I recently reread the short stories of Hector Hugh Munro, who used the pen name "Saki." The following are my reactions to the four collections of stories published before his death in 1916 and the two posthumous collections.
John
Lotts may be justified in his estimation that the first Reginald stories, which
Munro published in the Westminster
Gazette and collected in 1904 as Reginald,
amount to no more than quotable epigrams; he doesn’t include any of the stories
in The Folio Society Saki Short Stories,
but he does quote some of the
epigrams.
Wilde’s
influence strikes me first. This dialogue from “Reginald on the Academy,” with
a person only identified as “the Other,” might be a misremembered bit of
Algernon and Jack’s conversation from The
Importance of Being Earnest:
“To
be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.”
“Which
reminds me that I can’t remember whether I accepted an invitation from you to
dine at Kettner’s to-night.”
“On
the other hand, I can remember with startling distinctness not having asked you
to.”
“So
much certainty is unbecoming in the young; so we’ll consider that settled.”
Also reminiscent of Wilde is Reginald’s opinion, in
“Reginald on Tariffs,” that there ought to be a tax on people who urge you to
take life seriously.
Yes, too often we have the sense that
Reginald is coming out on a stage and performing a monologue, perhaps with a
lighted cigarette in a gold holder. The monologues can be entertaining, as when
he tells us in “Reginald on House Parties” about shooting his hosts’ peacock
and leaving it in the hall after he’s been ragged by everyone about his
unwillingness to go shooting with them. “Pavonicide,” he calls it.
The first story, “Reginald,” is narrated
by someone other than him—someone who has reason to regret taking him to a garden
party. In “Reginald on Christmas Presents” he is being quoted, which is
awkward. Then the narration becomes more conventional. Sometimes there is
genuine exchange between Reginald and an other, named or no. It may be a
position Reginald takes vis-à-vis a Duchess or a vicar’s daughter with the
intention épater le bourgeois. In
“Reginald at the Theatre,” the Duchess appeals to all the bulwarks of civilized
English life while he calls them into question. She accuses him of having read
Nietzsche until he hasn’t “any sense of moral proportion left.” The reading he
admits to, in a later story, is Max Nordau on fin-de-siècle decadence. “Reginald’s Peace Poem” is an offhand
acknowledgment of the end of the Boer War and the lifting of the siege of
Mafeking, which produced the verb to
maffick, meaning to celebrate boisterously. He also refers here to the
music hall song “Goodbye, Dolly Gray,” written during the Spanish-American War
but turned by the English into a Boer War anthem. Generally, though, Munro
avoids the timely.
Since they are a strength in this
collection, here are a few of Reginald’s epigrams:
”It’s the early Christian that
gets the fattest lion.” –“Reginald’s Choir-Treat”
“She believed in the healthy
influence of natural surroundings, never having been in Sicily, where things
are different.”
“I always say, beauty is only
sin deep.”
“Her husband’s people are
considerably lower than the angels, so to speak.” –Reginald on Worries”
“At present she’s rather in a
Balkan state of mind….”
“Her frocks are built in Paris,
but she wears them with a strong English accent.”
“Scandal is merely the compassionate
allowance which the gay make to the humdrum.” –“Reginald at the Claremont”
“C’est le premier pa qui compte, as the cuckoo said when it
swallowed its foster parent.”—“Reginald on the Drama”
“Mrs. Van Challaby said things
about me which in her calmer moments she would have hesitated to
spell.”--“Reginald on Tariffs”
“People may say what they like
about the decay of Christianity; the religious system that produced green
Chartreuse can never really die.” –“Reginald on Christmas Presents”
Some of
Munro’s characteristic moves and themes first show up in his second collection
of short stories, Reginald in Russia,
published in 1910. Metamorphosis and later metempsychosis fascinate him
throughout his brief writing career, for a couple of examples. “Gabriel-Ernest,”
takes the werewolf story into Munro’s territory by treating it with lightness
and humor, and into decadent territory by making the wolf’s daytime counterpart
a naked teenager, a “feral ephebe,” to borrow a phrase from one of his critics,
Sandie Byrne, in The Unbearable Saki: The
Work of H. H Munro (Oxford, 2007). And “The Reticence of Lady Anne”
employs, I think for the first time in his stories, the shock ending for which
he and O. Henry are often mentioned together.
He is
still epigrammatizing: he says of Olga, the Russian princess in the title
story, “with her, as with a great many of her sex, charity began at homeliness
and did not generally progress much farther.” But he is constructing more
substantial stories and enlarging his themes. “The Last Sanjak” explores how
fate can entrap us, with our conniving; a condemned murderer convinces the
chaplain attending him that anyone could have been caught in the trap that left
him, an innocent man, condemned for murder: he could not prove his identity. “A
thing like that,” says the shaken priest after listening to the prisoner’s
story, “might happen to anyone.”
Munro
tended to look at the world from a slightly askew or even inverted point of
view, so when he thinks about female suffrage, he imagines how suffragettes
might be treated in ancient Rome (in a story in The Square Egg) or how the female vote could work in the
very-much-still-going Ottoman Empire, where a candidate might be able to sway
an election because he controlled the votes of his fifty wives and five hundred
concubines; the result is “A Young Turkish Catastrophe in Two Scenes.” “The Sex
That Doesn’t Shop” offers the startling assertion that women don’t really
shop—they choose loyalty to establishments over actually buying necessities
where they can be had. A psychological ghost story, “The Soul of Laploshka,”
has a topsy-turvy angle: Laploshka’s ghost is haunting the narrator, not
because he kept the two francs he owed Laploshka, but because he gave them to the
poor.
The
little sketch called “Judkin of the Parcels” struck me immediately as like
Woolf, though it was written before Woolf was publishing anything but book
reviews. It begins with a fragment: “A figure in an indefinite tweed suit,
carrying brown-paper parcels.” Munro imagines a narrative for this figure, as
Woolf would do later with the people she observed.
“The
Strategist” is about the cruelty of children—I had almost said beastliness, but
that is a different topic with Munro—and the ways they cope with the cruelty of
other children, using allies or their wits. Munro’s insight into children and
his refusal to sentimentalize them will be responsible for some of his
best-known stories, and Rollo here, trying to avoid the brutality of the boys
who outnumber him by whatever shifts he can come up with, is the harbinger of
many self-possessed young persons to come.
Munro
hits his stride with The Chronicles of
Clovis in 1911. His mind runs on rest-cures and unrest-cures, but it's
mostly the latter if Clovis Sangrail is around (or even if he's not: sometimes
he is a mere listener or inactive participant, sometimes he makes one comment,
and sometimes, as in “Hermann the Irascible,” “Sredni Vashtar,””The
Chaplet,””Mowsle Barton,” and other stories, he's not there at all). Clovis's England is one where most of the inhabitants are
the idle rich, where the god Pan holds sway in some rural quarters and
witchcraft in others, where prominent men of politics and business can be
suddenly replaced by angels, and where Clovis
struggles, usually successfully, for control in townhouses and country houses
with the Baronesses and Lady Bastables. For example, when the Baroness wants to
jolly everyone up after a divisive local election, she lights on the idea of a
play, and Clovis suggests Agamemnon, with
predictably disastrous results. Lady Bastable's fear of social upheaval enables
Clovis to stampede her with a shout of “the jacquerie!” Here, as in some of the
dialogue, we can hear traces of Wilde: “All decent people live beyond their
incomes nowadays, and those who aren't respectable live beyond other
people's. A few gifted individuals
manage to do both.” Elsewhere in the same story (“The Match-maker”): “brevity
is the soul of widowhood.” One of my favorite remarks is the Baroness's to
Constance Broddle in Esme: “You're looking nicer than usual . . . but that's so
easy for you.” I imagine Dorothy Parker studying up a few Saki stories before
going off to the Algonquin to join the group.
A strain
of offhand cruelty runs through the stories. Although the wicked are punished
in “Sredni Vashtar,” the gypsy child eaten by the hyena in “Esme” seems
innocent enough, and there is no poetic justice in the suicide of the humorless
Eleanor Stringham―though there might be in the murder of the orchestra leader
by the chef in “The Chaplet.” People come to sticky ends in “The Easter Egg”
and “The Hounds of Fate.”
We are
apt to forget, looking back at the stories, that Clovis is still in his teens
at their beginning. But the themes of the stories are often those of adolescent
fantasy and wish-fulfillment. My mother is about to leave me with Lady Bastable
for a week, but what if I could prevent it? What if the pets around me could
talk or assume enough fierceness to punish my aunt-tormentor? What if I could
control the Baroness that everyone finds so formidable? What if all the venal
politicians could be turned into animals and replaced by beings who intended
nothing but good? Isn't there an odd resemblance between people and their pets?
Suppose it extended to behavior?
The last
collection of short stories published during Munro’s, lifetime, Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914), whose
title plays off George Bernard Shaw’s Man
and Superman (1903), 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: during the course of the visit, each one impersonates a
character, and the others try to guess it. 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 in the
stories 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 begin a frightening new one, I
know that the abrupt cruelties and bleak outlooks of these stories are still
bracing for me.
The thirty-three stories of The Toys of Peace and Other Papers are
Munro’s “last tales,” according to his friend Rothay Reynolds, who collected
them for publication in 1919 and prefixed a short memoir about Munro. They were
presumably first published between the appearance of The Chronicles of Clovis in 1914 and Munro’s death in November,
1916. Indeed, the first story excerpts a real newspaper article from March,
1914, and the last, “For the Duration of the War,” Reynolds assures us was
written at the front.
The first, title story is that
rare item in the Munro canon, a snorer, being wholly predictable. The last
story, however, is a gem about a rural Rector and his lady vying with each
other for the literary upper hand. Her translation of a French novel no one
will read is outshone by the Rector’s hoax of having uncovered a new Omar
Khayyam, whose verses, supposedly found and translated by the Rector’s nephew
in Mesopotamia, satisfy the public’s momentary yearning for a “comfortable,
slightly quizzical philosophy.” Hoaxes perpetrated upon one’s hostess or the
public at large were Munro’s delight, if the stories are anything to go by. In
“Quail Seed,” an artist, his sister, and his model hoax the customers of a
small suburban shop into making it a popular and talked-about place by the
appearance of a mysterious dark young man who orders exotic items and is
apparently being pursued, or is pursuing, a tall black-bearded man. Instances
of the impromptu hoax in Munro can be seen as the next plot step up from the
character who provides “romance at short notice.” But hoaxes had a special kind
of popularity in the teens of the century. The Piltdown Man Hoax was
perpetrated in 1912, and Horace de Vere Cole, who was at one time suspected of
being its originator, made a reputation wih a more comic variety of hoaxes throughout
the decade. He convinced Virginia Woolf, her brother, and other friends to join
him in impersonating the Emperor of Abyssinia and his attendants, and they went
so far as to wangle an invitation aboard the Royal Navy’s chief warship, where
they were given a tour and never suspected.
Sometimes an interesting scheme
is the subject rather than a hoax. Reggie Bruttle’s bright idea is to use his
inherited, expensive-to-maintain house for a “prolonged country-house party”
for young people not quite rich enough to go in for the shooting and hunting of
the real variety. Half the year, youngish people will be contributing hosts
rather than paying guests, “Excepting Mrs. Pentherby,” who Reggie reveals at
the end of the first experiment was his “official quarreler,” preventing squabbles
among the women by uniting them against herself.
“The Occasional Garden” may be
one extreme of the hoax/scheme idea: Elinor Rapsley has an entire garden
installed in hours by the emergency Occasional-Oasis-Supply Association in
order to impress the garden-proud Gwenda Pottingdon, and when Gwenda drops in
after the garden has been removed just as quickly, Elinor’s “emergency brain”
improvises, telling Gwenda that Suffragettes “broke in and made hay of the
whole thing in about ten minutes.”
Here a
number of stories seem to arise from Munro’s experience in eastern Europe,
”where Teuton lands pass from Hohenzollern to Hapsburg keeping,” and lands even
farther east. “The Wolves of Cernogratz” assemble and howl only at the death of
one of the family, as the old governess explains to the parvenu Baroness who
owns the castle now, and it is revealed, and then demonstrated, that the
governess is herself the last of the Cernogratzes. Among the eastern tales here
the star is “The Interlopers,” which may be the most-anthologized of Munro’s
short stories. Each of the two feuding landowners thinks the other is the
interloper; at the end, when they are both immobilized under a fallen tree and
have made up their quarrel, we realize that they are both interlopers as far the
wolves are concerned. The surprise ending and the cruel turn thus, because of
the story’s popularity, become Munro’s most characteristic techniques.
In this
category of Balkan sketches, two others here, “The Purple of the Balkan Kings”
and “The Cupboard of the Yesterdays,” feature a self-important financier and a
romantic known only as the Wanderer, each bewailing the recapture of
Ottoman-held lands by eastern European alliances in the Balkan Wars of
1912-1913, the financier because he’s going to lose money and influence, the Wanderer
because repatriation of Balkan lands means less territory for the soldier of
fortune and the adventurer. These pieces hardly seem to be stories, but rather
fanciful essays, and strike me as out of place here, which perhaps explains
Rothay Reynolds’s adding and Other Papers
to his title The Toys of Peace.
“The
Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh, though it is narrated on “a train
speeding Balkanward,” is set solidly in England, and sports a couple of
distinctly Munrovian features. There is the strong-minded woman who suddenly
loses her memory (compare “A Holiday Task”) and the sort of reversal the author
is fond of: instead of demanding a ransom for the return of the woman they
claim to be holding, the bogus kidnapers of Mrs. Umberleigh say that unless
they are paid money, they will return her to her family…and they are duly paid.
Later, in “The Phantom Luncheon,” Lady Drakmanton merely pretends to have lost her memory in order to disconcert the
mooching Smithly-Dubbs sisters into paying for lunch.
I can’t
imagine Munro’s choosing, had he lived to put together another collection
himself, “The Toys of Peace” at all, let alone as a title piece. I doubt he
would have included “The Purple of the Balkan Kings,” or “The Cupboard of the
Yesterdays,” either. With a little culling this collection would be the equal
of The Chronicles of Clovis as
representing Munro at the very top of his form.
The same
cannot be said of the other posthumous collection of Munro’s fugitive publications.
The pieces in The Square Egg and Other
Sketches (1924) are sometimes left out of the canon of Munro’s short
stories, and it was perhaps wise to call them sketches. “The Achievement of the
Cat” is an eccentric enough view of that animal, but does not qualify as
fiction. “The Old Town of Pskoff” is a travelogue/puff-piece about the Russian
city now usually spelled Pskov. A piece about the birds of no man’s land in
France during the war is straight reportage, and this is also true of at least
half of the title sketch, which begins in the mud of the trenches. It is difficult
to tell whether the second half, the French conman’s tale of developing
chickens who lay square eggs, told to a captive audience of the narrator, who
is a soldier trying to relax with a drink in an estaminet, is fiction. The narrator’s response is the
characteristic Saki one of the romancer outromanced, as the soldier says he
will seek out the conman’s home town and find his aunt, whom the conman says is
cheating him of his profits from the eggs. To the conman’s question, “And what
will you do then, monsieur?” the soldier answers, “I will marry her.”
More
like other Saki stories are the tour of hell (“The Infernal Parliament”) and
the emperor who releases wild animals on the Suffragetae, who have taken over the Roman circus to demand rights
for women (“The Gala Programme”). Each has the distinctive edge of cruelty,
without quite being up to Munro’s usual standard.
“The
Comments of Moung Ka” is a satirical look at the English “democracy” from afar,
and the very short “Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Business is notable only
for one epigram: “a little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.”
The
first edition of The Square Egg also
contained a short biography of Saki by his sister Ethel Munro and several plays
by Munro, “The Death-Trap,” and “Karl-Ludwig’s Window,” as well as one
co-written with Charles Maude, “The Watched Pot.”
One of Munro’s motifs is the
idea of the interloper. It shows up in perhaps his most famous story, “The
Interlopers,” the jewel of The Toys of
Peace, where each of the trapped men thinks the other an interloper, but
they are both interlopers in the country that belongs to the wolves. A comic
example is “The Scharz-Metterklume Method,” in Beasts and Super-Beasts, where Lady Carlotta is the interloper when
she accedes to the imperious Mrs. Quabarl’s statement, mistaking Lady Carlotta
for the governess. And its most melancholy instance is the doomed man of “The
Hounds of Fate,” in The Chronicles of
Clovis, whose suicide is averted when he is mistaken for a returning local
ne’er-do-well and who slips into that man’s identity until his fate catches up
with him. The situation of being out of place or isolated while among others
occurs often in the stories but is masked by the verve with which the young
people who don’t really fit exploit their clever differentness. I suspect that Munro spent a good deal of his time exploiting his clever differentness.
Munro
works on a small canvas, with stories averaging four printed pages. In a
sentence or two, he poses the social problem, gives background on the main
character, or, more rarely, establishes a mood with a scenic description. His
preferred method of development is dialogue. The travelers, country house party
guests, parliament hopefuls, minor bureaucrats, single-minded aunts, complacent
shoppers, and indulgent parents have no idea what is about to hit them. The children
do, and so do Clovis Sangrail, Reginald, Vera Durmot, Lady Carlotta, and the
other Super-Beasts. The reader waits eagerly for the turn, not knowing what’s
coming but certain it will be something interesting. The outcome may be a
lesson for the unwary, a debt repaid, or a cosmic roll of the dice that ends
cruelly. For this reader, the ending is invariably gratifying.
