Saki

HECTOR HUGH MUNRO, born in India in 1870, a delicate child who was not expected to live, was brought up from the age of two in a damp, dark country house in Devonshire, surrounded by high walls and hedges. Here he and his brother and sister, placed in the care of two dragonlike aunts, were virtually prisoners, mewed in behind closed windows at night and in all bad weather, and permitted to play only on the front lawn in summer — ‘ the kitchen garden being considered too tempting a place, with its fruit trees.’ Both the aunts, Miss Munro tells us in her memoir of her brother, ‘were guilty of mental cruelty.’ Their methods are described in those of the aunt in ‘The Lumber Room.’

It was her habit, whenever one of the children fell from grace, to improvise something of a festival nature from which the offender would be rigorously debarred; if all the children sinned collectively they were suddenly informed of a circus in a neighbouring town, a circus of unrivalled merit and uncounted elephants, to which, but for their depravity, they would have been taken that very day.

He spent a cosmopolitan youth traveling on the continent with his father, a year in India with the Military Police, several years in Russia, the Balkans, and Paris as a newspaper correspondent, and then settled down as a free-lance journalist in London. At the outbreak of the Great War, when he was fortyfour, he at once enlisted in the ranks, and he was killed in the attack on Beaumont-Hamel on November 13, 1916.

Admirers, in their natural wish to do justice to a man they loved, have pointed to passages in Saki’s works in which he reveals his personality directly, and from which it is possible to construct the man of flesh and blood behind the mask of mockery he chose to wear. But such criticism does him no service. He deliberately chose a pseudonym for his writings — Sákí, the cupbearer whose ’joyous errand’ was to serve the guests with wine in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. He never sought intimacy with his readers, or gave them his confidence. He asks nothing from them but lips that can laugh, flesh that can creep, and legs that can be pulled. Saki, in fact, agreed with the eighteenth-century essayist, Shaftesbury: —

I hold it very indecent for anyone to publish his meditations, reflections and solitary thoughts. Those are the froth and scum of writing, which should be unburdened in private and consigned to oblivion, before the writer comes before the world as good company.

Saki is the most impersonal of artists. His private emotions and enthusiasms, meditations or thoughts, have no place in the world of his art. Saki is not Hector Munro, any more than Elia is Charles Lamb. But the methods of the two writers are completely opposed. Lamb dowered Elia with all his own most lovable characteristics: his warm heart, his genius for friendship, his love of life. Hector Munro, though he was richly endowed with all these qualities, denied them to Saki. That artist, in all his short sketches and stories, is allowed but three strains in his nature: the high spirits and malicious impudence of a precocious child; the cynical wit of the light social satirist; and the Gaelic fantasy of the Highlander. We meet these three in turns: the irresponsible imp who invents unlimited extravagant practical jokes to mystify and enrage and outwit the heavy-minded adult world; the ironic mocker who speaks in the quips of Clovis and Reginald and the Duchess; and the Celt who sees the kettle refuse to boil when it has been bewitched by the Evil Eye, or hears Pan’s laughter as he tramples to death the doubter of his powers.

Hilaire Belloc once wrote a poem beginning, —

Matilda came to a bad end, but Saki’s child and adult liars never come to bad ends. Triumphantly they discomfit the forces of dullness and of feeble counter-deception opposed to them, and prove indisputably that fiction is stronger than fact. It must be owned that there are times when we tire of these enfants terribles of all ages, just as we can have too much of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse’s dithering dukes and prize pigs; but at his best the fiendish capacity for unveracious invention with which Saki endows his children, and the amazing mendacities with which his young men and women confute the commonplace, are the fine art of lying at its finest. My own favorites are the story spun by the ingenious niece of the house to the nervous caller, with the innocent opening, ‘You may wonder why we keep that window open on an October afternoon,’ or the visit of the Bishop to organize a local massacre of the Jews, invented by Clovis to animate a family in need of an ‘unrest cure.’ This, since it involved action as well as equivocation, perhaps belongs more truly to the stories dealing with elaborate hoaxes and practical jokes — such as the tale of Leaonard Bilsiter, who liked to hint of his acquaintance with the unseen forces of ‘Siberian magic’ but was somewhat horrified when it appeared that his powers had changed his hostess into a she-wolf; or that of the titled lady who was mistaken for the new governess and plays the part by teaching the children the history of the Sabine Women by the SchartzMetterklume method of making them act it for themselves.

There is an element of cruelty in a practical joke, and many readers of Saki find themselves repelled by a certain heartlessness in many of his tales. The cruelty is certainly there, but it has nothing perverted or pathological about it. He is not one of those whose motto might be ‘Our sweetest songs are those that tell of sadist, thought.’ It is the genial heartlessness of the normal child, whose fantasies take no account of adult standards of human behavior, and to whom the eating of a gypsy by a hyena is no more terrible that the eating of Red Ridinghood’s grandmother by a wolf. The standards of these gruesome tales are those of the fairy tale; their grim ness is the grimness of Grimm.

The other element in Saki’s cruelty springs from a certain unsparing consistency of vision which will allow no sentiment to intrude. He speaks of one young man as ‘one of those people who would be enormously improved by death,’ and he never hesitates to supply that embellishment himself on suitable occasions. Stories such as ‘The Easter Egg’ and ‘The Hounds of Fate’ are tragedies entirely without pity, but their callousness is consistent with the hard cynical sanity which is behind even his lightest satire, and gives it its strength. His mockery is urbane but ruthless. His wit is in the tradition of Wilde and the lesser creations of E. F. Benson’s Dodo and Anthony Hope’s Dolly Dialogues, and in the modern world he has affinities with Noel Coward and the early Aldous Huxley. Like them, he creates an artificial world enclosed in an element outside of which it could no more exist than we could exist outside our envelope of ether. It is embalmed in the element of Wit. To talk about Saki’s ‘characterization’ is absurd. His characters are constructed to form a front against which his light satiric artillery can most effectively be deployed. The forces against him are the common social vices of Vanity Fair: humbug and hypocrisy, greed and grab, envy and uncharitableness, sheer dullness and fatuity. Comus Bussing ton, listening to scraps of conversation at an At Home, comments: ‘I suppose it’s the Prevention of Destitution they’re hammering at. What on earth would become of all these dear good people if anyone should start a crusade for the prevention of mediocrity?’ The crusade would be a disaster, for it would extinguish Lucas Bassett, the young poet who had the triumphant inspiration of the couplet

and whom we see at the end of the story docketed for a knighthood under the letter L.

‘The letter L,’ said the secretary, who was new to his job. ‘Does that stand for Liberalism or liberality?’

‘Literature,’ explained the minister.

And ihe crusade would probably eliminate all those ardent slum workers and society socialists ‘whose naturally stagnant souls take infinite pleasure in what are called “movements’”; those Wodehouse-like moneyed aunts and impecunious and irresponsible nephews; those drones and butterflies ‘to whom clear soup is a more important factor in life than a clear conscience’; and those odious children whose ghastly pranks turn us into keen supporters of the canonization of good King Herod.

But the situations and characters which, left to themselves, would develop into what Jane Austen called ‘ the elegant stupidity of a private party’ develop instead into hilarious gayety and crackling brilliance, and it is Saki’s wit and not his satirical material, or any of his other literary material, which will make him live. It is his sheer good fun and good spirits and capacity to be such persistent good company. His power to comment that ‘so many people who are described as rough diamonds turn out to be only rough paste’; his power to describe the unsophisticated diner-out consulting the wine list ‘with the blank embarrassment of a schoolboy suddenly called on to locate a Minor Prophet in the tangled hinterland of the Old Testament’; or his impudent morsels of dialogue.

‘Such an exquisite rural retreat, and so restful and healing to the nerves. Real country scenery; apple blossom everywhere.’

‘Surely only on the apple trees?’

‘As a companion he was an unfailing antidote to boredom,’ wrote one of his friends. It is an epitaph anyone might envy.