Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  Agatha admitted, and her family and advisers recognised, that this was no more than, as she put it, ‘blowing off steam’. The interminable argument with the Revenue had frustrated her because she liked things clearly marked and ordered. She preferred to have her accounts straight; indeed, she liked an accounting. (She had a special one at the village shop in Churston, where others dealt in cash.) She wished to be tidy – and with reason, after the untidiness into which others seemed to have plunged her affairs.

  Instinctive generosity and a sense of humour carried Agatha through her financial difficulties and helped her brush off, with only slight exasperation, stories about ‘the vast wealth’ she actually lacked. She was also fatalistic; before their marriage she had confided to Max the fear that perhaps she took ‘too detached a view of life’. Max sensibly told her that if her disposition was, in his words, ‘to take an impersonal view’, she should stop worrying and recognise its benefits. Those who were close to Agatha believed that, after the collapse of her first marriage, when she realised life could be ‘unfair’, she resigned herself to whatever fortune and misfortune came her way. She displayed a certain aloofness, a calm self-analysis, which the few who knew of her discussions with psychoanalysts in the late ’twenties thought that experience had given her. Her propensity to draw general conclusions from specific instances, to classify and discern patterns of behaviour, also gave her a sense of perspective and proportion. Max said Agatha ‘saw things like a child’; there is advantage in that.

  More troubling was another consequence of success on such a scale: the invasion of her privacy. There were attempts to take aerial photographs of Greenway and constant applications to see the house and garden. Rosalind and Anthony helped her fend off these requests, for they had moved to Greenway a year after Mathew’s marriage, when he and Angela, and Agatha’s first great-grandchild, Alexandra, took over Pwllywrach. Rosalind and Anthony lived in Ferry Cottage, at the bottom of the garden by the water’s edge, but they spent much of the day at the main house, Anthony looking after the property and Rosalind seeing to the running of the house.

  It was as well that Agatha had her family and friends to protect her, so unrelentingly importunate were many of her admirers. Some could not understand her irritation at particularly daft proposals, and her refusal to open fêtes and sign piles of books in public baffled people. Agatha was adamant. ‘Why should writers talk about what they write?’ she asked Cork. Many did not know or refused to believe that she was shy. ‘NOT on your life,’ she told Cork, when French television asked her to present a self-portrait for ‘Qui suis-je?’ Her secretary and friend Stella Kirwan had great difficulty in convincing the producer of a British television programme, This Is Your Life, that Agatha would be horrified to be lured to a studio and suddenly confronted with her personal history. Though she grew less jumpy about references to the events of 1926, she preferred there to be no discussion. It was a private matter. Insidious references to it upset her: the occasion, for instance, when an American publisher invited her to complete Franklin Roosevelt’s outline for a plot about a successful man’s contriving his own disappearance. Her annoyance lingered, too, over the disclosure of ‘Mary Westmacott’s’ identity. ‘The people I really minded knowing about it were my friends,’ she told Cork, when a Sunday Times columnist made much of the story. ‘Cramping to one’s subject matter. It’s really all washed up.… An author’s wishes should be respected.’

  Idiotic stories in the press were wounding, particularly when they were bizarrely at variance with the facts. ‘I take exception to this,’ Agatha wrote to Cork from Bayreuth, where she had seen a German magazine alleging that her dog had devoured a recent manuscript, ‘which had decided me in future not to sip away at so many double scotch and sodas’. Woman’s Own received a salvo, when they introduced one of her stories with a ‘rare interview’ with ‘the world’s most mysterious woman’. ‘“Track down” indeed,’ Agatha expostulated to Cork. ‘I am in Who’s Who and am easily reached by post through my publishers. What do they suggest I am? A Bank Robber or a Bank Robber’s wife? I’m an ordinary successful hard-working author – like any other author.’

  Agatha would give interviews only if Cork recommended it or, even more rarely, if she was surprised by an especially tactful approach. ‘A positive posse of journalists received me at Amsterdam,’ she told Cork in 1951, describing a journey to Syria ‘How do they know these things! I was interviewed by three, had a “radio conversation” with another.… Not so bad really as it passed the time – one has four hours there – and after you’ve eaten an enormous steak there isn’t much to do!’ ‘An enormous bouquet of red roses’ paved the way for another group a year or two later: ‘I whispered hoarsely to them in French – their French was also a little sketchy, so goodness know what I actually said.’ Photography was equally unwelcome. For her sixtieth birthday celebrations Agatha had gone to the studio of Angus McBean, a clever, sympathetic and fashionable photographer, with a flair, suppressed on this occasion, for surrealistic composition. He found her nervous and difficult to photograph but tried to emphasise what was youthful and dramatic in her appearance. Agatha was no longer photogenic; her face, which now showed its heaviness, was more interesting in motion than in repose. She was pleased with the results – ‘He has taken out the wrinkles!’ – especially compared with an album of pictures Collins sent after her party. ‘It saddens me a good deal,’ she confessed to Cork, ‘and deepens my inferiority complex about my appearance.’ After that there were few photographs, apart from those taken by Agatha’s family and friends. These are often delightful; Agatha needed to be seen full-length, not simply as an immobile head and shoulders, and looked her best with flowers, or dogs, or Max. She became increasingly sensitive. ‘Look here, Edmund, have I got to stand for this?’ she wrote in 1953, on receiving a particularly unflattering photograph. ‘Just about fit for the psychopathic ward is what I would say … from now on, photography is OUT. I don’t see why I should continuously be humiliated and made to suffer. Even the Post Office have been stupid and delivered it to my flat in spite of the form they have. Otherwise, I daresay, you’d never have let me see it!! Yours sadly.…’ After that, only photographs by Walter Bird and Angus McBean were used for publicity, Cork doing his best to suppress the rest. Some slipped through, causing more distress, notably a set in Paris-Match in 1955, accompanying an interview Agatha had given to a journalist introduced by James Watts. ‘Edmund,’ she lamented, ‘it’s awful!’ Though the photograph taken for the National Portrait Gallery pleased her, she had asked Cork to buy the copyright, fearing to see it reproduced unexpectedly. By the end of the ’sixties, she was hypersensitive: one letter, drafted but not sent, complained to the editor of a magazine publishing her stories about the other contents of the page announcing the series: ‘It is occupied,’ she observed, ‘mainly by a large reproduction of a woman sitting at a table with a BALD HEAD – I have shown it to six separate people … one and all have said “bald, of course”. Don’t you think that this is rather a gratuitous insult to an elderly woman? Especially as my hair, not white, but iron grey, can be vouched for by any hairdresser as growing thickly in a mop all over my head.… I may mention,’ she added for good measure, ‘that on the facing page to this is an advertisement beginning: “If you have greasy unmanageable hair …” … Tactlessness could really go no further, could it?’

  Agatha’s work was largely self-promoting. Peter Saunders made a special effort to advertise her plays, devising a succession of ingenious wheezes for The Mousetrap in particular, but her books virtually sold themselves. The nineteen-seventies were to provide indisputable proof of this. Agatha, from the security of Winterbrook and Greenway, could enjoy the real fruits of her success: peace, privacy, the company of her family, friends and the dogs, delicious food and drink, and books. Her reading neither slackened nor became less varied: novels by Paul Gallico and Muriel Spark, Hammond Innes, Julian Symons, Norman Collins, H.E. Bates, Nancy Mitford and Gerald Du
rrell; ‘Spine Chillers’, as she called them; memoirs and biographies of Frieda Lawrence, Thomas Cranmer, Ivan the Terrible, Teilhard de Chardin; Shaw on Shakespeare, The Life of Christ; an enormous number of detective stories and encyclopaedias on crime, criminals, detection and drugs. She asked Collins for Ice Station Zebra which ‘everybody says is very good’ – and was not put off by finding that the book was not about animals. Always she returned to her favourite classical literature. During the War the ‘Brains Trust’ panel broadcasting on the wireless had been asked for a list of ‘Great Authors’ and Agatha and Max had exchanged answers to this question. ‘I should add Shaw,’ Agatha had written. ‘I’m not sure about Kipling – you must wait about another twenty years to know. What about Masefield? Wells? Galsworthy?’ She reread Dickens and Shakespeare and was never without a volume of poems. From Wallingford and Swan Court there were discreet expeditions to the opera and theatre: King Lear, Oliver, Mozart at Salzburg, How to Succeed in Business. She adored flowers and food; rich veal and egg dishes served in the restaurant at Swan Court, which she and Max sometimes enjoyed with Sybil Thorndike and her husband, who lived next door; bottled plums, black currants, raspberries and strawberries in the country. Agatha was proud of her appetite: A Murder Is Announced had been dedicated to friends at whose house she first tasted ‘Delicious Death’, an extremely rich chocolate cake, and, years later, on sampling a foaming meringue soufflé, its flavour enhanced with liqueur, she observed, ‘But this is delicious Life.’

  26

  ‘It will not, I think, be long …’

  Agatha arrived at the height of her fame in 1970, her eightieth year. It was to be a strenuous one. She and Max had not been away to the sun at the beginning of 1969 and in the spring she struggled with a severe chill. To gather strength and escape the damp, they had a holiday in Cyprus in January 1970 and at Easter went to Austria for mountain air; Agatha had her wish, too, and saw the Oberammergau Passion Play. For the rest of the spring she tried to tidy up her new book, Passenger to Frankfurt, or, as she spelt it, ‘Frankfort’.

  She had begun to think about the plot in 1963, asking Collins to find a copy of The Royal Family of Bayreuth, by Friedelinde Wagner, the composer’s grand-daughter, whom she, Max and Mathew had met at Bayreuth. Friedelind had taken them behind the scenes of the Opera House and later to King Ludwig of Bavaria’s opera house, and had told them anecdotes about her grandfather and Hitler. Agatha brooded on all this, fitting it to her ideas about world conspiracy and espionage. She also asked Collins for Contributions to European History and Cork for a list of ‘Iron Curtain Coins, all of small size and small value’, and the origins of the quotation ‘For want of a nail, the horse was lost.…’ Her draft took up another thought, long germinating, for a book beginning in ‘An Air Lounge’ – a place which is no place, designed for arrivals, departures, exchanges. ‘Passengers in Transit’ was one of Agatha’s working titles for the development of this idea, or ‘Missing Passenger Story’. This plot acquired the title Passenger to Frankfurt in 1966, in the notebook Agatha kept on her American visit: ‘Airport. Renata.… Sir Neil at War Office of M14. His obstinacy aroused. Puts advertisement in.… Hitler idea. Concealed in a lunatic asylum. One of many who think they are Napoleon – or Hitler – or Mussolini. One of them was smuggled out. H took his place … Branded him on sole of foot – a swastika. The son. Born 1945. Now 24. In Argentine? USA? Rudi, The Young Siegfried.…’

  Thus Agatha started to mix her old obsessions: disguise; people who actually are who they say they are, mixed up with people who are not; the hiding of people in the obvious place for them to be (a sort of ‘purloined letter’ notion); the international conspiracy idea; the advertisement in the newspaper device. These were intermixed with popular contemporary preoccupations – the true fate of Hitler and his entourage; the refuge they might have sought; the possibility of Hitler’s return, reincarnated almost, as a son. She joined these with another theme, ‘the Mrs Boynton character’, another megalomaniac, sadistic mother: ‘old lady Gräfin – in decay but she is a woman of power – Great riches – a Bertha Krupp – Armament heiress.…’ The draft brought together a tangle of fantasies, ideologies, fixations and recollections, some evolved via meetings with dotty prophets in California, some by Agatha’s reading. ‘Do you think I could have this series?’ she asked Billy Collins, after seeing a review of the Fontana Modern Masters paperbacks. ‘It would educate me to be up-to-date, and help my writing. Alexandra must have an intelligent great-grandmother!! If they could come here – not Greenway – I could commence study!! I know I am the daughter of the horse leech, saying “Give, Give, Give!”’ There she was, plunging into Marcuse, Fanon and Chomsky. Agatha had always found intellectual speculation exciting; her discussions with Max and her family at Greenway had included Freud and Jung, Moore and Wittgenstein, as well as, years before, Dunne on time and Jeans on Relativity. It was now harder for her to concentrate; even so, some of what she now read disturbed her, the more because, from what she gathered elsewhere, it was peddled effectively and swallowed uncritically. Not that this was anything new. ‘Trends and tendencies,’ Mr Robinson says in Passenger to Frankfurt, ‘coming again and again, repeating itself like a periodic table, repeating a pattern. A desire for rebellion.’ In itself the desire was not reprehensible. What made Agatha shudder was its malevolent exploitation, the wicked taking advantage of the innocent or naïve. A long note in her draft for this book, marked ‘Incorporate’, illustrates her attitude: ‘Idealism can arise from antagonism to injustice and to crass materialism – and is fed more and more by a desire to destroy … those who get to love Violence for its own sake will never become adults. They are fixed in their own retarded development.’

  This was the pin with which Agatha fastened her disjointed thoughts. ‘Suggestions’, she put in one notebook, ‘Quotation or Résumé of Stalin’s Aims (From Svetlana’s book?) … African Régime – Nkrumah or Congo? Algeria? Ireland? Belgian Congo? Italian risings and terrorist activity. American universities. Black Power etc.’ Her notes are fascinating, and moving. In large letters, with something of her middle-aged verve but more often with more of the child’s hand that had first written in the ‘Confessions’, she set down her troubled thoughts. Passenger to Frankfurt was stuffed with fantasy but it echoed the real fears expressed by Agatha’s friends and the people she met in London, Oxford and Washington, diplomats, journalists, politicians. In the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies there were constant reports of hijackings, terrorism, disaffected youth, drug-peddling, wars, coups and revolutions. Agatha described her book as an extravaganza and only the most gullible and paranoid readers saw it as more than that. It was, however, timely: a book that was confused but published at a time when everything seemed upside-down, views about human psychology and instinct as much as events in the external world. Agatha’s novel proclaimed, moreover, the triumph of the ordinary over the exotic, or, more precisely, that apparently unglamorous people could mobilise their somewhat eccentric resources against ruthless and well-equipped criminals. Lady Matilda Cleckheaton, pleasantly perfumed, pale pink, wrinkled, with a touch of arthritis; the careless, idiosyncratic Stafford Nye; stalwart, imperturbable Horsham; Colonel Pikeway, self-sufficient and weary, his office suffused (as Max’s and Stephen Glanville’s office had been) with cigarette smoke; and plain Mr Robinson, whose tastes were simple but who was one of ‘the great arrangers of money’ – these were Agatha’s archetypal heroes.

  When the book was done, almost everyone – Cork and Dorothy Olding, Agatha’s family – was dismayed. Collins, in particular, feared the book would be a disaster. Only Anthony liked it, apart from its soppy ending. They were all confounded. In the autumn, sales rocketed in Britain and, when the American edition appeared in spring 1971, it was as much of a sensation there. Agatha had not only dealt with universal and timeless themes; she had hit raw nerves.

  Passenger to Frankfurt also soared upwards on the publicity for Agatha’s anniversary. ‘If the book is
published as an 80th birthday book,’ she had acknowledged to Cork, ‘something … will have to be done, I suppose. But I suggest – Keep it snappy! Not long tiresome “Profiles”.’ She escaped with only an effusive interview in the Daily Mail, by Godfrey Winn, who, to everyone’s delight, was bitten by Bingo, the successor to Treacle, who had died of an epileptic fit at the beginning of 1969. Bingo was irredeemably neurotic. Rosalind had found him for Agatha, who insisted on a Manchester terrier from a breeder. It turned out that he had been so terrified as a puppy that he bit almost everyone in sight. Max’s legs were a mass of scars, one visitor after another was nipped, and there were innumerable stories of Bingo’s success in pouncing on those who crept through Winterbrook by a complicated route to answer the telephone or the doorbell. Only Agatha was immune. Bingo adored her, slept on her bed; she loved him, some victims believed, because he was loyal, spiritedly protecting her privacy, and because he needed only affection.