Dedication

A tricky question

This is a very old post, somewhat refurbished… apologies for this but I am on holiday for a few days for the first time, properly, in two and a half years (not an exaggeration); however I hate not posting after I received so many new subscribers from my birthday offer, for which I am hugely grateful. So this is that unfashionable thing in hysterical times: a compromise.

I finished going through the copy-edit of my little Agatha Christie book, Eleven Days, at 2am on Sunday, then had another pick at it the next morning - then realized I was in danger of becoming obsessional, as one does with these things. So it has gone. Done.

Although my publisher did ask whether I would like to add a dedication… which reminded me both of this post, and of an unexpected email exchange that I had last year with an immensely courteous American, who messaged me to say that he was giving a speech about Roger Ackroyd at a club in Washington, had found my Agatha biography of great use and wanted to ask, if I didn’t mind telling him of course, the origin of the dedication at the front of the book?

Which is, as it happens: ‘To Vinny, my friend, O.F.D.’

Those who know Agatha Christie’s books may well recognize that O.F.D.: it features in The Mystery of the Blue Train, which was published in 1928 and dedicated ‘To the two distinguished members of the O.F.D. Carlotta and Peter’.

The acronym stood for ‘Order of the Faithful Dog’.

Peter really was a dog, a wire-haired terrier, who later became ‘Bob’ in Dumb Witness and whose bronze image now accompanies Agatha in that rather nice new statue on Torquay harbour. Agatha had clung to Peter throughout the terrible year of 1926, the one I have just written about in my book, which culminated in the eleven-day ‘disappearance’. In 1930 she wrote to her second husband, Max Mallowan: ‘You’ve never been through a really bad time with nothing in the world but a dog to hold on to.’

Carlotta was Charlotte Fisher, Agatha’s secretary-companion and lifelong friend, who had also stood by her in the matter of the eleven days: whatever Charlotte knew about the event - and speculation upon this is very much part of my new book - she never betrayed a confidence.

So the dedication to Blue Train, a wretched book from Agatha’s point of view, completed in the grey aftermath of 1926, was to those who had shown its author loyalty and love, those most dog-like of qualities.

Vinny was my dog, a superlative dog. He died not long before my Agatha biog went to print, and so - the dedication.

I explained this to the charming American and he later emailed me to tell me that he told the little story of the dedication in his speech to the Washington society, which I found extremely touching.

In his middle years Vinny acquired this companion Italian greyhound, Louis, who had been bred for showing, then rejected as there was something not quite right about the angle of his tail (that cranky tail did him a big old favour, as my father was wont to say). Louis died - aged nearly eighteen - just after I completed The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters. So I dedicated that book to him: the inscription was in fact ‘To Louis, the well-beloved’, thus also an allusion to Louis XV, about whom Nancy had written in her biography of Madame de Pompadour (one of her slightly pompous friends advising her ‘that she might not say Louis XV was perfect heaven 3 times on one page’).

And most recently I dedicated Au Revoir Now Darlint, the edited letters of Edith Thompson, to ‘Milo, the darlingest boy’. Milo was my black labrador. Again, he had died not long before the book was published, and I still miss him quite atrociously. ‘Darlingest boy’ was how Edith described her young lover Freddy Bywaters; well, Milo was mine.

I have also dedicated a book to both my parents: easy decisions.

Then it starts to get a bit more complicated… rather weakly, I dedicated my Lucan book to ‘my family’, which was a half-hearted attempt to resolve a dedication-related issue, a family member by marriage who never reads a word that I write (hence I can say this on here) yet clearly expected to have a book dedicated to them, and has Meghan-level abilities to take offence at things. However I have no intention of dedicating a book to this non-reader, which merely entrenches the sulking situation in which none of my work is ever read.

As for love objects: when I think of a couple of the men to whom in the past I yearned to dedicate a book… suffice it to say that I would now pay good money, even in these hard times, even if it meant going round bookshops with a bottle of Tippex (should that still exist), to remove any such hypothetical inscriptions from any remaining copies.

Look at the fix that Nancy Mitford got herself into when she dedicated The Pursuit of Love to her adored Gaston Palewski: the ‘Colonel’, the ally of General de Gaulle whom she had met in London in 1942 and who, in the novel, is reimagined as the Duc de Sauveterre. Which gave Palewski great pleasure, although as I wrote in my Nancy biography (dedicated to my mother):

‘There had been a rift with Palewski in 1947 when The Pursuit of Love was published in France, and the dedication picked up on by the French press: ‘Hitler’s mistress’s sister dedicates daring book to M. Palewski’, ran a newspaper headline. This had turned the ever-cautious Colonel’s blood to ice; had he been in love with Nancy he would have laughed it off (he had, after all, wanted the dedication), but in his state of always trying to dance slightly away from her he reacted coldly: ‘he is in a great do about it & really I think I shall have to go away from here for a bit’, Nancy wrote to [her sister] Diana. ‘He says the General will be furious.’’

(Incidentally I am pretty sure that Unity Mitford was not Hitler’s mistress; but that is by-the-bye).

So I think I have been right in never dedicating a book to any person with whom my relationship is not absolutely fixed; although I am sure that Nancy never regretted the dedication to Palewski, even when, having told her for years that he could never marry a divorced Protestant (ie her), he went ahead and did exactly that. But their attachment - unsatisfactory as it was for her - was also something more, and when Nancy was dying Palewski helped to get her the Légion d’honneur: ‘she stood’, as I wrote, ‘while the love of her old life pinned the decoration to her dress.’

But I do wonder whether - for instance - Elizabeth Jane Howard later wished that she had not dedicated After Julius ‘To Kingsley’ in 1965. That was the year of their marriage, a time of such radiant bliss that Amis even wrote a short passage in the novel (EJH returning the favour in One Fat Englishman). Yet when the relationship broke down, some fifteen years later, he became immovably rancorous towards both his ex and her writing, as in this 1989 letter to Robert Conquest:

‘Martin tells me the bad news is they’re making a film of one of her books [Getting It Right], but the good news is it’s on a v. low budget. It amazes me now that for several months I was v cut up about it, wanted her back, contemplated a poem on the subj if you don’t fucking well mind… Well it’s all experience, though it’s a pity there had to be so much of it.’

A dedication is of its time; but because a book is, in a sense, for all time, at least until the skies fall in upon civilization (which I hope will be less soon than it sometimes seems), the dedication acquires its own quality of the eternal. Charlotte Bronte dedicating Jane Eyre to William Thackeray. Shakespeare and his onlie begetter. In the interests of ‘research’ I pulled out some random books from my own shelves and learned (what I had never before noticed) that Hotel du Lac is dedicated to Rosamond Lehmann, that Madame Bovary is dedicated to nobody, that The Go-Between is dedicated to ‘Miss Dora Cowell’ and that In a Summer Season is dedicated to John, which I found very interesting. The ‘John’ in receipt is presumably Elizabeth Taylor’s husband, who was not entirely faithful; the subject matter of the novel is the second marriage of an attractive, well-to-do, middle-aged Home Counties woman (in other words, very much Elizabeth Taylor herself) to a younger man, who envelops her in a haze of sexual desire that the novel conveys, almost chokingly, without a single explicit word or phrase. No such second marriage ever occurred for Elizabeth, although after her death aged just 63, John Taylor - who lived to be almost a hundred - acquired a second wife.

So those two words, ‘To John’, tell a little tale of their own, as many dedications surely do.

This, for instance, is from Agatha Christie’s 1932 novel Peril at End House: ‘To Eden Phillpotts, To whom I shall always be grateful for his friendship and the encouragement he gave me years ago.’

Phillpotts, a successful writer in the early twentieth century, had lived near Agatha’s family, the Millers, in Devon. When Agatha wrote her first novel, the unpublished Snow Upon the Desert, in around 1909, her mother Clara - always a determined advocate - urged her to send him the manuscript. He gave Agatha an introduction to his literary agency, which would indeed later represent her, although she was told to forget the novel. Later - but still some time before her first detective fiction - she sent Philpotts a short story, now lost, to which he replied:

‘All is going exceedingly well with your work and should life so fall out for you that it has room for art and if you can face the uphill fight to take your place and win it, you have the gifts sufficient. I never prophesy; but I should judge that if you can write like this now you might go far.’

For a man who did not prophesy, this showed a tremendous kindly prescience.

And the delicately implied warning - that life and art must strive to be reconciled - applied to no book so much as The Mystery of the Blue Train, which was completed in a state of grave unhappiness and which had, nonetheless, to be written, because that is what writers do.

As for my own latest, Eleven Days… the obvious dedicatees have put themselves forward, thus:

but I am more glad than I can say that they are both (I hope) several books away from requiring that particular kind of immortality; that time when the physical presence has gone and yet there they are, honoured, publicly yet intimately, the ineradicable words a signifier of the space that they occupy in my heart-memory.