Books |
The Complete Saki
By
Published: Feb 15, 2016
Category:
Fiction
Guest Butler Margaret Quamme grew up in Massachusetts near a good used book store. She has a PhD in English from Brown. Early jobs included teaching transcendental meditation and selling whole wheat bread from a street cart in Madison, Wisconsin. She now lives in Ohio, on the verge of the Appalachian Mountains, where she reviews books, theater, and occasionally something else for the Columbus Dispatch.
I discovered Saki when I was twelve, in one of those horror anthologies you could find in the ‘60s for a quarter in a used bookstore.
That was the right age to be introduced to the writer who, probably with some relief, shed his given name of Hector Hugh Munro for the sleeker pseudonym. And like many of us who came of age in the ‘60s, Saki maintained an adolescent disdain for the grown-up world well into middle age.
He may not have been a household name after the Edwardian era, but he’s always had admirers, including Noel Coward, a somewhat reluctant A.A. Milne, who fell in love with his “terrifyingly cosmopolitan” humor while bemoaning his “strange boyish insensitiveness,” and a less ambivalent Christopher Hitchens, who found his work “spellbinding.”
Before Saki died at 45 in the trenches in France in 1916 – his last words, allegedly, were the sensible, “Put that bloody cigarette out!” to a fellow soldier who was attracting the attention of the Germans – he had written many dozens of very short stories, three novels, and three plays.
They’re all collected in the bulky Penguin Classics edition of “The Complete Saki,” from which the author gazes out wearing a covetable hat and a feline expression. Cats are everywhere in Saki, detached, barely domesticated, and taking advantage of whatever goodies are on offer. [To buy the Penguin paperback from Amazon, click here. For a shorter Kindle edition, click here.]
Here’s one of those pampered tabbies:
He lies there, purring and dreaming, shifting his limbs now and then in an ecstasy of cushioned comfort. He seems the incarnation of everything soft and silky and velvety, without a sharp edge in his composition, a dreamer whose philosophy is sleep and let sleep; and then, as evening draws on, he goes out into the garden with a red glint in his eyes and slays a drowsy sparrow.
Two languid human parallels to these cats, Reginald (who closes “his eyes with the elaborate weariness of someone who has rather nice eyelashes and thinks it useless to conceal the fact”) and Clovis (who likes to hang out “in the hottest zone but two in a Turkish bath”) are the presiding spirits of many of these stories, tossing off bon mots and causing mischief at garden and house parties. Oscar Wilde looks over their shoulders, and they in turn are elder cousins to P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.
Like most of the young men in Saki’s world, they’re subject to the iron wills of aunts. Clovis’s aunt likes to “speak in a sleepy, comfortable voice whenever she was unusually keen about anything; it put people off their guard, and they frequently fell in with her wishes before they had realized that she was really asking for anything.”
Even Saki’s lesser tales, the ones where he appears to be ambling to the allotted word count of whatever newspaper he is writing for, are full of little gems, descriptions of characters like Constance, “one of those strapping florid girls that go so well with autumn scenery or Christmas decorations in church,” or backhanded compliments like, “You’re looking nicer than usual, but that’s so easy for you.”
Saki is a master of names, like Octavian Ruttle and Lester Slaggby. And of first lines and whiplash last lines, the ones that turn you around so fast you can’t at first make sense of what came before.
The last lines deserve to be encountered fresh, but here are a couple of the first ones:
“I want to marry your daughter,” said Mark Spayley with faltering eagerness.
And this:
It was distinctly hard lines for Lady Amanda, who came of good fighting stock, and was one of the bravest women of her generation, that her son should be so undisguisedly a coward.
If you read the collected stories, you’ll be lulled into placid satisfaction and then shocked awake, like eating through a box of pleasing chocolates and then biting into one with a sumptuous and possibly poisonous center. Best bets: stories that feature children, wild animals, and sometimes werewolves.
Back when I first encountered Saki, I knew that he had the allure of forbidden fruit. Kinder souls were falling for dreamy, depressive Holden Caulfield, too good for the adult world and longing to save younger children from its dangers. Saki’s enterprising kids and adolescents were made of sterner stuff: They sent their elders off to be eaten by tigers. I knew which side I was on — and I knew enough to shut up about my affection for Saki.
