“My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel,” said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; “in the meantime you must try and put up with me.”
Framton Nuttel endeavored to say the correct something which should duly flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come. Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a succession of total strangers would do much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed to be undergoing.
“I know how it will be,” his sister had said when he was preparing to migrate to this rural retreat; “you will bury yourself down there and not speak to a living soul, and your nerves will be worse than ever from moping. I shall just give you letters of introduction to all the people I know there. Some of them, as far as I can remember, were quite nice.”
Framton wondered whether Mrs. Sappleton, the lady to whom he was presenting one of the letters of introduction came into the nice division.
“Do you know many of the people round here?” asked the niece, when she judged that they had had sufficient silent communion. Continue reading →
One of my favourite conceits in Saki’s stories is the idea of “wolves and wapiti fighting on the steps of the Athenaeum Club.”[1]
The Athenaeum Club in 1830. Credit: Engraved by James Tingle (1801-1858) from an original study (now in the Museum of London) by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, the master recorder of nineteenth-century London. Originally produced for Shepherd’s part-work series “London and its Environs in the Nineteenth Century” (London 1829-1832). Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7355209
The quotation comes from the story ‘On Approval’ (in Beasts and Superbeasts). In it aspiring but penniless painter Gebhard Knopfschrank specialises in “an unusual and unvarying theme”:
His pictures always represented some well-known street or public place in London, fallen into decay and denuded of its human population, in the place of which there roamed a wild fauna, which, from its wealth of exotic species, must have originally escaped from Zoological Gardens and travelling beast shows. “Giraffes drinking at the fountain pools, Trafalgar Square,” was one of the most notable and characteristic of his studies, while even more sensational was the gruesome picture of “Vultures attacking dying camel in Upper Berkeley Street.” There were also photographs of the large canvas on which he had been engaged for some months, and which he was now endeavouring to sell to some enterprising dealer or adventurous amateur. The subject was “Hyaenas asleep in Euston Station,” a composition that left nothing to be desired in the way of suggesting unfathomed depths of desolation.
I recently happened to discover that the idea of painting a well-known place in a state of future ruination is common enough in art. The first reference that I came across to this sub-genre of painting referred to Hubert Robert’s 1796 painting Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie en ruines, which depicts part of the Louvre Museum in Paris, its roof collapsed and the artworks half buried under rubble:
Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre en ruines (Imaginary View of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre in Ruins) by Hubert Robert [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Here’s another painting (also by Hubert Robert) showing what it actually looked like:
Hubert Robert – Vue de la Grande Galerie du Louvre. Picture credit: Par Hubert Robert — Christian Stukenbrock & Barbara Töpper (2005) 1000 Meisterwerke der Europäischen Malerei von 1300 bis 1850, Hagen: Verlag Könemann, ISBN 3-8331-1310-3, p. 976., Domaine public, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4447576
More relevant to Saki is English painter and architect Joseph Gandy’s ‘Soane’s Bank of England as a ruin’ (1830):
This one can be seen at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. (Soane commissioned it himself.) Unfortunately the artist’s imagined vantage point is too high up for the viewer to be able to discern any wolves, giraffes, hyena or similar wild animals.
Apparently Gandy painted other similar fantasies (the technical term is capricci). I wonder if Saki knew them — and perhaps even drew inspiration from them?
The Athenauem Club is is a private members’ club on Pall Mall in London. Membership is reserved to those who have in some way distinguished themselves in science, engineering, literature or the arts. ↩
Saki’s earliest success – a series of sketches using Alice in Wonderland to satirise the politicians of the day. Illustrated by Francis Carruthers Gould.
Earlier this year, the Guardian newspaper published an article on the blue plaques put up on buildings in Britain to commemorate famous people who lived /worked there, together with interviews with the celebrities asked to unveil them. In Saki’s case, the plaque is on Mortimer Street, London W1, and the novelist Will Self (a Saki fan) was the invitee. Here’s what he wrote about it:
‘A somewhat unorthodox day’ … Will Self unveils the plaque for HH Munro. (From The Guardian)
I unveiled a blue plaque for English Heritage once – it’s the one on Mortimer Street for HH Munro (Saki, the short story writer). Scaffolding had been set up outside the building, and Loyd Grossman and I (at that time he was the head of the blue plaque committee) crawled over a desk and out of a window to access it. As I recall, the tenant of the desk didn’t even stop working. Later we went to the Fitzroy Tavern for a celebratory drink, and I ended up chatting with Saki’s biographer, a portly American gentleman in a trench coat, who told me how, when he was doing his research, he tracked down two descendants of the writer: suitably enough, a couple of ageing spinsters in a mouldering house somewhere in Northern Ireland. (Remember the fate of such types in Saki’s stories, such as Shredni Vashtar.) And in the attic of the mouldering house the biographer found a tin trunk, and in the tin trunk he found a cache of Saki’s papers, including “account books” in which the man-about-town had set down, um, accounts of all the young men he’d had about town, including their vital penile statistics. It was a fitting end to a somewhat unorthodox day.
Reposted here under the terms of the Guardian’s (very generous) Open License.
[This is Munro’s first published story. It appeared in St. Paul’s Magazine, credited to “H.H.M.”, in 1899.]
Artemus Gibbon was, by nature and inclination, blameless and respectable, and under happier circumstances the record of his life might have preserved the albino tint of its early promise; but he was of timid and yielding disposition, and had been carefully brought up, so that his case was clearly hopeless from the first. It only remained for the strong and unscrupulous character to come alongside, and the result was a foregone conclusion. And one afternoon it came. It is a well-tried axiom that, in human affairs, as in steeplechasing, the ugliest croppers occur at the ‘safest’ and most carefully pruned places, and of all conceivable occasions for a young man to go irretrievably wrong, a church bazaar would seem to offer the least appropriate opportunity. Yet it was at such a function, opened by a bishop’s lady, and patronised by the most hopelessly correct people in the neighbourhood, that Artemus Gibbon went unsuspectingly to his undoing.
In the first place it must be admitted that his natural timidity was played upon by the embarrassing absence of anything at the bazaar that a bachelor of prosaic tastes might reasonably be expected to purchase with any approach to hearty conviction that his money was profitably laid out. Baby linen, which seemed to be the staple article on most of the stalls, was not to be thought of for a moment and the innate modesty of his taste in dress caused him to recoil from the ‘Jubilee Memento Scarves’,[1] hand-worked with the royal arms in a delirium of crimson and gold. Hence, when he had purchased a harmless and unnecessary pincushion and two views of Durham Cathedral, he felt that he might, without odium, effect a dexterous retreat. Here it was that the Foreseen and Inevitable stepped in and changed the placid current of his life. He was pounced upon by a severe-looking dame, with an air of one being in authority, who gave him to understand that it was required of him that he should buy a dog. Continue reading →
BBC Radio 4 Extra broadcast a three-hour programme on Saki to mark the 100th anniversary of his death. Here’s the description from the BBC website:
Back in 1916 on the battlefield of the Somme, a German sniper brought to an end the life of perhaps Britain’s greatest short-story writer.
Hector Hugh Munro was a political sketch-writer, foreign correspondent, historian and novelist. But he is best known under the pen name Saki for his short story writing.
Saki’s dark and twisted tales make delicious radio drama. Many of them centre on childish mishief, small acts of rebellion against pretentious or overbearing authority figures, and supernatural beasts.
The stories draw on the author’s upbringing in North Devon, where Saki was raised by his aunts and grandmother.
Shaun Ley, who also grew up in Devon, returns to Saki’s childhood home to explore the environment that made the author.
In this three-hour programme, Shaun brings together a series of adaptations, including The Lumber Room, The Toys of Peace, The She-Wolf, The Schartz-Metterklume Method, Mrs Packeltide’s Tiger, The Open Window and Sredni Vashtar.
Contributors include: Sir Richard Eyre, Will Self and Dr Sandie Byrne.
Producer: Adam Bowen for BBC News – Westminster.
The programme can be accessed online for a month at the BBC website. Click here.
Tomorrow (16th November) marks the hundredth anniversary of Hector Hugh Munro’s death. He was killed by a sniper’s bullet while taking a rest in a shell-hole with members of his company, near the French town of Beaumont-Hamel, on the western front.
Thiepval Memorial to the Missing. (Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/martin55/15138020499)
His last words were addressed to one of the other men he was with: “Put that bloody cigarette out!” and it was presumably either the glowing tip of that cigarette or the noise of Munro’s order that alerted the German sniper to potential targets. It is tempting, if perhaps fanciful, to think that Munro, who as ‘Saki’ had dispatched so many of his characters to macabre, often arbitrary fates, might have seen some irony in the manner of his own death.
When the the First World War broke out in 1914, Munro was actually in the Houses of Parliament and witnessed the Prime Minister’s announcement. He was 43 by then and thus too old for the army. He hurried to enlist nonetheless. A year earlier he had written When William Came, a bitter fantasy of Britain under German rule (“William” being the Kaiser Wilhelm). In it he castigated the weak-willed Edwardian Britons whose lack of martial spirit had contributed to British defeat. Munro, it seems, was determined not to be like that. “It is only fitting that the author of When William Came should go to meet William halfway,” he wrote in a letter to John Lane, his publisher.[1] He ended up in the 22nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers after transferring from King Edward’s Light Horse.
After training, Munro and his battalion arrived in France in late 1915. The picture that emerges of him as a soldier is as distant as is imaginable from the effete and amoral dandies of his short stories. There is a photo of him carrying a bucket, his uniform rumpled, sleeves rolled up, a scrubby moustache on his top lip. If he was unrecognisable, then that perhaps suited him. Always an intensely private individual, he may have been happy that only a few of his fellows recognised the witty satirist Saki.
He continued to write nonetheless. As well as a few short stories-cum-reports from the front, such as ‘The Square Egg’, as well as more inconsequential pieces. He clearly retained his taste for black humour. Around Christmas 1915 he composed a mock carol:
While shepherds watched their flocks by night
All seated on the ground,
A high explosive shell came down
And mutton rained around.
Critics and biographers have viewed Munro’s actions as an expression of his political conservatism. If one wants to get more Freudian, then joining up could perhaps also be understood as a sublimation of his (presumed) homosexuality, allowing him to live within an environment that was all-male yet socially approved and assertively heterosexual. Whatever the reason, his apparent joy in army life (as recorded in his letters) as well as his conspicuous bravery under fire indicate that his decision to risk his life for his country as a common soldier was sincere. His social class and his education, such as his knowledge of German and familiarity with Mitteleuropa, made him an obvious candidate for officer rank, or even something like intelligence work, but he refused such offers more than once.
He was by all accounts a much liked and respected member of his troop. Writing about him after his death was reported, the second-in-command of his battalion said:
You will see in the papers that Sgt. Munro [sic], Hector Munro ‘Saki’ the writer was killed, one of the men that I really and honestly admire and revere in this war. He steadfastly refused a commission, and loved his friends in A Coy. […] when he got really ill two months ago, instead of going home and making the most of it as those other blighters do, he managed to get back to us about a week ago.[3]
The reference here is to a bout of malaria Munro came down with in the autumn. (He had first caught the disease two decades earlier while working in Burma.) He was sent to recover in hospital, but, knowing that a ‘push’ was imminent, he discharged himself early and returned to the front on 11 November.
The battle of Beaumont-Hamel was one of the last major engagements of the Somme. Beaumont-Hamel was the name of one of the German’s ‘fortress villages’, heavily fortified to control the valley it was in. The Allies had already tried to take it back in July, with a horrendous loss of life (particularly among Canadian regiments – in Newfoundland the date of the start of the battle is a day of remembrance). On November 12th they launched another attempt again. Four days later, during a brief respite in the fighting, Munro uttered his fateful final words.
His name is recorded on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing:
“H.H. Munro” among the names of the war dead. (Photo credit: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=12293752)
(The biographical details in this article are mostly drawn from Langguth’s biography.)
[In the run-up to Remembrance Day, here’s a piece Saki wrote while serving in the trenches in northern France in 1916 (with some extra pictures).]
Considering the enormous economic dislocation which the war operations have caused in the regions where the campaign is raging, there seems to be very little corresponding disturbance in the bird life of the same districts. Rats and mice have mobilized and swarmed into the fighting line, and there has been a partial mobilization of owls, particularly barn owls, following in the wake of the mice, and making laudable efforts to thin out their numbers. What success attends their hunting one cannot estimate; there are always sufficient mice left over to populate one’s dug-out and make a parade-ground and race-course of one’s face at night. In the matter of nesting accommodation the barn owls are well provided for; most of the still intact barns in the war zone are requisitioned for billeting purposes, but there is a wealth of ruined houses, whole streets and clusters of them, such as can hardly have been available at any previous moment of the world’s history since Nineveh and Babylon became humanly desolate.[1] Without human occupation and cultivation there can have been no corn, no refuse, and consequently very few mice, and the owls of Nineveh cannot have enjoyed very good hunting; here in Northern France the owls have desolation and mice at their disposal in unlimited quantities, and as these birds breed in winter as well as in summer, there should be a goodly output of war owlets to cope with the swarming generations of war mice. Continue reading →
“Scandal is merely the compassionate allowance which the gay make to the humdrum. Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people.”
― ‘Reginald at the Carlton’
It was a hot afternoon, and the railway carriage was correspondingly sultry, and the next stop was at Templecombe, nearly an hour ahead. The occupants of the carriage were a small girl, and a smaller girl, and a small boy. An aunt belonging to the children occupied one corner seat, and the further corner seat on the opposite side was occupied by a bachelor who was a stranger to their party, but the small girls and the small boy emphatically occupied the compartment. Both the aunt and the children were conversational in a limited, persistent way, reminding one of the attentions of a housefly that refuses to be discouraged. Most of the aunt’s remarks seemed to begin with “Don’t,” and nearly all of the children’s remarks began with “Why?” The bachelor said nothing out loud. “Don’t, Cyril, don’t,” exclaimed the aunt, as the small boy began smacking the cushions of the seat, producing a cloud of dust at each blow.
“Come and look out of the window,” she added.
The child moved reluctantly to the window. “Why are those sheep being driven out of that field?” he asked.
“I expect they are being driven to another field where there is more grass,” said the aunt weakly.
“But there is lots of grass in that field,” protested the boy; “there’s nothing else but grass there. Aunt, there’s lots of grass in that field.”
“Perhaps the grass in the other field is better,” suggested the aunt fatuously.
“Why is it better?” came the swift, inevitable question. Continue reading →
