Saki

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For other uses, see Saki (disambiguation).

Image:Hector Hugh Munro.jpg Saki (December 18, 1870 - November 14, 1916) was the pen name of British author Hector Hugh Munro, whose witty and sometimes macabre stories satirised Edwardian society and culture.

Saki is considered a master of the short story and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. His stories are always short but memorable, with delicately drawn characters and finely judged narratives. His story "The Open Window" may be his most famous, with a closing line ("Romance at short notice was her speciality") that has entered the lexicon. He also wrote several plays; a short novel, The Unbearable Bassington (1912); and two novella-length satires, the episodic The Westminster Alice (1902, a Parliamentary parody of Alice in Wonderland), and When William Came (1914), subtitled "A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns".

The name Saki is often thought to be a reference to the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, a poem mentioned disparagingly by the eponymous character in "Reginald on Christmas Presents" (see quote below). It may, however, be a reference to the South American primate of the same name, "a small, long-tailed monkey from the Western Hemisphere" that is a central character in "The Remoulding of Groby Lington" and that, like Munro himself, hid a vicious streak beneath a gentle exterior. This story is the only one of Saki's to begin with a quotation: "A man is known by the company he keeps", and plays on the idea of humans becoming like the pets they keep.

Contents

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Biography

H.H. Munro was born in Akyab, Burma (now known as the Union of Myanmar), the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an inspector-general for the Burmese police when that country was still part of the British Empire. His mother, the former Mary Frances Mercer, died in 1872, killed by a runaway cow, an incident that may have influenced the sometimes deadly animals of his later stories. He was brought up in England with his brother and sister by his grandmother and aunts in a straitlaced household whose comic side he appreciated only later in life. He used the severity of these domestic arrangements in many stories, notably "Sredni Vashtar", in which a young boy keeps a pet polecat without the knowledge of his spiteful and domineering female guardian, who, to the boy's great satisfaction, is eventually killed by the animal.

Munro was educated at Pencarwick School in Exmouth and the Bedford Grammar School. In 1893 he followed in his father's footsteps by joining the Burma police. Three years later, failing health forced his resignation and return to England, where he started his career as a journalist, writing for newspapers such as the Westminster Gazette, Daily Express, Bystander, Morning Post, and Outlook.

In 1900 Munro's first book appeared, The Rise of the Russian Empire, a historical study modelled upon Edward Gibbon's famous The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was followed in 1902 by Not-So-Stories, a collection of short stories and a clear reference to Kipling's Just-So Stories.

From 1902 to 1908 Munro worked as a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post in the Balkans, Russia, and Paris, then settled in London. Many of the stories from this period feature the elegant and effete Reginald and Clovis, who take heartless and cruel delight in the discomfort or downfall of their conventional and pretentious elders. As well as his well-known short stories, Saki also turned his talents for fiction into novels. On the eve of the Great War, he published a "what-if" novel, When William Came, imagining the eponymous German emperor conquering Britain.

At the start of World War I, although officially over age, Munro joined the Army as an ordinary soldier, refusing a commission. He returned to the battlefield more than once when officially still too sick or injured to fight. He was killed in France, near Beaumont-Hamel, in 1916. Munro was sheltering in a shell crater when he was killed by a German sniper. His last words, according to several sources, were "Put that damned cigarette out!". After his death his sister Ethel destroyed most of his papers and wrote her own account of their childhood. He never married.

Much of Saki's work was published posthumously.

In recognition of his contribution to literature, a blue plaque has been affixed to a building in which he once lived on Mortimer Street in central London. One of his social-climber young characters lived in a similar "roomlet which came under the auspicious constellation of W" (i.e. within London's West End, where, in Edwardian times, all the fashionable people lived).

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Controversy

Some believe that Munro made misogynist and anti-Semitic comments, although compared with his contemporaries in Edwardian England, he appears progressive for his time.

Rather than the blanket term 'misogyny', it might be more correct to say that Munro disapproved of childless women, probably from his own negative experience with them. A sickly motherless child, Munro was raised by straitlaced female relatives who, he believed, went beyond strictness into cruelty and spite. (Mrs. De Ropp, the guardian cousin in "Sredni Vashtar", is said to be a representation of his view of his own aunt. See also the quotation "Eleanor hated boys" from "Arlington Stringham" below.) He was also irritated by some aspects of female psychology, as described in "The Sex that Does Not Shop". As a reputed homosexual, he attracted many female friends but never married.

Despite his lampooning of suffragettes and aunts, his stories feature sympathetic portrayals of admirably cool and self-possessed schoolgirls. One of his closest childhood friends was his sister, and they remained close until his death.

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Short stories

Saki's world contrasts the effete conventions and hypocrisies of Edwardian England with the ruthless but straightforward life-and-death struggles of nature. Nature generally wins in the end.

Saki's work is now in the public domain, and all or most of these stories are on the Internet.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Some of his best-known short stories include:

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The Interlopers

Two feuding men trapped together by a falling tree in a forest settle their feud on realizing its absurdity and vow eternal friendship before greeting some unexpected visitors.

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The Schartz-Metterklume Method

At a train station, an arrogant and overbearing woman mistakes the mischievous Lady Carlotta for the governess she expected. Lady Carlotta, deciding not to correct the mistake, presents herself as a proponent of "the Schartz-Metterklume method" of making children understand history by acting it out themselves, and chooses a rather unsuitable historical episode for her first lesson.

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The Open Window (see above)

Vera, a self-possessed young lady, takes it upon herself to entertain Mr. Nuttel, a nervous newcomer to the countryside, by letting her imagination run wild.

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The Toys of Peace

Rather than giving their young boys toy soldiers and guns, a couple decides to give their sons "peace toys". When the packages are opened, young Bertie shouts "It's a fort!" and is disappointed when his father replies "It's a municipal dust-bin". The boys are initially baffled as to how to obtain any enjoyment from models of a school of art and a public library, or from little toy figures of John Stuart Mill, poetess Felicia Hemans, and astronomer Sir John Herschel. Youthful inventiveness finds a way, however.

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The Storyteller

A bachelor is irritated by noisy children in a railway ("the smaller girl created a diversion by beginning to recite 'On the Road to Mandalay'. She only knew the first line, but she put her limited knowledge to the fullest possible use"). He decides to tell them a story about a little girl named Bertha and keeps them quiet for the remainder of the journey with a sadistic story.

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The Unrest-Cure

Saki's recurring hero Clovis Sangrail, a sly young man, overhears the complacent middle-aged Huddle complaining of his own addiction to routine and aversion to change. Huddle's friend makes the wry suggestion of the need for an "unrest-cure" (the opposite of a rest-cure) to be performed, if possible, in the home. Clovis takes it upon himself to "help" the man and his sister by involving them in an invented outrage that will be a "blot on the twentieth century".

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Esmé

In a hunting story with a difference, the Baroness tells Clovis of a hyena she and her friend Constance encountered alone in the countryside, who takes a liking to them but cannot resist the urge to stop for a snack. The story is a perfect example of Saki's delight in setting societal convention against uncompromising nature.

The wailing accompaniment was explained. The gypsy child was firmly, and I expect painfully, held in his jaws.
"Merciful Heaven!' screamed Constance, 'what on earth shall we do? What are we to do?"
The child is shortly devoured, and Constance continues:
Constance shuddered. "Do you think the poor little thing suffered much?" came another of her futile questions.
"The indications were all that way,' I said; 'on the other hand, of course, it may have been crying from sheer temper. Children sometimes do."
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Quotations

From "Reginald on Besetting Sins":

The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went.
...and when Madame lost her temper, you usually afterwards found it in the bill

From "Reginald on the Academy":

"To have reached thirty," said Reginald, "is to have failed in life."
To die before being painted by Sargent is to go to Heaven prematurely.

From "The Jesting of Arlington Stringham":

Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the yearning of a woman who had no children of her own.

From "For The Duration Of The War":

'You are not on the Road to Hell,' You tell me with fanatic glee: Vain boaster, what shall that avail If Hell is on the road to thee?

From "Reginald on Christmas Presents":

Even friends of one's own set, who might be expected to know better, have curious delusions on the subject [of gift-giving]. I am NOT collecting copies of the cheaper editions of Omar Khayyam. I gave the last four that I received to the lift-boy, and I like to think of him reading them, with FitzGerald's notes, to his aged mother.
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Books

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External links

Template:Wikiquote

{{Persondata |NAME=Munro, Hector Hugh |ALTERNATIVE NAMES=Saki |SHORT DESCRIPTION=writer |DATE OF BIRTH=December 18, 1870 |PLACE OF BIRTH=Akyab, Burma |DATE OF DEATH=November 14, 1916 |PLACE OF DEATH=near Beaumont-Hamel, France }}de:Hector Hugh Munro es:Saki eo:Saki nl:Saki ja:サキ sk:Saki

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