One of the best books I have ever read and one that would have been wonderfully interesting even if the author hadn’t been Agatha Christie. Her stories of home life and growing up, courtship and its missteps, fame and society, God and humanity – are all interesting on their own and really have little to do with Christie’s literary life, which actually isn’t much of a focus throughout the book. She makes a point of saying that she never really viewed herself as a professional writer, and that holds true with the chapter contents of her autobiography. Whenever she was writing, she was also doing something else.
Great quotes and points of interest: Never interrupt the servants during the lunchtime meal; p. 29 “One of the things I think I should miss most, if I were a child nowadays, would be the absence of servants. . . Far from being slaves they were frequently tyrants. They ‘knew their place’, as was said, but knowing their place meant not subservience but pride, the pride of the professional.”
On learning she could never be known as “Lady Agatha” because that could come only from birth (p. 45): “It was my first brush with the inevitable. There are things that cannot be achieved. It is important to realise this early in life and good for you.” On her sister Madge’s intelligence and ability (p. 47): “It was not until I was over twenty that I realized that my home standard had been unusually high and that actually I was quite as quick or quicker than average.”
On learning how to treat children from how she disliked the treatment from her mother’s friend Mrs. Tower (p. 51): “All through life I have carefully abstained from rushing at children and kissing them unasked… Dear Miss Tower, so good and fond of children – but with so little idea of their feelings.”
On the test of true affection (p. 63): “It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realise just how much you love them!” On childhood memories (p. 80): “Never go back to a place where you have been happy. Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.” (The proceeding reveals her habit of English spellings and distaste for commas.)
Many of Christie’s life stories are interesting and illuminating due to the class, culture, and perhaps time differences between author and reader. For instance, she talks often about one of her favorite past times, bathing (swimming), which required the use of a (p. 142) “bathing machine.” “The beach was a steeply sloping one, and on it were eight bathing machines whose non-stop job was to let the machine up and down in the water.”
And on many points, Agatha Christie and I would have gotten along fine (p. 151): “On reflection, though, I think you are what you are going to be... you would always find your own pattern, because I am sure you are following a pattern... You can embellish you pattern, or you can scamp (?) it, but it is your pattern and so long as you are following it you will know harmony.” Also (p. 154): “… there are people who can perform in public much better than they perform in private; and there are people who are just the opposite. I was one of the latter. It is obvious that I chose the right career. The most blessed thing about being an author is that you do it in private and in your own time.” And speaking of time (p.171): “There is no greater mistake in life than seeing things or hearing them at the wrong time. Shakespeare is ruined for most people by having been made to learn it at school; you should see Shakespeare as it was written to be seen, on the stage.” And finally, an unfortunate warning: “I still dislike Mr S. when I remember him, and have no proper feeling of gratitude such as one was always taught should be felt for a good man’s love (Grannie’s maxim). I am sure he was a good man – perhaps that was what made him so dull.” And, sorry, one more thing, her favorite drink: (p. 337) “half a pint of raw cream thinned down with milk.” And (p. 408): “We are all the same people as we were at three, six, ten or twenty years old.” And (p. 438) “I can suspend judgement on those who kill – but I think they are evil for the community; they bring in nothing except hate, and take from it all they can. I am willing to believe that they are made that way, that they are born with a disability, for which perhaps, one should pity them; but even then, I think, not spare them.”
My favorite human observation in Christie’s book (p. 221): “… that one gift that other forms of life do not have, the sense of adventure, the unconquerable spirit, and with it courage – not merely the courage of self-defence, which all animals have, but the courage to take your life into your hands and go out into the unknown.”
I am also amazed at how much Christie admits to being in love with her first husband Archie and how she describes their first years of being together without spite, although with some premonitions. On his becoming an avid golfer (which is where I presume he met the woman he would leave Agatha for): “In the end that choice of recreation was to make a big difference in our lives (p. 284).”
And later (p. 288): “ ‘… Remember, if you’re not with your husband, if you leave him too much, you’ll lose him. That’s specially true of a man like Archie.’”
‘I’m sure that’s not so,’ I said indignantly. ‘Archie is the most faithful person in the world.’
‘You never know with any man,’ said my mother, speaking in a true Victorian spirit. ‘A wife ought to be with her husband – and if she isn’t, then he feels he has a right to forget her.’ ”
On the changes that come in life (p. 307): “Life is really like a ship – the interior of a ship, that is. It has watertight compartments. You emerge from one, seal and bolt the doors, and find yourself in another.”
There are parts of this book that ensure that it will never make it on the reading list of modern high schools. One is the liberal use of the “N-word,” once when talking about some servants from Africa and then when describing her book / play that was eventually called Ten Little Indians and then And Then There Were None. Also, her description of nationalities, as in when looking for a new governess for her daughter Rosalind: “I added ‘Scottish preferred.’ I had noticed, now that I saw more of other children and their attendants, that the Scottish seemed to be particularly good with the young. The French were hopeless disciplinarians, and were always bullied by their charges; Germans were good and methodical, but it was not German that I really wanted Rosalind to learn. The Irish were gay but made trouble in the house; the English were of all kinds. I had a yearning for somebody Scottish.”
Introducing the chapter that describes the heart-breaking ending to her first marriage, entitled “The Land of Lost Content” (p. 350): “What shall I do to drive away / Remembrance from mine eyes? wrote Keats. But should one drive it away? If one chooses to look back over the journey that has been one’s life, is one entitled to ignore those memories that one dislikes? Or is that cowardice?” And the chapter entitled “Second Spring” (p. 379): “ ‘Once you think of time and infinity, personal things will cease to affect you in the same way. Sorrow, suffering, all the finite things of life, show in an entirely different perspective.’ He (Agatha’s friend Maurice Vickers) asked me if I had ever read Dunne’s Experiment with Time. I had not. He lent it to me, and from that moment I realise that something happened to me – not a change of heart, not quite a change of outlook, but somehow I was things more in proportion; myself less large; as only on facet of a whole, in a vast world with hundreds of inter-connections.”
In the end, Agatha Christie had a successful second marriage with archeologist Max Mallowan and enjoyed a singular life of travel and adventure that probably complemented and aided her writing career. It allowed her to write things like (p. 457), “One does feel proud to belong to the human race when one sees the wonderful things humans have fashioned with their hands. They have been creators – they must share a little the holiness of the Creator, who made the world and all that was in it, and saw that it was good. But he left more to be made. He left he things to be fashioned by men’s hands. He left them to fashion them, to follow in his footsteps because they were made in his image, to see what they made, and see that it was good.”
Mallowan is well known in his field as the author of the three-volume work Nimrud and its Remains (p. 456), which I am going to check out through MelCat. And I might also check out a novel that Christie calls her proudest work (p. 500) Absent in Spring and perhaps her semi-memoir Come, Tell Me How You Live.
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- Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2022
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Top reviews from other countries
- ManofWordsReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 22, 2023
A charming autobiography
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