“I am worried,” admitted Suzanne; “not worried exactly, but anxious. You see, my birthday happens next week—”
“You lucky person,” interrupted Eleanor; “my birthday doesn’t come till the end of March.”
“Well, old Bertram Kneyght is over in England just now from the Argentine. He’s a kind of distant cousin of my mother’s, and so enormously rich that we’ve never let the relationship drop out of sight. Even if we don’t see him or hear from him for years he is always Cousin Bertram when he does turn up. I can’t say he’s ever been of much solid use to us, but yesterday the subject of my birthday cropped up, and he asked me to let him know what I wanted for a present.”
“Now I understand the anxiety,” observed Eleanor.
“As a rule when one is confronted with a problem like that,” said Suzanne, “all one’s ideas vanish; one doesn’t seem to have a desire in the world. Now it so happens that I have been very keen on a little Dresden figure that I saw somewhere in Kensington; about thirty-six shillings, quite beyond my means. I was very nearly describing the figure, and giving Bertram the address of the shop. And then it suddenly struck me that thirty-six shillings was such a ridiculously inadequate sum for a man of his immense wealth to spend on a birthday present. He could give thirty-six pounds as easily as you or I could buy a bunch of violets. I don’t want to be greedy, of course, but I don’t like being wasteful.” Continue reading →
“Hors d’œuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one’s childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like — and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d’œuvres.”
― ‘Reginald at the Carlton’
Marion Eggelby sat talking to Clovis on the only subject that she ever willingly talked about — her offspring and their varied perfections and accomplishments. Clovis was not in what could be called a receptive mood; the younger generation of Eggelby, depicted in the glowing improbable colours of parent impressionism, aroused in him no enthusiasm. Mrs. Eggelby, on the other hand, was furnished with enthusiasm enough for two.
“You would like Eric,” she said, argumentatively rather than hopefully. Clovis had intimated very unmistakably that he was unlikely to care extravagantly for either Amy or Willie. “Yes, I feel sure you would like Eric. Every one takes to him at once. You know, he always reminds me of that famous picture of the youthful David — I forget who it’s by, but it’s very well known.”[1]
“That would be sufficient to set me against him, if I saw much of him,” said Clovis. “Just imagine at auction bridge, for instance, when one was trying to concentrate one’s mind on what one’s partner’s original declaration had been, and to remember what suits one’s opponents had originally discarded, what it would be like to have some one persistently reminding one of a picture of the youthful David. It would be simply maddening. If Eric did that I should detest him.”
“Eric doesn’t play bridge,” said Mrs. Eggelby with dignity.
Sylvia Seltoun ate her breakfast in the morning-room at Yessney with a pleasant sense of ultimate victory, such as a fervent Ironside1 might have permitted himself on the morrow of Worcester fight.2 She was scarcely pugnacious by temperament, but belonged to that more successful class of fighters who are pugnacious by circumstance. Fate had willed that her life should be occupied with a series of small struggles, usually with the odds slightly against her, and usually she had just managed to come through winning. And now she felt that she had brought her hardest and certainly her most important struggle to a successful issue. To have married Mortimer Seltoun, “Dead Mortimer” as his more intimate enemies called him, in the teeth of the cold hostility of his family, and in spite of his unaffected indifference to women, was indeed an achievement that had needed some determination and adroitness to carry through; yesterday she had brought her victory to its concluding stage by wrenching her husband away from Town and its group of satellite watering-places and “settling him down,” in the vocabulary of her kind, in this remote wood-girt manor farm which was his country house.
“You will never get Mortimer to go,” his mother had said carpingly, “but if he once goes he’ll stay; Yessney throws almost as much a spell over him as Town does. One can understand what holds him to Town, but Yessney—” and the dowager had shrugged her shoulders. Continue reading →
“It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand, is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score.”
― ‘Reginald’s Rubaiyat’
“It’s a good thing that Saint Valentine’s Day has dropped out of vogue,” said Mrs. Thackenbury; “what with Christmas and New Year and Easter, not to speak of birthdays, there are quite enough remembrance days as it is. I tried to save myself trouble at Christmas by just sending flowers to all my friends, but it wouldn’t work; Gertrude has eleven hot-houses and about thirty gardeners, so it would have been ridiculous to send flowers to her, and Milly has just started a florist’s shop, so it was equally out of the question there. The stress of having to decide in a hurry what to give to Gertrude and Milly just when I thought I’d got the whole question nicely off my mind completely ruined my Christmas, and then the awful monotony of the letters of thanks: ‘Thank you so much for your lovely flowers. It was so good of you to think of me.’ Of course in the majority of cases I hadn’t thought about the recipients at all; their names were down in my list of ‘people who must not be left out.’ If I trusted to remembering them there would be some awful sins of omission.”
“The trouble is,” said Clovis to his aunt, “all these days of intrusive remembrance harp so persistently on one aspect of human nature and entirely ignore the other; that is why they become so perfunctory and artificial. At Christmas and New Year you are emboldened and encouraged by convention to send gushing messages of optimistic goodwill and servile affection to people whom you would scarcely ask to lunch unless some one else had failed you at the last moment; if you are supping at a restaurant on New Year’s Eve you are permitted and expected to join hands and sing ‘For Auld Lang Syne’ with strangers whom you have never seen before and never want to see again. But no licence is allowed in the opposite direction.” Continue reading →
If you’re a Saki fan, then the chances are you own one of the following:
Wordsworth Classics’ Collected Short Stories
Penguin Popular Classics’ Complete Short Stories
The latter is in fact the first part of Penguin’s Complete Saki, shorn of his two novels, the political sketches collected as The Westminster Alice and his plays.
This is no longer in print, Penguin perhaps having come to the conclusion that not many people are interested in reading anything other than the short stories. They have dropped the other works to create their ostensibly “new” edition, which in fact just reuses part of what they first typeset back in the 1970s.
And here we come to the nub of the problem.
These editions are no different to the 1945 Viking Press collection in my university library, which is itself a reprinting of a 1930 edition. In fact, every single edition I have looked at is exactly the same, comprising the four collections published during Saki’s lifetime, a posthumous collection (The Toys Of Peace) and a very short later collection (The Square Egg, 30 pages) rounding up what must have been missed the first time. If you believe most publishers, the Saki canon was complete by 1924.
This is not correct. Another couple of short prose pieces were included in Ethel Munro’s 1924 memoir of her brother. Since that time around 12 extra stories have been rediscovered. Six of these were published in A. J. Langguth’s 1981 biography (now out of print); a few more were made available by A Shot in the Dark (Hesperus, 2006). As far as I can make out, no one has ever reprinted ‘John Bull’s Christmas Tree’ (1902).
It’s pretty clear, then, that no edition can truthfully claim completeness. Even those publishers offering omnibus e-book editions seem to have just digitised old print editions.
To continue publishing a “complete” edition that’s not complete seems to me to be verging on an infringement of the Trade Descriptions Act. But how many book-buyers realise they’re being conned?
Although it would be nice to have all of Saki’s stories easily available, that’s not the main aim of this website. Rather, its purpose is to begin to address a second problem, namely, that none of the editions available have any critical apparatus. In particular, no annotated versions exist – this is true even of selections of the stories. Neither the Penguin nor the Wordsworth version provides any introduction, notes or suggestions for further reading. Yet with a social satirist such as Saki, explanatory notes are indispensable for appreciating the stories properly and indeed even for understanding some of the jokes. This becomes abundantly clear if you even have a brief look at the very first page of the first ‘Reginald’ story.
This website is going to publish some of the harder-to-obtain texts, properly annotated versions of others, selected excerpts, as well as information on Saki and links to other relevant sources or articles. H. H. Munro died in November 1916, and this project seems a fitting way to mark the upcoming hundredth anniversary.
