Every year or so, I reach for one of Georges Simenon’s “straight” novels–those bitter human comedies, such as The Rules of the Game, that he turned out as regularly as his Maigrets, usually spending under two weeks in writing them. As I once wrote, these novels have something of the attractive bitterness of a glass of Campari. I wouldn’t drink one every night, but they have the same effect of bringing your senses to attention. They’re rarely more than 150 pages long, something you can read in a couple of days, and involve people getting knocked out of their comfort zone and into some unsettling predicament–sometimes life-threatening, always character-testing.
It’s reassuring to know there are enough of these romans durs to satisfy my appetite for as long as I can manage to keep reading–which led me to consider what other writers had a similar capacity to produce books in quantities and qualities likely to provide a near-lifetime supply. The easy answer, of course, is to look at genre writers: Barbara Cartland (romance), Isaac Asimov (SF), Erle Stanley Gardner (mystery), and many others wrote many dozens, if not hundreds, of books in the course of their careers, consciously aimed at feeding the hunger of their readers for a certain predictability of content and effect. I have a friend who’s read nothing but westerns by Louis L’Amour for over twenty years and still hasn’t read the same book twice. And there is the example of P. G. Wodehouse, who in his Jeeves, Psmith, and other effervescent comedies invented a genre of which he was the master and sole proprietor.
The label most commonly applied to writers who, like Simenon, produced many good but few great books, is middlebrow, but this is too often associated only with women (and those mostly English) writers such as Angela Thirkell. As with any spotlight, however, there are still more writers left in the shadows despite all the attention given by the middlebrow movement, particularly in academic circles, to a relative few.
One of these is Peter de Polnay. I’ve probably been vaguely aware of Peter de Polnay for years, since at least one of his books can be found on the shelves of just about every bookstore in England, but it wasn’t until recently that I actually read one — Blood and Water (1975). Blood and Water opens with a young and rather sheltered man, Claud Darnell, waking to find his father lying, eyes open and mouth agape, dead. The shock sends him into a sort of limbo: “On reaching the dead man’s bedroom it struck him that if he continued to shunt between their bedrooms the present situation would become endless; and he saw himself alone in the world going from one room to another with nobody to speak to.” What follows is a systematic peeling away of the layers of lies by which Claud had been insulated from the real world. These include the fact that his father was not his real father, that his mother was a former prostitute and current madam of a discreet house of pleasure in Cannes, and that the property he thought had been in the family for generations had been actually been the pay-off for blackmail.
As de Polnay’s Times obituary noted, he was “a cool and sometimes cynical observer of humanity at all levels (often the lowest),” and in Blood and Water the cynicism runs fast and far. If I had to sum up my impression in a short phrase, it would be “a poor man’s Simenon,” although de Polnay’s characters appear to be better acquainted with money and privilege. At the same time, however, he balks somewhat at going as far as Simenon. Claud manages to say relatively innocent, despite the revelations, and the story ends with him heading back to his beloved Sussex farm to live happily ever after, married to the sweet French ingenue he’s fallen in love with. Had Simenon written this story, Claud would have been more likely to end up as her pimp.
Born in Hungary to a well-placed family, de Polnay fought with his father, left home at an early age, roamed about for years that included a spells as a tram worker in Buenos Aires and a farmer in Kenya before ending up in Paris as the Germans invaded in 1940. He managed to escape to England, spending time in one of Franco’s jail along the way, and wrote his first best-seller, Death and Tomorrow (1945), about the experience. Although he wrote in English and was considered an English author, de Polnay returned to France after the war, set most of his novels in France, wrote numerous biographies of French figures from history, and died in Paris in 1984 at the age of 78.
As a result, he was never fully accepted in English literary circles. Reviewing de Polnay’s novel The Grey Sheep (1972) in The Spectator, Auberon Waugh wrote:
Certainly Mr. de Polnay’s novel is as enjoyable as anything which appeared in the pre-Booker rush and far better written than any of them. So far as I know, he has never been awarded a literary prize of any description in his long writing career, although his work has been acclaimed by the great Anthony Burgess and laudatory comments are quoted from The Spectator and the Illustrated London News, whose perceptive novel reviewer often strikes me as one of the few in the business who does not actually hate novels. The most sickening aspect of it all is that Mr. de Polnay, whose appeal as a writer should embrace all educated and intelligent Englishmen, is tucked into a corner as if he were some bizarre minority taste while those who can only appeal to a bizarre minority taste are feted and lionised throughout the length and breadth of the land.
de Polnay currently lacks a Wikipedia entry and a complete list of his works doesn’t appear to have been assembled. Amazon reports 140 items under his name, but this number certainly includes some duplicates. On the other hand, by the 1970s his publishers were simply putting “Etc.” after listing a dozen or so of his novels. He also revisited the subject of Death and Tomorrow in a number of memoirs of the time of the German occupation of France and published several volumes of autobiography. Four of his novels, including Blood and Water, are available on the Open Library (link).
“Anybody who reads Mr. de Polnay will rejoice in the vitality of his imagination, the accuracy of his observation, the beautiful lucidity of his prose and the wisdom of his conclusion, but few, I fear, will ever be given the opportunity to learn about him,” concluded Waugh in his review of The Grey Sheep. Perhaps this post will encourage others to join those few.
Thanks for the comment. I wish someone would take the time to dig through the haystack of de Polnay’s work and pull out the “golden needles” so other readers could know better what to look for. I could offer a couple dozen other authors I have the same feeling about (e.g., is “Tobacco Road” Erskine Caldwell’s only book worth remembering?).
Many thanks for this write up of de Polnay, an unjustly neglected novelist. He was uneven – which is to be expected in a writer of so many volumes – but his best novels exhibit a great insight into the human condition. It’s a pity there’s not more about him online.
The majority of Asimov’s voluminous writings were not science fiction. He published a great many popular science books as well as books on the bible, Shakespeare, etc. I read he had seven electric typewriters ranged round his office, each with a separate work in progress.