I’ve probably seen Peter de Polnay’s name on the spine of books as long as I’ve been going to used bookstores, but it was only two years ago that I actually read one of his books — a relatively late novel, Blood and Water (1975). In my post, I compared de Polnay to Simenon’s “straight” novels, the ones without Inspector Maigret, which are often about the most mundane individuals finding themselves in extreme situations — on the run, committing murder, being blackmailed. Having read several more de Polnays, I’d moderate that comparison slightly. While de Polnay’s characters are every bit as unexceptional as Simenon’s, their situations tend to be more awkward than extreme, more uncomfortable than unendurable. Kind of like our situations now, if you’re lucky enough to only have to tolerate being locked down during this pandemic.
Peter de Polnay wrote nearly 100 books in the space of 40-some years and it’s pretty much a given that anyone who writes 100 books will produce a fair amount of justly neglected ones. The odds on there being a masterpiece or three among the 100 are long; but it’s a lead-pipe cinch that some of them are dreck. If anyone ever bothered to read through the entire de Polnay oeuvre, he or she didn’t bother to make their notes available, so there is no easy way to know in advance where any title you might pick up might fall on the masterpiece-to-dreck spectrum. Martin Black grabbed de Polnay’s 33rd novel, The Run of the Night, for example, and found it “not a good book…. The prose is wooden and clunky, the characters are uninspired and uninteresting.” When B.S. Johnson reviewed the novel back in 1963, he was equally blunt: “On almost every page of The Run of Night there are faults of sentence construction, punctuation, or grammar, this is the kind of novel which reads as though it was never revised (let alone proof-read)….”
I confess I chose to read A Pin’s Fee for no other reason than its cover. That bold color-blocked design — by de Polnay’s first wife Margaret — must have radiated when it sat on display tables back in 1947. It’s far more vibrant than anything else that would have sat in the fiction section, like something by Esphyr Slobodkina or Matisse in his papercut period.
The cover is by far the liveliest thing in this novel, which largely takes place in a grey, battered London still recovering from the war. Intact houses often look out on the rubble of bombed ones; when a character hears thunder from a sudden storm, he instinctly waits for the sound of sirens and collapsing buildings to follow. A few scenes take place in settings of great elegance — a cocktail party in a suite at Claridge’s — but more are in squalid flats, dingy pubs and sordid private clubs.
De Polnay moved easily in high society and low. He’d been raised in luxury, waited on by servants and governnesses, and he’d slept in flea-ridden flophouses. He’d been a hobo, tram-driver and store clerk in Argentina, maneuvered through the black marketing networks in occupied Paris, and seen the birth of his son announced in the “Court Circular” column in The Times. He’d gambled in the Casino at Monte Carlo, winning and losing a fortune, and by the time he was writing this book, just hitting his stride as a prolific middlebrow author, with sales and reviews respectable enough to assure an income high enough for summers on the Riviera and occasional lunches at the Savoy.
I found reading A Pin’s Fee a bit like watching a good B-movie from the Forties or Fifties. I went along as much for the period details, the interiors and exteriors, the lighting and costumes, as for the writing and story. I half suspect that De Polnay himself wasn’t sure where he was headed when he started. The story could have been about a father with a scandalous past or intrigue with a nearby country neighbor, but it ended up being about entanglement with a woman with a mysterious history, thrice-divorced … perhaps a high-priced prostitute? He was a good 40 pages into a 200-page book before he grabbed a narrative line and ran with it.
De Polnay takes his title from a line in Hamlet (Act I, Scene 4). Hamlet scoffs at the notion he should fear approaching the ghost of his father: “I do not set my life at a pin’s fee/And for my soul/what can it do to that/Being a thing immortal as itself?” Pins being one of the first mass-produced articles of Shakespeare’s day, “a pin’s fee” was another way of saying “not worth much.” Despite the fact that de Polnay’s leading character Nigel has enough of a stock portfolio to keep him in a country house and write an occasional book review or exhibition catalogue piece, he walks through his life as if it’s worth little more than a pin’s fee. While it makes him a less than compelling protagonist, it serves him well as an observer of the swank and the skids.
De Polnay is at his best depicting the desperation of people trying to hold onto their comfortable lives, as in this Kensington hotel filled with what he calls “evacuees from Menton” — Menton being the French Riviera resort that catered to people of a certain age and income, accustomed to good but not showy food and discreet help and able to afford a room in a respectable full-board hotel:
Not one young face, and while he waited for his food he looked first at this face, then at that, and since the food was slow in arriving he had examined every face by the time a waitress, with a melancholy squint, brought his soup. All those faces were the faces of usurers. They hung on to life, counting every second, hating every second, but none the less each new second was a second to add to the hoard.
“All those faces were the faces of usurers.” Such intermittent flashes of brutal cynicism shine like gems in the ashpile. On the other hand, it’s also some of the better passages that also betray the sloppiness of de Polnay’s prose:
He got in and found an empty compartment, but as he settled down in a corner seat he noticed that a small elderly woman was with him, nevertheless. She was huddled up in the corner, her hair was grey and she was full of angry misery. She looked at him and began to hate him. She hated him openly and conspicuously, and he couldn’t get on with The Time but had to glance at her at regular intervals: as though to be on the alert in order to duck swiftly when the hatred attacked him. She had a pale, saintly face with was swollen with hatred. Her bag, resting on her knees, was shiny black, and because her eyes were black, too, he had the irresponsible fancy that today she was wearing black eyes to match her bag.
There are several things right and wrong here. The last sentence, cut down by at least five words, should come right after “her hair was grey,” etc.. Her “face swollen with hatred” should follow. The paragraph should end with Nigel’s discomfort. The image of the old woman in the corner beaming hatred at Nigel is great, but the clunkiness of the prose diffuses its intensity.
I spent a good amount of my most recent lockdown Sunday reading A Pin’s Fee, and it was one of the more relaxing things I’ve done since this mess started. De Polnay could tell a good story even when it wasn’t clear to me — or, I think, to him — where it was going. While he was no master of prose style, he had a sure hand when it came to flawed people and their haunts. If anything, I closed the book with a renewed enthusiasm to venture further in the vast expanse of Peter de Polnay’s oeuvre.