Elephant Talk: Some Observations about Digressions in Elephants Can Remember (1972), by Agatha Christie

"I was really thinking of elephants....what we really have got to do is to get at the people who are like elephants.  Because elephants, they say, don't forget."--Ariadne Oliver in Elephants Can Remember (1972)

Earlier this year I devoted some time to considering later novels by Agatha Christie and the sharp decline that manifested itself in her work in the late Sixties, becoming a near collapse by the early Seventies.  On my rereads I really noticed it with By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968), the first of two geriatric Tommy and Tuppence mysteries, reviewed by me here.  While it's better, certainly, than the later Postern of Fate (1973), reviewed by me here, the plotting is none too good, getting quite cluttered and confusing at the huddled ending. Over and over Tuppence laments to her husband Tommy that it's all so difficult trying to remember anything, to piece together fragments of faded memory from one's mind.  

In At Bertram's Hotel (1965) and Third Girl (1966) and Endless Night (1967), Christie tried, not entirely without success, to stay abreast of present times.  These are good books, I think, offering fresh and original treatments of the modern world from the author.  Beginning with Thumbs, however, her books largely become about dithery elderly people trying to remember things--a situation which her biographies indicate reflected her own deteriorating mental state at the time.  Poor Tuppence is passing scatty in Thumbs and by the time Postern of Fate rolls around you might well suspect that she is afflicted with dementia, the way she childishly babbles on and on about inconsequential episodes from her past while struggling to remember any pertinent details from the present day. 

In the last six books Christie wrote--Thumbs, Hallowe'en Party, Passenger to Frankfurt, Nemesis, Elephants Can Remember and Postern of Fate--memory is so important.  Poignantly so, because like the author herself, so many of her characters have trouble remembering anything.  

Hallowe'en Party (1969), a somewhat underrated book in my opinion, and Nemesis (1971) stand out as comparative oases in this desert of arid memory, but even those books concern murders in the past, like Thumbs, Elephants and Postern.  Near the end of her life Christie in her books was utterly obsessed with the past and the struggle to recall it coherently.  

Memory fades....

Elephants Can Remember, the final Hercule Poirot novel which Christie wrote, concerns, yes, a murder in the past.  Not one that far off--twelve years, maybe, though people don't seem even certain even of that, despite the fact that it was a famous case, an apparent murder-suicide of a knighted British general and his wife.  

Like other Christie books from this period, the opening chapter is coherent and deceptively promises more than the book delivers.  Starting with Endless Night, I think, Christie (or her hapless editor) started rather grandiosely dividing her books into "Books"; and Elephant's first two chapters, before Book One and Book Two, would seem to be a sort of prologue, though they aren't called that, just chapters one and two.  

Anyway, in Chapter One, Christie's own stand-in, mystery writer Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, attends a literary luncheon.  This is a wryly amusing chapter, clearly based on the modest and retiring author's own experiences, with Mrs. Oliver lamenting having even to go to the damn thing, because she hates these sorts of soirees.  

Agatha Christie with her
feathers hat on the occasion
of her 80th birthday in 1970.
She wrote Elephants the next year.

"I can't make speeches," complains Mrs. Oliver, reflecting the attitude of the author herself, who hated making speeches.  "Now it's all right with words.  You can write words down or speak them into a machine or dictate them."  Christie was famously dictating her own books by this time.  It shows in their terribly prolix garrulity.  

Over everything, however, is a miasma of confusion.  "Why on earth am I going to it?" Mrs. Oliver fretfully asks herself of the luncheon.  "She searched her mind for a bit because she always really liked knowing what she was going to do instead of doing it first and wondering why she had done it afterwards."  

Fortunately she has a maid named Maria to help her out with these matters. There's a funny page where the two women pick one of Ariadne's four hats for her to wear.  

One hat is clearly inspired by one of Christie's own (see pic at upper left):

On the top shelf of Mrs. Oliver's wardrobe there reposed four hats....One, in a round bandbox, was of feathers. It fitted closely to the head and stood up very well to sudden squalls of rain....

Eventually Mrs. Oliver with Maria's help makes it to the luncheon, where she sits worrying about what to do when people come up to her, as they inevitably will, and praise her books, which always makes her uncomfortable:

It was women who gushed....She was not unduly modest.  She thought the detective stories she wrote were quite good of their kind.  Some were not so good and some were much better than others.  But there was no reason, as far as she could see, to make anyone think that she was a noble woman.  She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read. Wonderful luck that was....

This is charming stuff, amusing and self-deprecating, like when Mrs. Oliver worries about what she can eat with her artificial teeth.  "Lettuce was a difficulty, and salted almonds...."  In real life Christie wore a plate and struggled with her food, frustrating because food was one of her great pleasures as she aged.

Christie around the she wrote Elephants Can Remember,
looking rather bored.  Was she at a literary luncheon?  

But then an imperious, matronly woman named Mrs. Burton-Cox shows up to badger Mrs. Oliver and we are off to the mystery races, which immediately are mystifying--and not in a good way.  Mrs. Burton-Cox, after ascertaining that Mrs. Oliver is the godmother of a certain Celia Ravenscroft (good name), demands of Mrs. Oliver: "Did her mother kill her father or was it the father who killed the mother?"  

Well, this is a startling and arresting question, like the infamous "Was it your poor child?"  But it only leads Mrs. Oliver and the bedazed reader into a meandering maze of misty remembrance.  Initially Ariadne has trouble even remembering Celia:

[S]he couldn't remember them all [her goddaughters]....you had to remember to think when you had seen them last, whose daughters they were, what link had led to your being chosen as a godmother....The christening.  She'd gone to Celia's christening and found a very nice Queen Anne silver strainer as a christening present....Yes, she remembered the strainer very well indeed.  Queen Anne.  Seventeen-eleven it had been.  Britannia mark. How much easier it was to remember silver coffee pots or strianers or christening mugs than it was the actual child.

Sometimes memory is strained beyond capacity.  

Easier than remembering a little thing like a murder too, for that matter:

"Mrs. Oliver's brain was working desperately....Extraordinary, one couldn't remember these things....one did forget so...."

She ditches Mrs. Burton-Cox, but the question nags at her so she decides to pay a visit to her old pal Hercule Poirot.  Where does he live?  "I think it's Whitefriars Mansions.  I can't quite remember the name of it...."  Whitehaven, Ariadne.  

This all gets tedious fast, but writing about it seems to have been very important to Christie.  Therapeutic, perhaps, all this gabbling about memory loss?  Did going out of her way to have her characters forget everything make the author feel better about forgetting things herself?  Memory loves company--if it can only recall who it was that got invited.  

Whitehaven!

In Chapter Two Mrs. Oliver begs Poirot's help looking into the Ravenscroft affair.  God knows she needs it.  "I never can remember what years are, what dates are," she explains desperately to the aged Belgian sleuth.  "You know, I get mixed up. I know 1939 because that's when the war started and I know other dates because of queer things, here and there."  Um, yes, dear.  Maybe you just need a nice nap.

"Oh dear, how very difficult," Ariadne babbles as she plunges into the mystic mire of her memory and tries to explain about that Ravenscroft murder: "I can't remember if it was in Cornwall or Corsica....I think it was abroad but I can't remember."

All this dithering is anathema in a book, particularly a detective novel, but Christie, once the greatest of mystery plotters (not plodders), can't seem to help herself.  Still, it's Mrs. Oliver, we may tell ourselves hopefully.  She's always been kind of scatty.  Let's hear from Poirot, that delightful, clever little mustachioed Belgian with the egg-shaped head and the incisive little great cells.  

With horror we discover that Poirot now talks like this too.  Actually if Mrs. Oliver sounds exactly like an addled and scatterbrained Tuppence from Postern of Fate, Poirot sounds like an agonizingly long-winded Tommy from the same book.  Poirot actually delivers this horrifically long-winded soliloquy:

Human curiosity....Such a very interesting thing....To think what we owe to it throughout history.  Curiosity.  I don't know who invented curiosity.  It is said to be usually associated with the cat.  Curiosity killed the cat.  But I should say really that the Greeks were the inventors of curiosity.  They wanted to know.  Before them, as far as I can see, nobody wanted to know much.  They just wanted to know what the rules of the country they were living in were, and how they could avoid having their heads cut off or being impaled on spikes or something disagreeable happening to them.  But they either obeyed or disobeyed.  They didn't want to know why. But since then a lot of people have wanted to know why and all sorts of things have happened because of that.  Boats, trains, flying machines and atom bombs and penicillin and cures for various illnesses.  A little boy watches his mother's kettle raising its lid because of the steam. and the next thing we know is we have railway trains, leading on in due course to railway strikes and all that.  And so on and so on.

Letter from 1972, when an 82 year old 
Christie wrote her last, muddled novel
Postern of Fate, signed simply with 
the initial "C."  The effort of writing 
that book about killed her,
it was later said.

For years people had been saying of the Great Man in his mysteries things like: "Poirot, is he still alive?  He must be gaga by now."  Here, for the first time, Poirot confirms those speculations.  But when you have dementia, your mind can latch onto anything and then you do go on and on about it for a time before trailing off into silence.

This strikes me as poor writing indeed for a detective novel, however interesting it may be as a glimpse into an author's decayed mental state at the time.  Yet when people are attached to someone, even someone they don't know, because they love the person's writing or acting or singing or their politics, they often will stubbornly look past such things and insist everything is just fine, really.  Elephants actually gets a 4.4 rating on Amazon, with 59% of the reviewers incredibly awarding it five stars.  Why, it's a perfect mystery!  

Only 5% give the novel one or two stars, which is surely what it merits, while just 11% settled for three, which is generous.  Devotion is a tender emotion, one not always attached to unhappy reality.  Even Postern of Fate, the very worst book Christie ever wrote, gets four stars on Amazon.

Having finished rereading the first two chapters of Elephants, do I want to go on and read the remaining eighteen?  I think not. on the whole.  Sometimes you have to write a book off and move on to a better one.