Author Archives: Bruce Gaston

‘The Miracle-Merchant’: A One-Act Play by Saki

The Internet Archive has a scan of Modern One Act Plays, edited by Wayne Philip (1935), which includes ‘The Miracle-Merchant’, a short play closely based on the short story ‘The Hen’ (in Beasts and Super-Beasts). It takes over the plot and most of the dialogue from the original, though Mrs. Sangrail and Clovis become Mrs. Beauwhistle and her nephew Louis Courcet.

This is a curious piece, whose provenance, according to Brian Gibson, is unknown (Reading Saki, p. 197). It was first printed the year before in One-act plays for stage and study, eighth series; twenty contemporary plays (publisher: S. French, Ltd., 1934).

The notes to the play are not much help. They begin:

This is ‘Saki’s’ dramatic version of his own short story called The Hen, which is the fifth tale in the collection entitled Beasts and Super-Beasts. It is very interesting to compare the two and to observe the skilful [sic] addition of suitable stage movement: much of the dialogue remains unaltered, but the breakfast business, for instance, is added to enliven the scene.

The rest is a potted biography/overview of Munro’s works which leans heavily on Ethel Munro’s biographical sketch of her brother.

Neither of the other main works on Munro (Langguth’s biography and Sandie Byrne’s The Unbearable Saki) have anything to say about it.

Oddly, the play is prefaced by a legal notice beginning: “All performing rights are reserved by the author”, although by this time Munro had been dead for nearly twenty years, so couldn’t have given his permission even if he’d wanted to. On the other hand, in the Acknowledgments thanks are given to “the Literary Executors of the Author, and Messrs. John Lane, The Bodley Head, Ltd.” for permission to reprint. The mention of Munro’s publishers is interesting: had they in some way the rights to the play? Or rights deriving from the fact they published the story on which the play was based? The actual first publication of the play, as mentioned above, was not by The Bodley Head but by Samuel French, the pre-eminent publisher of stage plays (albeit in an anthology). Perhaps if that edition could be tracked down some more information could be gleaned on this offshoot of Munro’s main work as a short-story writer.

Here’s the link: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.34453/page/n189/mode/2up

[Edit 11 Oct. 2024: Brian Gibson kindly tracked down the aforementioned 1934 Samuel French edition. At the start of smaller print regarding any performance of the play and payable royalties, etc. it says: “The Miracle-Merchant is copyright, 1934, by E. M. Munro, and is subject to royalty.” E. M. Munro is, of course, Ethel Munro, Hector’s sister, who was his heir and literary executor. It makes more sense to find her name, although it doesn’t give us any more information on when the play was originally written.]

More on Saki, Selfridge’s and the ‘Romance of Business’

Following on from the publication here of the lost Saki story ‘The Romance of Business’, Saki scholar Brian Gibson managed to turn up the following article about the series of ads of which Saki’s tale was but a part. I publish it in full below. Readers may think that the writer is taking his brief a bit too seriously and the prose gets bit purple as a result, but it gives an idea of the context.

OCTOBER 3, 1914 SELFRIDGE & CO, LTD, London, England.–A series of ads exploiting the store’s fifth anniversary. There are some twenty odd ads in the complete series. Three of them are reproduced on this page.

It is possible that no more remarkable ads than these have been produced in the entire history of retail advertising. It is certain that there has never been a more interesting and more constructive presentation of the institutional phase of retailing–the side of retailing that is too often submerged when the actual function of a store is under consideration.

It is not in technique and design that the Selfridge ads are out of the ordinary–although they are in reality works of art, on the one hand, and literature, on the other. Their chief novelty and merit lie in the point of view they reflect, a point of view that puts retailing as an enterprise, and trade as a vocation, on the high level on which they properly should stand.

While each ad of the entire series carries the signature of Selfridge & Co., the theme in the text is “the Retail Store as an Institution,” and the subject matter is composed not of what Selfridge & Co. think of themselves, but of what other people think of them. And, after all, is it not public opinion that makes any institution what it is–any institution, at least, the basis of whose work is service? Continue reading →

Merry Christmas! (And don’t buy this!)

An e-book cover with a pirated picture of the film version of The Lion, The WItch and The Wardrobe, labelled as The Chronicles of Clovis.Here’s a suitably wintery book cover (which also happens to be entirely unsuitable in every other way).

This absolutely bizarre concoction is an e-book cover that I found on amazon.it while researching various editions of The Chronicles of Clovis (see also this post).

For those of you who can’t quite identify it, the photo is a (pirated, naturally) picture from the poster for the 2005 film version of The Lion, The WItch and The Wardrobe.

I think if you set yourself the task of deliberately making a cover that in no way matches the contents of the book you’d still never come up with something so utterly inapt and inept.

The e-book itself has now disappeared from the website, but you can guess it was produced by one of those fly-by-night outfits that grab an out-of-copyright text from the Gutenberg Project (or a similar website), add the title to a similarly sourced picture, and copy-and-paste in enough extra text (often the Wikipedia article on that particular book) to fool the Kindle Direct Publishing algorithm into accepting it as a new edition. Production costs are minimal and as long as you process enough books and sell at least a few of each, you’re pretty much guaranteed to make a profit. (This is a topic I ought to blog about at more length, as this is the kind of garbage my edition of Reginald & Reginald in Russia has to compete against.)

Anyway, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers.

Patriotism in the City Revisited

I’ve blogged before about the background to Reginald’s quip about “the City, where the patriotism comes from”. Reader Roger Allen sent me this poem by Herbert Asquith (son of the P.M.), which – as he writes – “shows something of the contemporary attitude”.

Herbert served with the Royal Artillery in the war; he survived, unlike his elder brother Raymond, killed at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette on 15 September 1916 (two months before Munro’s death).

The Volunteer

Here lies a clerk who half his life had spent
Toiling at ledgers in a city grey,
Thinking that so his days would drift away
With no lance broken in life’s tournament:
Yet ever ’twixt the books and his bright eyes
The gleaming eagles of the legions came,
And horsemen, charging under phantom skies,
Went thundering past beneath the oriflamme.

And now those waiting dreams are satisfied;
From twilight to the halls of dawn he went;
His lance is broken; but he lies content
With that high hour, in which he lived and died.
And falling thus he wants no recompense,
Who found his battle in the last resort;
Nor needs he any hearse to bear him hence,
Who goes to join the men of Agincourt.