Review: The History of Mr. Polly by H.G. Wells (Classics Club Spin #21)

This book is on my Classics Club reading list and it came up on the Spin List (#5) this last time around. My heart most definitely did NOT leap up when I beheld this title come up for reading, but I decided to give it a whirl.

And let’s just say…. Low expectations are wonderful. You’re never disappointed, and frequently surprisingly pleased.

I would venture to say that most people (including me) have never heard of this book, so a little background is in order. The History of Mr. Polly is a comic novel published by H.G. Wells in 1910. It’s actually a late novel for him, coming after his more famous works. And the word “comic” is the tiniest bit misleading, for this is definitely not a slap-your-knee funny kind of book. But it is amusing in an often farcical kind of way. It’s also interesting because it’s supposed to be semi-autobiographical, based on Wells’ early years as a tradesman. So it’s definitely worth your time.

The novel opens in medias res, with Mr. Alfred Polly at a crisis point in his life. He’s middle-aged, fat and unhappy. He’s trapped in a loveless marriage and an unsuccessful business. So the first part of the novel is to merely show how he got to this point of desperation, and to be honest, the story is very slow to take off. I had to keep prodding myself to keep going with it and not give up prematurely.

But it did, in fact, take off eventually. Part of it is just getting used to Mr. Polly himself. He’s a dreamer, a little bit of a ne’er-do-well, and the type of person that gets into situations before he even knows what’s going on. A prime example of this is his marriage to Miriam, a cousin whom he doesn’t really love. In spite of this, he finds himself proposing to her before he knows what’s happening. And things don’t get any better after the wedding, as you might expect. To wit:

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. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes.

I gradually realized that Wells injects a great deal of humor via Mr. Polly’s view of the world. Likewise, Wells uses a kind of running gag throughout the book in Mr. Polly’s propensity for making up words or misusing words he thinks he knows:

A man whose brain devotes its hinterland to making odd phrases and nicknames out of ill-conceived words, whose conception of life is a lump of auriferous rock to which all the value is given by rare veins of unbusinesslike joy, who reads Boccaccio and Rabelais and Shakespeare with gusto, and uses “Stertoraneous Shover” and “Smart Junior” as terms of bitterest opprobrium, is not likely to make a great success under modern business conditions. Mr. Polly dreamt always of picturesque and mellow things, and had an instinctive hatred of the strenuous life. He would have resisted the spell of ex-President Roosevelt, or General Baden Powell, or Mr. Peter Keary, or the late Dr. Samuel Smiles, quite easily; and he loved Falstaff and Hudibras and coarse laughter, and the old England of Washington Irving and the memory of Charles the Second’s courtly days. His progress was necessarily slow. He did not get rises; he lost situations; there was something in his eye employers did not like; he would have lost his places oftener if he had not been at times an exceptionally brilliant salesman, rather carefully neat, and a slow but very fair window-dresser.

Things get worse and worse for Mr. Polly, until we find him in the circumstances with which the novel opens. And it’s here that he decides he will set fire to his shop and commit suicide at the same time. Of course, he bungles the whole thing horribly, but then his fortunes finally take a turn for the better, and he eventually experiences happiness and redemption (not in a sappy way, but in a completely genuine and compelling turn of events that leaves the reader highly satisfied).

The final word should be given to Mr. Polly:

I’ve never really planned my life or set out to live. I happened; things happened to me. It’s so with everyone.

I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Polly here, but it is the perfect summation of his approach to life, and the reason I enjoyed this book as much as I did. I’m glad I read it and would probably re-read it.

Just FYI, interestingly there have been a few movie and TV adaptations of the story, including one as recently as 2007. So I’m thinking that may be worth a look as well.

R.I.P. Deal Me In Lite: Stories by H.G. Wells and E.F. Benson

It's the sixth week of my R.I.P. "Peril of the Short Story" version of Deal Me In Lite, and this week I start reading two stories each week in order to get to the magical number of 13 by the end of October.  And this turned out to be a very interesting event.  There's already a lot of serendipity built into the Deal Me In method of reading, but when you pick and read two stories together, you can achieve even greater levels of serendipity, as I found out this week.

So for this week I chose the Ace and two of spades from my "Tragic Royalty" deck of cards:

The Ace corresponded to "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells, and the two corresponded to "How Fear Departed From the Long Gallery" by E.F. Benson.  Both of these stories are available on the Internet, but I got them from an anthology I have owned for quite some time, Ghosts, edited by Marvin Kaye:

Yes, that is Edward Gorey artwork on the cover.  I found an image that shows the entire dust jacket because it's really wonderful and highly appropriate for this book.

Both of these stories involve a person who spends time in a haunted room -- but one spends time there on purpose (because they don't really believe it is haunted) and the other KNOWS the room is haunted and gets trapped there by accident.

In "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells, the narrator proposes to spend the night in a haunted room, the so-called "red room" of Lorraine Castle, in which braver souls than he have spent the night, and died there.  The servants, who are elderly and who have lived through the history of the house, do their best to dissuade the narrator from this foolhardy act, but he is determined to do it.  As he makes himself comfortable (if that word may be used here) in the room for the night, he tries to dispel the overwhelming gloominess and darkness of the room with candles that he lights and sets up in various nooks and crannies of the room.  Then the candles start going out, in various combinations.  Is it a draft?  Or something more sinister?  Eventually the candles all go out at once, and the fire goes out as well, and the narrator is thrown into a terrified panic.  He runs around frantically in the dark, trying to find the door of the room, and knocks himself out on a piece of furniture.  Not to spoil the story for you (because it's really not much of a story, although very well-written and interesting), the next morning the narrator comes to the conclusion that what really haunts the room is Fear itself.

This leads us to the synchronicity with the second story I read this week, "How Fear Departed From the Long Gallery," by E.F. Benson.  Let me just take a moment and make another plug, as I have before, for E.F. Benson as one of the more underrated modern British novelists (modern as in the early 20th century).  I have waxed eloquent about the pleasures of his Lucia novels elsewhere on this blog, and in my opinion this gem of a story is another example of his expert way with a tale.  I have never read much of his other work besides the Lucia novels, but apparently Benson is also well-regarded for his ghost stories, of which I believe he wrote several.  If they are anything like this one, I will have to hunt down the others and read them too.

In Benson's story, the Peveril family lives in a house that they know is haunted; in fact, they co-exist happily with several different family ghosts, and take a kind of pride and pleasure in interacting with their long-dead ancestors in this way.  This part of the story is actually pretty humorous, in Benson's typical understated, droll style.  However, there is one pair of ghosts that the family fears: the ghosts of twin babies that were brutally murdered by the ruthless Dick Peveril, so he could inherit the estate instead of them.  This murder, which involved throwing the babies into a fire, happened in the long gallery, and ever since then, the ghosts of the babies have haunted that room.  They appear only once or twice a year, and only in the dead of night, but the family is terrified of seeing them, because everyone who has ever seen their ghosts has died a horrible, gruesome death.  So every member of the family simply makes sure to stay out of the long gallery after dark, and they make sure their houseguests know this rule as well.

So this sets the stage for a New Year's Eve party where the family is hosting several guests, including Madge Dalrymple, who unfortunately twists her knee skating on the lake.  Madge decides to rest her leg by sitting in front of the fire in the long gallery.  She's warned not to forget about being in there after sunset, but of course you know what happens next.  Madge falls asleep over her book and wakes up right at dusk.  When she realizes what time it is, she becomes terrified, and of course the twin baby ghosts show up soon after.  What happens next, though, is an interesting twist on the traditional ghost story, and this ghost story actually turns out to have a happy ending.  It's not a sappy, tacked-on happy ending though -- it fits the tone and plot of the story perfectly.

I enjoyed both of these stories and would highly recommend both of them.  Look them up and let me know what you think!