All posts tagged Jim

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf (1941)

She was given to increasing the bounds of the moment by flights into past or future; or sidelong down corridors and alley.
(Old Mrs Swithin, describing Woolf’s own technique, page 8)

She gave him an arch roguish twinkle, as if to say—but the end of that sentence was cut short.
(One of many instances of interruption and incompletion which characterise the novel at every level, p.182)

‘Bless my soul, what a dither!’
(An unknown member of the audience as it disperses at the end of the pageant which forms the centrepiece of the narrative, p.180)

Virginia Woolf killed herself before her last novel, Between the Acts, was published. She drowned herself in the River Ouse on 28 March 1941 and the novel was published on 17 July 1941.

According to her biographer, after the long, gruelling process of writing and rewriting her previous work, the long novel The Years, which covers 55 years in the lives of the extended Pargiter family, the writing of Between The Acts flowed much more easily. It stems from one simple concept: all the events are set on just one day in the summer of 1939 (p.48), on the day of the annual village pageant at Pointz Hall, at the heart of a remote and idyllic rural community in the south of England.

As usual, the narrative describes not only of events, but the thoughts and memories of half a dozen of the central characters. And the pageant itself reviews and celebrates English history just at the moment when the nation was poised on the brink of another world war, which would rewrite or even obliterate much of that history.

Shadows

Born in 1882, Woolf was approaching 50 when she wrote Between The Acts. She had been a prolific author, but had also lived a life plagued with mental illness and periodic collapses into complete madness. So the idea of a rural village pageant sounds as idyllic as can be, but the book is darkened by multiple shadows, details and themes.

So, for example, Isabella (Isa) dawdling in the library of the big house at the centre of the novel, picks up a copy of The Times and starts idly reading it. What could be more privileged and tony? Except that she finds herself reading the account of what seems to be an assault or rape case, of some British soldiers accused of luring a women into their barracks, throwing her on a bed and tearing off some of her clothing, at which point she started to slap the soldier…

This upsetting image recurs to Isa throughout the book, only a few times but enough to add a very dark thread to the fabric. Also regarding Isa, she is very obviously unhappily married to Giles, son of the village’s posh landowner, and her day is punctuated by thoughts of not just unhappiness, but active hatred for him. She tries to counter these by repeating the mantra that he is ‘the father to my children’ but it doesn’t really help.

As I say, dark shadows…

Threads and themes

So there’s this ancient house, Pointz Hall, sitting in a dip in remote and unspoilt English countryside. In it live old Mr Oliver who’s accompanied everywhere by his big Afghan hound, and his widowed sister, Mrs Swithin, who he calls Sindy though her given name was Lucy. They’re both in their 70s.

Old Oliver doesn’t understand how his sister, like him in so many ways, can believe in God, wears a big crucifix, is always off to church. a) Woolf herself, in either her novels or essays, gives no indication of understanding religion: this is another massive gap in her sense of human nature and experience, along with her timidity about sex and her inability to grasp most aspects of masculinity. b) But Oliver’s incomprehension doesn’t affect the deep affection of brother and sister. c) Which reminds me of the deep affection between the 70-something brother and sister, Eleanor and Edward, in The Years, one of the many ways that themes from the previous book spill over into this one.

Lucy / Mrs Swithin is the classic Woolfian absent-minded and dreamy older woman cf Eleanor in The Years.

Was it that she had no body? Up in the clouds, like an air ball, her mind touched ground now and then with a shock of surprise.

With Bart and Lucy lives Bart’s son, Giles Oliver, who is a stockbroker in London, and his wife, Isabella, generally called Isa. Isa is identified from the start as another typically dreamy Woolf woman, not interested in details, drifting off when people talk, preferring her dream world of disconnected thoughts and perceptions. Isa writes poetry but does so in a book disguised as an accounts book so as to hide it from her husband.

Isa is not a slip of a thing. When she takes Dodge to see the greenhouses, the narrative tells us she is ‘broad’ and ‘fairly filled the path’ (p.101).

At one point there’s a really pure expression of the dream aesthetic underlying Woolf’s entire approach, the non-human stasis and timelessness she aspires to.

Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence. (p.33)

If only life, or art, could have that perfection. but things keep changing, moving on, everything is in flux, and so no record of it can be perfect.

The young people of the village – Jim, Iris, David, Jessica – are busy decorating the old stone barn where the pageant will be held. A stage has been erected at one end. They call Mrs Swithin ‘Old Flimsy’.

Enter Mrs Manresa and William Dodge

Uninvited, two people show up at the house, Mrs Manresa, 45, and her friend, William Dodge. Through Isa’s eyes we learn that Mrs Manresa is a well-known local eccentric, married to a well-off City financier, with homes in London and down here, well known for playing jazz, roaming round in unusual clothes, insisting on teaching the village girls basket weaving.

Isa affectionately mocks Mrs Manresa as ‘the wild child of nature’ but she represents enjoyment of life, what Woolf mockingly refers to as the importance of ‘the jolly human heart’. She stirs some sugar into her coffee and:

She looked before she drank. Looking was part of drinking. Why waste sensation, she seemed to ask, why waste a single drop that can be pressed out of this ripe, this melting, this adorable world? (p.51)

It is identical to the sentiment expressed several times in Mrs Dalloway, about the sheer delight in living, in being live and sensitive to everything around you, no matter how small.

The stories that never are

It was in Orlando that I realised something distinctive about Woolf: given that her characters hardly ever do anything except drift from house to house, stroll through the streets, catch buses or cabs, and attend luncheons and dinner parties – for action, for interest, to liven up conversations, they often refer to ‘stories’, are described as telling ‘stories’, remind each other of the old ‘story’ about so-and-so.

But here’s my point: we never get to hear these stories. The promised stories are never told.

This was most flagrant in Orlando where we are repeatedly told about the months Orlando spent with buccaneers and whores in the East End and the stories they told! How the knackered old playwright Nicholas Green told him story after story about his contemporaries Shakespeare and Marlowe! About his time with the Turkish gypsies who told many a fine yarn round their campfires! And here’s the point: we never hear one of these stories.

In her big long novel, The Years, characters threaten to tell each other ‘stories’ about the old days, but never do.

Partly this has a modernist feel, a deliberate strategy of indirection, reminiscent of The Waste Land or The Cantos, which are made of unfinished fragments. But it’s also, I think, because Woolf couldn’t actually tell a story; she was one of those people who doesn’t remember stories, isn’t really interested in stories; her thing is moments of being, her characters noticing luminous details, dreams. Each of her novels features a leading woman protagonist who is the first to admit how forgetful they are: Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay, Eleanor Pargiter and here’s inattentive old Mrs Swithin.

‘A bishop; a traveller;—I’ve forgotten even their names. I ignore. I forget.’ (p.64)

The never-told stories are closely connected to another phenomenon, which is something to do with incompletion. Characters start to say something that may be a story, but are interrupted, shouted down, talked over, or someone laughs and the character listening doesn’t hear the crucial part. Woolf’s narratives revel in incompletion and frustration. The classic instance is at the end of The Years when Nicholas attempts to cap the big party which forms the final section of the book with a speech, but he is interrupted once, tries again and is interrupted again, tries a third time but other people walk by, talk over him, suggest someone else makes a speech, and so it never happens.

That sense of an action, generally a narrative, of someone trying to tell a story or a speech but not being completed, left hanging, frustrated, is a fundamental aspect of Woolf’s fictions, and the same happens here in Between The Acts. Here is a typical Woolf anecdote, Mrs Manresa rattling on to the Oliver family:

On she went to offer them a sample of her life; a few gobbets of gossip; mere trash; but she gave it for what it was worth; how last Tuesday she had been sitting next so and so; and she added, very casually a Christian name; then a nickname; and he’d said—for, as a mere nobody they didn’t mind what they said to her—and ‘in strict confidence, I needn’t tell you,’ she told them. And they all pricked their ears. And then, with a gesture of her hands as if tossing overboard that odious crackling-under-the-pot London life—so—she exclaimed ‘There!…And what’s the first thing I do when I come down here?’ They had only come last night, driving through June lanes… (p.38)

What happened to the ‘story’? We are not told it. I think Mrs Manresa actually does tell it and Woolf simply doesn’t report it, though it’s not very clear. What is certainly clear is that Woolf doesn’t share it. She never does. In all these novels we never get to hear any ancillary or subsidiary stories.

Here’s another typical moment. Old Bart is telling the unexpected lunch guests, Mrs Manresa and William, about the paintings hanging in the dining room.

Dodge [said] ‘I like that picture.’
‘And you’re right,’ said Bartholomew. ‘A man—I forget his name—a man connected with some Institute, a man who goes about giving advice, gratis, to descendants like ourselves, degenerate descendants, said…said…’ He paused. They all looked at the lady. But she looked over their heads, looking at nothing. She led them down green glades into the heart of silence.
‘Said it was by Sir Joshua?’ Mrs. Manresa broke the silence abruptly.
‘No, no,’ William Dodge said hastily, but under his breath. (p.45)

And that’s it. Things move on to Mrs Manresa counting out the stones from the cherries in her tart. In other words the story, or anecdote, about the expert who assessed the Oliver paintings, is never completed.

Later, in the interval of the pageant, Mrs Manresa is tempted to tell an off-colour story, but, of course, doesn’t.

Mrs. Manresa laughed. She remembered. An anecdote was on the tip of her tongue, about a public lavatory built to celebrate the same occasion, and how the Mayor… Could she tell it? No.

No, we never get to hear this as we never get to hear hundreds of other ‘stories’ referred to but never told. Woolf conversations are full of these interruptions and incompletions, it’s her trademark move. Thus at the very end of this book, the vicar starts to make a speech but is interrupted in mid-word by a flight of airplanes overhead.

‘But there is still a deficit’ (he consulted his paper) ‘of one hundred and seventy-five pounds odd. So that each of us who has enjoyed this pageant has still an opp…’ The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music. The audience gaped; the audience gazed. Then zoom became drone. The planes had passed. ‘…portunity,’ Mr. Streatfield continued, ‘to make a contribution.’

We, like the author, want things to form a unity, to be whole. But life is never whole, life is really a litany of interruptions and distractions.

‘One thing follows another’

Giles Oliver, Isa’s husband, arrives by train from London. He is nettled that they have unexpected guests i.e. Mrs Manresa has imposed on them. Giles bolts his lunch (the fish) to catch up with the others, then they take their coffee on the terrace with a view.

If his wife is a Woolfian dreamer, Giles represents a type of the Angry Man. He is angry that Mrs Manresa is breaking the family mood he came down to enjoy. This spills over into his acute awareness that war is coming and his seething frustration that all these old fogies just sit around in their deckchairs admiring the view as if nothing’s up. He instantly forms a bad opinion of Dodge and, as the coffee conversation wears on, decides he is a ****, a word he cannot say. Presumably he means gay.

The narrative meanders on. On the face of it Old Bart commences an inconsequential conversation asking why the British are so indifferent to their painters but so much more devoted to their writers (because the writers are better is the short answer). But while these middle-class types noodle on their inconsequential conversation, other things go on. The narrative ponders the subtle affiliation between cross Giles and self-professed wild child Mrs Manresa.

A thread united them—visible, invisible, like those threads, now seen, now not, that unite trembling grass blades in autumn before the sun rises. She had met him once only, at a cricket match. And then had been spun between them an early morning thread before the twigs and leaves of real friendship emerge.

Woolf isn’t interested in ‘stories’ and her novels have next to no plot because this is what interests her: the invisible threads that link people, places, memories…

Miss La Trobe

Only now, a quarter into the text, are we introduced to a figure who’s going to dominate it, Miss La Trobe, the impresario who stages the village pageant every year.

Outwardly she was swarthy, sturdy and thick set; strode about the fields in a smock frock; sometimes with a cigarette in her mouth; often with a whip in her hand; and used rather strong language…

This commanding figure has decided that the country house’s terrace would be the ideal place to perform the play. Now the lunch party (the Olivers, Giles and Isa, Mrs M etc) hear voices coming from the dip beyond the lily pond because it is here that Miss La Trobe is organising her troops for the day ahead. (Her nickname among the village actors is ‘Bossy’.)

Mr Streatfield the vicar arrives, with his ‘handsome, grizzled head’.

Rhymes

Isa is a poet so we see her continually versifying and looking for rhymes. It’s her shtick, her identifier.

‘Where we know not, where we go not, neither know nor care,’ she hummed. ‘Flying, rushing through the ambient, incandescent, summer silent…’ The rhyme was ‘air’. She put down her brush. She took up the telephone.

But somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dust—She waited for a rhyme, it failed her…

Here she is, taking Dodge to see the greenhouses:

‘Fly then, follow,’ she hummed, ‘the dappled herds in the cedar grove, who, sporting, play, the red with the roe, the stag with the doe. Fly, away. I grieving stay. Alone I linger, I pluck the bitter herb by the ruined wall, the churchyard wall, and press its sour, its sweet, its sour, long grey leaf, so, twixt thumb and finger…’

This fondness for rhymes is occasionally present not just in Isa but in the narrator themselves. In the first third of the book it occasionally spills over into the narrative text but once the pageant gets going, it becomes far more present (see below).

A tour of the house

There’s an odd jump cut from Miss La Trobe fussing with props to the narrative suddenly showing us Mrs Swithin showing young Mr Dodge round their house. For some reason this tour by the 70-year-old lady becomes freighted with an almost symbolical weight:

‘The nursery,’ said Mrs. Swithin. Words raised themselves and became symbolical. ‘The cradle of our race,’ she seemed to say. (p.66)

And for his part Dodge feels a sudden urge to confess his life story, to tell her he was bullied at school and that, yes, he is a **** (the word which Giles thinks can’t be mentioned, presumably poof or some such slur meaning gay) and so describes himself as a ‘half-man’.

The sound of cars in the drive reminds them that guests are arriving to watch the pageant. It is half past three on a June day in 1939.

Rows of chairs, deck chairs, gilt chairs, hired cane chairs, and indigenous garden seats had been drawn up on the terrace.

Into these the guests start fumbling and sitting. And then, without any preparation from the narrator, a child steps onstage and starts reciting, meaning the pageant has started.

The pageant 1. Elizabethan age

The pageant is surprisingly incoherent and confusing. Woolf deliberately makes it so. Thus a child comes onto the terrace/stage and starts declaiming but half the audience can’t hear. A chorus of villages comes on and sings but the audience can’t hear the words etc. It’s a continuation of the non-stories and interrupted speech theme. Nothing can get finished or completely understood. In a way, it’s like a nightmare where you’re running full pelt but not moving.

Anyway it appears to be a pageant overview of English history, starting with Chaucer and people in medieval garb miming the Canterbury pilgrims. Then a local figure, Mrs Clark, who runs the local shops (‘licensed to sell tobacco’) comes on impressively made up as Queen Elizabeth.

First play with the play

She recites some (bad) verse describing herself but is interrupted and mocked by the village idiot, Albert, skipping around, mocking her and the audience. Elizabeth introduces a play within a play. This appears to be a pastiche of an Elizabethan play with lost relatives and far-fetched coincidences but the real point is that, characteristically, it is badly explained and we don’t see it all acted out.

She bawled. They bawled. All together they bawled, and so loud that it was difficult to make out what they were saying.

First interval: tea in the barn

The play with a play is interrupted and incomplete when the Interval arrives, much to the chagrin of Miss La Trobe, yet another example of incompletion. Here is Isa’s confused response:

There was such a medley of things going on, what with the beldame’s deafness, the bawling of the youths, and the confusion of the plot that she could make nothing of it. Did the plot matter?… Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing.

You can’t help reading that as Woolf’s instructions about her own novels: ‘the plot’s nothing’.

But the other thing about the pageants is the way format of poetry, rhyme and repetition infects the narrative. At the interval all the characters and the narrator have picked up the habit of rhyming, repeating short phrases, poetic diction, as if it’s catching. Here’s how the narrative describes the audience returning to their seats. See how it’s become… what exactly? Impressionistic? Certainly with fanciful rhymes.

Feet crunched the gravel. Voices chattered. The inner voice, the other voice was saying: How can we deny that this brave music, wafted from the bushes, is expressive of some inner harmony? “When we wake” (some were thinking) “the day breaks us with its hard mallet blows.” “The office” (some were thinking) “compels disparity. Scattered, shattered, hither thither summoned by the bell. ‘Ping-ping-ping’ that’s the phone. ‘Forward!’ ‘Serving!’—that’s the shop.” So we answer to the infernal, agelong and eternal order issued from on high. And obey. “Working, serving, pushing, striving, earning wages—to be spent—here? Oh dear no. Now? No, by and by. When ears are deaf and the heart is dry.” (p.107)

At the interval everyone crowds into the ancient barn where tea and cakes are being served. Woolf takes the time to emphasise that both are disgusting, the tea tasting like ‘rust boiled in water’. There’s a great press of people all talking at the same time, overhearing each other’s fragments of speech, never finishing their sentences, a festival of inconsequentiality.

Symbolical voices they seemed to her, half hearing…. feeling invisible threads connecting the bodiless voices.

Woolf likes this kind of thing, mocking but also enjoying the hubbub and sustained inconsequentiality of banal conversation, an atmosphere of ‘scraps and fragments’ (a phrase she repeats six times). She staged the same sort of thing in Mrs Dalloway’s party which forms the climax to the novel of the same name, in the Ramsay family dinner in To The Lighthouse and in Delia’s party which forms the climax of The Years.

Thus Mrs Swithin rambles on to Mrs Manresa about the swallows which nest in the barn every year, someone comments on the King and Queen’s upcoming trip to India, someone else points out it’s actually Canada they’re going to, random voices interrupt asking for a splash more milk or another slice of cake. Isa and Dodge find themselves in a corner and jokingly quote bits of the play to each other. Dodge is an alienated outsider, the role played by North at Delia’s party. He is just thinking he’s made a bit of connection with poetry-quoting Isa when here whole expression changes and her little boy George comes running over to her, while Dodge catches sight of her husband, Giles, by the door, virile and still angry about everything.

New faces at the pageant

  • Albert, the village idiot
  • old Cobbet of Cobbs Corner, who worked out East for a while
  • Lady Haslip, of Haslip Manor
  • Mrs Parker
  • Mrs Neale who runs the village post office
  • Mrs Moore the keeper’s wife
  • Mr Pinsent with his bad leg
  • Mabel Hopkins
  • Major and Mrs Mayhew
  • Mrs Lynn-Jones who shares a house with Etty Springett, both being widows
  • Mr Page the village reporter, who is used to point out many of the above

On being gay

On a whim, Isa offers to show Dodge the greenhouses and off they wander. He knows she’s realised he’s gay.

‘And you—married?’ she asked. From her tone he knew she guessed, as women always guessed, everything. They knew at once they had nothing to fear, nothing to hope. At first they resented—serving as statues in a greenhouse. Then they liked it. For then they could say—as she did—whatever came into their heads…. ‘I’m William,’ he said, taking the furry leaf and pressing it between thumb and finger. ‘I’m Isa,’ she answered. Then they talked as if they had known each other all their lives; which was odd, she said, as they always did, considering she’d known him perhaps one hour. (p.102),

The pageant part 2. Restoration comedy

The audience drifts back to the seating in front of the terrace-stage, with much fragmented and inconsequential chatter, many of them repeating an irritatingly catchy line from the first half:

‘O sister swallow, O sister swallow,
How can thy heart be full of the spring?’

Out onto the stage steps Mabel Hodges, one of the family nannies, in costume with make-up and starts to recite more poetry about Reason but, in the classic style, the audience doesn’t catch many of her words. Behind her a troupe of villages pass to and fro among the trees chanting something which also cannot be heard, for ‘the wind blew their words away’, which itself becomes a catchphrase, repeated three times, even though Miss la Trobe furiously yells at them to chat the words louder.

Then the wind rose, and in the rustle of the leaves even the great words became inaudible; and the audience sat staring at the villagers, whose mouths opened, but no sound came.

Second play within a play: a restoration comedy

If the play within a play in the first half was from the Elizabethan era, this one is from the age of reason, and so is a Restoration comedy. It is a very bad pastiche. The point of Restoration comedy is the rapier wit, the cut and thrust of dialogue. Woolf is useless at this, as she showed in Orlando. The characters keep drifting off into Woolfian reverie, dreaming, free association. Also Restoration comedy is funny. Woolf is rarely funny.

It’s actually quite long this pastiche play, consisting of four scenes, between which we see some members of the audience clapping, shouting ‘hear hear’, commenting on the action, or Mrs Elmhurst reading out the plot summary in the programme to her deaf husband.

It’s a pastiche of a Restoration comedy in which Lady Harraden, the aunt of a pretty young virgin, Flavinda, conspires with an old gent, Sir Spaniel Lilyliver, for him to marry the virgin so that she will inherit a fortune which the old couple can divide between them, when all the time young Flavinda is, of course, in love with handsome young Valentine.

Cast of the Restoration comedy

  • Lady Asphodilla Harraden, played by Mrs Otter from the End House
  • Deb, her maid: ?
  • Sir Spaniel Lilyliver: ?
  • Flavinda, played by Millie Loder, shop assistant at Messrs. Hunt and Dicksons, drapery emporium
  • Valentine: ?

In the characteristic Woolfian way which I’ve been emphasising, one of the four scenes is missing, was never written, and the programme gives a short prose summary of it (it’s the key scene in the plot). As I’m said quite a few times, Woolf is all about incompletion and absence.

Second interval

Mrs Swithin breaks convention by going into the bushes where Miss La Trobe is supervising the actors getting dress, to congratulate her, for activating invisible strings, for waking the sense of history in her. Miss La Trobe hastily dresses Mrs Rogers and Hammond in Victorian clothes.

The pageant part 3. Victorian age

Mr Budge the publican steps on stage in the costume of a Victorian policeman directing the traffic. In his speech Woolf mocks the Victorian age, its racist assumption of white superiority, the white man’s burden to rule the world etc. Then:

There was a pause. The voices of the pilgrims singing, as they wound in and out between the trees, could be heard; but the words were inaudible. The audience sat waiting.

Inaudibility. Fragments. Incompletion.

Third play within the play

The Picnic Party. About 1860. Scene: A Lake.

Quite a few actors in Victorian dress perform the creation of a large picnic party. There’s a young couple, Edgar and Eleanor, who very earnestly discuss getting married and going out to Africa to convert the heathen. There’s a chorus of young men and a chorus of young women. It’s as big as an opera! Ladies sing a song. Mr Hardcastle leads Victorian prayers.

The picnic party pack up and leave, as Budge-as-constable returns and stands on his dais, painting a picture of the hard-working Victorian bourgeois returning to the bosom of his family, while the gramophone, offstage, plays Home Sweet Home.

Third interval

Mrs Swithin, Mrs Manresa, William, Isa and Giles witter on.

The pageant part 4. The present day

The program tells the audience that the last part of the pageant represents ‘the present day’. Obviously the use of that phrase, ‘the present day’, recalls the end of her previous novel, The Waves, the long final section of which was titled ‘Present Day’. It brings out the way the structure of all her mature novels reuse a handful of the same themes, settings or ideas.

Tick tick

I haven’t mentioned yet that during the interludes and a bit during the performances, the audience can hear the sound of the gramophone turning but not playing anything and that this sound is a ‘tick tick tick’. Obviously this is the sound of time, and the more the phrase is repeated, the more ominous and oppressive it becomes…

Only the tick of the gramophone needle was heard. The tick, tick, tick seemed to hold them together, tranced… Tick, tick, tick the machine continued…

Tick, tick, tick, the machine continued. Time was passing. The audience was wandering, dispersing. Only the tick tick of the gramophone held them together…

Tick, tick, tick, went the machine in the bushes… Tick tick tick the machine reiterated.

What is time? Why are we trapped in time? How is it that we vividly remember events from our childhood but can’t remember what we did this morning? Can we ever recapture lost time? Time is a trap.

They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle. Nothing happened. The tick of the machine was maddening. (p.158)

The audience becomes restive, grumbling among themselves. Cut away to Miss La Trobe and it is a deliberate strategy: nothing happens for ten minutes so the audience can experience the present moment.

After ten minutes of this, something happens. The cast come onstage holding a variety of mirrors, large and small and silver surfaces, moving around to reflect an image of the audience back at themselves, but in shimmering fragments. Hmm. Could Virginia be saying something about art? Or the novelist’s art?

Then a scene is quickly concocted, a backdrop showing a ruined wall, and some workers in front rebuilding it. It symbolises our civilisation (ruined by the Great War?) and the endless labour needed to maintain it.

Suddenly an unseen voice sets off on a long surreal and bracing accusation of the audience declaimed through a megaphone, which reminded me of W.H. Auden’s many minatory verses from the 1930s.

Let’s break the rhythm and forget the rhyme. And calmly consider ourselves. Ourselves. Some bony. Some fat. Liars most of us. Thieves too. The poor are as bad as the rich are. Perhaps worse. Don’t hide among rags. Or let our cloth protect us. Or for the matter of that book learning; or skilful practice on pianos; or laying on of paint. Or presume there’s innocency in childhood.

Then the vicar, the Reverend G. W. Streatfield, appears and delivers a speech. Characteristically, his first words are inaudible. Life, Woolf insists, is a thing of fragments and incompletion.

He says he is speaking simply as a member of the audience, as puzzled as everyone else, but he thinks one of the pageant’s meanings was that we are all one, that one person plays many parts, that there is a spirit which pervades all things. His speech is interrupted mid-word by the roaring of a flight of airplanes flying overhead, the machine, the modern world intruding into this idyll. Interruptions and fragments.

Moving on, the Reverend congratulates everyone because the pageant has raised thirty-six pounds ten shillings and eightpence towards the fund for installing electric light in the church. But a hundred and seventy-five pounds is still required so he asks everyone to give to the collection tins which come round.

Lastly he goes to offer a vote of thanks to the impresario of the afternoon’s entertainment but Miss La Trobe is nowhere to be seen. This is very like the climax of Delia’s party in The Waves, which Nicholas repeatedly tries to make a speech to provide a climax to the evening but is repeatedly interrupted and shouted down and eventually gives up. Fragments and frustration.

Similitudes

And it’s not the only repetition or echo of earlier works. Some of the characters are so similar to ones in this novel’s predecessor, The Years, as to be virtually identical.

Old Lucy Swithin, in her good-natured vagueness, is very like good-natured, vague Eleanor Pargiter.

Isa’s sharp observations remind me of critical young North. But her habit of misquoting long streams of poetry, or making up long streams of verse in more or less every situation she finds herself in, reminded me very much of the eccentric Sara or Sally, who does exactly the same in The Years.

In the event his puzzlement is ended when someone puts the National Anthem on the gramophone and everyone stands and sings along. Then that’s it. The actors are still onstage chatting to each other and the audience, a bit puzzled, start to disperse. The gramophone plays a song, first heard earlier, with the refrain ‘Dispersed are we’, and the audience disperse with four pages of what Woolf enjoys, scraps and fragments of random conversation.

Coda

The audience packs up, gets into their cars, and leaves, leaving the family as in the first quarter: old Bart, Lucy / Mrs Swithin, Mrs Manresa and William, Giles and Isa.

Lucy asks whether they oughtn’t to go and thank Miss La Trobe. Bart gruffly says she doesn’t need thanks, she’ll go to the pub with the actors and stumps off with his dog. Thank God the bloody thing’s over for another year. Lucy stays to watch the fish in the big pool and reflect on God and the unity of all things.

William Dodge casts a shadow on the fish pool as he finds Lucy and thanks her and shakes her hand.

Isa listens to the bells in the nearby church, the one the pageant has raised money to illuminate. When they stop she knows the service is starting. So presumably it’s a Sunday. She notices William Dodge making for the car park and hastening thither, discovers her husband talking up close to Mrs Manresa. She has entranced him. But at that moment (gay) William arrives, Mrs Manresa flirtatiously tells him to jump in and the car roars off.

Miss La Trobe

She avoided everyone, refused to go forward to take the vicar’s thanks, waited until everyone left, and then packed up the gramophone and records. She is an emblem of the artist, of Woolf herself and the creative agony. if only she had had more time, more money, more resources, she might have said the thing she wanted to but instead… hurry, imperfection, incompletion. She is haunted by her failure.

For what it’s worth we learn that she shares her bed with an actress and is shunned by the village women.

She was an outcast. Nature had somehow set her apart from her kind.

So I think that pretty much confirms she is a lesbian, as William Dodge is gay. Interesting that Woolf made these queer identities not exactly prominent but just notable, in her last novel.

She goes to the local pub where the talk stops when she enters because they’d been talking about her, using her nickname ‘Bossy’. She doesn’t care and doesn’t hear, orders a drink and the whole world fades out as the nurses a vision, two figures onstage by a rock at midnight, and the shape of her next project starts to come to her. She is moving onto the next work. Which we imagine is how Woolf felt as each new project began to take shape in her (troubled) mind.

The Oliver family

Everyone has gone leaving the Oliver family to have dinner (prepared, served and cleared away by the unknown servants). Bartholomew, Lucy, Giles and Isa. They discuss the play and its meaning without any great ideas, for example Bartholomew simply thinks it was too ambitious. Isa regards her husband, dressed in formal evening wear and reflects that she loves and hates him. The second post of the day is handed into the drawing room by the butler Candish. The reader is a little awed at how flat and boring their lives are.

Darkness falls deeper and deeper. The flowers close up. The windows are closed. Lucy draws her shawl tighter as she resumes reading H.G. Wells’s Outline of History (a book which also crops up in D.H. Lawrence’s novella, St Mawr).

The end

The ending may be the best thing about it. All day long there had been barely suppressed tension between Giles and Isa. Old Bart and Lucy go to bed leaving them alone and they both know a fight is coming, but after the fight what we nowadays call ‘make-up sex’. The last three paragraphs are really powerful.

The old people had gone up to bed. Giles crumpled the newspaper and turned out the light. Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night.

Isa let her sewing drop. The great hooded chairs had become enormous. And Giles too. And Isa too against the window. The window was all sky without colour. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks.

Then the curtain rose. They spoke.

‘As the dog fox fights with the vixen’ sounds like D.H. Lawrence, and for the only time in the seven Woolf novels I’ve read, you get a real sense of the human depths, not polite and glossed over with dreams and memories and vivid impressions, but hard and dark and brutal. Wow.

Last thought

On the subject of thematic repetitions and echoes (or the very limited plot elements that Woolf chose to work with), Mrs Dalloway follows the lives of half a dozen characters during one day in London, whereas Between The Acts follows the lives of half a dozen characters during one day in the heart of the countryside. Town and country.

Make of this what you will but my interpretation is that High Modernism was an urban phenomenon which describes the fragmentation of experience and mentality in the modern (1920s) city: The Waste Land, Ulysses, Berlin Alexanderplatz, these are all intensely urban works.

But 20 years later, at the end of the 1930s, the modernist wave had retreated and there was a revival of interest in life in the country: T.S. Eliot transitioned from the intense alienation of The Waste Land (1922) to the powerfully rural descriptions of Burnt Norton (1936), and Virginia Woolf transitioned from the intensely London setting of Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the intensely rural setting of Between The Acts (1941) i.e. these two great modernists travelled in the same direction.

But it was also part of a broader cultural shift. In art the movement is called Neo-romanticism which turned against the city and revived interest in depicting an idealised, stylised (sometimes nightmarish) English countryside. In her own understated way, I think Woolf’s novel was part of that general cultural shift as the bitter end of the 1930s turned into the catastrophe of the 1940s.

Cast

Posh people

Mr Rupert Haines, the old gentleman farmer, his face ravaged by time and work

Mrs Haines, the wife of the gentleman farmer

Isabella, generally called Isa, the wife of their son – she is a dreamer, a quoter of poetry, haunting the library wondering which book to read

Mr Bartholomew Oliver, of the Indian Service, retired, who owns Pointz Hall, ‘A very tall old man, with gleaming eyes, wrinkled cheeks, and a head with no hair on it.’ Referred to by servants as The Master, or when no-one’s around, ‘Bartie’.

Mr Giles Oliver, a stockbroker, Old Bartholomew’s son, Isa’s husband. They met salmon fishing in Scotland.

Mrs Giles Oliver, daughter of Sir Richard ?, wife of old Oliver’s son, herself the mother of toddler George.

Old Mrs Cindy Swithin, sister of old Mr Oliver, Cindy is a nickname for Lucy. She married a squire, now dead, and two children, one in Canada, the other, married, in Birmingham. The staff call her ‘old mother Swithin’. The young people of the village call her ‘Old Flimsy’.

Sunny the cat, nickname of Sung-Yen.

Mrs Manresa, married to Ralph Manresa, a Jew who works in City finance.

Miss La Trobe, organiser of the pageant.

Servants and suppliers

Bates the dentist (up in London)

Mitchell the fishmonger and Mitchell’s boy who delivers orders on a motorbike.

Candish, the butler, fond of ‘gambling and drinking’.

Mrs Sands the Olivers’ cook, known to friends as Trixie, ‘the thin, acid woman, red-haired, sharp and clean, who never dashed off masterpieces, it was true; but then never dropped hairpins in the soup’ as her predecessor, Jessie Pook, had done.

Jane the kitchenmaid

Unnamed ‘girls’, maids and kitchen staff e.g. ‘the scullery maid’, dismissed as silly and superstitious, believers in ghosts etc.

Gardeners.

Billy, Mrs. Sands’s nephew, apprenticed to the butcher.

Bond the cowman

The future shadowed their present, like the sun coming through the many-veined transparent vine leaf; a criss-cross of lines making no pattern.

Credit

‘Between the Acts’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1941. Page references are to the 1992 Oxford World Classics paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.

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Posted by Simon on April 11, 2025

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The History of Mr Polly by H.G. Wells (1910)

A weakly wilful being struggling to get obdurate things round impossible corners—in that symbol Mr. Polly could recognise himself and all the trouble of humanity.
(Mr Polly remembers his poor father, page 57)

This is a hugely enjoyable comic novel, by far the best of Wells’s social comedies, full of brilliantly observed details, shrewd psychology and comic reversals, all told in a high good humour. I smiled continually and laughed out loud often, and read it in one highly entertaining day.

‘Mr Polly’ is often considered the last of Well’s social comedies, a series which had begun ten years earlier with ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’ in 1900. He wrote loads more novels over the remaining 35 years of his life, but they are considered ‘novels of ideas’ and tend to thin characterisation and a journalistic approach to Big Issues of the Day. ‘Polly’ is considered the last one to have a twinkle in its eye and smile with gentle humour. It is written throughout with the charming facetious tone which was so common at the time (compare Kipling’s arch attitude towards his characters).

It’s also one more of the novels in which Wells recycled his own poor upbringing and his time apprenticed to a shopkeeper (the fate of the protagonists of Kipps and Tono-Bungay).

The narrative kicks off by telling us that Mr Polly is 37-and-a-half and runs a small gentleman’s outfitters in Fishbourne High Street which is slowly going bankrupt. He is dim, lacking education and any self-awareness. He is a martyr to bad digestion which often leads to bad moods which he takes out on his long-suffering wife.

After just a few pages of this, the story then flashes back to Polly’s early life to explain how he got to this position. It briskly describes his lamentably shoddy education, incidentally indicating why, well before 1900, Germany and America were overtaking Britain in industrial output – because they educated their workforces.

He went for some time to a National School, which was run on severely economical lines to keep down the rates by a largely untrained staff, he was set sums to do that he did not understand, and that no one made him understand, he was made to read the catechism and Bible with the utmost industry and an entire disregard of punctuation or significance, and caused to imitate writing copies and drawing copies, and given object lessons upon sealing wax and silk-worms and potato bugs and ginger and iron and such like things, and taught various other subjects his mind refused to entertain, and afterwards, when he was about twelve, he was jerked by his parent to “finish off” in a private school of dingy aspect and still dingier pretensions, where there were no object lessons, and the studies of book-keeping and French were pursued (but never effectually overtaken) under the guidance of an elderly gentleman who wore a nondescript gown and took snuff, wrote copperplate, explained nothing, and used a cane with remarkable dexterity and gusto.

(cf the focus and efficiency of American tourists he notices, later, working in a shop in Canterbury, p.51.)

Then his father packs him off to become an apprentice at a haberdasher’s emporium, exactly the same as Kipps (very samey, Well’s social comedies, very based on his own autobiography). Kipps’s emporium was situated in Folkestone, Polly’s one is in Port Burdock, a thinly veiled version of Portsmouth.

He falls in with two fellow indentures, Platt and Parsons, who christen themselves the Three Ps and consider themselves very daring blades and devils, frequenting the local pubs, bravely chatting up young women, going for outings as far afield as Windsor (!), referring to each other as ‘O’ man’.

There’s bucolic descriptions of the south England countryside with idyllic accounts of hearty meals at wayside taverns etc. It’s on one of these outings that they visit the little town of Fishbourne and Platt remarks on it being a nice little place to set up a business, a remark which sticks in Polly’s mind.

Polly is a voracious if uncritical reader (Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare) and develops a completely uneducated enthusiasm for words which he frequently mispronounces and misunderstands. This becomes a comic running thread:

He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the rôle of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn’t be suspected of ignorance, but whim.
‘Sesquippledan,’ he would say. ‘Sesquippledan verboojuice.’
‘Eh?’ said Platt.
‘Eloquent Rapsodooce.’

‘Exultant, Urgent Loogoobuosity.’

‘Smart Juniors,’ said Polly to himself, ‘full of Smart Juniosity. The Shoveacious Cult.’

Mr. Polly returned slowly and thoughtfully to the inn, and suddenly his mind began to bubble with phrases…’I put him in the river,’ said Mr. Polly. ‘That toned down his alcolaceous frenzy!’

‘I’m going to absquatulate, see? Hey Presto! right away.’

‘I’ve always been the skeptaceous sort…’

These inappropriate neologisms often pop into Polly’s head at precisely the wrong moment. The narrator describes them as the product of ‘the insubordinate phrasemaker’ and ‘uncontrollable phrasemonger’ beavering away in the back of his mind, and you suspect Wells might have suffered from the same problem, a fatal facetiousness (p.48).

(This playing with the semi-literate’s misunderstandings of language(s) reminds of Wells gently mocking Uncle Edward and Aunt Susan in Tono-Bungay for their attempts to become ‘O Fay’ with the French language. But it’s sympathetic mockery, gently raillery.)

Anyway, Polly insists on a pay rise which the owner of the Burdock emporium refuses so he leaves and goes up to London, to hang around employment agencies (notably the one in Wood Street near St Paul’s) and hold a whole series of positions for short periods. His favourite job is down in Canterbury where he loves the cathedral and cloisters, if the accommodation was gloomy and the hours long.

Polly’s father dies and the funeral provides an extended comic-sympathetic chapter. The funeral is arranged by a cousin, Mr Harold Johnson and his pushy wife, at his father’s last residence, in Easewood west of London. Johnson is a signaller at a signal junction and the dozen or so guests are all very lower middle-class, fussing and fretting and shrieking with laughter, a milieu Wells captures with frenetic fondness, ‘Ooh, ‘ark at you’, ‘Oh I never did’, ‘Lor you are a treat’, shrieking with laughter at anything.

It’s at the funeral that he meets three jolly daughters of Aunt Larkins. Morose old Uncle Pentstemon maliciously points out that Aunt L makes a living through letting lodgers and charring and her three pretty daughters work in a factory, but Polly’s head swirls with their kissing hello and petting and shrieking at everything he says. They are literary descendants of Jane Austen’s eligible young ladies looking for a husband because it hasn’t escaped their notice that Polly has inherited money from his father, although a preliminary conversation with Johnson reveals that he hasn’t a clue what to do with it.

(Incidentally, it’s only during the funeral and wake that we learn that Polly’s given name is Alfred or ‘Elfred’ as the shrieking Larkins sisters insist on calling him.)

Polly forgot to notify his current employers that he would be gone for a few days and so is promptly dismissed. He ponders all kinds of ideas for a holiday but in the end returns to Easewood and takes up lodgings with the Johnsons. He buys a bicycle and learns to ride it. One of his first outings is to the nearby suburb of Stamton which just happens to be home to the Larkins family. They live in a dingy terrace house in a dingy street and Miriam opens the door with her sleeves pushed up, obviously in the middle of housework.

It becomes a regular venue and he becomes a bit schizophrenic, at cousin Johnson’s house having earnest discussions about either finding a new position or investing his inheritance in the little corner shops which Johnson’s pushing on him, but in secret enjoying cycling off each day to visit the Larkins women.

However one day something new happens. For a change he cycles a different route, south, and is taking a breather by a wall when to his astonishment a girl climbs over it from the other side and sits astride it. Turns out to be a wall enclosing a boarding school and she’s a bit of a rebel. Now, Polly has a ready wit and they instantly hit it off, him pretending to be a knight in shining armour (well, his bicycle has metal plating) and she a damsel in distress. They both take this witty conceit forward and laugh and enjoy each other’s company till the sound of a gong announces it’s time for her to run off to dinner.

For ten days they meet up, Christabel (her name) remaining on the wall looking down at him, and Polly falls deeply hopelessly in love with her, his soul and body suddenly shaken by fantastic longings. But she’s just a schoolgirl and she tells her friends who start coming along to the meetings and giggling and pinching each other on the other side of the wall, puncturing all Romance, making him realise she’s just an immature giggling schoolgirl. It’s an odd interlude.

On the rebound he goes back to the Larkins households and finds their amiable lack of pretension reassuring. There’s a brilliant scene where Polly is left alone for a moment with Minnie Larkins and what starts as banter gets perilously close to him hinting at a proposal, he finds his heart racing and blood pounding so hard he can’t hear himself but still pushes the flirtation further and only at the very last minute manages to stand and make up a diversion about a dog chewing his bicycle tyre and run out of the room and save himself. Wells is very good at the scenes, of conveying tension through dialogue.

Miriam

Alas, all good things come to an end and – as in Love and Mr Lewisham and Kipps and Tono-Bungay – once again the protagonist throws his prospects away and ruins his life by marrying the wrong woman. Once again, the immature protagonist deludes himself into thinking his fiancée is an epitome of femininity and womanhood and romance when in fact, in the case of Miriam Larkins, she is a narrow, pinched, skinny, flat-chested slavey of limited horizons. As to physique, on the sunny afternoon when Miriam really penetrates Polly’s affections:

the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively.

He goes for a walk with Miriam to the recreation ground and the sunlight and children playing and flowers in bloom and her delusive figure and him being on the rebound from romantic fantasies about the schoolgirl…well, it’s another brilliant scene where Polly finds himself proposing although he really doesn’t mean to, and is overcome not with joy when she says yes, but rising panic, but…it’s too late.

Oh dear. The lovely unbridled comedy of the first 100 pages grinds to a halt and we are back in Wells’s Unhappy Marriage trope.

At the same time the stocks he’s invested in lose value and he realises his holiday time has come to a close and he needs to make a decision about the corner shop. So he has a long evening conversation with Johnson who’s soberly done all the calculations for him and reckons he’ll just about make a go of it. But Johnson is shocked to learn Polly is engaged to Miriam.

Miriam and marriage

Polly lies awake at night suddenly feeling trapped. His thoughts become so bleak he sometimes contemplates suicide. It stops being funny or becomes a more complicated flavour of funny. One day he packs a light bag and cycles off to Fishbourne, remembered from that legendary walk with the 3 Ps, and returns a few days later to tell a shocked Johnson that he’s taken a shop in Fishbourne. Mrs Johnson is furious that her husband has put so much effort into helping Polly who has turned his back on them, run off and done a deal elsewhere and she’s right to be furious.

The wedding is a sad affair. Polly hangs around pondering running away again. Actually Wells pulls off a great comic scene in his depiction of the bored vicar running through the ceremony he’s done hundreds of times, worth quoting in full for the rhythm and accumulating comedy.

The officiating clergy sighed deeply, began, and married them wearily and without any hitch.

‘D’b’loved, we gath’d ’gether sight o’ Gard ’n face this con’gation join ’gather Man, Worn’ Holy Mat’my which is on’bl state stooted by Gard in times man’s innocency…’

Mr. Polly’s thoughts wandered wide and far, and once again something like a cold hand touched his heart, and he saw a sweet face in sunshine under the shadow of trees. Someone was nudging him. It was Johnson’s finger diverting his eyes to the crucial place in the prayer-book to which they had come.

‘Wiltou lover, cumfer, oner, keeper sickness and health…’

‘Say ‘I will.’’

Mr. Polly moistened his lips. ‘I will,’ he said hoarsely.

Miriam, nearly inaudible, answered some similar demand. Then the clergyman said: ‘Who gifs Worn married to this man?’

‘Well, I’m doing that,’ said Mr. Voules in a refreshingly full voice and looking round the church. ‘You see, me and Martha Larkins being cousins –’

He was silenced by the clergyman’s rapid grip directing the exchange of hands.

‘Pete arf me,’ said the clergyman to Mr. Polly. ‘Take thee Mirum wed wife—’

‘Take thee Mirum wed’ wife,’ said Mr. Polly.

‘Have hold this day ford.’

‘Have hold this day ford.’

‘Betworse, richpoo’—’

‘Bet worsh, richpoo’….’

Then came Miriam’s turn.

‘Lego hands,’ said the clergyman; ‘got the ring? No! On the book. So! Here! Pete arf me, ‘withis ring Ivy wed.’’

‘Withis ring Ivy wed—’

So it went on, blurred and hurried, like the momentary vision of an utterly beautiful thing seen through the smoke of a passing train…

‘Now, my boy,’ said Mr. Voules at last, gripping Mr. Polly’s elbow tightly, ‘you’ve got to sign the registry, and there you are! Done!’

Before him stood Miriam, a little stiffly, the hat with a slight rake across her forehead, and a kind of questioning hesitation in her face. Mr. Voules urged him past her.

It was astounding. She was his wife! (p.111)

And it made me laugh to read about the little posse of girls and boys standing outside the church with bags of dried rice in their hands and ‘massacre in their eyes’. Polly’s haplessness reminds me of Michael Crawford in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em or Wilt in the Tom Sharpe novels or any number of hapless, clumsy, dumb men who make fools of themselves in English comic novels and TV of the last 100 years.

Back to the present

And after the comic wedding and the farcical wedding feast the narrative does something unexpected and leaps forward 15 years to where we began, to Polly sitting on a stile above the village of Fishbourne cursing it for a rotten hole.

Miriam took against the house the moment she saw it and has spent 15 years hating living there. Removed from the hilarious atmosphere of the Larkins household she turns out to be humourless and irritable.

Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist’s entire disregard of the quality of the consequences…She ceased to listen to her husband’s talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence,

The shop just about manages to stay above water while Polly devotes more and more time to buying and reading old books, losing himself in fantasies of the imagination.

Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!…

But fifteen years pass ‘in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope’ i.e. Miriam and he gets fat and bald and sallow and, as he approaches 40, increasingly desperate.

There’s a comic passage describing Polly’s disintegrating relationships with all his neighbouring shopkeepers which collapse into apathy, antagonism or positive hatred.

on every hand it seemed were uncongenial people, uninteresting people, or people who conceived the deepest distrust and hostility towards him, a magic circle of suspicious, preoccupied and dehumanised humanity (p.137)

Leading up to a farcical fight with Mr Rusper the ironmonger after Polly’s bike wheel seizes up and he rides smack into the elaborate display of pails and buckets and tools outside Rusper’s shop. They both end up before the Bench and bound over to keep the peace like two children.

All this time Polly’s digestion, always sensitive, has suffered due to Miriam’s appalling cooking, this has become a central feature of Polly’s sense of malaise and illness, one more reason for his sweary exasperation in the scene we opened with, him sitting astride a stile above the town and roundly cursing it, his shop, all his neighbours, his sour wife, and his wretched cramped life.

Suicide attempt and fire

More and more frequently Polly contemplates suicide (p.145). To my surprise he goes so far as to make elaborate plans to set the shop and house on fire, slashing his own throat once the fire had got going so the blaze would be his funeral pyre. In the event he successfully sets fire to his house and shop but then bottles out of killing himself, instead running out into the street shouting Fire Fire!

And this leads into the unexpectedly hilarious scenes of The Great Fire of Fishbourne. The fire Polly starts burns down half the high street and shops of most of his hated neighbours, But unexpectedly, Polly emerges as the hero of the hour because as soon as the fire took, he remembered Mr Rumbold’s aged and deaf mother who lived next door, and so he very publicly, in full view of the gathering crowd, rescued her from her room, escaped with her up onto the roof, then managed her getting onto the ladder which the confused local fire brigade put up against the wall, and so saved her life.

Everyone is housed at the Temperance Hotel where all the locals insist on shaking his hand and all his former enemies declare Polly a hero who deserves a medal. Funny thing is almost all his fellow shopkeepers, far from being distraught, are all quietly happy. This is because they are all insured and so will recoup their losses. but more importantly, most of them had been trapped in the condition of small shopkeeper, a state in which all your capital is tied up in the premises and stock leaving little left over except your pitiful weekly takings. Now they would all receive a tidy lump sum and for many if not most of them, this represents liberation.

Essay about the small shopkeeper

In fact the notion of the small shopkeeper as a fundamentally uneconomical loser, trapped in a financial cage, is so central to the entire novel that Wells invents an unnamed London intellectual and economist and quotes a fictional essay by him on the subject, at great length. I’ll quote it in full because it’s quite interesting in itself but is also an example of the way Wells’s novels were subject to increasing amounts of journalism and digressions on contemporary social issues. (To emphasise, the following is a quote from a supposedly factual essay the author is inserting into his narrative):

‘A rapidly complicating society,’ he writes, ‘which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste….

‘Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dullness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the lower middle class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment with savings or ‘help’ from relations, of widows with a husband’s insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound….’

Freedom of the road

Which is why we find our hero, a month later, having received his payout and left Miriam, living as a tramp, walking the open roads of the south of England in the springtime and for the first time in his life really living. The joy of the open road, sleeping under hedges and waking with the dawn chorus, is described for a few pages, before the storyline resumes, as our hero walks round a corner and comes across the perfect inn, situated by a canal at a place called Potwell.

When he knocks and enters he finds a ‘plump’ woman asleep at one of her tables and, when she wakes, Polly and Flo hit it off immediately. They are perfectly in synch. She makes him a meal and when she says the place needs a handyman to do the chores and to punt people across the river on a little punt, Polly accepts at once.

Whatever the truth may be about love, there is certainly such a thing as friendship at first sight. They liked each other’s voices, they liked each other’s way of smiling and speaking.

And Wells captures the tone of their easy bantering very effectively, this is one of his real strengths, here and throughout the book, capturing the sub-texts and implications of dialogue, the charged psychology behind apparently simple remarks. See the extremely charged passage where he nearly proposes to Minnie then proposes to Marion in a kind of funk of reckless panic. Here his exchanges with plump Flo are lovely.

‘I suppose you’re all right. You’ve got a sort of half-respectable look about you. I suppose you ’aven’t done anything.’
‘Bit of Arson,’ said Mr. Polly, as if he jested.
‘So long as you haven’t the habit,’ said the plump woman.

There is just one fly in the ointment (otherwise the happy ending would come too soon) or one ‘Drorback’ as the plump woman puts it, which is that Flo is being terrorised by her sister’s no-good son, Jim. He was always trouble and has turned into a terror since being sent away to reform school, returning to extort food and money from her under threat of violence or damaging the inn.

And so Polly is thrown into the position of knight in armour come to save this fair (if plump) maiden, rather as he had, for those ten glorious days, fantasised about being the knight to the red-haired schoolgirl’s maiden in that odd interlude fifteen years earlier…

Polly contemplates walking away from Flo and her troubles but eventually deciding he has to do the right thing. Wells turns it into a mock epic in three sections or ‘challenges’ with echoes of Rabelais, Cervantes and the long tradition of mock epic.

‘Drop it!’ he cried, and came down the steps waving his poker and thrusting the spectacled gentleman before him as once heroes were wont to wield the ox-hide shield. (p.199)

There follow three distinct fights scattered over several weeks which Polly survives mainly because customers at the inn get involved and help him. After the third and final encounter, in which Jim loots and smashes up most of the inn, while plump Flo barricades herself in the attic, and which triggers the calling of the local police constable, Blake, Jim does a runner and never returns.

Five years later

Polly is happy. He has found his place in the world. He has painted the inn and made it even more popular. He is plump but no longer in a seedy dyspeptic way, but with health and good humour.

One day, five years after the Battle of Uncle Jim, he suddenly remembers Miriam and wonders how she’s getting on. Polly gave her the majority of the insurance after the Great Fire of Fishbourne, £100, but that won’t last forever. So, on the kind of impulse which has always governed his life, he tells Flo he’ll be going a little holiday for a few days, and sets off to find his ex-wife.

In a lovely last act he returns to Fishbourne and is surprised to discover that the three Larkins sisters have set up a tearooms (named Polly and Larkins because Miriam kept her married name). Annie serves him without recognising him and tells him that the errant husband (him) was found drowned at Medway, had been in the water so long he was unrecognisable except for the name labels sewn into his clothes.

Aha! This must have been Jim, who ransacked the inn and stole Polly’s nice new clothes in his final attack. He must have gotten drunk and drowned and the authorities, reading the labels, took it to be Polly. And the life insurance people paid out to his separated wife. And she used the money to establish this tea rooms. Annie explains all this, not recognising him.

Polly is still reeling from all this when Miriam comes in the door and recognises him at once. She collapses in a chair and Polly, terrified at what he’s done, tries to persuade her that he’s not himself, he’s a ghost, he’ll never return, he was never there, and swiftly exists past a puzzled Annie. Moral: never go back.

The novel ends, a few days later, with Polly and the plump woman sitting on a bench overlooking the river at sunset and pondering. Wells has Polly repeat the sentiment expressed in all these social comedies which is that life is never what you think it and never what you plan. Life just happens to you and you roll with the tides.

This may or may not be true but, in the context of this novel, this narrative, this text, it’s a deliciously calm and soothing way to end this brilliant comic novel.

They said no more, but sat on in the warm twilight until at last they could scarcely distinguish each other’s faces. They were not so much thinking as lost in a smooth, still quiet of the mind. A bat flitted by. ‘Time we was going in, O’ Party,’ said Mr. Polly, standing up. ‘Supper to get. It’s as you say, we can’t sit here for ever.’

And so, after a meditative moment, life goes on…

Southern England landscape

The Edwardian decade saw a flowering of patriotic nature writing about England. When I was a student this was explained as a hearty, ale-swigging reaction to the decadence of the 1890s which had been thoroughly discredited by the Oscar Wilde trial. It’s notable in the writing of Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton, in the sudden shift to Sussex tales by the former imperialist Rudyard Kipling, the rural background to many of Saki’s tales, and many more. ‘Mr Polly’ certainly contains numerous sensitive descriptions of the (southern) English landscape.

There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges – Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one’s memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does.

Thus the moment when Polly comes across the Potwell Inn:

It was about two o’clock in the afternoon one hot day in high May when Mr Polly, unhurrying and serene, came to that broad bend of the river to which the little lawn and garden of the Potwell Inn run down. He stopped at the sight of the place with its deep tiled roof, nestling under big trees – you never get a decently big, decently shaped tree by the seaside – its sign towards the roadway, its sun-blistered green bench and tables, its shapely white windows and its row of upshooting hollyhock plants in the garden. A hedge separated it from a buttercup-yellow meadow, and beyond stood three poplars in a group against the sky, three exceptionally tall, graceful and harmonious poplars. It is hard to say what there was about them that made them so beautiful to Mr. Polly; but they seemed to him to touch a pleasant scene to a distinction almost divine. He remained admiring them for a long time. (p.172)

And the specific joys of a country pub, as experienced by the Three Ps out on one of their excursions.

The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a ‘bit of character’ drinking in the bar.

There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug.

The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth!

‘Ready, Sir!’ or ‘Ready, Gentlemen’…The going in! The sitting down! The falling to!

If only any pub, anywhere, was actually like this myth.

Suicide and death

Odd that in the middle of all this comic malarkey there are thoughts of suicide. As Polly tells the plump woman at the very end of the novel:

‘I nearly killed myself with a razor. Who hasn’t? – anyhow, gone as far as thinking of it?’ (p.214)

You could argue that the suicide attempt stains the comic tone, although the suicide scene almost immediately morphs into the farcical scene of the Great Fire of Fishbourne. But it’s also as if Wells has grasped something profound about comic narratives, which is that the really deep comic narrative always pushes right to the edge of bleakness before bouncing back. This is something I learned when studying Shakespeare’s comedies which often include fake deaths or apparent loss, taking us to the edge of darkness before sweeping it all back into the light in a comic finale.

And in ‘Mr Polly’ the hero does, indeed, die, except it is not him, it’s his proxy, bad Uncle Jim, whose death allows Polly to be resurrected and start life anew with a clean sheet. With or without knowing it, Wells was following a very deep archetype.

Wells’s gift at phrase-making

Wells either put a lot effort into, or had a natural flair for, writing interesting, quirky imaginatively phrased sentences. These lopsided, strangely cast but vivid phrases occur on every page. Just in the last few pages I enjoyed:

Mr. Polly went about the place considering the militant possibilities of pacific things…

 The sense of helping numbers came to Mr. Polly’s aid…

A rough man in a blue jersey, in the intervals of trying to choke himself with bread and cheese and pickled onions, broke out abruptly into information.

‘My God!’ she whispered, and crumpled up rather than sat down.

This ability is embodied within the story itself by Polly’s addiction to reading and to the strange words he invents, samples of which I’ve given above. At first it struck me as improbable that someone who had such a poor education and limited life as Alfred Polly would be so bookish and linguistically inventive.

But then it dawned on me that I’m thinking too realistically. Polly is obviously a version of what Wells would have become had he not had the luck to win his scholarship to the Normal School of Science and had his horizons blown open, if he’d remained stuck in a pharmacy in Midhurst or a draper’s shop in Folkestone, his superb verbal imagination undeveloped and stunted. Polly’s home-made deformations of the English language are the cramped, uneducated version of Wells’s own superbly confident, super-articulate phrase-mongering, they are two sides of the same coin.

Anyway, this is made explicit in the story itself, in the long passage where Polly’s joy of reading, of the fantasy worlds opened up by literature, is rhapsodically described, and in particular his relish for unexpected epithets and evocative phrasing (i.e. Wells’s forte). Polly particularly loves Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Sea stories, and Polly is made to single out a specific phrase from one of Stevenson’s tales and then reflect:

Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty! (p.127)

Can’t help thinking this was Wells’s credo as well, but Wells, with his frabjous vocabulary, escaped the small, crabbed world which Mr Polly, happily enough, remains trapped in.

Credit

The History of Mr Polly by H.G. Wells was published in 1910. References are to the 1982 Pan Classics edition.

Related links

H.G. Wells reviews

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by Simon on December 23, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 23, 2024

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