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
- Mr Polly online
- Ian Sansom takes a look at The History of Mr Polly (Radio 4)
- The History of Mr Polly (Radio 4 dramatisation)
Books & Boots 