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.)
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