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| Hats for platforms |
One day I'll write the Key to All Mythologies – or rather, what we can learn about popular ideas about psychology from Golden Age mysteries. "Self-pity" is mentioned in passing. I remember this concept from the 60s. It was something you shouldn't "indulge" or "wallow" in, or "get stuck in a rut" of. It made it difficult to think about your situation. And this is a book about deciding what to do at crisis moments in your life.
This is a straight novel, originally published in 1948 under the name Mary Westmacott. The writer is Christie the philosopher and psychologist, not the puzzler. The writing is, as one contemporary reviewer put it, "crisp and lucid", though there is the occasional touch of melodrama: He whirled on Teresa, whom he seemed to consider the realist of the assembly.
World War Two is coming to an end when the narrator, Hugh Norreys, falls in love with a girl on a train, first seen crying into her soup. They become engaged, convinced they are each other's soulmate – "the sharing of a thousand small minor pleasures". Christie mentions this delusion in Death in the Clouds. But then the accident happens. "All that communion of mind with mind, our thoughts that leapt to complete each other’s, our friendship, our companionship: illusion—nothing but illusion."
Hugh's sister Teresa takes him in and he is a reluctant observer of an election campaign she is running. Everyone is true blue in St Loo. The town consists of "large luxury hotels, thousands of small bungalows, masses of little boarding houses." And a castle. The upper middle classes "ran things, and managed things, and got up things".
Hugh's brother-in-law is a taciturn artist, and Christie unloads her ideas about painting. Why did Naomi Carleton-Smith in The Mysterious Mr Quin paint the sky yellow and the sea red? "It's the way I see'em, Duchess." Likewise, "They are Robert’s idea of trees", Teresa explains.
‘You mean one painter would paint it naturalistically and another symbolically?’, asks Hugh.
‘They’d actually see it differently,' she replies.
Hugh decides that "to shut myself up and make a mystery of myself would be a form of self-advertisement". So he spends most of the novel lying in an invalid chair in a sitting room – like the hero of Monica Dickens' The Happy Prisoner. He dispenses wisdom and tries to understand everybody and improve their lives in the same way, too.
The Conservative candidate is the unlikely John Gabriel, who has a brilliant war record and bushels of charm. But it's a pity his legs are so common, complains Lady St Loo, quoting Christie's mother.
Drifting through the many characters is Isabella, also from the castle. She is beautiful and blonde, but not like other girls. She strongly resembles Margery Allingham's Prunella, in The Beckoning Lady. She is what we would now call "autistic coded". Nobody talked about autism in 1948, though they may have used terms like "schizoid personality". Another autistic-coded girl is Denham in Crewe Train, a book found in the bedroom of the victim in Murder in Mesopotamia.
The essence of femininity is summed up: It is a world of calculation of effects, of persuasion, of a thousand small subtleties. The anti-Isabella. Is this serene girl an avatar of Christie herself? She is very good at maths (like Megan in The Moving Finger), a subject Christie wished she had studied. And she has long blonde hair.
Milly Burt, married to a drunken vet, is a "nice little woman", like the neglected wife in Triangle at Rhodes. Unfortunately her voice is "over-refined" and she blames herself for everything. "Human beings enjoyed exaggerating their responsibility for events", thinks Hugh.
‘I
should stop thinking about it,’ I advised.
‘But how can I?’ Her large
pathetic brown eyes opened wide.
‘By the exercise of self-control and
will power,’ I said.
When did we stop talking about those? Now we have to be mindful and achieve a positive mindset – like Pollyanna, another literary heroine.
The Conservative candidate, John Gabriel, confides in Hugh at length. He wishes he was upper class. It means "being born sure of yourself—knowing what you’re going to do or
say—being rude only when you mean to be rude—and not being rude just
because you feel hot and uncomfortable and want to show you’re as good
as anyone else. Not having to [wonder] all the time what people are thinking of you, but just
concerned with what you think of them. Knowing that if you’re queer or
shabby or eccentric it doesn’t matter a damn because you are what you
are.'
Of his Victoria Cross, he explains: Bravery is "all a matter of nerves or glands or something".
"Oh yes, I know what my class is. I’m not a gentleman.’
‘Does that word mean anything nowadays?’ I asked sceptically.
‘The word doesn’t. But the thing the word means is still there.’
More of Gabriel's wisdom: Do you think a man is what he wants to be? A man is what he is born... It's always soldiers who buy dud shares, and believe in schemes for getting up Spanish treasure from sunk galleons. (Raymond West falls for one such scheme in an early Miss Marple story.)
And the stuff to give the troops: The... sort of idea that sounds as though it would make everything come right and which is extremely easy to grasp, noble but woolly—and which gives you a nice inner glow.
Teresa goes through the motions of campaigning for John Gabriel, even sitting on a platform wearing a formidable hat – probably something like a top hat, in the style of the late Queen. She too confides in the disabled narrator: To feel that my will and my brain can be entirely swamped and overridden by emotion is insufferable to me. I can control my actions and to a large extent my thoughts—not to be able to control my emotions is galling to my pride—it humiliates me.’... Teresa, I thought to myself, was adult—she had learnt to say ‘I’. (Remember the conversation between Helen and Leonard in E.M. Forster's Howards End?)
More of Teresa's philosophy: ‘You will insist on making your own design for life,
Hugh, and trying to fit other people into it. But they’ve got their own
design. Everyone has got their own design—that’s what makes life so
confusing. Because the designs are interlaced—superimposed.'
So you are who you're born, and your life has its own design? Where does free will fit in? Hugh later decides that nobody really makes decisions.
At one point Hugh asks himself: What did I know? What could I hope? What was I going to do? – a maxim of Hercule Poirot's. He ponders: Who had said ‘Love ’em and leave ’em alone’? Some psychologist writing advice to mothers? ... I desisted from what has been termed unprofitable speculation and rang the bell and ordered tea.
Here comes the spoiler. Instead of marrying Rupert St Loo, her first cousin and heir to the castle, Isabella elopes with John Gabriel. And in "Zagrade", Hugh meets them again. John Gabriel is drinking more and has coarsened mentally and physically. But Hugh finds Isabella sitting in squalor embroidering a square of silk:
I took the piece of work into my hand. It was a square of old silk—a delicate dove grey in colour, slightly faded, very soft to handle. On it Isabella was embroidering a design of dark red roses, wallflowers and pale mauve stocks. It was beautiful work, very fine, exquisitely executed. (In her autobiography, Christie relates that when young she liked to embroider flowers on silk, taken from Sèvres porcelain. Does she say she is prouder of her embroidery than of anything she wrote? She gives this skill to Louise Leidner in Murder in Mesopotamia.)
It is a rather Catholic story in the end, a Chestertonian paradox. The woman who achieves purity through degradation, or something. The woman with the "triple glaze" (The China Governess, Margery Allingham), who can pass through Hell and not be contaminated. And who may even save others just by being there. The appalling strangeness of the mercy of God (Brighton Rock, Graham Greene).
Gabriel eventually becomes "Father Clement", a saintly figure who stays in the Balkans and tries to improve people's lives. In the framing narrative, Hugh is summoned to his deathbed, remarking that "Father Clement" has come up with ideas that "we all" now live by. These ideas are left a mystery.
