A Hundred Years Of Saki

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1999 by Adam Frost

IT is a hundred years since 'Saki's' first story appeared in St Paul's Magazine. It is not one of his best, lacking his usual elegance and concision, and it was never reprinted in his lifetime, but it still bears all the hallmarks of a distinctive new talent. 'Dogged' centres on Artemius Gibbon, a nervous, middle-aged bachelor who comes into possession of 'a rakish looking fox-terrier' with a reputation for 'naked and unashamed depravity'. At first he wonders if he can tame it. Then it attacks his landlady, wrecks his flat and develops the habit of jumping into passing taxi cabs, forcing its owner to follow. Artemius' thralldom to the beast is reflected in the story's last lines. 'Does he belong to you?' a friend asks. 'No', Artemius replies, 'I belong to him. Body and soul'.

The reversal is typical of Saki. Owner becomes pet and vice versa. There is the familiar appetite for destruction, later to be found in hyenas, tigers, monkeys, mice, wolves and polecats, not to mention small children. Finally there is the sophisticated manipulation of genre as farce, fairy-tale, Gothic, the comedy of manners, melodrama and parable are all blended to chronicle the hounding down of Artemius.

It is the work of a genuine original. 'Saki' was the pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro, who was born in 1870 and killed in the First World War. Among his contemporaries, Kenneth Grahame and Rudyard Kipling experimented with animal narrative. D. H. Lawrence had a similarly savage contempt for the ostensible resilience of European manhood. Joyce shared a gift for immaculate parody. But nobody can match Saki for wit, grace and energy, and nobody engages so readily with his audience.

In later stories he would hone this talent to perfection. The ingenuity of 'Sredni Vashtar', in which an only child turns a half-savage polecat into a pagan God, is attested to by its continual presence in short-story anthologies. The appeal of 'Tobermory', in which a talking cat develops an unsettling penchant for plain speaking, is confirmed by a recent Daily Telegraph poll in which it was named the Nation's favourite Saki story. The uniqueness of 'The Easter Egg', in which an attempt to foil an anarchist plot culminates in the spectacle of an exploding baby, perhaps speaks for itself.

Of course, not everyone has agreed with this. When Saki's stories first began to appear a century ago, they were universally regarded as 'harmless fun', rarely deemed worthy of a review in the literary columns. This view was tacitly encouraged by Saki, who seemed happy to pose as a 'gentleman amateur'. Although his stories regularly appeared in the Morning Post and Westminster Gazette, he did not seek to collect them himself, tending to wait for publishers to suggest an edition. Many of his early satires (The Not So Stories, The Quattrains of Uttar Al Ghibe) remain uncollected. When the stories were turned into books, he gave little or no time to revision, partly reflecting the unparalleled concision and control of the original versions, but partly too revealing a cavalier attitude to his stories once they were out of his hands. He hated highfalutin literary friends. It is hardly surprising that he was seen as a lightweight.

This has changed. Over the last 100 years, there has been persistent interest in Saki's distinctive kind of storytelling. This is primarily thanks to the public who have kept his stories in print and alerted more highbrow readers to the virtuoso craftsman they have overlooked. But other writers too have realised that he is indispensable to an understanding of the possibilities of fiction. For G. K. Chesterton, he is 'sparkling and impenetrable'. For Graham Greene, 'the absurdities fly back and forth, they dazzle and delight'. For Evelyn Waugh, he is the author of 'six or seven masterpieces'. Noel Coward called him 'my favourite writer'. Tom Sharpe confessed he was a Said 'addict'.

All this has meant that Saki has remained in continual circulation, even if he has not always been on University syllabuses and inside literary supplements. Indeed he is one of those writers who -- through good luck or acute prescience -- seems to suit the century that followed him. His emphasis on black comedy must have seemed peculiar alongside Wilde and Pinero, but in a century m which comic writers delight in the destructive and absurd (Waugh, Pynchon or even Tarantino), Saki's stories of ingenuous assassination and puerile immorality seem apt. Likewise, the supreme brevity of the stories, which responded to the fragmentation and anxiety of his own fin de siecle, has seemed enduringly apposite in a disorientating, breakneck century and especially in our own fin de siecle in which the collective attention span has never been shorter and soundbite culture never more prevalent (The extent of it is perhaps best reflected in Tony Blair's soundbite on the Northern Ireland peace process: 'Now is not the time fo r soundbites'). Moreover, Saki's stories are always about stories. In 'The Seventh Pullet', Blenkinthrope tells his tall tale to a crowded railway carriage to relieve the monotony of his existence. In 'The Story Teller' a bachelor spins a yam about a 'horribly good girl' to keep a group of hyperactive children quiet. In 'The Open Window', Mrs Sappleton's niece invents a ghost story about her aunt out of chronic boredom. Adapting the 'frame' narrative, Saki always makes us aware of who is telling the story, and how, and why. The twentieth century has also seen narrative becoming the subject of narrative. Modernists like Eliot and Pound remind us of the poems that have been written before. Postmodernists like Rushdie and Carter people their stories with compulsive tale-tellers, often as a way of suggesting that all cultural concepts (gender, race) are fictions.