All posts tagged morphine

Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie (1935)

‘You’ve got a knack of turning up in the most unexpected places, M. Poirot.’
‘Isn’t Croydon aerodrome a little out of your beat, my friend?’ asked Poirot.
‘Ah, I’m after rather a big bug in the smuggling line. A bit of luck my being on the spot.’
(Inspector Japp explaining away the improbable coincidence that he is at Croydon Airport to greet the airliner on which there’s just been a murder, instead of on his normal beat in back London)

‘Rum business, this,’ he said. ‘Bit too sensational to be true. I mean, blowpipes and poisoned darts in an aeroplane—well, it insults one’s intelligence.’
(Dramatising summary from Inspector Japp)

‘The whole thing is a bit of a teaser.’
(Japp, puzzled as usual)

‘Every minute this case gets more puzzling,’ cried Fournier.
(Talking up the story’s mystery and atmosphere, Chapter 11)

‘It amazes me – the whole thing seems almost – unreal…’
(More talking up)

‘I have the feeling very strongly, Mademoiselle, that there is a figure who has not yet come into the limelight – a part as yet unplayed — There is, Mademoiselle, an unknown factor in this case. Everything
points to that…’’
(Adding depth to the mystery, Chapter 22)

Jane thought to herself with a touch of misgiving: ‘He’s French, though. You’ve got to look out with the French, they always say so.’
(Wise words, Chapter 13)

‘Ah, but, you see, an answer depends on the questions. You did not know what questions to ask.’
(Exactly what we’re learning about handing artificial intelligence – Poirot, Chapter 11)

Sensationalism dies quickly – fear is long-lived.’
(The wisdom of the old pro’, Chapter 16)

‘Mon cher, practically speaking, I know everything.’
(Poirot’s modesty)

‘If you ask me,’ said Mrs Mitchell, ‘there’s Bolshies at the back of it.’
(The comedy prole view, Chapter 19)

The setup

The regular Tuesday plane service from Le Bourget airdrome outside Paris to Croydon Airport south of London takes off with 11 passengers in First Class, and a similar number in Second Class. A few minutes before it’s due to land the steward shakes a sleeping woman who lolls forward onto her table. Marie Morisot is dead. He calls a doctor who confirms she’s dead.

Surreptitiously, Poirot has snuck up behind the stewards and the doctor, and points out that the dead woman has a red mark on her neck. Furthermore, he bends down to reveal a small dart at her feet, with a fluffy body and a thorn-like tip. Ms Morisot was murdered by a dart from a blowpipe! The American thriller writer, Clancy, is excited to see something he’s read and written about so often, in real life.

Anyway, who would want to murder Ms Morisot? And on an airplane flight? And with a blowpipe?

On landing they are met, improbably enough, by Poirot’s old friend Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard – Christie contrives an explanation about him being transferred to the anti-smuggling force to explain it – then they get down to the nitty gritty of interviewing each of the passengers, giving us readers a handy pen profile of each of them – full name, age, address, occupation and so on. Very much like the similarly stage-managed questioning of all the suspects on the Orient Express.

A few days later there’s the official inquest when the same series of witnesses are called to the stand and questions along with the local cops and doctor. Afterwards the young couple, Jane Grey and Norman Gale repair to a tea room where, after seeing off an offer by a redtop journalist to author a story about the murder, they decide to embark on the amateur investigation which feature in so many of Christie’s novels and Christie gives them a conveniently phrased excuse:

‘Murder,’ said Norman Gale, ‘doesn’t concern the victim and the guilty only. It affects the innocent too. You and I are innocent, but the shadow of murder has touched us. We don’t know how that shadow is going to affect our lives.’ (Chapter 5)

The main early revelation which opens the door, is the arrival of French Surete officers who reveal that the apparently harmless old French lady who’s been murdered is in fact a notorious loan shark to the aristocracy and professional classes. She loans these people small fortunes but her security is never a house or assets, it is knowledge about their intimate affairs. I.e. they take the loan knowing that if they don’t pay it back on time, she will leak the compromising information she has on them.

So any number of people, and possible other passengers on the plane, might have been in this position of having taken out a loan, being unable to repay it, and taking the desperate step of bumping off old Mme Morisot.

But there is a second obvious gainer from her death, her 25-year-old daughter, Anne Morisot, who is set to inherit her mother’s fortune of over £100,000.

As usual there are the customary clichés of the genre: characters telling each other that this form of murder was incredible, impossible, almost a miracle. Then, later, the conventional statement that the murderer must be a cunning devil, a fiend, a calculating fiend etc – none of which help in the detection, but all of which help to jack up the tension, deepen the atmosphere, make the whole thing a more intense reading experience.

Cast

On the flight

  • Seat No. 2 Madame Giselle aka Marie Morisot, ‘one of the best-known moneylenders in Paris’
  • No. 4 James Ryder – managing director of the Ellis Vale Cement Company
  • No. 5 Monsieur Armand Dupont
  • No. 6 Monsieur Jean Dupont – son, both ‘returned not long ago from conducting some very interesting excavations in Persia’
  • No. 8 Daniel Clancy – small American writer of detective stories
  • No. 9 Hercule Poirot –
  • No. 10 Doctor Bryant – a Harley Street specialist on diseases of the ear and throat (there’s always one on hand to verify the murderee is in fact dead)
  • No. 12 Norman Gale – dentist from Muswell Hill
  • No. 13 The Countess of Horbury
  • No. 16 Jane Grey – hairdressers assistant in a beauty salon in Bruton Street (location of Mrs Dacres’ dress shop in ‘Three Act Tragedy’), won £100 and used it to take a holiday in France
  • No. 17 The Honourable Venetia Kerr –
  • Henry Mitchell – chief steward on the airliner Prometheus
  • Ruth, his wife – ‘a buxom, highly complexioned woman with snapping dark eyes’
  • Albert Davis – second steward

Afterwards

  • Chief Inspector Japp – ‘an erect soldierly figure in plain clothes’
  • Constable Rogers – assistant to Japp
  • Dr James Whistler – doctor for Croydon Airport
  • Maître Alexandre Thibault – French lawyer for Madame Giselle
  • Mr Winterspoon – chief Government analyst and an authority on rare poisons
  • Detective-Sergeant Wilson
  • Monsieur Fournier of the Sûreté – ‘a tall thin man with an intelligent, melancholy face’

In Paris

  • Elise Grandier – the dead woman’s confidential maid, ‘a short stout woman of middle age with a florid face and small shrewd eyes’, who burned her mistress’s papers, as instructed, but kept Madam’s little black book which she hands over to Poirot
  • Old Georges the concierge of Morisot’s apartment – a woman came to visit her the night before the flight (and her murder) but his eyesight is failing and he didn’t notice her face
  • M. Gilles – Chief of the Detective Force at the Sûreté
  • Zeropoulos – Greek antique dealer who reported the sale of a blowpipe and darts three days before the murder, ‘a short, stout little man with beady black eyes’
  • Jules Perrot – clerk at the Universal Airlines office in Paris where Morisot’s plane ticket for England was bought, who turns out to have been bribed to make sure she was on the 12 noon flight
  • Madame Richards – Marie Morisot’s married daughter and heir

Back in England, at Horbury Chase

  • Stephen, Lord Horbury – another one of Christie’s dim English aristocrats: ‘Stephen Horbury was twenty-seven years of age. He had a narrow head and a long chin. He looked very much what he was—a sporting out-of-door kind of man without anything very spectacular in the way of brains. He was kind-hearted, slightly priggish, intensely loyal and invincibly obstinate’
  • Madeleine – Lady Horbury’s maid
  • ffoulkes, ffoulkes, Wilbraham and ffoulkes – the Horbury family solicitors, latest in a long line of gently mocked lawyers to the aristocracy

In London

  • M. Antoine – owner of the boutique where Jane Grey works, real name was Andrew Leech, whose claims to foreign nationality consisted of having had a Jewish mother
  • Gladys – Jane’s friend, ‘an ethereal blonde with a haughty demeanour and a faint, faraway professional voice. In private her voice was hoarse and jocular’ – she calls the boss ‘Ikey Andrew’ which isn’t very nice
  • Miss Ross – the nurse in Norman Gale’s dentist practice in Muswell Hill

Bookish

In previous reviews I’ve developed the idea that Christie having her characters regularly compare their situations and scenarios to the stereotypes and clichés of detective stories (or movies) serves several purposes. 1) It pre-empts criticism from critics or readers who may be tempted to complain about the corny (or preposterous) plot developments. 2) But at the same time it draws attention to the artificiality of the whole genre and nudges you away from even trying to compare anyone or anything that happens to ‘real life’, gently nudging you into the entirely fictional land of Detective Stories, where anything can happen, where anyone can disguise themselves as anyone else in order to carry out the most ludicrously complicated crimes.

Hence the succession of ‘nudges’ in this story.

‘It beats me,’ he said. ‘The crudest detective story dodge coming out trumps!’ (Japp, Chapter 3)

‘What an extraordinarily rum little beggar,’ said Gale. ‘Calls himself a detective. I don’t see how he could do much detecting. Any criminal could spot him a mile off. I don’t see how he could disguise himself.’
‘Haven’t you got a very old-fashioned idea of detectives?’ asked Jane. ‘All the false beard stuff is very out of date. Nowadays detectives just sit and think out a case psychologically.’
‘Rather less strenuous.’
‘Physically, perhaps; but of course you need a cool, clear brain.’ (Chapter 4)

‘Hullo, old boy,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a pretty near squeak of being locked up in a police cell.’
‘I fear,’ said Poirot gravely, ‘that such an occurrence might have damaged me professionally.’
‘Well,’ said Japp with a grin, ‘detectives do turn out to be criminals sometimes – in story books.’ (Chapter 6)

‘I’d like to do something,’ he said. ‘If I was a young man in a book I’d find a clue or I’d shadow somebody.’ (Chapter 14)

‘Anyway, we have heard something. Somebody – a woman – is going to be silenced, and some other woman won’t speak. Oh, dear, it sounds dreadfully like a detective story.’ (Chapter 14)

But as well as the usual arch references to the clichés and stereotypes of detective novels, this story actually features a writer of detective stories, who Japp immediately suspects and which gives him (and other characters) the opportunity to sound off about the iniquity of detective story writers.

‘Clancy let out that he bought a blowpipe. These detective-story writers… always making the police out to be fools… and getting their procedure all wrong. Why, if I were to say the things to my super that their inspectors say to superintendents I should be thrown out of the Force tomorrow on my ear. Set of ignorant scribblers! This is just the sort of damn fool murder that a scribbler of rubbish would think he could get away with.’ (Chapter 3)

‘I don’t think it’s healthy for a man to be always brooding over crime and detective stories, reading up all sorts of cases. It puts ideas into his head.’ (Chapter 7)

Or allows Clancy to make digs at the most famous detective of all:

‘Ah,’ said Mr Clancy. ‘But, you see, I have my methods, Watson. If you’ll excuse my calling you Watson. No offence intended. Interesting, by the way, how the technique of the idiot friend has hung on. Personally I myself think the Sherlock Holmes stories grossly overrated. The fallacies – the really amazing fallacies that there are in those stories –’

And generally satirise her own profession, by summarising the truly ludicrous plot Clancy is planning to elaborate from the plane murder and, when Poirot hesitantly suggests that it’s a bit melodramatic, explains that:

‘You can’t write anything too sensational,’ said Mr Clancy firmly. ‘Especially when you’re dealing with the arrow poison of the South American Indians. I know it was snake juice, really; but the principle is the same. After all, you don’t want a detective story to be like real life? Look at the things in the papers – dull as ditchwater.’

And you only have to consider the plots of some of Christie’s own novels or, for some reason the James Bond novels pop into my head, to know the truth of this generalisation.

Poirot’s method

In each Poirot novel the great Belgian repeats the key elements of his procedure: 1) to educate newcomers, 2) to please existing fans by repeating all his best moves. These are:

  1. trust no-one – everyone is a suspect until proven innocent
  2. every witness keeps something back, no matter how trivial, sometimes unconsciously
  3. seek out who the crime benefits
  4. use order and method to establish the facts
  5. then employ ‘the little grey cells’ to come up with ‘little ideas’ i.e. draft theories, which connect the facts
  6. accept no theory which doesn’t accommodate all the facts i.e. don’t jump to conclusions or hold onto pet theories which there is evidence disproving
  7. finally, your theory must be congruent with psychology i.e. with the characters of the people involved

Throughout the text he iterates these principles:

Suspect everyone

‘Shall I tell you something, Mademoiselle Grandier? It is part of my business to believe nothing I am told – nothing that is, that is not proved. I do not suspect first this person and then that person. I suspect everybody. Anybody connected with a crime is regarded by me as a criminal until that person is proved innocent.’ (Chapter 10)

Order and method

‘If one approaches a problem with order and method there should be no difficulty in solving it—none whatever,’ said Poirot severely. (Chapter 18)

‘You jump about a good deal.’
‘Not really. I pursue my course logically with order and method. One must not jump wildly to a conclusion. One must eliminate.’ (Chapter 19)

‘I proceed a step at a time, with order and method…’ (Chapter 21)

‘There must be in all things order and method. One must finish with one thing before proceeding to the next.’ (Chapter 24)

Little grey cells

‘Close your eyes, my friend, instead of opening them wide. Use the eyes of the brain, not of the body. Let the little grey cells of the mind function…Let it be their task to show you what actually
happened.’ (Chapter 9)

All the facts

‘I proceed always in the simplest manner imaginable! And I never refuse to accept facts.’ (Chapter 21)

Psychology

‘Ah, M. Poirot, that is your little foible. A man like Fournier will be more to your mind. He is of the newest school – all for the psychology. That should please you.’
‘It does. It does.’ (Chapter 11)

Japp’s cockneyisms

Japp’s being a class down from the posh aristocrats or upper middle-class protagonists, is indicated by his phraseology and vocabulary.

‘I suppose that little writer chap hasn’t gone off his onion and decided to do one of his crimes in the flesh instead of on paper?’

‘Everybody’s got to be searched, whether they kick up rough or not; and every bit of truck they had with them has got to be searched too – and that’s flat.’

‘If you ask me, those two toughs are our meat…. you must admit they don’t look up to much, do they?’

‘You don’t say so,’ said Japp with a grin.

Christie does the plebs.

‘That’s all right, old cock,’ said Japp, slapping him heartily on the back. ‘You’re in on this on the ground floor.’ (Chapter 6)

‘Just as well she wasn’t on that plane,’ said Japp drily. ‘She might have been suspected of bumping off her mother to get the dibs.’ (Chapter 7)

Several times Poirot actively objects to Japp’s offensive terminology, for example when, instead of asking whether he has an idea, he crudely accuses Poirot of having a ‘maggot’ in his brain. Is it me, or does Christie make Japp noticeably coarser and cruder in this book?

‘That’s the Honourable Venetia. Well, what about her? She’s a big bug.’ (Chapter 7)

‘Yes, she’s the type of pigeon to be mixed up with Giselle.’

Japp’s role

As usual Japp is positioned as not only crude in his speech and manner (beside the dapper, restrained Poirot, ‘exquisitely dressed in the most dandiacal style’) but as intellectually crude and limited, too.

Japp always jumps to rash conclusions, takes against suspects (often on the simple basis that they’re foreigners, the long deep Farageist thread in the English character). In every novel he mocks Poirot:

Japp whispered to Norman: ‘Fancies himself, doesn’t he? Conceit’s that little man’s middle name.’ (Chapter 26)

And accuses Poirot of over-thinking things, of actively preferring to make things complicated.

Take the way he dismisses Poirot’s insistence on the subtleties of psychology:

‘It is most important in a crime to get an idea of the psychology of the murderer.’
Japp snorted slightly at the word psychology, which he disliked and mistrusted. (Chapter 7)

The net result is that when you read any opinion offered by Japp, you must immediately consider the opposite to be likely or, more accurately, you immediately suspect Christie is using him to dismiss a possibility which, later on, we will find out is in fact true.

Poirot’s OCD

Poirot did not answer, and Fournier asked curiously: ‘It gives you an idea, that?’
Poirot bowed his head assentingly. ‘It gives rise to, say, a speculation in my mind.’
With absent-minded fingers he straightened the unused inkstand that Japp’s impatient hand had set a little askew… (Chapter 7)

Poirot did not answer for a moment or two; then he took his hands from his temples, sat very upright and straightened two forks and a saltcellar which offended his sense of symmetry. (Chapter 25)

It’s actually referred to nowadays as symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder.

Poirot’s comic English

Obviously there are hundreds of examples of  this, mostly fairly humdrum. But I laughed at:

‘Let us have an end of what you call in this country the fool-tommery.’

These novels are, essentially, comedies.

1930s locutions

‘She was an – an absolute – well, I can’t say just what she was through the telephone.’ (Chapter 21)

Through the telephone?

He looked at her sharply. ‘He attracts you – eh – this young man? Il a le sex appeal?’

In a later novel, a character abbreviates this to S.A.

Poirot explains a fundamental human need

‘What a horrible, tricky sort of person you are, M. Poirot,’ said Jane, rising. ‘I shall never know why you are saying things.’
‘That is quite simple. I want to find out things.’
‘I suppose you’ve got very clever ways of finding out things?’
‘There is only one really simple way.’
‘What is that?’
‘To let people tell you.’
Jane laughed.
‘Suppose they don’t want to?’
‘Everyone likes talking about themselves.’
‘I suppose they do,’ admitted Jane.
‘That is how many a quack makes a fortune. He encourages patients to come and sit and tell him things. How they fell out of the perambulator when they were two, and how their mother ate a pear and the juice fell on her orange dress, and how when they were one and a half they pulled their father’s beard; and then he tells them that now they will not suffer from the insomnia any longer, and he takes two guineas; and they go away, having enjoyed themselves – oh, so much – and perhaps they do sleep.’
‘How ridiculous,’ said Jane.
‘No, it is not so ridiculous as you think. It is based on a fundamental need of human nature – the need to talk – to reveal oneself.’

While mocking the widely known practice of psychoanalysis, Poirot concedes its basis on a fundamental human need. Elsewhere, it is explicitly raised and mocked.

‘Ah, yes, the flute… These things interest me, you understand, psychologically.’
Mr Ryder snorted at the word psychologically. It savoured to him of what he called that tom-fool business psychoanalysis. (Chapter 18)

But he reiterates his ‘compulsion to talk’ theory right at the book’s end:

‘It is my experience that no one, in the course of conversation, can fail to give themselves away sooner or later… Everyone has an irresistible urge to talk about themselves.’ (Chapter 26)

The press

Christie’s attitude to the British press may be gauged from the fact that in an earlier novel she names a national newspaper the Daily Shriek and this novel features a journalist from the Weekly Howl.

Drugs and drug addicts

I’m impressed by the ubiquity of illegal drugs in these stories: cocaine features in ‘Peril at End House’, while morphine crops up in:

Cocaine is here again, as Lady Horbury is revealed to be a user. Indeed at the very opening of the story we are given her internal monologue:

‘My God, what shall I do? It’s the hell of a mess – the hell of a mess. There’s only one way out that I can see. If only I had the nerve. Can I do it? Can I bluff it out? My nerves are all to pieces. That’s the coke. Why did I ever take to coke? My face looks awful, simply awful…’ (Chapter 1)

Christie’s cats

On the evidence of Christie’s novels, the word cat was widely used slang in the 1920s and ’30s for a bitchy, critical woman.

‘My face looks awful, simply awful. That cat Venetia Kerr being here makes it worse. She always looks at me as though I were dirt. Wanted Stephen herself. Well, she didn’t get him! That long face of hers gets on my nerves. It’s exactly like a horse. I hate these county women.’
(Lady Horbury’s internal monologue, Chapter 1)

Venetia thought, ‘She has the morals of a cat! I know that well enough. But she’s careful. She’s shrewd as they make ’em.’ (Chapter 12)

Stephen had been fond of her, but not fond enough to prevent him from falling desperately, wildly, madly in love with a clever calculating cat of a chorus girl…

However this meaning is interfered, like two beams of different coloured light intersecting, by the fact that Poirot, when he is on the trail, when he is excited by a breakthrough, is always described as developing green glowing eyes like a cat. Then sometimes there are just actual cats. So the two charged meanings overlap with each other, as well as the ordinary common or garden one, amusingly.

Meals

Novels very rarely indeed describe meals. They describe the events and the boring conversation, but rarely the actual dishes. So I note them when they occur. Thus Poirot in Paris suggests to Fournier they go for a ‘simple’ lunch.

‘A simple but satisfying meal, that is what I prescribe. Let us say omelette aux champignons, sole à la Normande – a cheese of Port Salut, and with it red wine.’

While in London, after interview Clancy, he takes Jane and Norman for:

Poirot ordered some consommé and a chaud-froid of chicken.

Muddle

JAPP: There you are again – unsatisfactory. The whole thing is a muddle.’
POIROT: ‘There is no such thing as muddle – obscurity, yes – but muddle can exist only in a disorderly brain.’

Wish I could have introduced Poirot to E.M. Forster whose novels are about nothing but muddle.

‘Every woman adores a fascist’ (Sylvia Plath)

Poirot laments that sweet Jane Grey was so strongly attracted by Norman Gale who turned out to be a serial killer.

‘A killer,’ said Poirot. ‘And like many killers, attractive to women.’ (Chapter 26)

The theme was aired in 1928’s ‘Murder on the Blue Train’ where young Ruth Kettering is attracted to Comte Armand de la Roche precisely because he has such a bad reputation. And in ‘Three Act Tragedy’ where the heroine’s mother, Lady Mary Gore fell for a wrong ‘un despite all her father’s warnings, and laments that:

‘There doesn’t seem to be anything that warns girls against a certain type of man. Nothing in themselves, I mean. Their parents warn them, but that’s no good – one doesn’t believe. It seems dreadful to say so, but there is something attractive to a girl in being told anyone is a bad man. She thinks at once that her love will reform him.’
(Lady Mary, Chapter 14)

Her daughter, Egg, is a chip off the old block who falls in love just as inappropriately, with an older man, with Sir Charles, who turns out to be a murderer.

It’s tempting to attribute the belief that good women are attracted to bad men to Christie herself, but I’m more inclined to think it’s one of the many standard clichés and stereotypes which she placed and positioned in order to construct her preposterous stories.

Credit

‘Death in the Clouds’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1935 by the Collins Crime Club.

Related links

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on August 4, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Detective stories, Novel, Psychoanalysis
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on August 4, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/08/04/death-in-the-clouds-agatha-christie/

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen (1881)

‘Here I go battling on with ghosts, both within and without…’
(Old Mrs Alving lamenting her lot in Ghosts, page 126)

A drama about not only the sexual and religious hypocrisies of late-nineteenth century bourgeois society but of the multiple levels of deceit and, more profoundly than that, the dead hand of old ways of thinking, which lie like ghosts upon the lives of the living.

Act 1

Pastor Manders arrives at the estate of widowed old Mrs Alving, situated near a fjord. The next day he is due to deliver a speech at the opening of a new orphanage named in honour of her dead husband, the Captain Alving memorial Home (p.103)

Mrs A is attended on by a young buxom serving girl, Regine. Regine’s crippled, often drunk carpenter father, Jacob Engstrand, has been over on the estate helping to build the new orphanage. He shambolically tries to persuade Regine to accompany him on a ferry back to his house in town but she refuses. Engstrand has a plan to set up a refuge for merchant seamen. He wants Regine to help out but this quickly degenerates into a vision of her dancing and entertaining the sailors in the evenings, and the suggestion that if she plays her cards right she’ll wangle herself a ship’s officer or even captain. And she wouldn’t have to marry them, just extract money in return for…At which point a furious Regine threatens him and forces him to back out through the French windows.

After some time away in Paris, her artistic son Oswald has returned for a visit.

There’s a long conversation between Manders and Mrs Alving which reveals a whole load of scandalous family secrets. Manders triggers it all by accusing Mrs A of being a bad wife for running away from her husband after just a year of marriage and seeking refuge with him, the pastor.

Nettled, Mrs Alving decides to reveal the truth. During that miserable first year of marriage she had discovered that Alving was a womaniser and a philanderer and how wretched it made her feel. Manders dismisses this by pontificating about the duties of a wife and mother:

MANDERS: All this demanding to be happy in life, it’s all part of this same wanton idea. What right have people to happiness? No, we have our duty to do, Mrs Alving! And your duty was to stand by the man you had chosen and to whom you were bound by sacred ties.

And:

MANDERS: It is not a wife’s place to sit in judgement on her husband. Your duty should have been to bear with humility the cross which a higher power had judged proper for you.

As if accusing her of being a bad wife isn’t enough, Manders then goes on to accuse her of being a bad mother, in that she sent her son away when he was only seven to be raised in a different household.

‘Slowly and with control’ Mrs Alving then unleashes the truth. Her husband never reformed, her husband carried on being a corrupt womaniser till the day he died. He forced her to sit with him getting drunk on wine and listening to his stupid stories before she had to roll him into bed. For nineteen long years of married purgatory she had to put up with his dire behaviour.

And he had an affair with their maid. She overheard them in the conservatory, her husband making a move, the maid (Johanna) trying to push him away. He got the maid pregnant. The whole thing was only hushed up by giving her a big cash sum ($300) and packing her back to the arms of her boyfriend, the very same ramshackle old Jacob Engstrand we saw at the start. So Regine is the illegitimate daughter of her ex-husband. Engstrand was flattered by her returning to him and then, she came with a tidy sum of cash and a story about some passing some rich foreigner who’d taken advantage of her, so shamefacedly went to Pastor Manders to get them married in a hurry (p.122).

It was because, aged seven, Oswald was getting old enough to ask questions that she sent him away. Not because she was a bad mother, because she was a good mother who didn’t want him raised in a household full of corruption and lies (p.118).

This is why she has devoted a lot of money to building the orphanage in her husband’s name, to try and prevent any whiff of scandal. But there’s another, buried motive. The orphanage cost exactly as much as her bride price. She wanted to get rid of it because ‘I don’t want any of that money to pass to Oswald. Anything my son gets is to come from me.’

When, on the morrow, the orphanage is opened, Mrs Alving will feel it like an exorcism. At long last the ghost will be laid and ‘this long, ghastly farce will be over’ (p.120).

But then something strange happens. In a way which breaches realism but is packed with symbolic meaning, both the pastor and Mrs A hear a scuffled coming from the dining room and then Regine’s voice urgently whispering: ‘Oswald! Are you made? let me go!’

The heavily moralising or symbolic point is that – the young generation are repeating the sins of their parents. Or, as Mrs Alving puts it:

MRS ALVING: ‘Ghosts! Those two in the conservatory…come back to haunt us.’ (p.120)

Act 2

Act 2 picks up in the same drawing room immediately after dinner i.e. an hour later, and shows Mrs Alving still reeling from the revelation that his son is trying it on with her maid and Manders reeling from the way everyone involved lied to him. Manders reassures himself that the marriages were all carried out according to law and order but Mrs Alving blasphemously wonders whether it’s the law and order which cause all the trouble and delivers a Nora Helming outburst:

MRS ALVING: I’m not putting up with it any longer, all these ties and restrictions. I can’t stand it! I must work myself free! (p.124)

This leads into a classic ‘moral’ quandary, namely should Mrs Alving tell her son the truth about his father. Pastor Manders, as representative of social morality, finds himself arguing no, that she shouldn’t burst his illusions and ideals. But Mrs Alving now feels that observing the proprieties i.e. lying, for all those years, and continuing to lie to her son, just indicts her as a coward.

She starts out saying she needs to get Regine out of her house as soon as possible, to send her back to her father. But then, pondering her reluctance to go home, she voices another scenario: maybe she should encourage Oswald and Regine, if not to marry, then at least to commit to live together, unconventionally but honestly.

Manders is horrified because…it would be incest – they both share the same father, they are half-brother and sister. To which Mrs Alving delivers the devastating response:

MRS ALVING: Do you think there aren’t plenty of couples all over the country who are every bit as closely related? (p.125)

So now we can see how incest brought about by male philandering is the core of the plotline. But Mrs Alving goes on to deliver a little speech which rises above this ‘issue’ to address a more imaginative or symbolic level:

MRS ALVING: Ghosts! When I heard Regina and Oswald in there, it was just like seeing ghosts. But then I’m inclined to think that we are all ghosts, Pastor Manders, every one of us. It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them. I’ve only to pick up a newspaper and I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. Over the whole country there must be ghosts, as numerous as the sands of the sea. And here we are, all of us, abysmally afraid of the light. (p.126)

Impressive speech and compelling vision, especially to someone like me with my view of the unchangeability of human nature which condemns each new generation to repeat the behaviours of the previous ones.

Because now there’s another revelation (Ibsen’s plays seem to proceed from one devastating revelation to another) which is that back then, nineteen years ago, when Mrs Alving ran away from her unfaithful husband, she ran to Pastor Manders because she was in love with him and she knew he was in love with her. In the pastor’s mind, the greatest achievement of his life was overcoming his own personal wishes, putting duty and responsibility first and telling Mrs Alving to return to her husband. Now her revelations that this led to 19 years of purgatory throw into doubt the meaning of that great ‘victory’. He calls it a victory over himself but Mrs Alving calls it ‘a crime against both of us’.

What’s more it led her to rethink the entire notion of religious faith, honour, duty and so on, and the harder she thought about them the more they fell to pieces in her hands:

MRS ALVING: Yes, when you forced me to submit to what you called my duty and obligations. When you praised as right and proper what my whole mind revolted against, as against some loathsome thing. It was then I began to examine the fabric of your teachings. I began picking at one of the knots but as soon as I’d got that undone, the whole thing came apart at the seams. It was then I realised it was just tacked together.

So she’s quite the speech maker and quite the social radical.

Scene: Engstrand plays the pastor

Then enters Engstrand. He puts on a big performance for the pastor, claiming that now the orphanage is finished he and the lads would like the pastor to mark it with a little service. Manders hits him between the eyes with everything Mrs Alving’s told him, that Engstrand only took Johanna back for the money and lied and lied to him (Manders) about getting her pregnant etc etc. But Engstrand (who needs, I imagine, to be played by a slyly comic actor) comes over all working class piety, clutching his hat in his hand and yes my lord no my lord-ing Manders. He spins events to place himself in the light of a pious hard-working soul who saw it as his duty to rescue this poor sinner woman (Johanna) etc. When directly accused of only marrying her for her money (the $300) Engstrand loftily insists he never touched a cent of it but used it all to educate his (legal) daughter, Regine.

Manders is completely taken in and enchanted. When Engstrand exits to go and prepare the building for a little service Manders turns triumphantly to Mrs Alving and says ‘Well?’ but she (presumably like the audience) has completely seen through Engstrand and finds Manders’ naivety touching: ‘I say you are a great big baby and always will be’ and goes as if to hug him till the pastor flinches back in naive horror. He exits to go carry out the promised service.

Scene: Oswald’s illness

In the silence that follows Mrs Alving hears the tink of glass from the dining room and is disconcerted to realise Oswald is still in the dining room. She thought he’s gone for a walk. She calls him in to the living room (the main set) worried he might have overheard some of their talk. But this is quickly eclipsed by Oswald making a revelation to her (another of Ibsen’s revelations) that he is ill, very ill, so ill that he thinks he’ll never be able to work again.

In Paris, he’s been having more and more severe headaches and he went to see a specialist who confirmed that he has some kind of inherited sexual disease, or, as the doctor put it, ‘The sins of the father are visited upon the children.’ But Oswald shows the doc all the letters from his mother (Mrs A) praising her husband, Oswald’s father, to the skies (lying, as required by social convention), and so proved it couldn’t have been an inherited STI.

At which point Oswald blames himself for leading an indulgent bohemian lifestyle. He reiterates that it’s all his own fault and he can’t live with the guilt of wrecking his own life. If only he had someone else to blame it on…

Well, there’s a ton of dramatic irony here because half an hour earlier we learned that it almost certainly was inherited from his dissolute father (though the genetics and/or disease theory of all this is pretty ropey: he could, in fact, only have been infected via his mother i.e. the captain gave Mrs A syphilis or some such which she transmitted to Oswald at birth. The Wikipedia entry has a footnote dealing with the science).

Anyway, obviously Mrs Alving paces up and down in anguish, knowing that with a few sentences she could release her son from his crushing guilt but only at the cost of destroying his illusions about his father. I know it’s meant to be heart-wrenching scene of a poor mother torn between etc etc, but the patness of it, the cunning artifice of it, is quite funny.

But Mrs Alving doesn’t get to tell the truth because first he a) desperately asks for something to drink to wash away his headful of anguish and then b) makes his mother sit with him while he drinks champagne and…asks her opinion about Regine: ‘Isn’t she marvellous looking, Mother?’

He is, in other words, unconsciously copying his father, drinking far too much, forcing her to listen to him burble on, and fancying the maid. But then he goes further (as I say, Ibsen’s plays seem to consists of a succession of revelations).

He tells his mum that last time he was home he was waxing lyrical about the joys of life in gay Paris when one thing led to another and he playfully said: ‘You must come with me there’. Now, on his return, he’s discovered that Regine remembered that remark and took him literally. (This is why she’s been learning French and explains why Regine’s character keeps popping little French tags into her conversation). Anyway, she asked him: ‘What about my trip to Paris?’ and it suddenly made sense to him – that Regine, so full of life and certainty, can be the cure for the dread and anxiety he feels.

During the scene Mrs Alving had asked Regine to fetch a half bottle of champagne. Now Mrs Oswald tells her to bring another, whole, bottle and Oswald adds, ‘as a glass for yourself.’ As Regine returns with the bottle and the third glass and, very nervously accepts a drink, Oswald tells his mother his mind is made up. He’s returning to Paris and taking Regine with him.

This finally stings Mrs Alving into action and she stands and announces she has something to tell them (obviously a) his father’s immorality and b) their incestuous consanguinity). But at that moment, probably meant to be dramatic but also has a comic impact, the parson enters, as in a Whitehall farce.

He is surprised to see Regine sitting with the other two and holding a glass of champagne as if she is their social equal but flabbergasted when Oswald announces that she (Regine) is leaving with him for Paris as his wife! For the second time Mrs Alving stands and says now she is going to speak plainly but, for a second time is interrupted. For this time they hear shouting in the distance, throw open the windows and see that the brand-new orphanage, which was due to be opened the next day, is on fire!

Act 3

Scene 1

They’re all back in the main house later the same night, with the embers of the ruined orphanage glowing in the distance. It burned to the ground. Nothing was saved.

Remember how I described the scene where Engstrand posed as the embodiment of aggrieved piety, insisting that he married Joahnna out of Christian charity rather than for her little nest egg, in order to wrap the pastor round his little finger? Well, that scene has its sequel here. For we find Engstrand with mock reluctance persuading the pastor that it was him (Pastor Manders) who started the fire, it was he who they left to put out the candles, who they all saw pinch one out with his fingers and chuck the stub away, unfortunately into a pile of shavings.

Manders doesn’t remember any of this and insists that he never puts candles out that way, but Engstrand’s mock-apologetic insistence wins him round. The con man (for that is what he is) insists that he’ll stand by Manders at the public hearing, which there’ll have to be, and will do his best to deflect the anger of the townspeople at the loss of the orphanage which was going to be benefit everyone (by taking parentless children off the rates).

And one last thing: the money to find the maintenance and expenses of the orphanage was to come from the interest from her bride price which Mrs Alving had invested. Now that money needs a purpose at which point Engstrand usefully pipes up to remind the pastor about his plan for a Seaman’s Home.

Just in case there was any doubt whatsoever that Engstrand invited the pastor down to the orphanage to carry out a ‘service’ precisely in order to burn it down and blame him, and thus secure the funding and support for his own project, Ibsen gives Engstrand an ‘aside’ to his daughter in which he says: ‘Now we’ve got him nicely, my girl.’ Ibsen is routinely described as a giant of modern theatre but moments like this are as subtle as a stage villain twirling the ends of his black moustache and cackling, ‘My evil plan is working!’

There’s a final joke so broad surely the audience was meant to laugh. Engstrand helps Manders on with his coat and makes a parting promise:

ENGSTRAND: And this place for seafaring men, it’s going to be called the ‘Captain Alving Home’, and if I can run it my way, I think I can promise it’ll be a place worthy of the Captain’s memory. (p.152)

Well, as we learned earlier, the captain turned out to have been a world class philanderer, adulterer and womaniser, and this confirms the passage of the opening scene where Engstrand was trying to encourage his own daughter to come back to the city with him so as to provide ‘entertainment’ for the sailors, in the form of singing, dancing and sexual favours. I was surprised to find Ibsen doing such broad comedy.

Scene 2

So the comedy duo of Manders and Engstrand exit, leaving the tragic trio of Mrs Alving, Oswald and Regine. Oswald has only just staggered in from the scene of the fire in a semi-catatonic state. He sits stiffly while his mother cleans his face and then calls for all the doors to be closed to try and shut out his terrible feeling of dread. He starts to talk wildly, almost cackling. Basically, the actor has to give the impression of someone who’s mind is genuinely going.

Mrs Alving hurries to comfort him but poor Regine is, understandably, bewildered. Nobody told her her posh knight in shining armour was going mad.

So Mrs Alving proceeds to tell her son that his father was just like him, full of joy and energy but, finding himself trapped in a provincial town with a wife confined by her sense of duty, he felt trapped and took it out in womanising and getting drunk. And then, elliptically, refers to the fact that Regine is his father’s daughter i.e his half-sister. That makes them both sit up!

And Regine announces she will leave at once. She was having second thoughts about mad Oswald and this thunderbolt clinches it:

REGINE: No, you won’t catch me staying out in the country, working myself to death looking after invalids. (p.156)

So she wraps her shawl around her and announces she’ll hurry off to try and catch the same ferry as the pastor and her ‘father’ or ‘that rotten old carpenter’ as he calls him. Angry at being lied to, and being brought up as a servant instead of on equal terms to Oswald, she storms out, leaving the sad mother and mad son.

Scene 3

The thrust of the scene is that Oswald doesn’t feel anything for his dead father. He barely knew him and has one and only one memory of him, as a boy, making him smoke a cigar till he was sick. When Mrs Alving gives way to convention (contradicting her speeches earlier in the play) and says surely a son ought to have a duty to love a father, Oswald replies that’s just one of those old superstitions, just a relic lying around, to which Mrs Alving replies, ‘Ghosts’, and the audience go, ‘Yes, the title, the theme, we get it.’

But Oswald reveals a dismayingly instrumental view of Mrs Alving, he likes her and she will do to look after him in his illness. But then he makes her pull up a chair and reveals (remember how Ibsen plays consist of a carefully paced series of revelations?) that his illness is not physical, it’s in his head. He had an attack in Paris which rendered him helpless as a baby.

Mrs Alving is horrified but promises to be a mother to him when these attacks happen. But Oswald explains that the next attack might be permanent, infantilise him forever, and he’d be a bed-bound baby until he was old and grey. This is the course of his dread.

Which is why he shows her the small box he keeps in his breast pocket. In it are 12 shots of morphine. When he has his next attack he wants her to administer them and kill him. She screams and says, ‘What? Me who gave you life?’ to which Oswald makes the slightly teenage reply:

OSWALD: I never asked you for life. And what sort of life is this you’ve given me. I don’t want it! Take it back!

So from having been about incest this has become a play about euthanasia. Packs in the topical issues, doesn’t he, Ibsen? Mrs Alving promises she will, if he has an attack, administer the poison. Oswals calms down. She pulls up her chair and promises to look after him like a mother looks after a child. Dawn breaks over the mountains and the fjord.

And it’s at this moment that Oswald has an attack, saying, ‘Mother give me the sun,’ then shrinking in his chair, going flaccid, losing his mind, repeating flatly ‘the sun, the sun’. Mrs Alving leaps to her feet and screams, struggles to find the box Oswald just gave her, says yes, yes, then no, no, and stands staring at him in horror as the curtain falls.

Comment

I thought it was going to be a predictable number about Victorian sexual hypocrisy and double standards but the central plot of Regine and Oswald being half-siblings by the same father and the threatened risk of their incest takes things to a higher, more dangerous level.

But then, in the last few pages, the entirely new topic of a mother faced with the euthanasia of her stricken son has a blistering intensity which blots out everything which came before it.

A searing, intense, deeply disturbing experience.

The title

According to Wikipedia:

Ibsen disliked the English translator William Archer’s use of the word ‘Ghosts’ as the play’s title, the Danish or Norwegian Gengangere would be more accurately translated as ‘The Revenants’ which literally means ‘The Ones Who Return’…It has a double meaning of both ‘ghosts’ and ‘events that repeat themselves’ which the English title ‘Ghosts’ fails to capture.

Related links

Ibsen reviews

Play reviews

  • Play reviews
2 Comments
by Simon on September 30, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, Theatre, Translation
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on September 30, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/30/ghosts-henrik-ibsen/