Agatha gets meta

Among my recent companions on the commute has been Agatha Christie, and specifically her series of murder mysteries featuring the retired Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, who is almost never wrong. In the 1937 novel Cards On The Table, I found an intriguing sequence in which Christie either wrote about her writing process or poked fun at herself, and probably both.

One of the book’s characters, Mrs. Oliver, is the author of a series of books featuring a brilliant Finnish detective, who is almost never wrong. She, Poirot and Inspector Battle spend the book comparing notes and trying to decide whodunit. During a visit Rhoda Dawes, flatmate of one of the suspects, tells Mrs. Oliver how marvelous it must be to be a writer.

“Why?” Mrs. Oliver responds, flustering Miss Dawes, who blurts well, it must be wonderful to be able to sit down and write out a whole book.

“It doesn’t exactly happen like that,” said Mrs. Oliver. “One actually has to think, you know, and thinking is always a bore. And you have to plan things. And then one gets stuck every now and then, and you feel you’ll never get out of the mess, but you do. Writing’s not particularly enjoyable. It’s hard work like everything else.”

It doesn’t seem like work, says fangirl Rhoda.

“Not to you, because you don’t have to do it. It feels very much like work to me. Some days I can only keep going by repeating to myself the amount of money I might get for my next serial rights. That spurs you on, you know. So does your bank book when you see how much overdrawn you are.”

Undeterred, Miss Dawes can only insist that it must be fun to sit down and just think things up. But the response is:

“I can always think of things. What is so tiring is writing them down. I always think I’ve finished and when I count up, I find I’ve only written 30,000 words instead of 60,000 — and so then I have to throw in another murder and get the heroine kidnapped again — it’s all very boring.”

I chuckled at the exchange as I flew along the highway listening to Hugh Fraser read, enjoying what appears to be Ms. Christie’s commentary on the creative process. The scene begins with Miss Oliver lamenting that she just realized she wrote green beans into a scene and only then recalled they would be out of season during the time of year when the scene is set. She just knows some reader will catch the error and call it to her attention, so she’s stuck until she fixes the scene.

As much fun as writing is, as Miss Oliver says, it can feel very much like work. It’s comforting to know that even after 20 novels, Agatha Christie still had moments where it stalled. I wonder if she wrote the conversation between the misses Oliver and Dawes at one of those moments, when she was stuck and needed to write anything to keep her momentum until something came out that was worth keeping in the novel.

That might be boring, but the result was pure gold.

The rewards of risk

Found in the liner notes to The Complete Artie Shaw, Volume III, an anecdote about the creative process from my favorite jazz clarinetist. (I once horrified my father by deciding I preferred Shaw to Benny Goodman.)

“Playing it safe ain’t what it’s all about. Great music, particularly in the jazz field, is never made that way. I recall I once had a run-in with a friend about this.
“He took me to hear Jimmy Dorsey’s band. I didn’t respond too strongly to what was played. He asked me why I didn’t like what I heard. It was his feeling that Jimmy had a great band because the men played so perfectly.
“‘That’s the trouble,’ I said. ‘They never make a mistake. They don’t reach out for that something extra. They don’t take risks.’ He thought I was out of my head. On the contrary, I felt — and continue to feel — it was an eminently sane way to think. Jimmy was a safe player, like Glenn Miller. Glenn and his people never made mistakes, ever.”

When you take risks in any art, you accept the possibility that it will fall flat because it coexists with the possibility that it will soar. That’s why I often like bizarre and “out there” music and other art. As a kid I was obsessed with “Yellow Submarine” because it was an example of how the Beatles always risked doing something completely different.

I didn’t know until years later that producer George Martin tried to talk the Beatles out of the closing chord on “She Loves You” because it used harmonies out of the 1940s or some such. All I knew was that it was a great song and the melodic finish was part of its greatness. I liked that Joni Mitchell tuned her guitar differently with open chords and the like, because it gave her work a unique sound.

I enjoy musicians like Laurie Anderson and Sparks because they push the envelope and sometimes rip the envelope wide open. They risk falling flat, and they risk losing some of the audience, but the results can be spectacular because they “reach for that something extra.”

There’s a place for perfection; a live performance that sounds just like the original recording is sweet comfort food. But the meat of music is the thrill that accompanies reaching for that something extra — another shade of color in that familiar solo, an improvised detour that sails the song into a new dimension, or a new blend of familiar and adventure beyond what came before.

Here’s to the artists who make mistakes in search of the next level.

Reintroducing The Demi-Gods

The fifth volume in The Roger Mifflin Collection is available today: The Demi-Gods, a 1914 masterpiece by James Stephens.

“If you need ‘all manner of Irish,’ and a relapse into irresponsible freakishness, try ‘The Demi-Gods,’ by James Stephens,” said Mifflin, the proprietor of Christopher Morley’s Haunted Bookshop. “It is a better book than one deserves or expects. It’s a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.”

Three angels come to Earth to learn more about people. They land in the Irish countryside and encounter a nomadic man and his feisty daughter, and what happens next is what happens next.

I can’t describe the book any better than that, or any better than Morley does. My main point in sharing this series is that I haven’t yet found a book Roger Mifflin recommends that hasn’t delighted and challenged me as a reader, and what more can you ask?

Once again, this is a “lost” classic that deserves to be rediscovered and preserved, and so it joins The Roger Mifflin Collection.