Mr Polly Walks to Freedom

‘I think I’m having a mid-life crisis,’ I told my wife the other night at dinner.

Instead of sympathizing, she started laughing, and then immediately apologized. ‘I’m sorry, dear. You know I love you, but you’re always having a mid-life crisis. You’ve been having a mid-life crisis since the moment I met you, twenty-seven years ago.’

Now this is more or less true, but I prefer not to hear it. And I think ‘always’ is a bit of an exaggeration. The fact that my friends call me ‘Eeyore’ is neither here nor there. But I suppose that’s why I’ve always loved H. G. Wells’s novel The History of Mr Polly. Polly and I have so much in common. When we first meet Alfred Polly, he is sitting on a stile between ‘two threadbare-looking fields’ contemplating suicide:

Mr Polly sat on the stile and hated the whole scheme of life – which was at once excessive and inadequate of him. He hated Fishbourne, he hated Fishbourne High Street, he hated his shop and his wife and his neighbours – every blessed neighbour – and with indescribable bitterness he hated himself.

Seeing no way out, he resolves to kill himself. This seems a rather unpromising start to a comic novel, but that’s exactly what The History of Mr Polly is: a comic masterpiece – the sunniest, warmest novel H. G. Wells ever wrote. Certainly, it was his least polemical. Later in life, Wells would admit that, if he didn’t rank Polly as his best book, it was certainly his happiest and the one he cared for most. Part of the attraction lies in its hero, Alfred Polly. He is a small, inconsequential man, the sort who drifts through life as if in a dream. ‘I’ve never really planned my life, or set out to live,’ Polly admits. ‘I happened; things happened to me. It’s so with everyone.’ But Polly is graced with a warm heart and a real need for affection. He has a romantic streak fuelled by a voracious and indiscriminate love of reading. He also has a knack for comic neologism that makes up for his lack of formal education. Pushy youngsters are referred to as a ‘Shoveacious Cult’, full of ‘Smart Juniosity’. A man with a prominent Adam’s apple is the ‘Soulful Owner’ of an ‘Exorbiant Largenial Development’. Wells’s handling of dialogue and dialect is deft and frequently hilarious. The funerary dinner for Mr Polly’s father reads like a Robert Altman script channelled through the muse of Charles Dickens. Polly is also Wells at his most autobiographical. Like his hero, Wells started life in trade as a draper’s apprentice and plunged into an unhappy marriage with a cousin. Like Polly, he had little formal education but loved to read. (Wells would eventually win a government scholarship to a teacher-training college where Darwin’s friend T. H. Huxley was one of his instructors.) But here the parallel breaks down. Wells would escape his former life through literary success. Polly, it would seem, must follow a darker path. But nothing turns out as Polly anticipates. This is a comedy after all. One night when his wife is at church, Polly resolves to cut his throat. He will disguise his suicide by first setting fire to his shop, so that his wife can claim the insurance. But the fire spreads so quickly Polly must delay his own death to rescue a neighbour, a deaf elderly woman, whom he leads across the burning rooftops to safety. His neighbours, fellow shopkeepers with whom he had been carrying on a running feud for years, congratulate him and call him a hero, each dreaming of the new start that the insurance money will allow. Polly’s wife arrives home to find their shop gutted and plots to rebuild on a larger scale. But Polly has had an epiphany: Fishbourne isn’t the world, he realizes, and ‘If the world does not please you, you can change it.’ One day, he quietly slips away with just twenty pounds in his pocket and walks out into the Kent countryside and a new life. Wells clearly loved the English countryside, for he describes it in glowing terms:

There is no countryside like the English countryside for those who have learned 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.

He goes on to list the pleasures of other countrysides in other parts of the world and concludes:

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.

No one could write like this if they did not feel it. But for anyone suffering from a continuous mid-life crisis Mr Polly is a dangerous book to read, for Polly finds that the vagabond life suits him.

For the first time in many years he had been leading a healthy human life, living constantly in the open air, walking every day for eight or nine hours, eating sparingly, accepting every conversational opportunity, not even disdaining discussion of possible work. And beyond mending a hole in his coat, that he had made while negotiating barbed wire, with a borrowed needle and thread in a lodging house, he had done no real work at all. Neither had he worried about business nor about times and seasons. And for the first time in his life he had seen the Aurora Borealis.

It is not long before Polly has become a larger and better man. After a number of adventures, which include rescuing an old woman and her granddaughter from a dangerous bully, he finds a place as a general handyman in a cosy riverside inn, and he is content. At the end of the novel, however, Polly’s conscience prods him to return home and check on his wife. He discovers, to his surprise, that he is dead. A body has been found in the river, and his wife has claimed it as his, using Polly’s life insurance to start a tea shop with her sister. When Polly re-enters her life she is terrified that her fraud will be discovered, but Polly assures her that he is quite happy to remain a corpse, and they part amicably. He returns to the inn, his conscience clear. Marital strife is rarely concluded with such ease, but then The History of Mr Polly is a comedy. Only in fiction do we see such happy endings, and perhaps that is why we read fiction. And which of us has not wished that he could just walk away from his humdrum existence, throw a rucksack over his shoulder and become a vagabond? Richard Jefferies, another writer who celebrated the English countryside, wrote: ‘Hardly any of us have but thought, some day I’ll go on a voyage; but the years go by, and still we have not sailed.’ Tick, tock.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 59 © Ken Haigh 2018