“The History of Mr Polly” (1910) is a disturbing comic masterpiece that might have gotten its start from Thoreau’s remark that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” It could also be seen — at least in its first two-thirds — as a more gently satirical and masculine counterpart to Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” Like Emma Bovary, the lower-middle-class Alfred Polly, a subordinate window dresser in a department store, reads novels and dreams of a life of wild freedom and romance:
“Deep in the being of Mr. Polly, deep in that darkness, like a creature which has been beaten about the head and left for dead but still lives, crawled a persuasion that over and above the things that are jolly and ‘bits of all right,’ there was beauty, there was delight; that somewhere — magically inaccessible perhaps, but still somewhere — were pure and easy and joyous states of body and mind.”
Alas, Mr. Polly soon grows convinced that he has fallen into the wrong trade, even the wrong life. Caught in his unsatisfying existence, he views the human condition as one in which we merely struggle, and struggle in vain. We waste our energies trying, quite uselessly, “to get obdurate things round impossible corners.” As his friend Parsons complains about life in the modern world, there’s “no Joy in it, no blooming Joy!” But then Mr. Polly’s father dies, leaving him a tidy sum from insurance, and the little clerk realizes that he might do something more, something different. But what? “I think,” writes the omniscient Wells, that “his distinctive craving is best expressed as fun — fun in companionship.” Almost immediately, Mr. Polly meets the three Larkins sisters at the lavish and hilarious funeral supper for his father, where hitherto unknown relatives have come to drink and chow down. Our poor hero sips a little too much sherry and ends up flirting with all three sisters. Worse still, because of his habit of “drinking at the poisoned fountains of English literature,” as Wells puts it, bumbling Mr. Polly attempts rakish compliments, believing that “it becomes a man of gaiety and spirit to make love, gallantly and rather carelessly.”
In due course, “Elfrid” — as the girls call him — finds himself sucked into the Larkinses’ orbit and, almost in spite of himself, eventually proposes to one of the sisters, though not the one he’d been intending to ask. In short order, the newlyweds have set up a small shop in the village of Fishbourne. “One did ought to be happy in a shop,” Mr. Polly tells himself. “Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were.”
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