Beasts and Super-Beasts

            The last collection of short stories published during Saki’s, that is, H. H. Munro’s, lifetime, whose title plays off George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903), this is the longest, at thirty-six stories. The beasts include “The She-wolf” that Clovis Sangrail deftly substitutes for his willing friend Mary Hampton in order to rout  gullible believers in eastern European magic and the otter that “Laura” predicts shortly before her death that she will metempsychose into, and does. The beasts are often manipulated by the super-beasts, the clever people in the stories for whom, like the very self-possessed young lady in “The Open Window,” “romance at short notice” is their speciality. The collection could easily bear the title Romance at Short Notice, in fact, as Clovis and Vera Durmot, the sixteen-year-old flapper, (both appear in several of the stories), Lady Carlotta (“The Schartz-Metterklume Method”) and others fend off aunts and other bores while amusing themselves with their own invention. One of the stories is called “The Romancers” and describes a duel in which a panhandler on a park bench and his intended mark tell each other stories, with the mark determined and able to fend off any sad story with a wilder one of his own. “Dusk” is a story that reverses this plot, in that the panhandler successfully extracts money from the mark, although he is helped by a fortunate accident that seems to lend his story credence. “You are merely the club bore. I am the club liar,” says Treadlefoot to Amblecope as the former claims precedence exiting the smoking room of the club, after having pre-empted each of Amblecope’s attempts to tell a story with a more outrageous one of his own (“A Defensive Diamond”). I was not surprised to see that Munro goes so far as to critique the idea of the fast-talking specialist in romance more than once here. “Dusk” is such an example, and another is “The Seventh Pullet,” where the protagonist is the star of his commuting circle with made-up stories of his remarkable experiences until something truly remarkable actually happens to him when his wife prophecies her own death, and the story-teller is not only doubted, but accused of bad taste in the face of a tragic event, and he subsides into mundane anecdotes and then into silence.

            Most of these stories, including the frequently anthologized “The Lumber Room” and “The Story-Teller,” appeared in the Morning Post in London. Also very frequently selected for reprints are “The Open Window,” “The Schartz-Metterklume Method,” and “Clovis on Parental Responsibilities,” which were first published in the Westminster Gazette.

            As little of the real, outside world enters Munro’s stories as those of P. G. Wodehouse, who was a fan. But in “The Unkindest Blow,” he takes satiric aim at a “season of strikes,” as the Duke of Fulverton and his wife decide to go “on strike” rather than pursue their highly publicized international sensation of a divorce trial. We revisit the strike motif in “The Byzantine Omelette,” where the house staff and then the kitchen staff of Sophie Chattel-Monkheim go on strike, spoiling her plans to entertain the Duke of Syria. But this story has less to do with social unrest than with another favorite theme of Munro’s which is disconcerting the rich, the complacent, or the affected. A whole Christmas house party unravels when the guests decide to take too seriously their charades game of each one impersonating a character the others have to guess during the course of the visit. Another aunt, Adela Chemping, never quite lives it down when the nephew she brings along as a parcel-toter on her shopping trip to Walpurgis & Nettlepinks’ is taken for a shop boy, and goes along with the mistake to the tune of collecting scores of pounds from unwitting customers. A politician is Vera Durmot’s target in “The Lull.” Gebhard Knopfschrank, more pig farmer than painter, nevertheless fools Sylvia Strubble, Mrs. Nougat-Jones, and other “discerning critics of the Nuremberg” Café into buying his worthless pictures. Another ne’er-do-well nephew, instead of the riches he is brought in to find in “The Treasure Ship,” finds material to blackmail his rich relatives.

            John Letts, in the introduction to the Folio Society Saki Short Stories, has pointed out how a frequent device of Munro’s is inversion, perhaps owing partly to Munro’s acknowledged fondness for Wilde (“Divorces are made in heaven” and so on). Thus the very best story to tell children is one in which the young girl’s medals for goodness clanking together get her eaten by the wolf. Clovis suggests to his aunt a new holiday, “The Feast of Nemesis,” when, instead of sending gifts or flowers, we pay off old scores and grudges. The peasant or the neighbor’s child who reverses the usual power relation to those older and richer is the burden of “The Boar-Pig,” “The Cobweb,” and “The Name-Day.” Another sort of inversion is the shift of power from an aunt to a nephew or niece. So many aunts. They are usually the ones who have to be talked into or out of things or simply bamboozled. It isn’t even a real aunt who attempts unsuccessfully to terrorize Nicholas in “The Lumber Room,” but his cousins’ aunt—a “soi-disant aunt,” as the narrator styles him. Munro’s terrifying Aunt Augusta was a real feature of his youth, while Bertie Wooster’s was, like himself, fictional, so we must assign a good deal of the aunt-routing in the stories to psychic payoff.  

            Another plot driver is best-laid plans going agley. “The Elk” rearranges Teresa Thropplestance’s plans for her grandson to marry the Bicklebys’ German governess by killing the governess. Carefully laid plans are rearranged by a clever rearranger rather than fate in “The Fur,” where the friend of the birthday girl, resenting a slight, manages to redirect to herself the gift of a fur coat from a rich relative.  

            Doubtless J. W. Lambert is right when, in introducing The Bodley Head Saki, he writes of Munro’s “ruthlessness tipping over into cruelty.” Some of the beasts in Beasts and Super-Beasts like the taste of human flesh, and I think this aspect of the stories has special appeal for adolescents. I know it did for me when I first discovered them. Like the man who amuses the noisy children on the train with a tale in which the good little girl comes to a sticky end, Munro knows his audience. But, though we can talk about that audience being the adolescent or England tired of a worn-out age and about to enter a frightening new one, I know that the abrupt cruelties and bleak outlooks of these stories are still bracing for me.