Some day perhaps you will publish it in a volume; but you’ll want to re-write it first. I take it you may read what you please now & should advise that you read a few of the French men. If you can read equally easily in French as in English, then read them in French; Anatole France – the stories – & Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. But this last is very strong meat & perhaps you had better wait till you have taken some lighter dose first of the more modern men. When you come to it, remember that it – Madame Bovary – is one of the greatest novels in the world.
Come & see me if you like & when you want to know anything, or have time for more books.
Try another short story – quite a new one of three thousand words – & we’ll see if we can publish it. A little print is very encouraging I know; but I don’t want you to be in too much of a hurry.
Your friend,
Eden Philpotts.
There was one more exchange. Agatha wrote to Philpotts to ask what she should be doing with her life and, firmly and sensibly, he put her problems into proportion.
Art is second to life & if you are living just now (we only live by fits & starts) then put art out of your mind absolutely.… Tell me when I can be useful to you again.
Clara could not have directed Agatha to a wiser mentor.
5 ‘… he will change your entire life’
Agatha’s confusion arose largely from the romantic complications of her life. While staying with the Ralston-Patricks in Warwickshire, she had been taken to ‘a cold and windy meet’, where she had encountered a Colonel in the 17th Lancers, Bolton Fletcher. That evening they met again, at a fancy-dress ball at another house, The Asps, and on several other occasions. Agatha had dressed for the ball as Elaine, in white brocade with a pearl-covered cap, and three or four days after her return to Torquay she received a parcel containing a small silver-gilt box, engraved inside the lid with the words ‘The Asps, To Elaine’ and the date of the meet. Bolton Fletcher was, like Agatha’s later portrayal of him as Major Johnnie de Burgh in Unfinished Portrait, a master of the love letter, and ardent notes, flowers, books, chocolates and other tributes followed swiftly. On his third call at Ashfield, he proposed. Agatha was dazed and almost, but not quite, ready to be swept away: ‘I was charmed like the bird off a tree, and yet, when he was gone away, when I thought of him in absence, there was – nothing there.’ Clara was troubled. As she told Agatha, she had prayed for a good, kindly husband to appear for her daughter, one ‘well-endowed with this world’s goods’, for her income was now stretched very thin.
Somehow this suitor did not seem quite right. Handicapped by the lack of husband or sons who might make inquiries, Clara wrote to the Ralston-Patricks, who assured her that, apart from a profuse scattering of wild oats, Bolton Fletcher was in every way satisfactory. Clara did not mind the wild oats, nor the fact that the candidate was fifteen years older than Agatha (after all, there had been eight years between Frederick and herself), but she advised him that her daugher was too young to be pressed for an immediate decision and proposed that there be no letters or visits for six months, ‘which was probably just as well,’ Agatha remarked later, ‘because I should have fallen for those letters in the end.’ When the moratorium was over, a prepaid telegram arrived: ‘Cannot stand this indecision any longer. Will you marry me yes or no?’ ‘No,’ she wrote and straightaway felt enormous relief. ‘I turned over on my pillow and went immediately to sleep. So that was the end of that.’
Though Agatha’s life temporarily lost some of its savour, she regained her high spirits a few months later, with the arrival of Wilfred Pirie, whom she had last seen in Dinard when she was seven years old and he, older and rather superior, had been a Midshipman in the Navy. Now a Sub-lieutenant, he served in a submarine that came often to Torquay. Relieved to settle into a tranquil relationship, fortified by the friendship their fathers had enjoyed and their mothers now shared, and, no doubt, attracted as much by the lovely and intelligent Mrs Pirie as by her son, Agatha agreed that she and Wilfred should have ‘an understanding’. The friendship prospered; the romance did not. Agatha’s description of the fading of her illusion that she shared Wilfred’s tastes and enthusiasms (a phenomenon immediately recognisable to anyone who has ever sought to persuade themselves that they have met their perfect match) shows she was bored, especially when Wilfred talked about theosophy and spiritualism. It was not Wilfred’s embrace Agatha coveted but his family’s. His father was dead but in some respects Wilfred provided the masculine protection and challenge of which Agatha was deprived by her own father’s death and Monty’s elusiveness. It did not occur to her that she treated Wilfred exactly like a brother. Then there was Wilfred’s mother, whose character was as tantalising to Agatha as her schemes of interior decoration. Lilian Pirie represented the sort of woman Agatha admired; well-read, well-informed, lively and assured, she was a more emphatic version of Clara. As Agatha was to write in Unfinished Portrait, where much of Wilfred is to be found in Jim Grant (‘interested in theosophy, bimetallism, economics and Christian Science’), ‘the thing Celia enjoyed most about her engagement was her prospective mother-in-law.’ In marrying Wilfred, moreover, Agatha could believe that she would not really be leaving Clara: ‘I liked the idea of marrying a sailor very much. I should live in lodgings at Southsea, Plymouth, or somewhere like that, and when Wilfred was away on foreign stations I could come home to Ashfield and spend my time with Mother.’
The tedium of the understanding dawned on Agatha when Wilfred telephoned to ask whether she would mind if he spent his leave treasure-hunting with an expedition in South America. Naturally she agreed and on the day after he sailed she realised – for the second time – ‘that an enormous load had slipped off my mind.… I loved Wilfred like a brother and I wanted him to do what he wanted to do. I thought the treasure-hunting idea was … almost certain to be bogus. That again was because I was not in love with Wilfred. If I had been, I would have seen it with his eyes.’ Clara and Wilfred were disappointed but not devastated. A few months later Wilfred married someone else.
For this was the time when Agatha’s friends and contemporaries were determinedly marrying. Twice a bridesmaid, she speculated about her own prospects. She and Madge would look about the room for the most unappealing-looking candidates for ‘Agatha’s Husbands’, forcing her to choose between them. That was in play, but in reality, too, Agatha appraised the eligible men around her. She said something about this in her Autobiography, in a passage discussing friendship between men and women:
I don’t know exactly what brings about a friendship between man and woman – men do not by nature ever want a woman as a friend. It comes about by accident – often because the man is already sensually attracted by some other woman and quite wants to talk about her. Women do often crave after friendship with men – and are willing to come to it by taking an interest in someone else’s love affair. Then there comes about a very stable and enduring relationship – you become interested in each other as people. There is a flavour of sex, of course, the touch of salt as a condiment.
According to an elderly doctor friend of mine, a man looks at every woman he meets and wonders what she would be like to sleep with – possibly proceeding to whether she would be likely to sleep with him if he wanted it. ‘Direct and coarse – that’s a man,’ he put it. They don’t consider a woman as a possible wife.
Women, I think, quite simply try on, as it were, every man they meet as a possible husband. I don’t believe any woman has ever looked across a room and fallen in love at first sight with a man; lots of men have with a woman.
At first glance, these observations seem naïve. While acknowledging that sexual chemistry plays a part in all relationships, it is unwise to generalise, given the differences in people’s sexual proclivities, or their lack of them. It is also harder, in some societies at least, to understand Agatha’s