Childhood Memories

Should an historian try to recreate a past era so completely the reader recognizes its very alienness or should he or she focus on those parts of the past that survive into the present and influence its form?

The first is the province of the historical novelist; the second drives the mystery writer.

A few years ago I took down a book by Hugh Walpole thinking then was perhaps the right time to read a genuine gothic novel. I didn’t think too much when it began with an adventure of an eight-year-old boy, but when I was half way through and the boy was only a few months older I realized I’d confused Hugh with Horace.

By then I was hooked on Jeremy, a series of childhood adventures published by Walpole in 1919. Nothing could be more removed from my experience, and yet every vignette rang true. Some were the events of psychological growth, when Jeremy got his first dog or when he realized he’d been tormenting his nurse. Others were just the things that happen, the first exposure to town life at the local fair or to the arts when his uncle took him to the theatre.

After each adventure I thought, yes, that’s how it was, not for Jeremy, but for me. The event wasn’t the same, but the experience was. Walpole wrote fiction, created an imaginary town from places he’d lived, yet he evoked the universal in those adventures.

I just finished Agatha Christie’s autobiography and the reading experience couldn’t have been more different.

She didn’t begin to write for an outside reader, but for herself in 1950 when she was back in Iraq with her husband after World War II. She says she didn’t know why she wanted, suddenly, to record the past, but I rather suspect it was the realization, that as she was turning 60, life as she had known it had changed dramatically during the war.

What’s obvious is that when she returned to it in 1965, at age 75, she was looking at the manuscript as a reminder of her past, not as a literary project. Indeed, her celebrity and her personal experiences prevented her from reworking the material. She knew that many would read it for errors, and so she was inhibited from reworking material the way the obscure Walpole could.

More she knew everyone wanted to know what led to her breakdown in 1926 after her husband announced he was in love with another woman and she had disappeared for a few days. She continually tells you she’s a private person, and the experience of being hounded by the media, omitted from this book, instead appeared in her novels when she focused on the horror of being wrongly suspected and the double villainy of a murderer who is willing to let an innocent person suffer for his crimes.

By the time she published her autobiography, Christie also had the view that "we are all the same people as were at three, six, ten or twenty years old." Youth is a time of inventing oneself and maturity occurs when "it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day."

And so, Christie focused on the points of continuity, her life of the imagination when she created dramas in her mind about some kittens, or later some girls. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember exactly what those stories were or how she created them, only that, in fact, she had done so. Her childhood of unrecallable events and ones unmentioned lest they be used to scout out her psychology makes for very dull reading.

The differences between Walpole and Christie are vast: the second was far more successful and more creative. Although both were writing immediately after wars, one was writing in his mid thirties when life was still unfolding as a series of new adventures, while the other was much older and seeing only what had survived the transformation of war.

Still, it’s Walpole who was the better writer of childhood because he was able to capture the inner life of the child. The older Christie was too wise to consider what she couldn’t recall had mattered very much after all.