CharlesPaolino's Blog

GOV. MARK SANFORD

It goes without saying that Gov. Mark Sanford wasn’t the first person to take a powder because of an affair of the heart. What may be more rare is the response from the governor’s wife, Jenny, who quoted the Fourth Psalm and Archbishop Desmond Tutu in explaining to the Associated Press why she might forgive her husband for his transgressions. The archbishop’s take, according to Jenny Sanford, is that “forgiveness is the grace by which you enable the other person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew.” Presumably, Dina McGreevey doesn’t subscribe to this formula.

In a way, Sanford’s adventure has been done to death, but it turns out that the novelist Agatha Christie had a unique take on the unexplained disappearance. She vanished for 11 days in 1926 because her husband was having an affair. After throwing the British public into a panic and providing the newspapers with a sensational story, Christie turned up at a resort hotel where she had registered under the name of her husband’s paramour. This was never publicly explained, but it seems to have  been part of an elaborate scheme to prod her husband — who had already asked for a divorce — into reconciling with her. It didn’t work, and she ended up in a satisfactory relationship with another man.

This is all spelled out in a new biography of Christie by Richard Hack. There’s an entertaining review in the Los Angeles Times:

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-book2-2009jul02,0,2014380.story

AGATHA CHRISTIE