Adventure classics – A joy to live those days between wars

Come, Tell Me How You Live

by Agatha Christie Mallowan

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It was spring 1944 as Agatha Christie (in a rare use of the name of her second husband, Max Mallowan ) wrote the epilogue to Come, Tell Me How You Live, the memoir of her time as an archaeologist’s wife in the Middle East. She began it before World War II, laid it aside for years, and at last took it up again, writing, “. . . it seems to me that it is good to remember that there were such days and such places, and that at this very minute my little hill of marigolds is in bloom, and old men with white beards trudging behind their donkeys may not even know there is a war.”

So after years of war (with more than another year still to go), she took up the writing again. She could remember with both nostalgia and humor the travails of the years she and Max spent on excavations in Syria and Iraq.

There were the plagues of mice (dealt with by “a very professional cat”); the excavation’s top-heavy lorry (christened Queen Mary) and prone to getting mud-bound when seasonal rains wash out roads; the local forms of entertainment (“there is to be a hanging,” their foreman said, “a woman…who has poisoned three husbands! Surely (you) would not like to miss that!”).

Agatha fears her refusal to attend the hanging costs her a great deal in status, as does her insistence on not having the sheep that will constitute dinner slaughtered in plain sight of their house.

And although she considers herself handy at washing excavated artifacts and developing photographs, and dealing out first aid, her writings get no respect. And no wonder. Because after a workman proud of his rare literacy writes a note on an empty cigarette packet that another man has been drowned, the unlucky packet finds its way to the supposed dead man’s home village, prompting the arrival of “a great cavalcade of mourners”, the man whose rumors of death were so greatly exaggerated attacks the literate one. Max docks the supposed dead man a day’s pay for fighting, sentences the prankster to walk the 40 kilometers to the not yet dead man’s village to explain and apologize, and docks him two days’ pay.

“And the real moral is—Max points out afterwards to his own select circle—what very dangerous things reading and writing are!” she writes ruefully.

Perhaps most of all, she remembers an old man (one of those who seemed to arrive out of nowhere as if in a fairy tale) who arrives and after a long silence, “inquires courteously if we are French. German? English?. . . ‘Is it the English this country belongs to now? I cannot remember. I know it is no longer the Turks.’

“‘No,’ we say; ‘the Turks have not been here since the war.’

“‘Ah yes, about the time you mention, many (soldiers) went to and fro over the railway. That, then was the war? We did not realize it was a war. It did not touch us here.’”

“After four years spent in London in war-time, I know what a very good life that was, and it has been a joy and refreshment to me to live those days again…not an escape to something that was, but the bringing into the hard work and sorrow of today of something imperishable that one not only had but still has!…Inshallah, I shall go there again, and the things that I love shall not have perished from this earth…”

(The illustration for today’s post is reproduced from a photograph by World War I Australian Expeditionary Force member Eric Keast Burke and published in The National Geographic Magazine April 1922.)

(Next Friday Adventure classics begins a February of animal adventures with A Dog of Flanders, by Marie Louise de la Ramee, writing as “Ouida”.)

Adventure classics – How do you know where to dig?

Come, Tell Me How You Live, by Agatha Christie Mallowan

Throw Me a Bone, by Eleanor Lothrop

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There’s an element of melancholy even under the self-deprecating humor of memoirs by women who helped lost civilizations to light, Come, Tell Me How You Live, by Agatha Christie (using a rare instance of her second husband’s name, Mallowan), and Eleanor Lothrop’s Throw Me a Bone. From Christie Mallowan’s viewpoint in the Middle East, Lothrop’s in Central and South America, major civilizations have vanished almost without a trace beneath desert or jungle.

“People are always saying, ‘How did you happen to know just where to dig? Your husband must be psychic.’ As if it were magic that leads an archaeologist instinctively to the right spot,” Lothrop writes in her 1948 memoir of adventures with American archaeologist husband, Sam Lothrop.

“Unfortunately it’s not that easy; as a rule tedious and hard work is necessary…your best bet is to chase directly after the men who farm the land, for in ploughing or tilling they are apt to turn up remains of another era.” It’s still not an easy job, as Lothrop demonstrates with the following questionnaire sample:

Q. “Have you done any ploughing or digging around here?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “By any chance have you come across any ancient skeletons or pottery or ornaments?”

A. “No.”

Q. “Do you know anyone who has?”

A. “No.”

Except that, after a similarly disappointing session at one farmstead, Sam notices a pig eating from a delicately painted prehistoric bowl. “‘What’s that?’ he asks, trying to control his excitement.” The answer, delivered with a pitying look: a pig. “‘I mean what is he eating out of?’” The answer, no doubt given even more pityingly: a pot. Soon, however, the farmer discloses that the pot came from a nearby field, and the Lothrops are on their way.

Christie Mallowan has a similar take of the sites chosen by her second husband, Max Mallowan, for his excavations in Syria and Iraq.

“Here, where nowadays only the tribesmen move with their brown tents…were the beginnings of civilization, and here, picked up by me, this broken fragment of a clay pot, hand-made, with a design of dots and cross-hatching in black paint, is the forerunner of the Woolworth cup out of which this very morning I have drunk my tea…I sort through the collection of sherds which are bulging the pockets of my coat (I have already had to mend the lining twice), throwing away duplicate types, and see what I can offer…”

Of course, the sherds must meet Max’s time table before a spot can even be considered for excavation. He disdains any artifacts from, oh, say, the last two thousand years, “intrusive Roman” stuff in his eyes. But he, like Sam Lothrop, his colleague of a hemisphere away, finds himself credited sometimes with psychic powers.

When a well dug at the Mallowans turns out to have been the exact site of a more ancient one, villagers in need of water flock to Max. “The secrets of antiquity are to you an open book,” they say. “Therefore, indicate to us the right places to dig…”

None of Max’s protestations of a chance finding are believed. Of course the original well would have to have been what he called “a beastly Roman well.” One more strike in his eyes against those all too modern imperialists.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics concludes a January of true adventures with the Mallowans and Lothrops.)

Adventure classics – Adventures of 'le camping' in the desert

Come, Tell Me How You Live

by Agatha Christie Mallowan

***

Last Friday’s post left Agatha Christie and her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan leaving Palmyra. But those lovely Roman-era ruins are far too modern for Max, whose mind, as Christie notes in her introductory poem, was attuned “to far B.C.” But before the Mallowans depart the first century CE for circa 3,000 BCE, they encounter some of those hangers-on of archaeology, tourists. Specifically, French tourists who need a ride back to their hotel after the breakdown of their taxi, and whose high-heeled ladies are unable to make the trip on foot.

While gallant Max returns to the hotel to fetch the Mallowans’ rented car, Agatha makes small talk.

“The French ladies profess a charming interest in our journeyings,” she writes in her 1946 memoir, Come, Tell Me How You Live. “‘Ah, Madame, vois faites le camping?’ I am fascinated by the phrase. Le camping! It classes our adventure definitely as a sport.”

It is a phrase she comes both to love and to rue, as the adventures come to include scourges of mice, fleas and cockroaches; the company of their Armenian driver Aristide who was rescued and adopted by an Arab tribe while escaping the World War I era genocide of his people; and encounters strange, comic or tragic.

The Mallowans’ first visits to Iraq and Syria are made in autumn to scout potential excavation sites for the following spring. Mallowan has three requirements for a dig: it needs proximity to villages where he can hire labor and to water (not to be taken for granted in a desert). And most important, it has to be of the right era. Of the hundreds of “tells” – artificial mounds indicating the places of ruined and buried cities dotting the Syrian and Iraqi deserts – he passes over any he considers too recent, i.e., within the past two millennium or so. Even sites with more ancient strata don't make the cut if their oldest layers are too deeply buried under more modern debris – the cost of excavating will simply be too high.

They are indeed camping, setting up their tents nightly, including a never-to-be forgotten night of rain and wind. "the wind rises to a gale, the rain is lashing down," Christie writes. "Aristide runs in to say he thinks the tents are coming down. We all rush out in the rain. It dawns on me that I am now going to see the seamy side of le camping.”

And then there are the people, who often appear seemingly out of nowhere like figures from a fairy tale, such as the very old man with “a long white beard and ineffable dignity…He sits down beside us. There is a long silence—that courteous silence of good manners that is so restful after Western haste.” After asking Max’s name: “‘Milwan…How light! How bright! How beautiful,’” he leaves. The Mallowans never see him again.

More tragic is the mother who comes to their camp begging for medicine to cure her son who “has not his proper senses.” The child’s mental disability is all too obvious, and Max tells her gently that there is no medicine that can help the boy. “The woman sighs—I think a tear runs down her cheek.” Then she asks Max for poison “‘for it is better that he should not live.’” This request too must be refused as gently as possible.

I suspect the fate of this mother and child especially weighed on Agatha. Much later, she would use the trope of a mentally disabled child and a mother’s revenge by poison in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (published in the US under the shortened title, The Mirror Crack’d).

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a January of true adventures with Agatha Christie Mallowan’s Come, Tell Me How You Live.)

Adventure classics – Digging through dirt in a labor of love

Come, Tell Me How You Live

by Agatha Christie Mallowan

***

So you think you know Agatha Christie? Just as we Christie fans can’t really know the famously private author without reading the romantic novels she wrote under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott (possibly the closest Christie ever came to public revelation of her inmost feelings), we also can’t know her until we read her sole comic work, Come, Tell Me How You Live. This short memoir cum travel book is the record of the years she spent with her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan, between sifting happily (more or less) through the sands covering the ancient cities of Iraq and Syria.

Published in 1946, it is a record of Mallowan’s archaeological digs of the 1930’s, written nostalgically during the Second World War, while Mallowan was posted to Egypt and Christie was living alone in London. It is one of only two books she published under the name “Mallowan,” and comprises a love letter of sorts to her then-absent husband.

Christie and Mallowan met at an archaeological excavation site, the ancient Sumerian city known as Ur, south of Baghdad. (The illustration for today’s post is taken from his 1930 article in National Geographic Magazine, “New Light on Ancient Ur.”) Christie at the time was divorced from her first husband, Archibald Christie. She claims in her autobiography to have been astonished when the much younger Mallowan proposed to her after a relatively short acquaintance, although given Christie’s typical reticence about her private life, the proposal may not have been entirely unexpected.

Believing that extended absences were one of the reasons for her divorce from Archibald, she seems to have been determined not to make the same mistake in her second marriage. Each year, as Mallowan left England for a new expedition, Christie traveled with him.

Personally and professionally, the digs proved fruitful for both. While he worked on (and later directed) excavations at Nineveh, and several other sites in Syria and Iraq, Agatha added archaeological backgrounds to the settings for her mystery stories, beginning with Murder in Mesopotamia, a fictionalized record of the Ur site where the two met.

Ever artful, Christie collapses several seasons of excavation into what appears in Come, Tell Me How You Live to be a single expedition.

In contrast to today’s headlines from Syria, the Syria of Christie’s record, Syria seems blissfully exotic, its worst dangers a malady known as “Gippy tummy” and a tendency to discombobulate the inner workings of fountain pens and watches.

“The desert is not kind to watches,” she writes. “After a few weeks there, one’ watch gives up steady everyday work. Time, it says, is only a mode of thought. It then takes its choice between stopping eight or nine times a day for periods of twenty minutes, or of racing indiscriminately ahead. Sometimes it alternates coyly between the two.”

Suitably prepared (on her part) with a plentiful supply of watches and on Max’s part by suitcases filled primarily with books, the pair start off, crossing the Channel by ferry and boarding the Orient Express to Istanbul (the setting for a favorite Christie mystery). From Turkey, the pair embark in a further series of trains and hired vehicles, arriving at last in Palmyra, where her description serves as an epithet to a place now synonymous with horror and ruin. “…the charm of Palmyra—its slender creamy beauty rising up fantastically in the middle of hot sand. It is lovely and fantastic and unbelievable, with all the theatrical implausibility of a dream.”

Alas, its Roman-era ruins are all modern for Mallowan, who craves more ancient ruins. And so he and Christie continue their travels, deeper into the past.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a January of true adventures with Agatha Christie’s Come, Tell Me How You Live.)

Adventure classics -- Art of murder made personal

Murder in Mesopotamia

By Agatha Christie

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What’s a mystery writer to do when the wife of her husband’s boss tries to sabotage her marriage? For Agatha Christie, the temptation was overwhelming -- to kill the offender, in fiction if not in reality.

When young archeologist Max Mallowan joined the Iraqi archeological investigation at Ur, he soon learned the acid test of his qualifications was meeting Katharine Keeling, the future wife of his employer, Leonard Woolley.

Mallowan passed the test so well Katharine (by then Mrs. Woolley) deputized him as a tour guide when the famous mystery novelist Agatha Christie visited Ur. Katharine’s cordiality, however, dissolved at the unexpected mutual attraction between Agatha and the much-younger Max.

“I finally broke the news (of Mallowan’s proposal) to the Woolleys,” Agatha recounted in her autobiography. “They seemed pleased. . . .Only (Katherine) said firmly, ‘you mustn’t marry him for at least two years.. . . it would be fatal.’”

Of course, they married as soon as possible. And of course, the outcome was fatal -- just not to Max or the new Mrs. Mallowan.

The excavation season following Agatha and Max’s marriage was his last with the Woolleys. Given Agatha’s knowledge of poisons, it’s lucky Katharine’s notoriously poor health survived the encounter, and fascinating to speculate on what might have happened if she had succumbed to a bout of food poisoning during Agatha’s visit. Would the Queen of Crime have found herself a murder suspect?

Four years later, Agatha published Murder in Mesopotamia, whose victim was a thinly-disguised version of Katharine Woolley.

In his biography, Woolley of Ur, H.V.F. Winstone reports that another of Woolley’s assistants persuaded Agatha to give the central role of Murder in Mesopotamia to a character based on Katharine Woolley, the team leader’s wife, Louise Leidner. But only Agatha could have described the too-deserving victim’s sense of entitlement so acutely, as in the following exchange between members of the fictional excavation staff.

“‘She’s always known as Lovely Louise.’

“‘Is she so very handsome then?’ I asked.

“‘It’s taking her at her own valuation. She thinks she is!’”

Did the scent of libel hang in the air? Fortunately, according to Winstone, although everyone else on the excavation recognized the inspiration for Louise Leidner, “Katharine always believed that she was represented by a minor character named Emmott.”

In Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, Agatha refrains from any mention of Murder in Mesopotamia, speaking only graciously of Katharine, whose last words to her husband as she retired to bed November 7, 1945, were, “Leonard, I shall die this night.” And she did, apparently of natural causes.

The Mallowans called on Woolley the next day, paying their last respects to “the woman who perhaps found her only substantial reality,” Winstone writes, “as one of Agatha’s characters.”

(Next Friday -- Writers need jobs. They also need hobbies. Adventure classics takes counsel on sailing from Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Crooked Candle.)