6 Friday May 27 2022 | the timesThe
casual
return
of Putin’s
diva
Two months ago I
reported that the
music world outside
Russia was united
in shunning Anna
Netrebko, the
Russian soprano
who (as is evident
from Le Monde’s
recent interview)
still refuses to
condemn Vladimir
Putin. Well, that
ban didn’t last long.
This week Netrebko
sings recitals in the
Philharmonie in
Paris and La Scala
in Milan. “Forgive
and forget” seems
to be the attitude
in France and Italy,
even as Russian
guns bombard
Ukrainian cities.
How long will it
be, I wonder, before
the conductor
Valery Gergiev —
Putin’s closest
cultural ally —
wheedles his way
back into a concert
hall somewhere in
western Europe?
I give it six months.T
here are certain
mystery writers whose
real-life personalities
strike me as even more
dark and complex than
their fiction. Think of
Daphne du Maurier,
the author of such
ominous, twisted masterpieces as
Rebecca and Don’t Look Now, who was
abused as a child by her actor father
(or so her biographer alleges) and was
notoriously cold and reclusive as an
adult. Or Patricia Highsmith, who
wrote the unforgettably amoral
Ripley novels. “A mean, cruel, hard,
unlovable, unloving human being”
was how her publisher Otto Penzler
described her. Then he added: “But
her books? Brilliant.”
Then there’s Agatha Christie. What
sort of mind creates stories, dozens
of them, in which the first chapter
of the Book of Genesis is played out
again and again, except with a happy
resolution each time? As in the
Garden of Eden, an idyllic setting is
polluted by an act of transgression,
a murder, only for an incorruptible
and all-seeing outsider (whether
Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple)
to restore order.
The answer is the sort of mind
that is perceptive enough to know
about the dark side of life, but mostly
willing to comfort readers with the
illusion that even the worst situations
can be resolved by rational thinking.
Christie had an immense career:
more than 70 books, plus short stories
and of course The Mousetrap, now
approaching 30,000 performances in
the West End. Yet in only a few novels,
it seems to me, did she abandon her
hugely popular “queen of crime”
formula and write stories that
explore the bleaker layers of her life
experience. One such story can be
heard on May 29 when Radio 4
broadcasts Malcolm McKay’s
dramatisation of Mary Westmacott’s
Giant’s Bread.
Mary Westmacott? Who she? Well,
that was the pseudonym Christie
invented in 1930 and kept secret for
nearly 20 years. Giant’s Bread was
the first of six novels published under
that name.
Why did so many famous writers
throughout history use pseudonyms?
It’s a fascinating psychological
question. Sometimes it markedsisters published their
early works under
male pseudonyms,
and of course Mary
Ann Evans wrote
her novels as
George Eliot.
Rather more peculiar was the
case of Benjamin Franklin. This
founding father of the United States
masqueraded as a series of improbably
named women — Silence Dogood,
Martha Careful, Alice Addertongue,
Busy Body — to write letters to
newspapers in which he/she put
forward social views that were perhaps
too dangerously radical for a leading
politician to express.
Sometimes, however, the reasons
were more personal. Eton-educated
Eric Blair apparently wanted to avoid
embarrassing his family when he
wrote an account of his time as
a vagrant. Consequently, Down and
Out in Paris and London was said to
be the work of one George Orwell.
You may have heard the name.
And when Sylvia Plath wrote her
only novel, The Bell Jar, about a young
woman driven close to suicide by hercontrolling mother and others, she
used the name Victoria Lucas to
disguise its painful autobiographical
elements. Tragically, Plath’s suicide,
a month after the novel’s British
publication, made the connection
with real life obvious.
It seems that Christie’s reasons
for becoming Westmacott (a name
pinched from distant relatives) were,
like Blair’s and Plath’s, personal rather
than professional. It happened at the
end of the most traumatic period in
her life, after her first husband’s
adultery, the break-up of their
marriage and the nationwide search
triggered by her infamous ten-day
“disappearance” (possibly in what
psychiatrists call a “fugue state”,
involving temporary amnesia), when
she checked into a Harrogate hotel,
bizarrely, under the surname of
her husband’s lover.
Perhaps all this prompted
a desire to explore the
unresolved, irrational or
subconscious tensions in
her life through fiction.
If so, it was something
that couldn’t be done
through the logic-driven
investigations of Poirot
or Marple.
Giant’s Bread certainly
fits with that thesis. The
sprawling plot, spanning
decades, involves a mentally
damaged First World War
veteran who (writing under
a pseudonym!) becomes a composer
to exorcise, or perhaps flee from,
his demons — the result of failed
relationships as well as battlefield
horrors. There’s a horrific account of
a drowning at sea that evokes the
sinking of the Titanic, 18 years earlier.
All in all, it’s a fatalistic and disturbing
story laced throughout with
autobiographical hints.
How much of
that will survive
in a 50-minute
radio adaptation
remains to be heard, but if
the Radio 4 play sparks new
interest in the novels of the
almost forgotten Mary Westmacott,
that’s fine with me. From what I’ve
read, she was a much more
interesting character than her exact
contemporary — the one who sold
two billion books.JK Rowling said
she was yearning
for ‘unvarnished
feedback’
a change of style or medium. That
oddball Victorian academic Charles
Dodgson, for instance, wrote
mathematical treatises under his own
name and fantasy children’s fiction as
Lewis Carroll.
Sometimes a writer famous for one
sort of fiction wanted to make a fresh
start as an “unknown newcomer”.
When JK Rowling turned herself into
Robert Galbraith to write adult crime
fiction she said she was “yearning
to go back to the beginning of a
writing career and receive totally
unvarnished feedback”.
Often, especially in the distant
past, a pen name disguised a woman’s
gender when she was trying to
break into an overwhelmingly male
publishing world. All three BrontëRichard Morrison the arts column
Whydunnit? The real reasons writers hide behind pseudonyms
BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGESh a u s h Ith
th
in
ofi
s
d
d
vAgatha Christie
used the pen
name Mary
Westmacott
for Giant’s
Bread, below