Troubles of Biographers: C is for Christie

Trouble 3: There is no self-explanatory information about a notable event in the biographee's life. 

Many books attempt to answer why the young women in Salem Village behaved the way they did--why they accused their neighbors of being witches. 

There are many theories, from psychological to health-related to economic. And the truth is...

Nobody knows. 

The young women never said. One of them many years later gave an official apology to her church, but it is notably bereft of explanation. (There is a separate problem here since the young women themselves may not have fully understood why they did what they did--but this post will focus on the absence of any personal explanation at all.)

Does it matter? 

Sure--to historians! 

In 1926, Agatha Christie disappeared from her abandoned car. The kind of news media and social media reaction that we think is exclusive to the 21st century ensued. Christie was eventually discovered in a resort, using her husband's mistress's name. Her family claimed she had amnesia. 

Amnesia is not likely. As I discuss in a prior post, amnesia usually attends other extremely noticeable physical effects. Christie did not have these. Her behavior was far too organized for amnesia. 

The family never renounced the amnesia story.

Christie never spoke of the event. Ever. In her autobiography, she discusses the breakdown of her marriage. She is honest and fair, almost too much so (a responsible human being, Agatha Christie was ready to bear some of the blame for her marriage's dissolution; her ex-husband, Archie, was not). But she avoids discussing the particular event that made the papers. She even employs her detective novel techniques, leaving things half-said:

So, after illness, came sorrow, despair, and heartbreak. There is no need to dwell on it. I stood out for a year, hoping he would change. But he did not. So ended my first married life. (340)

She adds: 

From that time, I suppose, dates my revulsion against the press, my dislike of journalists and of crowds. It was unfair, no doubt, but I think it was natural under the circumstances. I had felt like a fox, hunted, my earths dug up and yelping hounds following me everywhere. (340)  

The phrase "natural under the circumstances" is sheer British understatement. Imagine all the rabble-rousing of the online environment paired with physical proximity. The press that hunted for Christie were the stuff that nightmares about paparazzi are made of. 

And Christie is likely right: "There is no need to dwell on it."

Except--

The disappearance is part of her life. If one intends to understand the entire life and character of a person, addressing what happened when Christie "disappeared" does matter. 

Laurie Thompson's biography A Mysterious Life attempts an explanation. She begins the chapter about Agatha's disappearance with a narrative, arguing that "there is a solution [to her disappearance] that clears the tangle from the forest. But it can only do so, in honesty, by acknowledging the dark areas, the ambivalences, the unknowable. Agatha herself barely understood what she had done throughout those eleven days: how, then, can they be rendered except as story? All biography is storytelling" (219, my emphasis).

The story? Agatha had a nervous breakdown. Her mother had just died. She was left alone to clear out her family home. Her husband went off to London. When he returned, he informed her that he was divorcing her and marrying someone else. His reason? He didn't like being inconvenienced (practically his own words). In the 1920s, divorce was still a scandal. Agatha attempted to argue with him. In early December 1926, she sent his brother and her secretary letters. She then abandoned her car. She "escaped" to a spa in Harrogate where she checked herself in under her husband's mistress's name. When her family tracked her down, they claimed Agatha had amnesia.

Thompson tells the story, then analyzes the circumstances as well as Agatha's personality. She asserts, with the support of several character witnesses, that Agatha had no idea that her disappearance would lead to a public outcry: 

She always saw the story as a private one, right up to the moment that she was found at the Harrogate Hydro...She was an entirely private person and, even in her right mind, she would never have dreamed that her actions would become public property...Thus it was that she believed she could abandon a car over a quarry and cause serious alarm to just one person: her husband. The idea that her behavior might reverberate beyond her own circle would simply not have occurred to her. She was not that kind of person.

It was the Golden Age of Mysteries!

Thompson cogently argues that in fact the case never would have become a cause celebre if self-serving Deputy Chief Constable Kenward had not insisted on turning it into one. Another Deputy Chief on the case believed exactly what happened: Agatha was stressed and went away to a spa. But Kenward insisted on turning the matter into a potential murder case, giving interviews to the press and basically making a spectacle of himself. Ah, the seduction of the media's spotlight!

As a columnist at the time stated:

Shortly after Mrs. Christie had left home a letter from her was received by a brother of Colonel Christie stating that she was in ill health and was going to a Yorkshire spa, which, apparently, is precisely what she did. So all that can be said now is that various people have had a good run for someone else's money. (220)

I find Thompson's rendering of the event as well as her analysis entirely plausible. It is backed by a plethora of evidence, which Thompson smoothly handles.

I cannot, unfortunately, give Thompson unqualified approval as a biographer. I found her book about Edith Thompson weak in the extreme since her theory, in that case, overpowers the available material (ironically, putting theory before evidence is exactly her accusation of Kenward). And I don't entirely approve of the end of A Mysterious Life where Thompson turns her speculations on Max Mallowan, Christie's second husband. Her theories there sound more like gossip than reasonable deductions in the absence of absolute proof. 

However, outside of biographers such as Thompson, the only other place one can go to figure out Agatha Christie's state of mind when she disappeared in 1926 is her fiction. Of course, this immediately raises the issue discussed in Troubles of Biographers: A is for Austen. Can one truly learn anything about individual authors from their fiction?

With the huge caveat "no, one cannot," I will nevertheless argue that Christie's mystery novel Sad Cypress comes closest to exploring what she suffered when her marriage dissolved. The main character Eleanor loves her fiance Roddy wildly but is careful not to pressure him with too obvious demonstrations of affection. He is kindly but self-involved and somewhat fastidious. He is the kind of man who holds to Archie's belief: Someone has to be unhappy. Why should it be me?

When Roddy determines to leave Eleanor, she falls into despair accompanied by imagined solutions: Suppose the other woman died? What if I acted to bring that about? She doesn't feel that she will ever be free of her heartache, but one day, she wakes up and she is. She eventually marries another man whom she trusts and with whom she can be herself.

The movie Agatha provides a view of Agatha Christie's disappearance that combines the characterizations in Sad Cypress with Thompson's interpretation. I highly recommend it.

Christie, Agatha. An Autobiography. Dodd, Mead & Company, 1977. 

Thompson, Laura. Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life. Pegasus, 2018.