“Saki” was the pen-name of Hector Hugh Munro, an English
journalist and author who lived from 1870 to 1916. He wrote three short novels and three even
shorter plays, but short stories were his metier. I have been an admirer for a lot longer than
Munro was in this world, and my recent re-acquaintance has prompted this blog.
There were two Saki stories in the compilation of tales that
featured in the English curriculum when I was at high school. They were droll, and they infected me with
the Saki bug. One, The Storyteller, was
about three children in a railway carriage, driving their aunt nuts with their
demand to be entertained with a story, and the male passenger who did indeed
entertain them with a story; but while the story enchanted the children it
scandalized the aunt. It concerned a
little girl who was horribly good - the combination of good with horribly got
the children’s attention - so good that she earned medals for her
goodness. Then one day, when walking in
the park, she was chased by a wolf. She
hid in the bushes – until her trembling caused her medals to clink together,
and the wolf found her, and “devoured her to the last morsel”.
“’The story began badly,’ said the smaller of the small
girls, ‘but it had a beautiful ending.’
“‘It is the most beautiful story that I ever heard,’ said
the bigger of the small girls, with immense decision.
“’It is the only
beautiful story I have ever heard,’ said Cyril.
“A dissident opinion came from the aunt.”
The other story from school-days, Dusk, finishes with the
ironical twist that is so typical of Saki stories. Our hero, sitting on a park bench, is
accosted by a young man with a hard-luck story: stranger to town, booked into an unknown
hotel, left his room to buy a cake of soap then couldn’t find his way back to
his lodgings, and could he borrow a few shillings? Our hero, benevolent but smelling a rat, says
show me the soap. The stranger fumbles,
claims to have dropped the soap, is admonished, and skulks off. Arising from the seat our hero sees a cake of
soap on the ground, and chases after the surprised stranger with apologies, and
some financial succour. Upon returning
past the park bench our hero sees an old man searching around…….for the cake of
soap he’d lost earlier.
The schoolboy taste for Saki led me to acquire The
Best of Saki, a much-reprinted volume of 38 Saki stories collected and
introduced by Graham Greene no less. I
subsequently bought two companion volumes:
The Complete Short Stories of Saki and The Complete Novels & Plays
of Saki. The former collection
contains the 136 stories, plus a 78-page biography of Hector Munro by his
sister Ethel.
These acquisitions, and my admiration of Saki, date from the
1950s. That admiration has recently been
re-kindled by reading some of the stories again. Back in 1995, to celebrate their 60th
year, Penguin Books produced a boxed set of 60 small volumes devoted one each
to authors published by Penguin during that 60 years. Having
owned the boxed set for nearly 20 years, and not having read a single word, I
decided recently that its and my time had come.
One of the Penguin set has 14 Saki stories; and I am marvelling at Saki
anew.
Saki was the master of the epigram, and in this he was the
natural successor to Oscar Wilde – who was 16 years Munro’s senior (and, who -
dare I say - ironically, died at the
same age of 46). Consider:
Wilde: A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Saki: A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of
explanation.
Wilde: There is no sin except stupidity.
Saki: Poverty keeps together more homes than it
breaks up.
Wilde: A man cannot be too careful in his choice of
enemies.
Saki: You can’t expect a boy to be vicious till
he’s been to a good school.
Wilde: I can resist everything except temptation.
Saki: A woman who takes her husband about with her
everywhere is like a cat who goes on playing with a mouse long after she’s
killed it.
Wilde: Experience is the name everyone gives to
their mistakes.
Saki: You can’t expect the fatted calf to share the
enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal’s return.
Wilde: In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the
other is getting it.
Saki: It requires a great deal of moral courage to
leave in a marked manner in the middle of the second Act when your carriage is
not ordered till twelve.
In reflecting on Munro’s unhappy childhood, Graham Greene
says that “he protected himself with epigrams as closely set as currants in an
old-fashioned Dundee cake………..the epigrams, the absurdities fly unremittingly
back and forth, they dazzle and delight, but we are aware of a harsher, less
kindly mind behind them than Wilde’s.”
Wilde’s epigrams seem
designed for effect, almost as though he expected them to be recognised
separately from their context, and hopefully one day collected in web-page
lists. Saki’s are more unobtrusive, more
embedded in the story-line.
But Saki was much more than a scatterer of smart bons mots. A notable feature of his writing is the evocation
of his time and place. In this he and
P.G. Wodehouse are as one. In a generous
overview, critic and commentator Peter Craven has written that “Saki is the
great offbeat Edwardian humourist and his savagery and his sparkle are
addictive because they inhabit a world that purrs with leisure and grace and
comfort, as though the prospect of World War I were the merest black fantasy
that no sane person could dream of……..The upper class are filled with ennui
because their lives are based on a lie.
Not that there’s anything unattractive about this world: it’s
discernably the world of Wind in the Willows and G.K.
Chesterton. It’s as deeply civilised as
the Empire ever got…….It’s just that Saki knows we’re all beasts…and the fact
that he doesn’t care a fig, the fact that he is a comedian to his back teeth,
is what gives these strange jewel-like stories their perennial air of secret vice, their nonchalant brilliance and,
against all odds, their enduring air of reality.”
Humorous writing, even when sprinkled with wise aphorisms,
is hardly the flavour of our times. But
the real joy of Saki, overtrumping any perceived frivolity, is not the wit
itself but Saki’s truly brilliant use of the words he uses to convey his humour.
But don’t rely on my effusions, sample
for yourself:
“….the look a foundered camel gives when the caravan moves
on and leaves it to its fate.”
“Conversation flagged, and there settled upon the company
that expectant hush that precedes the dawn – when your neighbours don’t happen
to keep poultry.”
“The archdeacon’s wife was buttoning up her gloves with a
concentrated deliberation that was fearful to behold.”
“The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with
an Agnostic conscience: you get the
mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the
other.”
“She was one of those people who regard the Church of
England with patronizing affection, as if it were something that had grown up
in their kitchen garden.”
“Personally, I think the Jews have estimable qualities;
they’re so kind to their poor – and to our rich.”
“Reginald slid a carnation of the newest shade into the
buttonhole of his latest lounge coat, and surveyed the result with approval.”
“….he dropped more money than his employers could
afford. When last I heard of him, he was
believing in his innocence; the jury weren’t.”
“He had been staying at a country vicarage, the inmates of
which had been certainly neither brutal nor bacchanalian, but their supervision
of the domestic establishment had been of that lax order which invites
disaster.”
“Without being actually afraid of mice, Theodoric classed
them among the coarser incidents of life, and considered that Providence, with
a little exercise of moral courage, might long ago have recognized that they
were not indispensable, and have withdrawn them from circulation.”
“And now he was claiming to have launched on the world a
discovery beside which the invention of gunpowder, of the printing-press, and
of steam locomotion were inconsiderable trifles.”
“Bertie van Than, who was so depraved at seventeen that he
had long ago given up trying to be any worse, turned a dull shade of gardenia
white……..”
“He was in the mood to count himself among the defeated.”
“He belonged unmistakably to that forlorn orchestra to whose
piping no one dances…..”
Hector Munro was born in Burma, where his father was a
British civil servant, rising to be Inspector-General of the Burmese
police. His mother’s father was a rear
admiral; and Munro’s life was not economically deprived. But his mother died when Munro was barely two
years – she was knocked down by an errant cow while on furlough in England
awaiting the birth of her fourth child!
Munro’s motherless early life was spent between Burma and Devon; Devon
where he was harshly treated by his two unmarried aunts, his father’s sisters. He
found relief only when consigned to boarding school; and later when his father
returned from Burma when Munro was 17.
Munro himself spent some time with the Burma police (as did
Orwell subsequently), and was widely travelled and a linguist. Post Burma he wrote for a number of
newspapers, including as foreign correspondent in Warsaw, the Balkans, St.
Petersburg, and in Paris. As they
euphemistically said in earlier times, he never married.
In 1909 Munro settled back in England – small income, city
club, and growing celebrity – the world of cultured urbanity portrayed in so
many of his stories. But as the world war approached he grew
discontented with the facile London milieu that had provided him with the
targets for his satiric comedy. One result,
in 1913, was the writing of a novel, When William Came, a fantasy about
the German occupation of England after war, “and how a flabby society full of
jokesters, hucksters and aesthetes would adapt to it”. The book was not successful. Munro’s other response to his own unrest was
to enlist in the army straightaway in 1914.
At age 43 he was technically too old, but he pulled strings. And he could have taken a commission, but he
joined as a private, although later promoted to lance-sergeant
On the morning of November 14, 1916, Munro noticed a comrade
lighting up for a smoke. He shouted out
“Put that bloody cigarette out!” and was shot through the head by a sniper.
Munro biographer, A.J. Langguth, in Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro
[1981], notes that Munro the unbeliever “did not concern himself with the
relationship of man to God”, and shunned writing about love “in all of its
disguises”. Yet in the narrow range he’d
left himself “he fashioned a comedy of manners that looks to be enduring”. Saki is matchless, a story-teller with
“flawless sentences on almost every page that could have been the work of no
other English writer……….The humour comes less from his jokes than from
the…absolute rightness to his language”.
So true. Peter Ryan, the The Age’s reviewer of
Langguth’s biography, notes that Saki’s short stories were “consummately
crafted in language most direct and simple.
They glistened with wit and ingenuity…..”.
And, if further proof is necessary, here is some more of
Saki’s consummately crated language:
”Mrs Troyle paused again, with the self-applauding air of
one who has detected an asp lurking in an apple charlotte.”
“The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she
went.”
“…..for all I care his slumbers may be one long indiscretion
of unsuitable erotic advances in which the entire servants’ hall may be
involved.”
“It’s as bad as selling a man a horse with half a dozen
latent vices and watching him discover them piecemeal in the course of the
hunting season.”
“She’s certainly jolly, and quite all right as far as looks
go, and I believe a certain amount of money adheres to her.”
“I regard one’s hair as I regard husbands: as long as one is
seen together in public one’s private disturbances don’t matter.”
“It was partly compounded of old brandy and partly of
curacao; there were other ingredients, but they were never indiscriminately
revealed.”
“She was one of those imperfectly self-assured individuals
who are magnificent and autocratic so long as they are not seriously opposed.”
“……bounding into the topic with the exuberant plunge of a
hunter when it leaves the high road and feels turf under its hoofs.”
“She shut her lips with the resolute finality of one who
enjoys the blessed certainty of being implored to open them again.”
Gary Andrews
