Tag Archives: life as art

Little Grey Cells Tackle Agatha’s Christies Perennial Popularity

Posted on by

Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries is to crime what Romeo and Juliet is to lovers; her thrillers inspires admiration from criminals themselves. My ignorant companion of last night made some distinctly unappreciative sounds when he discovered what my ‘big find’ at the library yesterday was. Harrumph! was my returning noise, and so we watched The Blue Train, A&E version of the novel starring David Suchet. Soon he was chuckling at the detective Poirot’s vanity over his waxed moustache and throwing out (entirely wrong) guesses as to whodunit. The perennial popularity of Agatha Christie, the best-selling author of all time at over 2 billion books, stem from the ‘order and method’ she uses to construct her thrillers, the same ‘order and method of the little grey cells’ with which Poirot solves his cases.

Order and Method
Agatha Christie’s work is brilliant because its purely driven by plot. A whodunit is a suspenseful process of revealing facts, and with Poirot’s ‘order and method’ arranging them into a solution. The order and method of my little grey cells, as opposed to Poirot’s, are perhaps not so strong. In Christie’s work, nothing in the plot is superfluous to arriving at this denouement. Characters gradually expose themselves in connection to it, people knew each other through it, and closed situations such as the snowed-in manor house or blue train have the advantage of keeping the suspect pool focused but large.

This is not to say I disparage her characters because they are by-products of plot. She sketches individuality in a few quick strokes. Overall, her books capture post-WWII British society with the wounds of the past and the changing mores of the Jazz Age. But her characters are plausible without the reader being tempted into their interior lives. They are shallow books of circumstance and mere fun, but mere fun is a great thing and Christie writes them to perfection.

Christie quite rightly tends to keep the viewpoint to a limited 3rd person, so that we see what Poirot sees, but not what he thinks. This engages the reader to sleuth out the mystery too. The few novels that she has done from the point of view of a character has its pitfalls, as the reader automatically side with the protagonist. It feels like a gyp when something happens that the narrator leaves out.

Of course she’s popular: her whodunits perfect their type, and her detectives are delicious, whether it be the wax-moustached Belgian Hercule Poirot or the old village gossip Miss Marple.

But who is this woman?
The Queen of Crime was in many senses a steadfast, disciplined writer who produced mystery upon mystery rather than illegal activities. She remains something of an enigma herself. While the later part of her life found her happily married to an archaeologist- not Mr. Christie- and going on digs between buying new houses, there was a most curious case (more here) in her youth. The only odd incident in an interesting, but ordinary life.

She disappeared in 1926. Classically enough, without a trace. The police were at their wits end for 11 days. Then one day a reporter is in a hotel lobby in the country. He notices something odd about the woman sitting on the chair. “Mrs. Christie?” he asks. Mrs. Christie blinks, and says “Oh yes. I have no idea how I got here.” To the end of her life she claimed amnesia.

Jealousy Strikes Over Writer’s Rooms

Posted on by

A creative space, exactly as you like it, and a routine, undisturbed, can make a day or, in the case of some people, a work of art. Balancing work and writing is something I’ve thought about lately, but more than that I’m curious about other people. How do they write best? So to fill that curiosity, we have creatives spaces and routines…(ahh, the wonders of the internet.)

Rooms:

The Guardian has a great page dedicated to writer’s rooms…literally a series of photographic “portraits” of the rooms the writers work in by Eamonn McCabe. Coincidentally, McCabe has an exhibit that just opened that runs through January 17 at Madison Contemporary Art if you are in London.

They’re gorgeous and interesting shots that give you an intimate look of the creative spaces of various authors. They tend to have a desk and a computer…but other than that, these spaces are as varied as can be. Some are bare spaces with merely a desk, but most tend toward a messy, comfortably chaotic appeal. I wish they would do a series of artist’s studios next.

These are clearly all successful, middle-aged writers because they have rooms they can devote to writing. I live in New York city, and have a compact desk in my bedroom that I can devote to writing. There is just room for it between the door and the bed. It’s usually crowded with papers that I once meant to look at. The chair hurts my shoulders after a while. A certain someone likes to sit at it with his computer. And so, my workspace has become wherever there is a computer. A helpful versatility, no doubt, but I envy the luxury of a room of one’s own and the flourish of a quill pen, like in Jane Austen’s room, right.

Routine:

It isn’t mere space I pine for, but the lives that could be led in them. Similar to these room portraits, blog Daily Routines gives a brief summary of how artists, writers, and other ‘interesting people’ organize their day in all its intimate detail. The writer Murakami runs marathons to get into a zenlike state, much like his dreamy novels. Kafka’s is bizzare. Truman Capote is a “horizontal” author.

My routine involves a lot of ‘sometimes’. I go to an office sometime. Sometimes I have been up writing or reading for an hour. Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes I’ll polish something up during the day, sometimes I’ll write at night. Today, I’ll cook up a nice breakfast and lay in bed typing while trying to plan the most productive possible day.

I’m still settling into a quasi-writing life, but I have dreams of what it would be like. They run along the lines Oscar Wilde’s perscriptum of life as art. In which case, I have a lot of work to do. Christmas angels and huge koi decals are competing for decorative space to ill effect in this writer’s rooms. Yet based on the differences I found in rooms and routines, I’d have to say to each his own.

Coco Chanel and Edith Piaf: French Icons with Panache

Posted on by

Beware the women of Paris. They will chew you like a baguette, and down you with a sip of wine.

Formed by a hard childhood in poverty and wartime France, these two self-made women Coco Chanel, legendary house founder of Chanel, and Edith Piaf, “the little songbird” (at 4 feet 10 inches) exercised a severe dedication to their arts that led to international success and renown. Despite personal problems and society’s moral approbation, the designer and the singer fashioned themselves into the top people in their profession, in a style that was wholly their own.

I watched La Vie En Rose last night, a 2007 movie telling the tempestuous life of French singer Edith Piaf starring the excellent Marion Cotillard. The movie switches poetically between scenes of her childhood and her early death from liver cancer at 48 years of age, and I recommend seeing it. Born in 1915 to a mother who sang on the streets and later deserted her and a circus performer father who left her in a brothel where prostitutes cared for her until he took her to sing on the streets at 14, Edith had small prospects and no education. A club owner recognized the talent in the starving street urchin at age 20, and her fortunes begin to change. Along with success came tragic love affairs and morphine and alcohol addiction. The movie paints her as the ‘artiste’ throwing temper tantrums, and she retains a coarseness throughout her life. Edith was not always a pleasant person, but then neither was Coco when something blocked her shrewd plans (albeit Coco exhibited great self-control).

Perhaps this temperamental street brat doesn’t seem similar to Coco Chanel, educated in a convent and now the epitome of elegance? Yet the two aren’t linked merely by coming into the height of their power around the WWII, worldwide success and a close identification with that French je ne sais quoi.

As women, they overcame the social stigma of their origins, had affairs with rich and successful men and were left brokenhearted, and surpassed who they were as individuals by creating something bigger than themselves, seen today in their fascinating legends. In an age where women weren’t praised for grit or business acumen or unfailing dedication to art over home and family, these were women to be reckoned with. They weathered changing fortune not with happiness so much as triumph.

WWII found Paris overrun with Nazis. Coco had closed her shops in 1939 and took up residence in the Hôtel Ritz Paris, where she stayed through the Nazi occupation of Paris. During that time she was criticized for having an affair with a German officer/Nazi spy who arranged for her to remain in the hotel. The French despised her after that liaison. What did she do? Come out with a collection after the war the was a sensational hit in America.

Edith was a frequent performer at German Forces social gatherings in occupied France, and many people considered her a traitor. Following the war she claimed to have been working for the French resistance, but then she, and Coco, often lied about themselves. Despite the negative stigma, she remained a national and international favorite.

Small women of bad family and little education, they became enigmatic French icons. They became such with panache. It makes me want to stroll the banks of the Seine in Chanel humming Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien and nursing heartbreak with cigarettes and wine.