At a time when many first-time novelists bemourn publishers’ reluctance to back their works with advertisement, Alfred A. Knopf’s half-page ad for Peter de Polnay’s Angry Man’s Tale (1939) stands as righteous refutation. Look at that headline (perhaps not the best choice of font, Mr. Knopf): “Not the book of the year. Not even the book-of-the-month.” Talk about faint praise. Yet it seems as if Knopf’s motivation was that same simple urge that drives this site: “I like this book uncommonly well and want you to share my discovery.”
Angry Man’s Tale was taken from de Polnay’s experiences on the island of Mallorca, where he spent a few months after giving up his attempt to become a colonial gentleman farmer in Kenya. He fell in love with a party girl who took his money and tossed away his affection with contempt. This is a story of the jet set before the jet was invented, a group of pleasure-seekers dancing on the edge of a precipice — in this case, the Spanish Civil War. “I wonder what’s happening in the world,” one character speculates. One reviewer quoted by Knopf described de Polnay’s work as “a curious and effective blend of James M. Cain and Noel Coward,” which sounds pretty appealing to me.
Reviewing the book in The Saturday Review a week after Knopf’s ad appeared, Ben Ray Redman was a little more moderate in his estimation: “It is a competent, well-turned book rather than an impressive or an exciting one.” Redman did credit de Polnay for producing a book “written with an economy that is found more usually in French fiction than in English or American.” I admired the same quality in one of his later books, Blood and Water !975), back in April 2018, comparing it to George Simenon’s “straight” novels: short, spare, efficient, and utterly cynical.
The New York Times’ reviewer, Ralph Thompson, had similar mildly positive comments: it “ought to please those who like a taste of tartness now and then. It has wit, character and, for a first novel, which it is, fine polish.” He criticized de Polnay, though, for having “merely one idea, and that one … never fully developed or resolved.” The TLS gave it front billing in its “Novels of the Week” feature. R. D. Charques placed de Polnay squarely in the hard-boiled school: “He cultivates a studiously base way with emotion, though he is never done with it; he shies away from solemnity, which he seems to dread more than anything else in the world; he has no use for flowers of speech, no love of romantic epithets, no patience with long-drawn analysis of character or motive. Whether grave or gay, he is most obviously at home in a brisk and ribald flippancy of self-contemplation.”
Though he wrote dozens of novels, about a dozen works of biography and history, along with several volumes of autobiography, de Polnay gained neither lasting recognition as a serious writer nor enduring appreciation as an entertainer. In a Spectator review of de Polnay’s 1972 novel, The Grey Sheep, titled “On an under-valued triumph,” Auberon Waugh wrote:
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.
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.
I picked up several of de Polnay’s later novels in the bargain basement of a London bookstore last year. I will have to go dig them out.