All posts tagged generalisations

Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie (1943)

‘Correct me if I am wrong, Mr Poirot, but I think you are interested in—character, shall we say?’
Poirot replied: ‘That, to me, is the principal interest of all my cases.’

Hercule Poirot had the gift of listening…

‘Murder is a drama. The desire for drama is very strong in the human race.’

‘You are at least right in this – not to take what has been written down as necessarily a true narrative. What has been written may have been written deliberately to mislead.’

‘I want to show you, mademoiselle, that even in a small unimportant matter, I am something of a magician. There are things I know without having to be told.’

Three points about ‘Five Little Pigs’:

  1. It’s another nursery rhyme story
  2. It’s a cold case
  3. It’s a closed circle mystery

1. Nursery rhyme

Quite obviously this is another of the detective stories Christie concocted from, or constructed in order to parallel, a nursery rhyme (compare ‘Pocket full of Rye’, ‘Crooked House’, ‘Five Little Pigs’, ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’, ‘One, Two, Buckle my Shoe’, ‘Three Blind Mice’). It has five main suspects who correlate exactly to the five pigs in the rhyme:

This little piggy went to market.
This little piggy stayed at home.
This little piggy had roast beef.
And this little piggy had none.
And this little piggy cried wee wee wee all the way home.

2. Cold case

Poirot is called in to solve a murder which took place sixteen years earlier. Back then beautiful Caroline Crase was convicted of poisoning her husband, the high-living artist Amyas Crale and sentenced to life imprisonment. In the end she served just a year before dying in prison.

The motive for the crime was that Amyas was openly having an affair with a beautiful 20-year old woman, Elsa Greer, and just the day before, Elsa had openly taunted Caroline, claiming Amyas was going to divorce her and how soon the family home would be hers (Elsa’s). Various witnesses overheard Caroline saying that would never happen, that she would kill her husband first; and then, later, she was heard having a stand-up row with Amyas, in which she said she would kill him rather than let him run off with another woman.

The means was a poison called coniine, extracted from the plant spotted hemlock. This coniine was the product of a neighbour of the Crales’s, a man named Meredith Blake who had spent years experimenting with herbs, plant extracts and home-brewed medicines. The day before the death, this Meredith, along with his brother Philip, had come over to the Crales’ house for tea, and had delivered quite a monologue about his hobby, and about this poison in particular.

Next day Meredith discovered that his bottle containing coniine (a volatile poisonous compound found in hemlock and other plants) was suddenly half empty. After the death, a bottle with traces of coniine in was found in Caroline’s room. Her story was that, after hearing about its deadly properties, she had stolen some from Meredith’s laboratory, with a view to killing herself if the divorce went ahead. But what clinched her conviction was that this poison was discovered in a bottle of beer she personally brought and served to her husband as he painted a portrait of Elsa in the garden, and which the doctors quickly established as the painter’s cause of death.

Sixteen years later, her daughter, Carla Lemarchant, who was 5 at the time, and was taken away and looked after by relatives in Canada, comes of age (21) whereupon the family solicitor gives her a letter written by her mother claiming that she (Caroline) was innocent, and didn’t murder her father.

Whereupon Carla tracks down Hercule Poirot, meets and hires him to find the identity of the real killer and so clear her mother’s name. As Poirot explains for the umpteenth time, this kind of case suits him because all the forensic clues have long since disappeared and so it is a question almost entirely of psychology, of meeting and questioning the suspects, finding out about their lives and motives, and slowly figuring out who had the character and personality to be the murderer.

Poirot said placidly:
‘One does not, you know, employ merely the muscles. I do not need to bend and measure the footprints and pick up the cigarette ends and examine the bent blades of grass. It is enough for me to sit back in my chair and think. It is this’ – he tapped his egg-shaped head – ‘this that
functions!’
(Chapter 1)

And, less obviously, he always needs to know about the personality of the murderee.

‘Have you ever reflected, Mr Blake, that the reason for murder is nearly always to be found by a study of the person murdered?’
‘I hadn’t exactly – yes, I suppose I see what you mean.’
Poirot said:
‘Until you know exactly what sort of a person the victim was, you cannot begin to see the circumstances of a crime clearly.’
He added:
‘That is what I am seeking for – and what you and your brother have helped to give me – a reconstruction of the man Amyas Crale.’

More about psychology, below.

3. Closed circle

According to Google AI:

A ‘closed circle mystery’ is a subgenre of detective fiction where a crime, usually a murder, occurs within a limited group of suspects who are isolated from the outside world. The core concept is that the perpetrator must be one of the individuals present, and the detective’s task is to identify the killer from this select group.

Thus Poirot quickly finds out that on the day of Amyas Crale’s death, there were five people at the couple’s home (Alderbury) who he proceeds, whimsically, to nickname the five little pigs.

The five little pigs

  1. Philip Blake – the pig who went to market – the younger Blake brother, stockbroker, lives at St. George’s Hill, ‘a prosperous, shrewd, jovial looking man – slightly running to fat’ – ‘a well-fed pig who had gone to market – and fetched the full market price’
  2. Meredith Blake – the pig who stayed at home – the older Blake brother who inherited the estate , a basic huntin’, shootin’ fishin’ squire but who has amused himself with amateur dabbling in herbalism and chemistry – he ‘resembled superficially every other English country gentleman of straitened means and outdoor tastes. A shabby old coat of Harris tweed, a weather-beaten, pleasant, middle-aged face with somewhat faded blue eyes, a weak mouth, half hidden by a rather straggly moustache’
  3. Elsa Greer – the pig who ate roast beef, Amyas’s painting model and the woman he was planning to leave his wife for – ‘a superb, slim, straight creature, arrogant, her head turned, her eyes insolent with triumph’ – ‘They’ve fed her meat all right,’ he [Depleach] said. ‘She’s been a go-getter. She’s had three husbands since then. In and out of the divorce court as easy as you please. And every time she makes a change, it’s for the better. Lady Dittisham – that’s who she is now. Open any Tatler and you’re sure to find her.’
  4. Miss Cecilia Williams – the piggy who had none – Angela’s governess, a small, elderly lady in a neat shabby dress, living in very straitened circumstances in a one-room flat, but buoyed up by her Victorian sense of duty and feminist loathing of men
  5. Angela Warren – the piggy who went wee wee wee – Caroline’s younger half-sister who, as a child, she threw a paperweight at and blinded in one eye (!) – has turned out a very distinguished woman: ‘traveller to weird places. Lectures at the Royal Geographical Society’

Schematic

Christie’s early novels are chaotic harum-scarum adventures. In the later 1920s and 1930s they become more structured. Murder on the Orient Express is a classic example of her taste for clarity and logical structure, with a chapter each devoted to the testimony of all the witnesses. ‘Five Little Pigs’ as another of the same type, its contents laid out with the clarity and logic of an official report, feeling almost like an engineer or architect’s schematic design for a novel.

Thus in book one, Poirot goes to interview the key figures form the trial 16 years earlier, the counsel for the defence, for the prosecution, a young solicitor involved in the trial, and the Crase family solicitor. Then he goes to see each of the five key suspects, in the same order as the nursery rhyme. He not only interviews them (with the thin excuse that he is involved in a book which is being written about the murder) but asks each of them to write their own account of what happened and why. And it is the five written statements by the five little pigs which make up part two of the book.

And then in part three, Poirot uses everything he’s learned in order to, as usual, create a detailed reconstruction of the crime which, at various points seems to incriminate every one of the piggies, before, of course, revealing the actual murderer with a flourish!

Book One

  1. Counsel for the Defence
  2. Counsel for the Prosecution
  3. The Young Solicitor
  4. The Old Solicitor
  5. The Police Superintendent
  6. This Little Pig Went to Market [Philip Blake]
  7. This Little Pig Stayed at Home [Meredith Blake]
  8. This Little Pig Had Roast Beef [Elsa Greer]
  9. This Little Pig Had None [Cecilia Williams]
  10. This Little Pig Cried ‘Wee Wee Wee’ [Angela Warren]

Book Two

  • Narrative of Philip Blake
  • Narrative of Meredith Blake
  • Narrative of Lady Dittisham
  • Narrative of Cecilia Williams
  • Narrative of Angela Warren

Book Three

  1. Conclusions
  2. Poirot Asks Five Questions
  3. Reconstruction
  4. Truth
  5. Aftermath

Christie makes it neat by attributing part of the schematic, diagrammatic layout of the text to Poirot’s own, well-known symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Thus towards the end, in part 3 chapter 2, we find Poirot telling himself he doesn’t really need to interview Miss Williams, but…

Really, when he came to think of it, he did not want to ask Angela Warren any questions at all. The only question he did want to ask her could wait… No, it was really only his insatiable passion for symmetry that was bringing him here. Five people – there should be five questions! It was neater so. It rounded off the thing better.

Cast

As well as the five little pigs, additional characters are:

  • Hercule Poirot
  • Carla Lemarchant – daughter of Caroline and Amyas Crale – named Caroline after her mother, her first and last names were changed when she was sent to Montral, Canada, to live with her aunt and uncle when her mother was sent to prison
  • John Rattery – Carla’s fiancé, a ‘ tall, square-jawed young man with the steady grey eyes’
  • Sir Montague Depleach – council for the defence i.e. defended Caroline Crase 16 years ago – ‘force, magnetism, an overbearing and slightly bullying personality. He got his effects by a rapid and dramatic change of manner. Handsome, urbane, charming one minute—then an almost magical transformation, lips back, snarling smile—out for your blood’
  • Quentin Fogg, K.C. – ‘thin, pale, singularly lacking in what is called personality. His questions were quiet and unemotional —but steadily persistent. If Depleach was like a rapier, Fogg was like an auger. He bored steadily. He had never reached spectacular fame, but he was known as a first-class man on law. He usually won his cases’
  • George Mayhew – junior solicitor in the firm representing Caroline
  • Edmunds – managing clerk of Mayhew’s firm of solicitors
  • Mr Caleb Jonathan – senior solicitor in the Crale family firm, retired to Essex
  • Ex-Superintendent Hale – leading officer on the Crale murder investigation

Locations

The three main properties are on the south Devon coast.

  • Handcross Manor – home of the Blake family, inherited home of Meredith Blake – just a short row across a creek from…
  • Alderbury – home of Amyas and Caroline Crale
  • Ferriby Grange – home of Lady Tressillian, where Angela is sent after Amyas’s death
  • Montreal, Canada – home of Uncle Simon and Aunt Louise Lemarchant, where 5-year-old Carla was sent to live after her mother went to prison

The psychology book

‘What is the meaning of all this nonsense?’ demanded Miss Williams.
‘It is to show you that it is the eyes of the mind with which one really sees…’

When he sets off to interview the five little pigs, Poirot needs a cover story. Saying he’s actively investigating a 16-year-old crime would raise lots of questions. So he comes up with the more plausible notion that he has been commissioned to write a book about classic crimes. The sales angle is that he’ll give the crimes a modern, psychological interpretation.

‘It is proposed to rewrite the stories of certain bygone crimes – from the psychological angle. Psychology in crime, it is my speciality.’

As Poirot explains to Philip Blake, in the olden days the interest in crimes often focused on ‘romance’, about love triangles and so on. Nowadays, psychology is in the ascendant, and the reading public want to hear all about complexes and traumas etc. (This, by the way, is flatly disproved by Christie’s own works, which include very occasional references to actual psychology, to Freud, complexes and so on – but are still heavily reliant on love triangles, affairs, adultery, jealousy and so on.)

Obviously this handily chimes with Poirot’s own genuine interest in psychology and in the psychology of the five main suspects, so his cover story fits neatly with his actual interests.

‘My success, let me tell you, has been founded on the psychology – the eternal why? of human behaviour. That, Mr Blake, is what interests the world in crime today.’

Poirot uses his outsiderness

In previous novels we’ve seen Poirot consciously deploy his foreignness, his outsiderness, when it suits him, when it gives him a tactical advantage. In this novel he several times lays it on with a trowel, deliberately playing up his foreignness in order to play to his interviewees’ prejudices and lull them. For example when trying to inveigle himself with hale-fellow-well-met Philip Blake.

‘Of course you are. We all know that. The famous Hercule Poirot!’ But his tone held a subtly mocking note. Intrinsically, Philip Blake was too much of an Englishman to take the pretensions of a foreigner seriously.

So:

Hercule Poirot shrugged his shoulders. He was at his most foreign today. He was out to be despised but patronized.

Whereas with the other Blake brother, Meredith, the piggy who stayed at home and is a more traditional country squire:

Hercule Poirot prided himself on knowing how to handle an ‘old school tie’. It was no moment for trying to seem English. No, one must be a foreigner – frankly a foreigner – and be magnanimously forgiven for the fact. ‘Of course, these foreigners don’t quite know the ropes. Will shake hands at breakfast. Still, a decent fellow really…’

Poirot imagines Meredith Blake’s view of him:

Really a most impossible person – the wrong clothes – button boots! – an incredible moustache! Not his – Meredith Blake’s – kind of fellow at all. Didn’t look as though he’d ever hunted or shot – or even played a decent game. A foreigner.

But by playing up to this stereotype, Poirot lulls his interviewees into thinking he is stupid, they are clever, and so gets more information out of them.

Everyday sexism

The case, at least to start with, appears to be entirely about the eternal triangle, a married couple broken up by a young woman seducing the husband, and the murderous jealousy of the wronged wife. Which just triggers, in my mind, the tired conclusion: Humans, and their complete inability to manage their relationships! Why on earth are they called ‘adults’? How on earth do they think they can run a planet when they can’t even run their own relationships?

Anyway, the focus on sexual relationships means the novel lends itself to more than the usual quota of casual generalisations about the sexes, with the majority of them – rather inevitably – being unflattering comments about ‘women’.

Poirot said: ‘With women, love always comes first.’
‘Don’t I know it?’ said Superintendent Hale with feeling.
‘Men,’ continued Poirot, ‘and especially artists—are different.’

FOGG: ‘Very good looking, hard-boiled, modern. To the women in the court she [Elsa] stood for a type – type of the home-breaker. Homes weren’t safe when girls like that were wandering abroad. Girls damn full of sex and contemptuous of the rights of wives and mothers.’

Superintendent Hale said: ‘Oh, you know what women are! Have to get at each other’s throats.’

‘The girl [Elsa] was a good looker, all right,’ said Hale. ‘Lots of make-up and next to no clothes on. It isn’t decent the way these girls go about. And that was sixteen years ago, mind you. Nowadays one wouldn’t think anything of it. But then – well, it shocked me. Trousers and one of those canvas shirts, open at the neck – and not another thing, I should say!’

Philip Blake said: ‘I don’t know that there was much subtlety about it. It was a pretty obvious business. Crude female jealousy, that was all there was to it.’

‘Women will always see a private detective! Men will tell him to go to the devil.’ (Poirot)

‘There was Mrs Crale, there was Miss Williams, there was a housemaid. It is a woman’s job to pack—not a man’s.’ (Poirot)

And much more in the same vein, scores of casual generalisations about the character of all women, or all men, which have, maybe, become unacceptable in our time…

Countered by feminism

‘She was a great feminist and disliked men.’
(Angela Warren on Miss Williams)

The sweeping generalisations about ‘women’ made by pretty much all the men in the story are given a strong counter in the character of the impoverished old governess, Miss Williams, who is described more than once as a ‘feminist’.

For a brief moment you think Christie is fighting back against these sexist stereotypes. But then you realise that Miss Williams is herself a stereotype, a caricature of the dried-up old spinster, impoverished and bitterly anti-male. Poirot is interviewing her:

‘He was devoted to her as she was to him?’
‘They were a devoted couple. But he, of course, was a man.’
Miss Williams contrived to put into that last word a wholly Victorian significance.
‘Men—’ said Miss Williams, and stopped.
As a rich property owner says ‘Bolsheviks’ – as an earnest Communist says ‘Capitalists!’ – as a good housewife says ‘Blackbeetles’ – so did Miss Williams say ‘Men!’
From her spinster’s, governess’s life, there rose up a blast of fierce feminism. Nobody hearing her speak could doubt that to Miss Williams Men were the Enemy!

And Christie shows that feminists are just as capable of stereotyping and judging men as the chauvinist men are of stereotyping women.

‘Oh, I dare say you are a sentimentalist like most men—’
Poirot interrupted indignantly:
‘I am not a sentimentalist.’

It is of course a woman writing all this. And it’s worth making the point that all the ‘feminists’ in Christie’s novels are liable to be mocked. According to her biographer, Laura Thompson, Christie had no time for feminism. She associated it very much with anti-men i.e. misandrist attitudes (misandrist: ‘a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against men’) and this is precisely the attitude she attributes to Miss Williams. Christie thought it was as absurd for feminists to be anti-men as it was for what she called woman haters (what we nowadays call misogynists) to be anti-women. For her, the two extremes were equally as ridiculous.

Christie and stereotypes

But more broadly, the flagrancy of Miss Williams’ character reminds you all over again that Christie’s novels are made out of stereotypes. Certain ones – the stereotyping of women and, occasionally, of ethnic minorities, in Christie’s works – are what leap out to us because, a hundred years later, they are (still) the hot button topics of our day, drilled as we are at work and in all public spaces with the mantras of diversity and inclusion.

But Christie deploys stereotypical ‘wisdom’ or tropes about pretty much every human type and category. This reliance on stereotypical characters expressing stereotypical views is what makes her novels genre fiction and nowhere near ‘literature’.

Thus characters all make sweeping generalisations not only about men, women and numerous sub-types of men and women, but about servants, butlers, the police, lawyers, the entire criminal justice system, about children and teenagers, and many more…

Artists are usually careless about money matters…

Even Poirot sums up all the suspects as ‘types’ – for a start, describing them as ‘little pigs’ isn’t that flattering, is it? He thinks of Meredith as a typical country squire, of Philip Blake as a typical affluent stockbroker, of Miss Williams as a typical spinster, and so on.

And, of course, Poirot is very fond of making sweeping generalisations about criminals, about ‘the criminal mind’, murderers, and so on.

From one perspective Christie’s texts amount to a kind of battle or conflict between rival generalisations: Superintendent Hale’s generalisations about women or murder being rebutted by Poirot’s countervailing generalisations, all the characters sharing their prejudices about artists and ‘the artistic temperament’. In a sense every single conversation can be seen as a conflict of generalisations.

He looked a bit ashamed of himself. Men do when women pin them down in a corner.
(Philip Blake describing Amyas)

Then he calmed down a little and said women had no sense of proportion.
(Philip on Amyas again)

‘I have to admit that she looked incredibly beautiful that afternoon. Women do when they’ve got what they want.’
(Philip Blake)

‘It made him appear at a disadvantage, and men do not like appearing at a disadvantage. It upsets their vanity.’
(Miss Williams)

A study of Christie’s novels makes you realise just how much human conversation is made up of dodgy generalisations, very often based on a person’s own anecdotal evidence, or ‘someone told me x or y’ – or just picked up from the culture at large.

And realise just how much a person’s character can, in a sense, be defined by the generalisations or mental axioms they operate with. Most people’s generalisations aren’t meant to be taken in a statistically significant, scientific or logical way. They are just ways of expressing character, or mood. In a sense a person’s character is the totality of the generalisations they harbour. When Elsa says the following to Amyas:

‘I think you’re right about Spain. That’s the first place we’ll go to. And you must take me to see a bullfight. It must be wonderful. Only I’d like the bull to kill the man—not the other way about. I understand how Roman women felt when they saw a man die. Men aren’t much, but animals are splendid.’

That final axiom has no meaning or value whatsoever as objective information about the world. It is entirely an expression of her character and attitude, which are young and selfish, thoughtlessly cynical, conventionally rebellious. Meredith Blake, who gives us this quote, draws the correct conclusion:

I suppose she was rather like an animal herself – young and primitive and with nothing yet of man’s sad experience and doubtful wisdom.

But this is because he is a puppet in his creator’s hands. The supposed quote from Elsa, along with its sweeping generalisation, is entirely meant to characterise her, and Meredith’s comment is just an elaboration of the same point: a repetition of it in a different mode.

But since Elsa never existed, in fact none of these people ever existed, these kinds of generalisations should be seen as simply one of the techniques by which Christie creates the distinctions between the characters she’s inventing. Empty of intrinsic value or meaning, they are just rhetorical strategies associated with the textual entities referred to as characters.

Summary

In all my summaries of Christie’s novels I’ve broken off before the final act and never revealed whodunnit. I won’t here, either – except to say that the big reveal and explanation of whodunnit in lots of them, by far the majority, is often ridiculously contrived and complicated and often unbelievable. ‘Five Little Pigs’ has a claim to be one of the best of her novels because the revelation, when it comes, is not only not too preposterously contrived, but psychologically believable and convincingly bleak.

Credit

‘Five Little Pigs’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in January 1943.

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The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie (1942)

‘Morning, Bantry,’ said the chief constable. ‘Thought I’d better come along myself. This seems an extraordinary business.’
‘It’s – it’s –’ Colonel Bantry struggled to express himself– ‘it’s incredible – fantastic!’
(Chapter 1, section 5)

Jefferson nodded. He said, ‘It certainly seems fantastic.’
(Chapter 8, section 3)

‘It’s an extraordinary business,’ Sir Henry commented when Jefferson had finished.
(Chapter 11, section 1)

Superintendent Harper said, ‘Have you any idea at all, sir, who can have done this?’
‘Good God, I wish I had!’ The veins stood out on Jefferson’s forehead. ‘It’s incredible, unimaginable!’
(Have we got the message yet, that all the characters find the whole thing wildly improbable)

‘You know,’ said Mrs Bantry, ‘I can’t help feeling glad they’ve taken the body away. It’s not nice to have a body in one’s house.’
(The genteel approach to murder in a village of posh ladies and gossipy spinsters)

Jefferson said, frowning, ‘I can’t help feeling it must be the work of some maniac – the brutality of the method, breaking into a country house, the whole thing so unconnected and senseless.’
(The same baseless claim made by someone in more or less all of the novels, that the murderer must be a fiend, a maniac, a lunatic – which helps to ramp up the tension and give the text the Gothic sense that there’s a madman on the loose)

Funny old tabby, thought Dinah… Eccentric old bean… Nosey old cat…
(Young floozy Dinah Lee’s opinion of old Miss Marple)

Plot summary

The body in the library trope

Right from the start it’s a sort of joke that a murdered body is found in the library of a posh country house because it’s such a cliché of the genre. Thus the improbably amused tone of the lady of the manor where the body is discovered, Dolly Bantry, in a phone call to Miss Marple:

‘But you’re very good at murders. She’s been murdered you see; strangled. What I feel is that if one has got to have a murder actually happening in one’s house, one might as well enjoy it, if you know what I mean. That’s why I want you to come and help me find out who did it and unravel the mystery and all that. It really is rather thrilling, isn’t it?’

It was 1942 and Christie was well aware that this sort of thing had happened so many times in previous detective stories that ‘the body in the library’ was virtually a sub-genre in its own right. Particularly if it’s the body of a nubile young woman, as it is here. And a blonde, to boot!

Miss Marple demanded breathlessly, ‘But whose body is it?’
‘It’s a blonde.’
‘A what?’
‘A blonde. A beautiful blonde – like in the books…’

Indeed, according to the Wikipedia article on the book:

In her ‘Author’s Foreword’, Christie describes ‘the body in the library’ as a cliché of detective fiction. She states that when writing her own variation on this theme, she decided that the library should be a completely conventional one while the body would be a highly improbable and sensational one.

So one aspect of the entertainment, then, derives from finding out how Christie will treat such a familiar subject or cliché – or classic trope – of the detective genre.

Miss Marple

And the answer is given almost straight away when we realise this is going to be a Miss Marple story. Miss Jane Marple, shrewd spinster inhabitant of the little village of St Mary Mead, first appeared in a short story in 1927, ‘The Tuesday Night Club’, which was then made the basis of a collection of stories, ‘The Thirteen Problems’, published in 1932. Her first appearance in a full-length novel was in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930 so ‘The Body in the Library’ is only the second novel devoted to her, a full 12 years after the first.

The library in question is part of the country house, Gossington Hall, a mile and a half from St Mary Mead, the village where Miss M lives, and soon after the body is discovered (by the servants), the Hall owner’s wife, Mrs Bantry, is on the phone to her old friend Jane Marple, to tell her the shocking news.

‘We’ve just found a body in the library.’
For a moment Miss Marple thought her friend had gone mad.
‘You’ve found a what?’
‘I know. One doesn’t believe it, does one? I mean I thought they only happened in books.’

The police

In fact, despite Mrs Bantry’s invitation to her old friend to help out, it takes about half the text before Miss Marple becomes really involved in the case. First of all the police are called in, in the form of: Colonel Melchett, the chief constable of (the fictional country of) Radfordshire and Inspector Slack. There’s a slight complication in that the body was found in the library at Gossington Hall, which is in the country of Radfordshire, while the Majestic Hotel where they discover the murdered girl worked, is across the country border in the county of Glenshire, and so the investigation has to be a joint undertaking by Melchett and Slack from the Radfordshire force, and Superintendent Harper from the Glenshire force. So there’s a certain amount of jostling and dislike between these three men who each have different temperaments and approaches (Melchett is bluff to the point of rudeness; Slack is hyperactive; Harper is slow and imperturbable).

Anyway, over the leisurely course of the first half of the narrative, they discover that:

Ruby Keene

The dead woman is a dancer and hostess named Ruby Keene who worked at the Majestic Hotel in the (fictional) seaside resort of Danemouth. There’s a backstory: her cousin, Josephine ‘Josie’ Turner, had for some time been working at the hotel, entertaining guests by dancing and/or organising bridge games with them, alongside her stylish dancing partner, Raymond Starr. Until, that is, a month or so before the narrative starts, Josie twisted her ankle climbing over slippery rocks on the shore. She was no longer able to undertake her dancing duties which angered the hotel manager, Mr Prestcott, until Josie suggested inviting her pretty young cousin to come and replace her. And so Ruby arrived. Very young, only 18, not particularly attractive (in Mark Gaskell’s opinion, ‘A thin ferrety little face, not much chin, teeth running down her throat, nondescript sort of nose…’) but knew how to use make-up and, above all, was young and vivacious. The guests liked her.

Conway Jefferson

But the massively central fact of the story rotates around a character Conway Jefferson. This is complicated. Jefferson is an older man (in his 60s?). He was happily married with two grown-up children, Frank and Rosamund, who were themselves married. But then he and his family were involved in a disastrous plane crash. His wife and two children were killed, and he himself was so seriously injured that both his legs had to be amputated, confining him to a wheelchair. But he is a forceful, determined personality and, following the crash, he took to speculating on the stock market and made a fortune. Now he regularly visits the Majestic Hotel where he takes the best suite of rooms and treats himself to the best food.

I mentioned that his children were married. At the hotel he is routinely accompanied by his son’s wife/widow, Adelaide ‘Addie’ Jefferson; and his daughter’s husband, Mark Gaskill. Addie already had a son by her first marriage, young Peter Carmody who, like lots of boys in Christie, is a keen reader of detective stories!

Conway was going to adopt Ruby

Now what the police establish, in the course of interviews conducted by Melchett, Harper and Slack, is that this wheelchair-bound older man had taken a very strong liking indeed to the murdered woman, Ruby. Jefferson himself explains that, confined to a wheelchair as he is, he is attracted to youth and vitality. And young Ruby was fresh and young and unselfconsciously friendly. And so he had taken legal steps to adopt her as his daughter! He had made a new will, just a matter of ten days or so earlier and in this will he left no less than £50,000 to be held in trust for Ruby Keene until she was twenty-five, when she would come into the principal.

Motive?

Obviously the cops’ ears prick up. Now we have a motive for the murder, one of the oldest motives in the book, money. Was Ruby murdered by someone who stood to lose out as and when Jefferson died and most of his money went to young Ruby? The problem with this theory is, as Jefferson himself explains, that he had already settled significant sums on his two children’s spouses, Addie and Mark, so it wasn’t like they were champing at the bit for his inheritance. His generosity had already made them both independently wealthy.

Conway called the cops

Anyway, this explains why, when Ruby failed to show up for her second shift of dancing and hostessing, on the night in question – something which became obvious to Josie and the dancing partner Raymond – it wasn’t they or the hotel manager who called the police, but Jefferson who, when he learned about her absence, became extremely concerned, and called the cops.

Josie conspiring

There’s another angle, which is that it was Josie who pushed her cousin towards Jefferson. From interviewing Josie and the others, the police begin to understand that Ruby being quite so kind to Jefferson was at least a conscious plan by Josie to butter the old man up.

George Bartlett

As to the night of the murder, the police discover another very strong suspect. This is a silly, flustered young man named George Bartlett:

A thin, lanky youth with a prominent Adam apple and an immense difficulty in saying what he meant. He was in such a state of dither that it was hard to get a calm statement from him.

Bartlett hangs round the hotel trying to chat up young women and consistently failing. On the night of the murder he danced with Ruby till about 11 and then vaguely describes going outside for a walk around, in the evening air, only appearing back in the ballroom about midnight when the missing girl failed to turn up for her next dancing session and her colleagues started to worry. In other words he was a) the last person seen with the murder victim and b) had no alibi for the hour or so during which she was murdered. Also c) he owns a car, and so could have offered to take Ruby for a spin, during which he, for whatever reason, strangled her, drive to Gossington Park and dumped her body.

He had the opportunity but the police are left asking themselves what possible motive he could have? Why drive all the way to Gossington Hall, break in, and smuggle into the library a dead body? If he had some sudden violent turn and strangled the poor girl in his car, why not just dump her body in some remote site and drive back to the hotel quickly.

Those are the main facts the trio of policemen have established by halfway through the book which is where Miss Marple – who’d popped up here and there, mainly as a good friend of the owner of Gossington Hall, Dolly Bantry – begins to become more involved.

Sir Henry Clithering recommends Miss Marple

She is consciously brought into the case in the following way. Jefferson calls up an old friend of his, Sir Henry Clithering, ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard, to conduct a private investigation, alongside the official police one. And it just so happens that this Sir Henry had featured in the short story collection ‘The Thirteen Problems’, which I mentioned above, wherein he had seen Miss Marple solve an impressive number of crimes using her particular method. So Clithering recommends her to Jefferson:

Sir Henry said slowly, ‘You probably won’t believe me, but you’ve got an expert at solving mysteries sitting downstairs in the lounge at this minute. Someone who’s better than I am at it,
and who, in all probability, may have some local dope.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid, spinsterish face and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it as all in the day’s work. Her name’s Miss Marple. She comes from the village of St Mary Mead, which is a mile and a half from Gossington; she’s a friend of the Bantrys and, where crime is concerned, she’s the goods, Conway.’
Jefferson stared at him with thick puckered brows. He said heavily, ‘You’re joking.’

But Clithering isn’t joking and so Jefferson takes Miss Marple on.

Miss Marple’s method

1. Universal scepticism

Miss Marple’s ‘method’ consists of two parts. Part one is universal scepticism:

‘The truth is, you see, that most people, and I don’t exclude policemen, are far too trusting for this wicked world. They believe what is told them. I never do. I’m afraid I always like to prove a thing for myself.’

She likes to think things through based on the actual facts of what she sees for herself, maintaining a healthy scepticism about everything that she hears. Or, as she puts it:

‘As I’ve told you, I’ve got a very suspicious mind.’

2. Village parallels

But the core of her ‘method’, improbable though it sounds, consists in finding analogies from life in the small village where she lives, St Mary Mead, and applying them to the characters in crimes.

Miss Marple had attained fame by her ability to link up trivial village happenings with graver problems in such a way as to throw light upon the latter.

Or, as Clithering (not totally satisfactorily) explains it:

‘Woman’s intuition, I suppose,’ Jefferson said sceptically.
‘No, she doesn’t call it that. Specialized knowledge is her claim.’
‘And what does that mean?’
‘Well, you know, Jefferson, we use it in police work. We get a burglary and we usually know pretty well who did it of the regular crowd, that is. We know the sort of burglar who acts in a particular sort of way. Miss Marple has an interesting, though occasionally trivial, series of parallels from village life.’

So her ‘method’ runs along the lines of her saying to Sir Henry, or Inspector Slack, or Dolly, or whoever she’s talking to, things like, ‘It reminds me of the young Billy, Mrs Mop’s son, do you remember, when he ran off with the baker’s daughter’ and so draws a parallel between a village incident and the case in hand etc. She overflows with homely gossip about her sweet little village which, on closer inspection, turn out to bear an uncanny relevance to the crime under investigation…

As Clithering phrases it in the conversation where he tells her Jefferson wants to hire here:

Miss Marple said composedly, ‘Dolly thought that a change of scene would be a good thing and she didn’t want to come alone.’
She met his eye and her own gently twinkled. ‘But of course your way of describing it is quite true. It’s rather embarrassing for me, because, of course, I am no use at all.’
‘No ideas? No village parallels?’

Village parallels That’s Miss Marple’s method in a phrase, and Christie plays it up. Later, when Miss M first meets Huge McLean, Sir Henry leans over and asks her: ‘Village parallel, please.’

Some of Miss Marple’s village parallels

For example:

‘Take the young maidservant at Mr Harbottle’s, for instance. A very ordinary girl, but quiet, with nice manners. His sister was called away to nurse a dying relative, and when she got back she found the girl completely above herself…’

Or:

‘And there was Mr Badger, who had the chemist’s shop. Made a lot of fuss over the young lady who worked in his cosmetics section. Told his wife they must look on her as a daughter and have her to live in the house. Mrs Badger didn’t see it that way at all…’

It’s:

‘A little,’ added Miss Marple, ‘like Jessie Golden, the baker’s daughter.’
‘What happened to her?’ asked Sir Henry.
‘She trained as a nursery governess and married the son of the house, who was home on leave from India. Made him a very good wife, I believe…’

Or:

‘Like Major Bury. He hung round an Anglo-Indian widow for quite ten years. A joke among her friends! In the end she gave in, but, unfortunately, ten days before they were to have been married she ran away with the chauffeur…’

Or:

‘You remember when I was so against letting Mrs Partridge collect for the Red Cross and I couldn’t say why…’

And many more anecdotes from village life. Because, after all:

‘One does see so much evil in a village,’ murmured Miss Marple in an explanatory voice.

And this, this is her explanation for the whole story, for why a dead blonde turns up in Colonel Bantry’s library, as she explains to a bewildered Basil Blake and Dinah Lee:

‘Yes, yes,’ said Miss Marple. ‘Little Tommy Bond had very much the same idea. Rather a sensitive boy, with an inferiority complex, he said teacher was always picking on him. He put a frog in the clock and it jumped out at her. You were just the same,’ went on Miss Marple, ‘only, of course, bodies are more serious matters than frogs.’

The second murdered girl

Back to the narrative, once Miss Marple is on board there is one further major plot development, which is that an abandoned car is set alight up on Danemouth Downs and is discovered to contain the charred remains of another girl, Pamela Reeves, who was reported missing a few days earlier. So are the abductions and murders of these two girls connected and, if so, how? And why?

Furthermore, about two-thirds way through, the police discover that both the bereaved spouses – Adelaide and Mark – are not as financially secure as we thought: Conway gifted them their large amounts some years ago and 1) Adelaide’s husband made a string of bad investments and lost most of the money, while 2) Mark Gaskell is an actual gambler (‘Risk everything – that’s my motto’) and has gambled away the entire sum Conway gave him, and got into debt. So both of them did have a strong motive to eliminate Ruby before Conway changed his will in her favour.

And also, several characters and the cops speculate what Conway himself might have done if he’d discovered that Ruby was seeing another man. Although the crippled Conway was in no way having an affair with her, he did, on the other hand, regard her as pure and having become, in some way, his. If he discovered that she was slipping off to see a fancy man might he, in a furious rage, have strangled her with his own hands? Christie talks up this possibility by having his physician tell the cops that Conway has more than usual strength in his upper body.

So as the book enters its last quarter there are more suspects than ever, each with believable motives and gains. Still no clue whatsoever why the murdered woman was dumped in the library at Gossington Hall, though. Or the connection with the other missing girl, Pamela Reeves.

As usual at this point I’ll stop my summary to avoid spoilers. And also because the last part, and especially the solution, of Christie novels tend to be murderously complicated and convoluted…

Cast

  • Colonel Arthur Bantry – owner of Gossington Hall, principal magistrate of the district
  • Mrs ‘Dolly’ Bantry – his wife
  • Lorrimer – the butler
  • Police Constable Palk – who Colonel Bantry calls when they find the body
  • Mrs Palk
  • Inspector Slack – ‘An energetic man who belied his name and who accompanied his bustling manner with a good deal of disregard for the feelings of anyone he did not consider important’
  • Colonel Melchett – the chief constable of Radfordshire – ‘an irascible-looking man with a habit of
    tugging at his short red moustache’
  • Superintendent Harper – from the Glenshire police
  • Doctor Haydock – the police surgeon
  • Basil Blake – Young fellow connected with the film industry – ‘Basil Blake was not a film star, not even a film actor. He was a very junior person, rejoicing in the position of about fifteenth in the list of those responsible for set decorations at Lenville Studios, headquarters of British New Era Films’ – lives in a ghastly modern house where he has loud parties for sybarites down from London, featuring many shameless, scantily clad young women – so he is an early suspect in the murder of just such an over-made up, scantily clad young woman
  • Dinah Lee – young woman Basil argues with in front of the police when they go to interview him
  • Conway Jefferson – rich man, his wife and 2 children died in an airplane crash and he had both legs amputated; has suite at the hotel where Josie worked – ‘He had a fine head, the red of the hair slightly grizzled. The face was rugged and powerful, deeply sun-tanned, and the eyes were a startling blue. There was no sign of illness or feebleness about him. The deep lines on his face were the lines of suffering, not the lines of weakness. Here was a man who would never rail against fate, but accept it and pass on to victory’
  • Edwards – his valet
  • Adelaide Jefferson – widow of Jefferson’s – ‘She had a singularly charming and sympathetic voice, and her eyes, clear hazel eyes, were beautiful. She was quietly but not unbecomingly dressed and was, he judged, about thirty-five years of age’ – she ‘had the power of creating a restful atmosphere. She was a woman who never seemed to say anything remarkable, but who succeeded in stimulating other people to talk and in setting them at their ease’
  • Mark Gaskell – Rosamund Jefferson’s husband – Melchett ‘was sizing up Mark Gaskell as he spoke. He didn’t much care for the fellow. A bold, unscrupulous, hawk-like face. One of those men who usually get their own way and whom women frequently admire’
  • Ruby Keene – ‘Ruby Keene, eighteen, occupation, professional dancer, five feet four inches, slender, platinum-blond hair, blue eyes, retroussé nose’
  • Josephine Turner, ‘Josie’ – Ruby’s cousin, a professional dancer, who asked Ruby to come to the hotel and take her place as the show dancer with Raymond, while her ankle heals after an accident
  • Raymond Starr – the tennis and dancing pro, ‘a fine-looking specimen, tall, lithe and good-looking, with very white teeth in a deeply-bronzed face’, ‘A tall dark young man in white flannels’
  • Mr Prestcott – manager of the Majestic Hotel in Danemouth
  • George Bartlett – ‘a thin, lanky youth with a prominent Adam apple and an immense difficulty in saying what he meant. He was in such a state of dither that it was hard to get a calm statement from him’
  • Sir Henry Clithering – ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard, who is friends with Jane Marple – ‘Sir Henry, during his term as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, had been renowned for his quick grip on essentials’ – in other words, another of Christie’s bluff, intelligent, effective coppers cf Inspector Battle
  • Huge McLean – long-term boyfriend of the widowed Addie – ‘a tall, middle-aged man with a thin brown face’
  • Albert Briggs – labourer who discovered the burning car with the corpse in it
  • Major Reeves – father of the murdered schoolgirl Pamela Reeves, ‘a stiff man with a grey moustache’
  • Mrs Reeves – Pamela’s mother
  • Florence Small – Girl Guide and friend of Pamela Reeves who admits to Miss Marple that Pamela lied to her friends when she said she was popping into Danemouth to go to Woolworth, but was in reality going to meet a young man from the Lemworth film studios who had promised her a screen test for the movies
  • Griselda – wife of the vicar at St Mary Mead, proud mother of baby David who’s just learning to crawl

Locations

  • St Mary Mead, Radfordshire
  • Gossington Hall, Radfordshire
  • The Majestic Hotel, Danemouth, Glenshire

Comedy

As I’m always saying, despite her best efforts to be serious (and her most successfully ghoulish books are probably ‘The ABC Murders’ and ‘Appointment with Death’, which both deal with psychologically disturbed characters), Christie is an essentially comic writer. Hercule Poirot is a comic character and so is Miss Marple.

A permanently comic attribute of the Marple stories is the way the community of gossipy old ladies in St Mary Mead (‘the ruling class of censorious spinsters’) are not only horrified by the discovery of the murdered woman, but secretly thrilled by it. It gives them all sorts of opportunities to tut and pass comment, not least on poor Colonel Bantry who is, after all the owner of the house where a lovely young woman is found murdered. You can imagine the huge amount of self-righteous gossip this triggers in a small village community! This extract conveys the very enjoyable comic tone of the thing:

St Mary Mead was having the most exciting morning it had known for a long time. Miss Wetherby, a long-nosed, acidulated spinster, was the first to spread the intoxicating information. She dropped in upon her friend and neighbour Miss Hartnell.
‘Forgive my coming so early, dear, but I thought perhaps you mightn’t have heard the news.’
‘What news?’ demanded Miss Hartnell. She had a deep bass voice and visited the poor indefatigably, however hard they tried to avoid her ministrations.
‘About the body of a young woman that was found this morning in Colonel Bantry’s library.’
‘In Colonel Bantry’s library?’
‘Yes. Isn’t it terrible?’
‘His poor wife!’ Miss Hartnell tried to disguise her deep and ardent pleasure.

And:

Mrs Price Ridley was among the last to hear the news. A rich and dictatorial widow, she lived in a large house next door to the vicarage. Her informant was her little maid, Clara.
‘A woman, you say, Clara? Found dead on Colonel Bantry’s hearth rug?’
‘Yes, mam. And they say, mam, as she hadn’t anything on at all, mam not a stitch!’
‘That will do, Clara. It is not necessary to go into details.’
‘No, mam, and they say, mam, that at first they thought it was Mr Blake’s young lady what comes down for the weekends with ‘im to Mr Booker’s new ‘ouse. But now they say it’s quite a different young lady. And the fishmonger’s young man, he says he’d never have believed it of Colonel Bantry not with him handing round the plate on Sundays and all.’

Delicious!

Bookishness

As I’ve mentioned in every Christie review, her detective novels routinely compare themselves to detective novels. The characters regularly comment that this or that situation is like something in a book (or, occasionally, movie).

I think these kinds of comments are designed to pre-empt the reader’s criticism, informing the reader that the author knows the whole thing is as preposterous as they do, but that it doesn’t matter, it’s just an entertainment. By emphasising the story’s artificiality, these kinds of comments soften the reader’s instinctive seeking for verisimilitude, lull us into MurderMysteryWorld. They’re a sort of equivalent of saying ‘Once upon a time…’, alerting you to the fact that what you’re reading is in no way serious: the opposite. It’s untroubling poolside, holiday reading. Welcome to MurderMysteryWorld!

Thus Colonel Bantry’s initial response to the news:

He said kindly, ‘You’ve been dreaming. Dolly. It’s that detective story you were reading, The Clue of the Broken Match. You know, Lord Edgbaston finds a beautiful blonde dead on the library hearth rug. Bodies are always being found in libraries in books. I’ve never known a case in real life.’

Mrs Bantry phones her friend, Jane Marple:

Miss Marple demanded breathlessly, ‘But whose body is it?’
‘It’s a blonde.’
‘A what?’
‘A blonde. A beautiful blonde – like in the books…’

Mark Gaskell’s response:

Mark Gaskell looked at Miss Marple in a somewhat puzzled fashion. He said doubtfully, ‘Do you… er… write detective stories?’
The most unlikely people, he knew, wrote detective stories. And Miss Marple, in her old-fashioned spinster’s clothes, looked a singularly unlikely person.

And then Superintendent Harper encounters Conway Jefferson’s grandson who is everso excited by news of the murder:

‘Do you like detective stories? I do. I read them all and I’ve got autographs from Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie and Dickson Carr and H.C. Bailey. Will the murder be in the papers?’
‘It’ll be in the papers all right,’ said Superintendent Harper grimly.

And not forgetting the obligatory nod to Sherlock Holmes which occurs in pretty much all her novels.

Sir Henry Clithering said, ‘Speaking as Watson, I want to know your methods. Miss Marple.’

The purpose of generalisations

As I’ve explained at more than enough length in other reviews, Christie’s novels abound in sweeping generalisations but these aren’t really to be taken at face value. They are more indicators of the characters who express them. In a sense, you could extract from the novels a hierarchy of generalisations, from the most obviously crass and superficial at the bottom, such as Josie’s angry outburst after she’s identified the body of her cousin:

‘What swine men are, aren’t they?’

Up to the supposedly authoritative ones of figures like Poirot and Marple. But even here they are, how shall I put it, non-factual. Not based on statistically significant surveys of the data. And so really just rhetorical in intention. Here are some of Miss Marple’s more sweeping generalisations:

‘Gentlemen are usually rather selfish.’

‘Gentlemen so easily feel neglected.’

‘Gentlemen,’ she said with her old maid’s way of referring to the opposite sex as though it were a species of wild animal, ‘are frequently not so level-headed as they seem.’

‘I should think they were both restless under old Mr Jefferson’s yoke of perpetual remembrance. Only,’ added Miss Marple cynically, ‘it’s easier for gentlemen, of course.’

But then the male characters are, of course, just as quick with sweeping generalisations about the opposite sex:

Superintendent Harper said sapiently. ‘Easier for him to look on her as a daughter than to look on Mr Gaskell as a son. It works both ways. Women accept a son-in-law as one of the family easily enough, but there aren’t many times when a woman looks on her son’s wife as a daughter.’

‘Women,’ said Sir Henry, ‘treat their devoted admirers very badly.’ Miss Marple smiled, but made no answer.

‘Women,’ said Sir Henry, ‘are eternally interested in marriages.’
‘Especially,’ said the superintendent, ‘elderly single women!’

And at various points all manner of characters are prone to drop general rules about life:

Dr Metcalfe: ‘The human frame is tougher than one can imagine possible.’

Harper: ‘Girls usually like to shop with someone.’

The English, Sir Henry decided, had a distrust for any man who danced too well.

There is no truth in any of these axioms. They are rhetorical devices designed to bring out the personality (and complacency) of the characters, and to give the novel a spurious sense of depth.

Or spurious wisdom

I suppose there’s another interpretation which is that literature, books etc are associated with wisdom. Novels in particular tend to overflow with authors and characters summing up this or that aspect of human nature. So Christie’s pithy axioms can also be seen as a nod to that tradition. They’re just something you have in novels – characters dropping generalisations and pearls of insight.

In other words, the generalisations give the impression that they are part of serious books conveying some kind of authorial wisdom. But the axioms themselves are for the most part trite and empty just in proportion as the Christie novels fall far short of any definition of ‘literature’.

Literature is, on the whole, in some sense demanding, demands a higher level of linguistic or cultural or psychological awareness. Whereas Christie’s novels are designed to be the exact opposite, easy to consume as a bag of sweets. As demanding as a crossword or Sudoku puzzle, maybe, but designed to be easily consumed and forgotten. And so with the rather grand-sounding but ultimately empty and meaningless generalisations which the characters come out with, and which are purely designed to bring out their characters, and grease the wheels of the plot.

1940s slang

Apparently these two phrases were still new in the late 1930s / ’40s:

Boyfriend

‘She’d got a date with someone, “a boy friend”, as the saying goes.’

Crush

‘Well, the idea is, isn’t it, that Ruby Keene changed her dress and went off to meet someone on whom she presumably had what my young nephews call a “crush”?’

Whereas ‘bottled’ appears to be common currency:

‘Bottled, was he?’ said Colonel Bantry, with an Englishman’s sympathy for alcoholic excess. ‘Oh, well, can’t judge a fellow by what he does when he’s drunk.’

Credit

‘The Body in the Library’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in May 1942.

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Karl Marx’s prose style

It is a constant surprise how rhetorical Marx is: pithy poetic phrases, bombastic generalisations, baggy lists, nifty antitheses, classical references, all these are deployed in a tone dominated by sarcasm and satire – Marx constantly expects the ‘bourgeoisie’ to do its worst and is rarely disappointed.

This blog post simply aims to highlight the importance of techniques of rhetorical persuasion in Marx’s writings.

It’s based on a close reading of Karl Marx Political Writings Volume 2: Surveys from Exile edited by David Fernbach – specifically from Marx’s two long essays about the political turmoil in France between 1848 and 1852, The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850 and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Page numbers refer to the 1973 Pelican paperback edition.

Insults 

For a start Marx is not respectful. He doesn’t feel any inhibitions about abusing and insulting all his enemies, from the bourgeoisie in general to the hollow trickster, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who he calls

  • a grotesque mediocrity
  • a ludicrous, vulgar and hated person
  • the adventurer who hides his trivial and repulsive features behind the iron death mask of Napoleon

The Provisional Assembly which replaced the French king in February 1848, had the bright idea of declaring universal male suffrage i.e. all adult men were empowered to vote, most importantly in the election for a new president to replace the abdicated king. 1. The urban liberals in their idealism overlooked the fact that by far the biggest single part of the electorate was the millions of peasants, who outnumbered the populations of all French cities and towns several times over. 2. By the time the presidential election was held in December 1848, the political landscape had changed out of all recognition. The result was an overwhelming victory for the buffoonish figure of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte.

Thus Marx not only doesn’t like Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, he actively despises the backward, clumsy, ignorant peasants who voted for him.

The symbol that expressed the peasants’ entry into the revolutionary movement, clumsily cunning, knavishly naive, doltishly sublime, a calculated superstition, a pathetic burlesque, a cleverly stupid anachronism, a world-historic piece of buffoonery and an indecipherable hieroglyphic for the understanding of the civilized – this symbol bore the unmistakable physiognomy of the class that represents barbarism within civilization.

But his strongest vituperation is, of course, reserved for the hated ‘bourgeoisie’.

The mortgage debt burdening the soil of France imposes on the French peasantry an amount of interest equal to the annual interest on the entire British national debt. Small-holding property, in this enslavement by capital toward which its development pushes it unavoidably, has transformed the mass of the French nation into troglodytes. Sixteen million peasants (including women and children) dwell in caves, a large number of which have but one opening, others only two and the most favored only three. Windows are to a house what the five senses are to the head. The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly emerged small holdings and fertilized them with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks the blood from their hearts and brains and casts them into the alchemist’s cauldron of capital. (p.242)

Note how solid factual analysis (of the results of debt on French peasants) is inextricably entwined with highly alarmist and exaggerated similes and metaphors – of enslavement, troglodytes and vampires. Abuse and insults are an intrinsic part of Marx’s analysis, not an accident, not a removeable element – bitter hatred of the bourgeois enemy is a key part of Marx’s worldview.

Rhetorical repetition 

Marx uses rhetorical repetition, often in the time-honoured form of the three clauses trick.

Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not of fleeing from its solution in reality; of finding the spirit of revolution once more, not of making its ghost walk about again.

Bonaparte represented the peasant’s superstition, not his enlightenment; his prejudice, not his judgement; his past, not his future.

Antitheses 

He likes antithesis, or the repetition of an idea with variations – ideally a straight inversion – to produce a snappy phrase.

The republic had announced itself to the peasantry with the tax collector; it announced itself to the republic with the emperor.

The December 10 Society was to remain Bonaparte’s private army until he succeeded in transforming the public army into a December 10 Society.

This tendency is more important than it seems because it indicates the underlying fondness for neat patterns of Marx’s thought. He thinks that History moves in neat antitheses, just like his prose (just like the neatly antithetical prose he learned as a student at the feet of the classically trained Idealist philosopher, Hegel).

Repetition of phrases

Sometimes Marx uses repetition with variation (as above). On other occasions he uses simple repetition, its flatness and bathos indicating the batheticness of the actors he attributes it to, in this case the charlatan, Louis-Napoléon. The use of deadpan repetition reminded me of modern stand-up comedy.

As a fatalist, [Louis-Napoléon] lives by the conviction that there are certain higher powers which man, and the soldier in particular, cannot withstand. Among these powers he counts, first and foremost, cigars and champagne, cold poultry and garlic sausage. With this in mind, to begin with, he treats officers and non-commissioned officers in his Elysée apartments to cigars and champagne, to cold poultry and garlic sausage.

Out of context this comes over as a bit flat, but in the warmth of his ongoing text this little trick comes as a moment of comic relief. Boom, boom.

Lists

There is nothing so glorious as a long, ragbag, rollercoaster of a list.

On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpenproletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section being led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole organization. Decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, rubbed shoulders with vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, portes, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars – in short, the whole of the nebulous, disintegrated mass, scattered hither and thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the December 10 Society…

Having conjured up this vivid Dickensian mob, Marx proceeds in his characteristic tone of High Sarcasm to reveal the ‘real’ motives of such bourgeois shams, and uses a panoply of rhetorical tricks to ram home his contempt for Louis.

… A ‘benevolent society’ – in so far as, like Bonaparte, all its members felt the need to benefit themselves at the expense of the labouring nation. This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in the scum, offal and refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. An old crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade where the grand costumes, words and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery.

Note the use of three clauses to build rhetorical power. Note the insult words (scum, refuse). Note the ad hominem attack on Louis-Napoléon (a crafty old roué with a vulgar sense of theatre). Rhetoric and insults are central.

Conjuring ghosts and spectres

The word ‘conjure’ appears five times in the Brumaire, ‘ghost’ eight times, ‘spirit’ 16 times. Circe and her ‘black magic’ are mentioned.

The opening sentence of The Communist Manifesto is bold and memorable – ‘A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of communism’ – but reading further into Marx, you realise that the use of imagery connected to ghosts, spirits, conjurors and magicians is not that exceptional. It is a routine fixture of his imagination and his rhetoric.

Even a mere Vaisse [a deputy in the national assembly] could conjure up the red spectre… (p.212)

The social republic appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy, on the threshold of the February Revolution. In the June days of 1848, it was drowned in the blood of the Paris proletariat, but it haunts the subsequent acts of the drama like a ghost… (p.234)

All the ‘Napoleonic ideas’ are ideas of the undeveloped small holding in the freshness of its youth; they are a contradiction to the outlived holdings. They are only the hallucinations of its death struggle, words transformed into phrases, spirits transformed into ghosts. (p.244)

1. The frequency of ghost imagery reminds you that Marx the writer grew to maturity in the 1830s, the heyday of High Romantic writing, of plays and operas about the supernatural, especially in Germany, and so it’s no surprise that there is a certain Gothic quality to his imagination, teeming as it is with ghosts and spectres.

2. It worryingly reminds you that Marx was above all a writer, given to conjuring up words, classes, nations, conflicts with the stroke of a pen, without a second thought. Historical eras, sociological classes, leading politicians, can all be made to appear or disappear in a puff of smoke by Marx, the political prestidigitator.

The constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, all the other publications, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, liberté, egalité, fraternité, and the second Sunday in May, 1852 – all have vanished like a series of optical illusions before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not claim to be a magician. (p.151)

So we find his compadre, Engels, writing in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions with the optimistic hope that all the reactionary types who had helped to crush the uprisings (specifically, in the Austrian empire) would be swept away.

The Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward. (The Magyar Struggle in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 13 January 1849).

Unfortunately, their descendants in the Marxist-Leninist line of ideology would take them at their word and, instead of merely textual flourishes, would make real people in the real world and – in Stalin and Mao’s cases – entire groups of people (the kulaks, the urban intelligentsia), disappear with the stroke of a pen into freezing gulags or mass graves.

The language of theatre

The language of magic and conjuring is intimately linked with the lexicon of drama, theatre, comedy, masquerades, costumes and stage with which these texts are drenched.

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day. (p.152)

The opening pages of the Brumaire are famous for stating an enormous theory of history, which is that current political actors always clothe themselves in the names and values of previous ones. This allows Marx to compare all of the actors, throughout the book, with their predecessors in everywhere from ancient Israel to the Jacobin Revolution via the Rome of the Caesars.

Whether Marx’s theory that history repeats itself with modern political pygmies dressing up in the clothes of Great Men of the Past has any factual validity, as an imaginative and rhetorical trope it creates a vast sense of a) historical knowledgeableness, and of b) intellectual spaciousness – we feel we are privy to a mind which understands all of human history.

If we consider this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a salient difference is revealed immediately. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society.

The first ones smashed the feudal basis to pieces and mowed down the feudal heads which had grown on it. The other created inside France the only conditions under which free competition could be developed, parcelled landed property exploited and the unchained industrial productive power of the nation employed; and everywhere beyond the French borders he swept the feudal institutions away, to the extent necessary to provide bourgeois society in France with a suitable up-to-date environment on the European Continent. Once the new social formation was established, the antediluvian Colossi disappeared and with them resurrected Romanity – the Brutuses, Gracchi, Publicolas, the tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself.

This long quote demonstrates the way Marx thought of politics as intrinsically theatrical, and the way his imagination constantly recurs to Great Men of the (real or legendary) past.

But he is not only pointing out the way that modern political actors often invoke the shades of the Great Protagonists of the past to bolster their authority – there is also a deeper reference in this idea to Marx’s fundamentally Hegelian worldview: the worldview that History is moving through inevitable phases to an inevitable conclusion. The Jacobins ‘performed the task of their time’; Napoleon ‘swept the feudal institutions away’: both prepared the way for the triumph of ‘free competition’. Marx’s view of History is profoundly teleological; the basis of his entire position is that human History is moving along a pre-determined course towards a pre-determined end.

And if History is heading towards an inevitable conclusion, it must follow that we are all to some extent actors on a stage, playing parts in a drama which is already written. This premise maybe explains Marx’s fondness for theatrical metaphors.

The first act of his ministry was the restoration of the old royalist administration. The official scene was at once transformed – scenery, costumes, speech, actors, supers, mutes, prompters, the position of the parties, the theme of the drama, the content of the conflict, the whole situation.

The revolution made progress, forged ahead, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements but, on the contrary, by the creation of a powerful, united counterrevolution…

Marie’s ateliers, devised in direct antagonism to the Luxembourg, offered occasion, thanks to the common label, for a comedy of errors worthy of the Spanish servant farce…

Instead of only a few factions of the bourgeoisie, all classes of French society were suddenly hurled into the orbit of political power, forced to leave the boxes, the stalls, and the gallery and to act in person upon the revolutionary stage!

The people cried: À bas les grands voleurs! À bas les assassins! when in 1847, on the most prominent stages of bourgeois society, the same scenes were publicly enacted that regularly lead the lumpenproletariat to brothels, to workhouses and lunatic asylums, to the bar of justice, to the dungeon, and to the scaffold.

The terrible attempt of April 16 furnished the excuse for recalling the army to Paris – the real purpose of the clumsily staged comedy and for the reactionary federalist demonstrations in the provinces.

In the many places where Marx invokes the theatre, we join him in the audience watching a political drama which has already been written, assimilated and analysed: while the poor political actors take their parts in the farce or tragedy totally seriously, we, the privileged spectators, understand what is really going on behind the sham of bourgeois rhetoric and in the drama of History.

The rhetoric of both these long essays encourage in the reader a sense of superiority to other commentators and analysts, to the politicians and moralists who are taken in by the play. We are not taken in. We know what is really going on. We are the only ones who understand that all human existence, all human history and all political events are based on class conflict, that this dizzying vaudeville of political acts are all combinations on the theme of the ‘bourgeois’ control of power – and that the entire giddy play will one day come tumbling down when we, the clever ones, and the workers, rise up in revolution.

It is in the opening lines of the Brumaire that he expresses most pithily the idea that History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. (p.147)

Taken in isolation this has the crisp appeal of an Oscar Wilde witticism. But I hope I have provided enough context to show that it is just one among many examples of Marx’s highly theatrical way of thinking about history, and of his very dramatic and rhetorical way of writing.

It isn’t, in other words, the one-off insight it is so often painted as being. On the contrary, this pithy quote is a key which opens up Marx’s entire imaginative worldview of the world as being a stage, a platform on which a pre-scripted drama is unfolding towards its preordained end and we, his readers and the members of his ‘party’ – sitting by his side – are privileged to be in on the secret of the plot, we are the cognoscenti, we have a front row seat at the great drama of History.

Summary

There are plenty more examples, and I could have elaborated a bit more on the connection between rhetorical tropes and his actual ideas – but I wanted to keep this blog post short and sweet.

The point is simply that, whenever you read that Marx founded a form of ‘scientific’ socialism, invented the objective ‘scientific’ analysis of society, of its economic and class basis and so on – you should also remember that he did so in texts notable for their sustained irony, ad hominem abuse, rhetorical play and theatrical melodrama.

Related links

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Communism in Poland

  • Warsaw 1920 by Adam Zamoyski (2008) How the Polish army stopped the Red Army from conquering Poland.
  • The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953) A devastating indictment of the initial appeal and then appalling consequences of communism in Poland: ‘Mass purges in which so many good communists died, the lowering of the living standard of the citizens, the reduction of artists and scholars to the status of yes-men, the extermination of entire national groups…’

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  • The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor (2006) Comprehensive account of the Spanish civil war with much detail on how the Stalin-backed communist party put more energy into eliminating its opponents on the left than fighting the fascists, with the result that Franco won
  • Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938) Orwell’s eye-witness account of how,during the Spanish Civil War, the Stalin-backed Spanish communist party turned on its left-wing allies – specifically the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification which Orwell was a member of – and how Orwell, having fought bravely for the Republic, was forced to flee the country, only just escaping arrest, interrogation and probable execution.

Communism in England

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by Simon on February 22, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, European History, France, History, Literary criticism, Philosophy, Politics
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Posted by Simon on February 22, 2018

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