Second-hand Bookstore Gold: H.H. Munro (Saki)

[published on July 9, 2006 in my previous blog, "The Flatland Oracles"]

*also available free on the internet.

[1]  A few biographical facts about H. H. Munro.

I bought my 1930 Random House Edition of The Short Stories of Saki (with introduction by Christopher Morley) on a grey January day back in 1995.  I was in a most depressed frame of mine.  My husband and I were living in different cities; I had a room at the house of a friend who had just been fired and was taking it out on me; and my husband's job was looking pretty problematic. I needed diversion----I needed to contemplate someone else's troubles.

Since I've had trouble finding the collected stories of two of my favorite short story writers (L.P. Hartley and Robert Aikman), I wondered if it would be similarly difficult for an interested person to procure a copy of Saki's stories.   Happily, the Penguin Classics collection of The Complete Saki (both used and new) is presently available at both Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  Certainly most libraries should have all or some of his works (or even the same collection that I love so dearly).   

Even better, if you're not sure you want to invest, three of his short story collections are available online at no cost to the reader , including my hands-down favorite, The Chronicles of Clovis.  Most of the stories I recommend below are from the Clovis book.

According to this article at Wikipedia,  Saki was born in Scotland .  His real name was Hector Hugh Munro; if you want more biographical information, check out this link or  this link (or read the biography his sister wrote).  I always thought that his name was from the Rubaiyat, but the previously cited article indicates that its source may be in dispute.  He died in France in 1916, killed by sniper fire.

Saki's best stories are gently twisted, usually infused with irony or understated malice, and sadistically witty.   Many of them will leave you slightly shaken. Even the more prosaic ones are entertaining. 

2.  Stories you may already know.

A few of Saki's short stories are often anthologized.  The ones I've seen in anthologies are:  Tobermory, The Easter Egg, and Sredni Vashtar (from The Chronicles of Clovis);  Laura, The Open Window, and The Story-Teller (from Beasts and Super-beasts).

The Open Window is a famous ghost story, although it is not really about ghosts.  It is not very frightening ultimately, but before you get to the 'ultimately' you might well experience what Edith Wharton called 'the fun of the shudder.'  It's one of his best known stories, and I imagine that most people who have finished high school have read it.  I like the story, but it is not one of Saki's more powerful (by which I mean 'disturbing') stories.  His best stories have a tendency to linger.

The Story-Teller isn't exactly disturbing.  It's a story within a story:  annoyed by the ruckus created by a pack of young children on a train, a young man offers to tell them a story to keep them quiet.   Nothing terrible happens to anyone in the 'frame' story, but the story-within-the-story (about a little girl named Bertha who was very very extraordinarily good) ends on a sadistic note---to the great delight of the children. In Saki, the only good children are naughty children (sometimes psychopathically naughty, as in Hyacinth, a particular favorite of mine).  Saki knew the sort of story that children would find absorbing and he knew how such a story ought to end. 

Tobermory is one of his animal stories.  It was featured in an anthology someone gave me as a Christmas gift of famous stories about cats, but I've seen it elsewhere.  As cat stories go, it is one of the more realistic.  Saki liked cats, but he was not sentimental toward them in his writing. 

In Tobermory, a professor who is visitng at a country house announces that he has developed a technique for teaching animals to talk and that he has been given lessons to the hostess's cat (Tobermory).  Tobermory, a stellar pupil, is invited to lunch to demonstrate his newly acquired skill. Alas, he is all too adept.  (This is, after all, a Saki story). 

[T]hen Miss Resker, in her best district-visitor manner, asked if the human language had been difficult to learn.  Tobermory looked squarely at her for a moment and then fixed his gaze serenely on the middle distance. It was obvious that boring questions lay outside his scheme of life.

.. Major Barfield plunged in heavily to effect a diversion.

"How about your carryings-on with the tortoise-shell puss up at the stables, eh?"

The moment he had said it everyone realized the blunder.

"One does not usually discuss these matters in public," said Tobermory frigidly.  "From a slight observation of your ways since you've been in this house, I should imagine you'd find it inconvenient if I were to shift the conversation on to your own little affairs."

The panic which ensued was not confined to the major.

The Easter Egg is the story of a cowardly young man's single courageous act.  It is both funny and horrifying, as many of Saki's stories are.  That is to say, it is at first funny and then horrifying. 

In Laura, another one of his better known stories, the title character is a dying woman who believes in reincarnation. After her death, she returns in various successive animal forms for the purpose of tormenting her brother-in-law, who---failing to recognize her----kills her repeatedly.  It's funny in an edgy and uncomfortable way.  It seems to be frequently anthologized.

Sredni Vashtar is one of Saki's most violent and macabre stories, involving an abused and neglected child's terrible revenge against his abusive aunt.  I first encountered it in my treasured book, Great Stories of Terror and the Supernatural.  It's more a story of terror than the supernatural. 

3.  The Achievement of the Cat

I love Saki's stories for the light amoral tone and the whiplash sting of wit infused (as true wit so often is) with quiet malice.  "[M]y mother never bothered about bringing me up," says Saki's Clovis Sangrail.  "She just saw to it that I got whacked at decent intervals and was taught the difference between right and wrong; there is some difference, you know, but I've forgotten what it is."

If you're introduced to a tender and moralizing soul in a Saki story, or if the narrative takes a sentimental turn, watch out.  Middle-class convention, particularly if accompanied by self-satisfaction, is also regularly punished. Though sometimes the punishment is probably more often than not  social humiliation (particularly galling to the conventional), there are a few stories in which it is lethal.  The 'sadism' in Saki to which commentators always refer is genreally not expressed as a thirst for blood, but in enjoyment of another's (often well-merited) suffering. And it is clear in most of the stories that Saki himself  enjoys their suffering and expects the reader to enjoy it.

Saki's 'villains', to the extent he can be said to have them, are typically characterized by pettiness.  They may even take their faults for virtues.  In The Lumber Room, the nasty aunt---evidently based on the unpleasant woman who brought up Saki and his siblings----enjoys punishing the children, but is perhaps not aware that the children know this as well as she does, though the reader is aware.  She may be able to convince herself that she is simply trying to bring them up properly, but it is clear to the reader that she likes causing them pain.

So his boy-cousin and girl cousin and his quite uninteresting younger brother were to be taken to Jagborough sands that afternoon and he was to stay at home.  His...aunt...had hastily invented the Jagborough expedition in order to impress on Nicholas the delights that he had justly forfeited by his disgraceful conduct at the breakfast-table.  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 neighboring town, a circus of unrivalled merit with uncounted elephants, to which, but for their depravity, they would have been taken that very day.  ...A few decent tears were looked for on the part of Nicholas when the moment for the departure of the expedition had arrived.

The tears do not appear, further illustrating to the aunt the need to punish. But in this story the tables are turned and the little boy gets revenge  on his aunt. The sadistic strain that characterizes so many of these stories is played out to comic effect; no actual bloodshed ensues.  But the story is funny because the reader is aware that the very astute little boy---and the likable children in Saki are always amoral and always precocious--- is relishing the opportunity to make the aunt suffer just as much as she secretly relishes making the children suffer and by using her own weapons against her. 

The stories often turn on an opportunity to make someone who is smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious, greedy, manipulative, or stingy suffer a bit  (usually through social or physical humiliation) or occasionally much more than 'a bit.'  When the opportunity arises, the character generally seizes it.   In Saki's stories, the oppressed are very seldom inclined to show mercy to their oppressors.  The stories are so contrived that the reader seldom or never wishes for this to occur----though in some cases the punishment exceeds the crime.  It's the dread of excess punishment that creates much of the tension for me. In Saki, you just never know.

The qualities that Saki admired (and admires in his characters)  are spelled out quite clearly in one of his later stories, The Achievement of the Cat.  I say 'stories' but it is not so much a story as a short essay in praise of the cat's 'achievement.'

For not as a bond-servant or dependent has this proudest of mammals entered the human fraternity; not as a slave like the beasts of burden, or a humble camp-follower like the dog.  The cat is domestic only as far as suits its own ends; it will not be kennelled or harnessed nor suffer any dictation as to its going out or comings in.  Long contact with the human race has developed in it the art of diplomacy, and no Roman Cardianl of medieaval days knew how to ingratiate himself with his surroundings than a cat with a saucer of cream on its mental horizons.

But the social smoothness, the purring innocence, the softness of the velvet paw may be laid aside at a moment's notice, and the sinuous feline may disappear in deliberate aloofness to a world...where the human element is distanced and disregarded.  Or the innate savage spirit that helped its survival in the bygone days of tooth and claw may be summoned forth from beneath the sleek exterior, and the torture-instinct (common alone to both human and feline may find free play in the death-throes of some luckless bird or rodent.

It is, indeed, no small triumph to have combined the untrammelled liberty of primeval savagery with the luxury which only a highly developed civilisation can command; to be lapped in the soft stuffs that commerce has gathered from the far ends of the world; to bask in the warmth that labour and industry have dragged from the bowels of the earth; to banquet on the dainties that wealth has bespoken for its table, and withal to be a free son of nature, a mighty hunter, a spiller of life-blood.  This is the victory of the cat.

But besides the credit of success, the cat has other qualities which compel recognition.  The animal which the Egyptians worshiped as divine, which the Romans venerated as a symbol of liberty, which Europeans in the ignorant Middle Ages anathametized as an agent of demonology, has displayed to all ages two closely blended characteristics---courage and self-respect.  No matter how unfavourable the circumstances, both qualities are always to the fore.Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instintively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in object submission to the impending visitation, the kitten will brace its tiny body for frantic resistance.

And disassociate the luxury-loving cat from the atmosphere of social comfort in which it usually contrives to move, and observe it critically under adverse conditions....The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, out-cast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it placed of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside. 

Perhaps it is because I am a lover of cats that Saki's stories so appeal to me.  The characters in his stories that he likes himself are essentially catlike.

4.  Three of my favorite stories (with excerpts)

The stories I like best are the ones which mix  Edwardian drawing room manners of the drawing room with the uncanny and terrifying.  With a couple of exceptions (e.g., The Soul of Laploshka"), his stories aren't ghost stories.  The horror is more elemental and less prosaic.  Animals (as in Laura) and elementals are particularly likely to show up and start behaving strangely.  Gabriel-Ernest is one story that involves both.

Gabriel-Ernest. Van Cheele, a pompous young man discovers that a beautiful young boy (who happens to be a were-wolf) is living on his land.  When Van Cheele orders the beautiful young man to leave his land, the beautiful boy turns up (naked) on his doorstep ("You told me I was not to stay in the woods," said the boy calmly).  The boy is immediately adopted by Van Cheele's well-meaning do-gooding aunt.

Clothed, clean, and groomed, the boy lost none of his uncanniness in Van Cheele's eyes, but his aunt found him sweet. 

"We must call him something till we know who he really is," she said.  "Gabriel-Ernest, I think; those are nice suitable names."

Van Cheele agreed, but he privately doubted whether they were being grafted on to a nice suitable child.  His misgivings were not diminished by the fact that his staid and elderly spaniel had bolted out of the house at the first incoming of the boy, and now obstinately remained shivering and yapping at the farther end of the orchard, while the canary, usually as vocally industrious as Van Cheele himself, had put itself on an allowance of frightened cheeps.

After consulting a friend in London,Van Cheele becomes convinced that the boy is a were-wolf and responsible for the recent disappearance of a couple of local children.  What to do?  "He dismissed the idea of a telegram, "Gabriel-Ernest is a werewolf" was a hopelessly inadequate effort at conveying the situation, and his aunt would think it was a code message to which he had omitted to give her the key."  The story ends disturbingly, like all of Saki's best stories.   

Esme.  Esme is a story-within-a-story told by a recurring character known simply as 'the baroness.'

During a fox hunt, the baroness and another woman, Constance, get separated from the pack and lose their way.  While trying to find their way back, they encounter a hyena which has escaped from his owner (an eccentric local lord). After an unpleasant moment with some of the hounds, the hyena decides to follow the baroness and her companion, a woman whom the baroness dislikes on social grounds for general tediousness and charmlessness.

The hyenea "hailed our approach with unmistakable relief and demonstrations of friendliness. It had probably been accustomed to uniform kindness from humans, while its first experience of a pack of hounds had left a bad impression....Constance and I and the hyena were left alone in the twilight."  The baroness decides that she will call him (the hyena) Esme. He trots along beside them as they ride slowly "along a faintly marked cart-track, with the best following cheerfully at our heels." Eventually they pass a gypsy encampment, where a small child, picking berries, is frightened by the sight of the hyena and begins to cry. The two women ride on. 

""I wonder what that child was doing there," said Constance presently.

""Picking blackberries.  Obviously."

""I didn't like the way it cried," pursued Constance; "somehow its wail keeps ringing in my ears."

""I did not chide Constance for her morbid fancies; as a matter of fact the same situation, of being pursued by a perpetual fretful wail, had been forcing itself on my rather overtired nerves.  For company's sake I hulloed to Esme, who had lagged somewhat behind.  With a few springy bounds he drew up level, and then shot past us.

""The wailing accompaniment was explained.  The gipsy child was firmly, and I expect painfully, held in its jaws."

""Merciful Heaven!" screamed Constance, "What on earth shall we do?  What are we to do?...Can't we do something?" she persisted tearfully, as Esme cantered easily along in front of our tired horses.

"Personally I was doing everything that occurred to me at the moment.  I stormed and scolded and coaxed in English and French and gamekeeper language;  I made absurd, ineffectual cuts in the air with my thongless hunting-crop; I hurled my sandwich case at the brute;...And still we lumbered on through the deepening dusk with that dark uncouth shape lumbering ahead of us, and a drone of lugubrious music in our ears."

I'll leave it there.  It is an excellent example of a Saki animal story (and of my favorite sort of Saki story). 

The Music on the Hill.  Saki wrote several stories in which people who 'escape' to what they expect will be a life of peace in the country instead find themselves sucked into a mysterious atmosphere of menace and dread.  Examples are:  The Blood-Feud of Toad Water, The Cobweb, The Peace of Mowsle Barton, and The Music on the Hill.  My favorite is The Music on the Hill (though The Peace of Mowsle Barton is a close contender).

The Music on the Hill illustrates rather graphically the meaning of the word Pan-ic (the terror of unseen things).

Sylvia Seltoun, the main character, has through various methods overcome her husband's reluctance to move  to move to his country house.  Though Saki does not say so directly, she appears to be an officious or even bossy woman, some years older than the husband she has recently married.  When the story opens, she is preening herself on her success in getting him to marry her and on "wrenching her husband away from Town."   She has apparently married the homosexual Mortimer at least partly in order to get her hands on the house in question.   "To have married, Mortimer Seltoun, "Dead Mortimer," as his more intimate enemies called him, in the teeth of the cold hostility of his family, and in spite of his unaffected indifference to women that had needed some determination and adroitness to carry through."  Her decision to get him to move to the country was apparently the result of her new "distrust of town-life" because of its (unstated) effects on Mortimer. 

The land surrounding the house, Yessney, is the stock 'beautiful-but-menacing' scenery that you are told quite early on conceals a lurking danger. 

"In its wild open savagery there seemed a stealthy linking of the joy of life with the terror of unseen things.  Sylvia smiled complacently as she gazed with a School-of-Art apprecitation at the landscape, and then of a sudden she almost shuddered."

"It is very wild," she said to Mortimer, who had joined her; "one could almost think that in such a place the worship of Pan had never quite died out."

"The worship of Pan never has died out," said Mortimer.  "Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last.  He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn."

Sylvia was religious in an honest, vaguely devotional kind of way, and did not like to hear her beliefs spoken of as mere aftergrowths, but it was at least something new and hopeful to hear Dead Mortimer speak with such energy and conviction on any subject.

"You don't really believe in Pan?" she asked incredulously.

"I've been a fool in most things," said Mortimer quietly, "but I'm not such a fool as not to believe in Pan when I'm down here.  And if you're wise you won't disbelieve in him too boastfully while you're in his country.

She does not take her husband's advice.  The consequences for her are not pleasant.  This is one of Saki's more disturbing stories.

5.  Other stories

I've recommended several stories, but I could really go on and on.  Though many of the stories are disturbing or have a sadistic twist, others are merely amusing in his trademarked light and malicious fashion.  Often the focus is the less admirable aspects of human nature, but not all of them end disastrously for the characters.  Some end quite happily. Here are some I particularly enjoyed:

1. The Soul of Laploshka
2. The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope
3. The She-Wolf
4. The Schartz-Metterklume Method
5. The Seventh Pullet
6. Cousin Teresa
7. The Feast of Nemesis
8. The Name-Day
9. The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat
10. The Toys of Peace
11. The Wolves of Cernogratz
12. Excepting Mrs. Pentherby  (actually one of my all-time favorites)
13. Morlvera
14. Shock Tactics
15. Hyacinth

6.  Quotes.

The epigrammatic quality of Saki's writing lends itself to quotations.  Here are a few.

"If you're going to be rude...I shall dine with you tomorrow night as well." 

Reginald on the Academy

"You are really indecently vain of your appearance.  A good life is infinitely preferable to good looks."

"You agree with me that the two are incompatible.  I always say beauty is only sin deep."

Reginald's Choir Treat

"Some one has observed that Providence is always on the side of the big dividends," remarked Reginald.

The Duchess ate an anchovy in a shocked manner; she was sufficiently old-fashioned to dislike irreverence toward dividends."

   Reginald at the Carlton

"It's the maddest thing I ever heard of," said Lucas angrily.

"Well, there is a strong strain of madness in our family.  If you haven't noticed it yourself all your friends must have."

  Adrian

"I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French.  What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English."

   Adrian

[W]henever a massacre...is reported...., every one assumes that it has been carried out "under orders" from somwhere or another; no one seems to think that there are people who might like to kill their neighbors now and then."

Filboid Studge, The Story of a Mouse that Helped

"Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death."

The Feast of Nemesis

Comments

[dave]

There is an animated, illustrated version of Tobermory at:
http://www.adamsmithacademy.org/etext/Tobermory.html

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So cute! I already like you on FB and also get your posts on Google Reader. :)