Chapter 5 Passionate Solitude The Eternal Fugitive (1)

Agatha Christie Agatha Christie hardly ever smiles with her mouth open in her photos: she has bad teeth and pays close attention to her appearance.In truth, she cared about the appearance of everything: she needed the world to be a place of calm and certainty, harmony and order.But reality is bewildering and tends to be chaotic, no matter how we try to make it obey our demands; thus, from the age of forty, Agatha has gained weight and become a strong woman with large breasts and hips.She used to be slender (she herself is responsible for repeating it tirelessly in all her autobiographies, as someone mentions an almost miraculous event, a marvel that is unbelievable to others, perhaps even herself. would not believe it), so this sudden and decisive fattening, she will be imprisoned in a huge body for the rest of her life, which probably aggravated her inner sense of disaster.For Agatha Christie's survival becomes a long escape from darkness, a secret struggle against chaos.

She was born in 1890; thus she belonged to the generation of Britons who had to look beyond their Victorian heritage and confront the empire's initial decline.Victorianism had established a worldview as firm and unambiguous as a lead bucket: everything has its place, everything has a reason for being, reality is perfectly understandable, beauty and law are equated.This precise dream was shattered at the end of the nineteenth century.Darwin explained that God's prophecy did not create man and animals in our image, and that our evolution was marked by accidental and random jumps.Noxious invisible molecular bacteria with a fluid habit were discovered so that disease was no longer a punishment or test from God, it became a matter of bad luck.What's more, amidst all this unease and so much change, Einstein threw out his theory of relativity in 1905, claiming that even time and space were unreliable.The twentieth century came hastily with all its fears, disorder and wars.The immobile grandeur of Victorian collapsed with the Titanic's dying breath at sea.

Victorian heirs havetened to attest to the shipwreck: writers of the "Bloomsbury Group" (Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, etc.) embraced the disorder and rupture of existence to construct their work , thus entering the twentieth century from a literary point of view.In contrast, Agatha, though belonging to the same generation (she is eight years younger than Virginia), has struggled with chaos all her life.She wanted to defy this chaos, trying to restore the order and rules of the previous world, the perfect world of her childhood.So her detective works (seventy-nine novels, nineteen screenplays) are fully explainable ring worlds, math games that are not only relaxing but also brain-stimulating, predictable worlds where good and bad rule predetermined location.

① Lytton Strachey (1880-1932): British biographer, critic, leader of the "Bloomsbury Group"—annotation. Why the desire to plug the leaky hole?Why can't bear the slight revealing of the abyss?Who knows what makes each of us who he is: heredity of character, accidents in early life.Agatha was the youngest daughter of a dandy who squandered his annuity so happily that he died leaving nothing to his family when Agatha was eleven years old.Thus, at an early age, the future authoress recognizes the orphan situation, bankruptcy, and the suffocating love of a possessive, depressed mother, whom she has had to take care of ever since.All this is like a monster sticking out its claws in the dark.

Agatha knew all too well that inner monster, the persecutor she had evaded all her life.In her autobiography, Agatha accurately described a terrible childhood memory: when she was only five or six years old, she was on vacation in France. During a walk in the summer, a very kind tour guide gave Agatha For a gift, catch a beautiful butterfly and stick a pin through it.The guide pinned the butterfly on the girl's straw hat.For hours, in that still and unending time of childhood, the group walks the fields while butterflies flutter hopelessly, dying on the brim of their straw hats.Agatha was so stupefied with terror that she could neither cry nor speak: only distressed by the madness of other people's pain.That silence, that inability to face the horror, consumed her again years later in the most famous and symbolic event of her life—her disappearance.

Agatha married Archie Christie in World War I, a competitive aviation pilot who was charismatic but immature and seemed rather stupid.Archie had given her the name Christie (Agatha had been called Miller) and was the father of her only daughter, Rosalind; I was happy to leave my little daughter in the hands of my grandmother, and go out with my husband for a year to travel the world. They have bathed in the sulfurous waters of Canada (she is an excellent swimmer) and surfed the heavy boards of Hawaii.Her first novel, The Mysterious Case of Stiles, already had the character of Poirot, and was a great success after it was published in 1920.The world seems like a perfect place right now.

But the persecutor is around the corner.Her relationship with Archie begins to sour: he's only interested in golf.Agatha always tried to be an ideal wife (and an ideal daughter, an ideal neighbor. It has been said that for her the world should be a comfortable and conventionally lovable place), in order to accompany Archie , She also learned to play golf, but she was bored inside and couldn't stand it.Still, she would never end the relationship: it was not possible in those days, let alone her.She was so willing to close her eyes before the darkness, ready to cover up with her imagination what she didn't like, so used to pretending to herself - shutting her mouth so she couldn't see the broken teeth: if you couldn't see them, the broken teeth Teeth don't exist.

The disaster begins with the death of Agatha's mother.Clara, possessive Clara dies suddenly.A deeply depressed authoress returns to her mother's estate to attend to her funeral: there, of course, she is caught in the clutches of chaos.It was her childhood home, but now it was deserted and broken, with the roof falling off, the rooms locked, and the living room full of dusty rags that some dead person had used.Selfish Archie doesn't like any questions, he moves to club life in London, only to show up a few months later, just to tell that he's in love with a lady with whom he plays golf, Nancy Neal, and that he's going to be with him Agatha separated.That was the final blow.

On the night of December 3, 1926, Agatha disappeared.At about eleven o'clock she left the old manor in her own car; a few hours later the car was found in the middle of an embankment not far from home, with the doors open, and Agatha's coat and trunks in the car.But the earth seemed to swallow her up.Agatha was already a well-known writer by then; her disappearance has sparked speculation.Some say she died (or was assassinated), others say she eloped with a man, and many see it as an advertising hype or an out-of-the-ordinary joke by the writer herself, as she tries to show her in a practical way The Feasibility of a Fictional Plot: A Way of Disappearing Without Leaving a Trace.

①Harrogate: a city in North Yorkshire, England, known as a spa resort since the seventeenth century—annotation. Eleven days later, on the 14th of December, she was found at the Spa Hotel in Harrogate, a respectable spa.It was dinnertime; when Agatha came down from her room to go to the dining room, Archie, notified by the police, approached her.The writer looked at Archie as if someone hadn't recognized the doorman's face, but she graciously allowed him to accompany her to the table.She has completely lost her memory (she has run away, from herself); she has lived in the hotel for ten days, bathing, playing cards with other guests, and commenting with them on the strange incident of the missing woman writer.She was registered under the sad name of Teresa Neal (the same last name of her golf rival Nancy Neal), and when she saw she hadn't received any letters on December 11, she worried A notice was placed in The Times: "Friends and relatives of Teresa Neal, please contact her. Harrogate Spa Hotel".Naturally, she received no reply.

No account of the event appears in her thick autobiography: it probably terrified her.Nor is there any mention of Nancy Neal.Indeed, she never spoke openly in her life about the strange event of her memory loss.Agatha received psychiatric help and, over time, gradually reconstructed what had happened: but it seems she never fully recovered her memory of those days.In Christie's book there is never a thread left to be clarified, a link to be connected, a piece to be fitted; She did create an absence, a defect, a crack in life.Agatha has been having to drag around in her memory those hours without memories, that black hole where her fears and madness, or what people call madness, maybe it is the intense fear of not being able to live, is the fear of the world and herself. puzzled. The Fugitive Forever (2) In Agatha's six serious books, written under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, this disturbing intuition that reality is discontinuous appears allusively.They were sentimental novels without a detective plot, plain and clumsy in style, but the writer considered them her best work.Agatha's favorite work "Leaving in Spring" is about the crisis of a conservative, superficially happy bourgeois woman who suddenly understands that her life is not what she thought it was. Or rather, she suddenly discovered the cracks in the world, the holes in reality that Agatha was so determined to mend. She insisted on covering it up.Agatha Christie spent her life disguising things, concealing flaws, altering qualities, and shaping herself into a moving fictional character.She was indeed a marvelous poser, and a terrific liar.For example, she pretends to be completely and calmly in control of life, even pretending to be indifferent and uninterested, when in fact she is a woman full of enthusiasm and fear.She pretends to be indifferent to her literature, viewing it as a very modest pastime, but Agatha is a writer with strong aspirations, and she defends her work fiercely.She put on a toothless smile and tried to avoid being photographed of herself since the age of sixty-three: she was disturbed when she saw herself, the mutable and aging image, not in her advertising portraits The elegant and demure image of a lady established on the Internet.Everyone thinks that she is a very decent and helpful lady, but in fact she has spent her life inventing ways to assassinate people: her novels are always brewing like this, first imagining a new way of killing people, a perfect crime. ① Markuse (1898-1979): American political philosopher born in Germany.His Marxist critical philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis of twentieth-century Western society are quite popular among ultra-left college students.His main works include "Eros and Civilization", "One-sided Man", "Counter-revolution and Rebellion", "Studies in Critical Philosophy", etc. - Annotation. ②Dunne (1867-1936): American journalist and humorist.He created a simple philosopher Mr. Dooley - Annotation. Agatha was so proficient and persistent in training different means of disguise that she deceived herself and, of course, confused her biographers.Janet Morgan, for example, wrote a good book about Christie, saying she wasn't an intellectual (although Agatha, at eighty, was still reading and bitingly commenting on the likes of Markuse, Chomsky, Floyd De, Jung, Moore, Wittgenstein, or Donne), but a conservative provincial lady.These two adjectives seem rather inappropriate to define a female adventurer who loves to travel and travels a lot, can live for months in a tent in the Syrian desert, and remarry to a man fifteen years younger than herself of.All of this for Agatha takes place in a time and social environment where extravagance comes with a high price: Agatha, for example, cannot introduce her daughter to the palace because of the unjust circumstances of her divorce and remarriage.Teenage Rosalind had to be escorted to her first court ball by some more respectable friends, while Christie stayed at home, devising a novel about debutante balls, "their mothers in the swift succession dying in the middle of the night"—she took revenge. What Agatha doesn't fake is her love of life, her passion, and her delightful ability to make happiness.Just reading "You Come Tell Me How You Live," an interesting little autobiographical book, is enough to see the basic humanity of the writer, how the blood flows in Agatha's veins, how everyday life becomes a real life. pleasure.Missing her successor husband during World War II, Christie wrote Tell Me How You Lived, in its pages reliving her trip to Syria with her husband Max Mallowin in the 1930s archaeological expedition.This book is actually a testimony of love, a proof of her love for life and for Max. When she married Max, she was forty years old, while he was twenty-five years old. Death did not separate her from him until forty-five years later. .Agatha, imaginative and always in a good mood, may have embellished her life with Max, adding a sparkle to it that wasn't there.But even if the intensity of the experience is carefully toned down, it can still be said that this marriage was one of the great achievements of her life, a relationship full of humor, complicity and adventure.Perhaps the archaeologist Mallowan showed his love for her in old age, and he did age rapidly, his health deteriorated badly, and he did not outlive his wife by a few years (although he remarried during this time). Agatha Christie in You Tell Me How You Live is my favorite: eccentric, gluttonous, funny, on her crutch-chair at an archaeological dig, her plump flesh stuffed In a decent dress of silk, with small flowers, it would look out of place in the middle of the desert.The same unsuspecting Agatha, wearing a coat and a hat, goes into a bath in a shop window in order to buy a bath, because that kind of thing needs to be tried beforehand.Or, like her jovial and pampering father, suffers from troublesome financial constraints for squandering money.In short, the woman who can sit on a hill with small yellow flowers on the Turkish border at eight o'clock in the morning, immersed in the admiration of the blue mountains of the horizon: "It's one of the moments when it's fun to be alive", fifteen She will write when she recalls that scene years later.Because Agatha is one of those people who knows that the true essence of life lies in moments like that. Agatha Christie began writing her long and entertaining autobiography at the age of sixty while accompanying her husband on an archaeological dig in Nimrut (Iraq) in 1950, and completed it fifteen years later at her home in Wallingford this book.In a moving postscript, she said she ended her memoir "because now, at seventy-five, it seemed the right time to stop writing. As for life, that's all there is to say." .Agatha, who had personally endured her grandmother's surly temper in old age, feared a similar outcome: "Maybe I'll live to be ninety-three and drive everybody crazy with my deafness... I'll be with some patient My nurse had a violent quarrel with her and accused her of poisoning me...I would cause endless trouble to my unfortunate family," she writes in her postscript.In fact she lived to be eighty-five years old, and her last novel was published a year and a half before her death, although the publisher made many revisions to the work.During those last months she worked out her spell, gradually losing her mind.She talked nonsense, and cut off the hair that was once proud but now messy, strand by strand.She refused to accept the nurse, so that the elderly Max had to sit in a chair for a long time by her side. Agatha had fought for so long to maintain control, to escape her inner fear and darkness, only to be captured by her persecutors.Maybe we all harbor our own persecutors inside; maybe it always catches us after all; maybe knowing it, and not being afraid, is the secret of life itself. Bibliography ○ "Agatha Christie, An Autobiography", Moreno Press. ○Agatha Christie Mallowan: "You Come and Tell Me How You Live", Tusgate Press, "Travel Collection" series. ○Janet Morgan: "Agatha Christie", Overseas Publishing House, "Great Biography" series. ○ Gillian Gill: Agatha Christie, Esparza Calpe Publishers. ○A novel by Mary Westmacott published by Gerry Halver Press. ○A detective novel published by Moreno Publishing House.