Sandie Byrne: The Unbearable Saki: The Work of Hector Hugh Munro

Saki's stories are funnier than P.G. Wodehouse's, his satire wickeder than Evelyn Waugh's, his epigrams more pointed than Wilde's. Saki devotees include Graham Greene, Noel Coward and Will Self. Once bitten, readers are addicted, but the readership has expanded largely through word-of-mouth. This book aims to place Saki's work in its literary and cultural context and to reassess his standing and significance.

Hector Hugh Munro was born in Akyab, Burma, in December 1870, the youngest child of an inspector general in the Burma police and his wife. When Hector was two years old, his mother met with a tragic and yet bizarrely Saki-esque fate. Having returned to the safety of England during her fourth pregnancy, she was taking a walk in a quiet country lane when she was charged by a runaway cow. The shock caused her to miscarry, and she subsequently died. Nor was this the only bizarre death in the family history; that of General Hector Munro in India eighty years earlier was immortalized as a much-reproduced Staffordshire pottery piece entitled 'The Death of Munrow' [sic], which depicted the General's head between the jaws of a large tiger. Saki himself died in a manner which, in wry mood, he might have appreciated. He was killed during a rest-break in a shell crater near Beaumont Hamel in November 1916. His last words were 'Put that bloody cigarette out', before he was shot through the head, presumably by a sniper aiming for the glowing tip of another man's cigarette.

Their father left the three Munro children, Charles, Ethel and Hector, in the care of his mother and two sisters at Broadgate Villa, in Pilton, near Barnstaple, North Devon. The eccentric and domineering aunts imposed a regime of confinement, restraint, and arbitrary rules enforced by corporal punishment. The children were thought to have poor constitutions; like Conradin in Saki's Sredni Vashtar, they were not expected to reach adulthood, and Hector, the most sickly of all, was not allowed to go to school until he was twelve. The stultifying regime was enlivened only by the one Christmas party they were permitted to attend each year, the annual visits of an uncle, and their father's four-yearly leave. Hector compensated for the narrowness of their daily lives with highly developed imaginative powers, and led his brother and sister in every form of mischief which might escape detection or from which his cunning might exculpate them.

After the Burma Police, Munro began a writing career as political journalist, historian and travel writer. He travelled to the Balkans, Warsaw, Paris, and Russia, where he witnessed the assault on the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. On returning to England and settling in London he assumed a dual identity, as Hector Munro, a quiet lower-echelons socialite impeccable in manners and tailoring, and 'Saki', parodist, satirist, and evilly witty writer of the blackest black humour.

Saki became the acknowledged master of the short story, and his forms are perfect. His writing is elegant, economical, and witty. The dominant tone is worldly, flippant irreverence delivered in astringent exchanges and epigrams more neat, pointed, and poised even than Wilde's. The deadpan narrative voice allows for the unsentimental recitation of horrors and the comically grotesque, and the generation of guilty laughter at some very un-PC statements.

Saki's short stories have been much reprinted as well as adapted for radio, stage and television, but his novels The Unbearable Bassington and When William Came are almost unknown, his journalism and travel writing forgotten, and his plays, Karl-Ludwig's Widow, The Death Trap and The Watched Pot, rarely performed. His reputation has been unfairly overshadowed by his predecessor Oscar Wilde, contemporary George Bernard Shaw and followers P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh.

In a well-meaning introduction to the Penguin Complete Saki, Noel Coward reinforces the received image of Saki's work as part of a garden party of pre-war light literature; an Edwardian or even Victorian milieu of privilege, luxury, and affectation; of comedies of manners and light satire.

Saki's writing was no nostalgic evocation of a lost golden age, and he was rarely concerned with charm and delight. His preoccupations, political, social, and personal, were twentieth-century. One was the advent of war, which triggered his self-engineered metamorphosis from cosmopolitan cynic and dandy-about-town to patriotic, even jingoistic, NCO in the trenches.

Saki's Reginald, Clovis and Bertie may have been the models for P.G. Wodehouse's young men of independent means and effete habits, but they are not well-intentioned upper-class twits like Bertie Wooster (first seen in The Man with Two Left Feet published in 1917, the year after Saki's death). They are perhaps closer to the characters of Evelyn Waugh's satires such as A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938), and may be related to the dandies of Ronald Firbank's novels such as Vainglory (1915), Inclinations (1916) and Valmouth: A Romantic Novel (1919). The dandyism and affectation of Saki's heroes might be reminiscent of Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), but while Sir Percy throws off his airs and graces to rescue doomed aristocrats from the Guillotine, Saki's heroes would be more likely to be gleefully working it - and equally as likely to be constructing witty epigrams as they mounted its steps.

While their heartlessness constitutes much of the comedy, and their bon-mots the style of the stories, Saki's young men are both to be feared and pitied. Something, it is suggested, has gone awry with their development. An exchange in The Baker's Dozen contains a line which might well get a laugh, but it also has a painful resonance.

Schoolboys in Saki's writing are far more vicious than the animals, and they inhabit a world impenetrable to female or adult influence. Abandoning a young boy to this world is tantamount to exposing him in the jungle. He will become either predator or prey. But nature has other connotations in Saki's work. The supernatural force of the wilderness is associated with the beauty of a lovely, wild boy who might well have been an object of worship for the heroes of the stories, with their cult of youth and beauty; their indifference to the fate of mortal man, and their capricious hedonism. The object of desire in Saki's stories is often adolescent and inhuman, or at least outside human society, and therefore constraints of class, manners, and mores. The anarchic force of nature which manifests as the faun-like Gabriel-Ernest, a were-wolf and a laughing, Pan-like boy with a flute, is also aligned with abused children, and perhaps called into being by them. The object of desire in Saki's stories is not classically modelled as in many of his contemporaries' work. While the writing dwells on the beauty of the ephebe, the excitement comes from the whiff of the feral, and the imagery calls on an eastern European register of wolves and steppes and icy spaces.

Always politically aware, perceiving the threat to Great Britain from the coming First World War, Saki made an about-face in the treatment of the decadent young heroes of his fiction. The qualities which made Reginald and Clovis admired wits, arbiters of fashion, and sought-after guests become the very qualities which are sapping the morale of the young and leaving the country vulnerable to attack by stronger, healthier nations. Though the Author's Note to The Unbearable Bassington (1912) suggests the cheerful cynicism and amorality of Reginald: 'This story has no moral. If it points out an evil at any rate it suggests no remedy', it is neither cynical nor cheerful. The characters are all doomed, trapped in a series of hells from which there is no escape. The decadence of the young men of the short stories was a matter of style, but Comus Bassington's decadence is unhealthy, unpleasant, corrupt, and ultimately lethal. Yet in spite of his vicious nature, Comus is the hero of the story, and Saki manages to get us on his side, to the extent of willing him to win the heiress, and avoid exile from London, his natural setting. Indeed, Comus seems a distillation of London society as represented by the cast of minor characters, except that he does not pretend to be good. London in this novel is both the only place where one would not be bored to death, and utterly bleak; loveless marriages, false friendships, rapacious women, malicious-tongued old men, avaricious young ones; all fuelled by gossip. Comus' mother, Francesca Bassington, personifies the brittle materialism of her circle. 'Francesca herself, if pressed in an unguarded moment to describe her soul, would probably have described her drawing-room [...]' (p. 10).

A Morning Post reviewer called When William Came (1913) 'Mr Munro's first novel with a purpose' and announced that the author's 'jester's bauble has become a whip, and every stroke tells'. The novel opens on a note of reproach: a vision of an England in which complacency and liberal thinking has diluted the qualities of the people who were once assured of their fitness to be rulers of half the world. English youth has become effete and apathetic; the abolition of national service has robbed the nation of its gymnasium and removed the proper outlet for aggression. Long-standing peace and unshakeable belief in the invincibility of the empire has led to the disbanding of the Royal Navy and a careless indifference to the growing power of Germany. The result is that the once-great Britain has become a colony of the Hapsburg Empire. Saki's dystopic vision was daring and shocking in 1913, but perhaps the most interesting aspect of When William Came, and one largely ignored by critics, is its representation of women, a volte-face from Saki's usual representations.

Easy links can and have been made between Saki's work and his life: the loss of his mother; the repression in the prison of his aunts' house; the wanderings abroad; the fascination with Russian and Balkan history; the unpublicised homosexuality... but important distinctions need to be made between the life of H.H. Munro and the representations of Saki, and a better understanding of work and life are achieved through the grounding of both in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England and Europe.

No full-length biography of H.H. Munro, or study of the writings of Saki has been published since A.J. Langguth's Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro: With Six Short Stories Never Before Collected (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), to which any student of Saki which must grateful and on which all future studies must depend. This succeeded an earlier short study by George James Spears, The Satire of Saki: a Study of the Satiric Art of Hector Munro (New York: Exposition Press, 1963), and Charles H. Gillen's H. H. Munro (Saki), Twayne's English Authors Series (New York: Twayne, 1969), which contained a brief guide and synopses of the stories. A number of short introductions to collections of the stories by fans such as Will Self include the bones of the biography and appreciations of the writing, but these tend not to discuss the plays, novels, and non-fiction.

The Unbearable Saki is published by Oxford University Press in November 2007.

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