Todo Tiene Su Como-Se-Llama

Jared's Salute to Saki

After a ride from Gilbert Hall to Phys. Plant in the back of a pickup . . . in the pouring rain . . . after a long day of dabbing paint in corners and along edges . . . I am clearly ready for a blogpost. Clearly.

I promised a post on Saki and his Complete Works, and this is about the best I can do in just a few hours. Watson's copy of The Complete Works is nearly 950 pages long, and I certainly can't do that justice in terms of sheer quantity (to say nothing of the high quality). Hopefully, however, I can convey at least a sense of what I gleaned of the man who wrote it. As to his work, I highly recommend that you read some of it yourself.

I'll try and hit a few of the high points insofar as I judge they are important to understanding Hector Hugh Munro (aka Saki), but I encourage you to drop by Project Gutenburg and read some of his earlier short stories for yourself (unless you either already have, or you've heard those which I have read aloud from time to time).

Anyway, without further ado, we shall dive right in:

On this particular morning the sight of Lady Bastable enthroned among her papers gave Clovis the hint towards which his mind had been groping all breakfast time. His mother had gone upstairs to supervise packing operations, and he was alone on the ground-floor with his hostess--and the servants. The latter were the key to the situation. Bursting wildly into the kitchen quarters, Clovis screamed a frantic though strictly non-committal summons: "Poor Lady Bastable! In the morning-room! Oh, quick!" The next moment the butler, cook, page-boy, two or three maids, and a gardener who had happened to be in one of the outer kitchens were following in a hot scurry after Clovis as he headed back for the morning-room. Lady Bastable was roused from the world of newspaper lore by hearing a Japanese screen in the hall go down with a crash. Then the door leading from the hall flew open and her young guest tore madly through the room, shrieked at her in passing, "The jacquerie! They're on us!" and dashed like an escaping hawk out through the French window. The scared mob of servants burst in on his heels, the gardener still clutching the sickle with which he had been trimming hedges, and the impetus of their headlong haste carried them, slipping and sliding, over the smooth parquet flooring towards the chair where their mistress sat in panic- stricken amazement. If she had had a moment granted her for reflection she would have behaved, as she afterwards explained, with considerable dignity. It was probably the sickle which decided her, but anyway she followed the lead that Clovis had given her through the French window, and ran well and far across the lawn before the eyes of her astonished retainers.

That brief passage offers just a taste of the hilarity that awaits anyone who is fortunate enough to discover the adventures of Reginald and Clovis. It pretty much sums up everything I've loved about reading Saki . . . most of his stories are about that funny (of course, that particular story, "The Stampeding of Lady Bastable," has some good build-up and concluding remarks, but you get the gist . . .). But there's more to Saki and his writing than just the really funny stuff, as I hope to show in the rest of this post.

Now, a coupla weeks back I had just finished reading "When William Came" by Saki. Published early in 1914, it is basically a rather searing, pro-war indictment of England's general state of being. It is set in the not-too-distant future (as of publication date, of course) and it is an account of what happens after Germany has successfully defeated the British Navy and invaded and occupied England. Very interesting, being pre-WWI and all that . . .

I had my eye on a particular passage, near the end of the book, that I wanted to be sure and quote here. The main character is riding a train out into the country and he is joined by a Hungarian. The character (Yeovil, an Englishman) pretends to be from Russia in order to hear the Hungarian speak his mind on what he thinks of the current state of affairs.

A few excerpts:

In religion they had come to look on the Christ as a sort of amiable elder Brother, whose letters from abroad were worth reading. Then, when they had emptied all the divine mystery and wonder out of their faith naturally they grew tired of it . . . but they were not virile enough to become real Pagans; their dancing fauns were good young men who tripped Morris dances and ate health foods and believed in a sort of Socialism which made for the greatest dullness of the greatest number . . .

They grew soft in their political ideas. For the old insular belief that all foreigners were devils and rogues they substituted another belief, equally grounded on insular lack of knowledge, that most foreigners were amiable, good fellows, who only needed to be talked to and patted on the back to become your friends and benefactors . . . Ah, the British lion was in a hurry to inaugurate the Millennium and to lie down gracefully with the lamb. He made two mistakes, only two, but they were very bad ones; the Millennium hadn't arrived, and it was not a lamb that he was lying down with.

The Hungarian gets off at the next station and he is replaced by an Englishman who is glad to hear that our hero is also English. He doesn't like travelling with foreigners. They begin to discuss the current state of affairs, and the new arrival expresses nothing but mindless optimism . . . He is certain that England can rebuild their army and navy and get Germany out of the country.

This is nonsense, of course, and Yeovil tells him so. As much as Yeovil would like for this to be true, he sees the depressing reality of the situation, and he expresses this in no uncertain terms to the other man.

"Here's my station and I'm not sorry," said the fisherman, gathering his tackle together and rising to depart; "I've listened to you long enough. You and me wouldn't agree, not if we was to talk all day. Fact is, I'm an out-and-out patriot and you're only a half-hearted one. That's what you are, half-hearted."

And with that parting shot he left the carriage and lounged heavily down the platform, a patriot who had never handled a rifle or mounted a horse or pulled an oar, but who had never flinched from demolishing his country's enemies with his tongue.

"England has never had any lack of patriots of that type," thought Yeovil sadly; "So many patriots and so little patriotism."

I feel like this from time to time . . . and I suspect that if I was more vocal about what I thought sometimes, I'd feel even more beat-down by all the blasted, rabid patriots running about with stars (and stripes) in their eyes.

Anyway, I've quoted Saki on occasion during the course of my reading of his complete works. He picked up the mantle of dry, witty social commentary dropped by Oscar Wilde (publishing his first collection of short stories in 1902).

When WWI started, although he was overage, he joined the army . . . For some reason, he turned down a commission, enlisting as an ordinary soldier. He was killed in France, by a sniper, in late 1916.

Dreadful waste.

At least, however, we had Wodehouse on hand to step into the role . . . and he proceeded to fill it for the next three decades or so. No single volume collections of his complete works, let me tell you this. But I'll be readin' 'em as I happen upon 'em.

Anyway, back to Saki . . . I think that the difference between him and Wilde or Wodehouse is the razor-sharp edge that he seems to have developed over the course of his writing. His earliest collections of short stories show a kind of good-natured tolerance of the quirky existence led by the upper-crust of society. However, as time goes on, the stories get a good bit darker, and a great deal more vindictive.

His foolish characters are quite likely, at any given moment, to be devoured by wolves or to drown after falling through a patch of thin ice (for instance). One hapless woman is savaged to death in her own shed by a mad weasel. Another particularly amusing (though gruesome) episode has "Suffragetae" of Ancient Rome being torn apart by an arena full of dozens of ravenous wild beasts. His protagonists gradually shift from dryly dropping cute, witty one-liners (of the Wilde variety) while nibbling at muffins to staring seriously off into space and delivering solemn (albeit unconventional) speeches on the meaning of life and death. His antagonists go from being offended to being offed.

His novel, "The Unbearable Bassington," (1912) shows this shift in microcosm. The entire beginning is fairly light-hearted and includes all of the usual elements. Comus Bassington is Saki's typical Clovis/Reginald character, hopping in and out of amusing scrapes with sickening ease and generally causing his mother and uncle grief within their snooty social circle. But he has to get himself a rich wife, because he is one of those leeches who will never really be able to support himself and he hasn't got a large family fortune holding him up . . . but when he blows that, his mother (Francesca) exiles him to a colonial post in deepest darkest Africa.

His going-away party is one of the most dreary scenes I've ever read, full of dark foreshadowing omens hinting that he will never return from Africa alive. In the very next scene, we find him there, grimly contemplating his fate:

It was almost a relief to turn back to that other outlook and watch the village life that was now beginning to wake in earnest. The procession of water-fetchers had formed itself in a long chattering line that stretched river-wards. Comus wondered how many tens of thousands of times that procession had been formed since first the village came into existence. They had been doing it while he was playing in the cricket-fields at school, while he was spending Christmas holidays in Paris, while he was going his careless round of theatres, dances, suppers and card-parties, just as they were doing it now; they would be doing it when there was no one alive who remembered Comus Bassington. This thought recurred again and again with painful persistence, a morbid growth arising in part from his loneliness.

Staring dumbly out at the toiling sweltering human ant-hill Comus marvelled how missionary enthusiasts could labour hopefully at the work of transplanting their religion, with its homegrown accretions of fatherly parochial benevolence, in this heat-blistered, fever-scourged wilderness, where men lived like groundbait and died like flies. Demons one might believe in, if one did not hold one's imagination in healthy check, but a kindly all-managing God, never. Somewhere in the west country of England Comus had an uncle who lived in a rose-smothered rectory and taught a wholesome gentle-hearted creed that expressed itself in the spirit of "Little lamb, who made thee?" and faithfully reflected the beautiful homely Christ-child sentiment of Saxon Europe. What a far away, unreal fairy story it all seemed here in this West African land, where the bodies of men were of as little account as the bubbles that floated on the oily froth of the great flowing river, and where it required a stretch of wild profitless imagination to credit them with undying souls. In the life he had come from Comus had been accustomed to think of individuals as definite masterful
personalities, making their several marks on the circumstances that revolved around them; they did well or ill, or in most cases indifferently, and were criticised, praised, blamed, thwarted or tolerated, or given way to. In any case, humdrum or outstanding, they had their spheres of importance, little or big. They dominated a breakfast table or harassed a Government, according to
their capabilities or opportunities, or perhaps they merely had irritating mannerisms. At any rate it seemed highly probable that they had souls. Here a man simply made a unit in an unnumbered population, an inconsequent dot in a loosely-compiled deathroll. Even his own position as a white man exalted conspicuously above a horde of black natives did not save Comus from the depressing sense of nothingness which his first experience of fever had thrown over him. He was a lost, soulless body in this great uncaring land; if he died another would take his place, his few effects would be inventoried and sent down to the coast, someone else would finish off any tea or whisky that he left behind--that would be all.

He sees some African children playing outside . . .

Those wild young human kittens represented the joy of life, he was the outsider, the lonely alien, watching something in which he could not join, a happiness in which he had no part or lot. He would pass presently out of the village and his bearers' feet would leave their indentations in the dust; that would be his most permanent memorial in this little oasis of teeming life. And that other life, in which he once moved with such confident sense of his own necessary participation in it, how completely he had passed out of it. Amid all its laughing throngs, its card parties and race-meetings and country-house gatherings, he was just a mere name, remembered or forgotten, Comus Bassington, the boy who went away. He had loved himself very well and never troubled greatly whether anyone else really loved him, and now he realised what he had made of his life. And at the same time he knew that if his chance were to come again he would throw it away just as surely, just as perversely. Fate played with him with loaded dice; he would lose always.

One person in the whole world had cared for him [his mother], for longer than he could remember, cared for him perhaps more than he knew, cared for him perhaps now. But a wall of ice had mounted up between him and her, and across it there blew that cold-breath that chills or kills affection.

The words of a well-known old song, the wistful cry of a lost cause, rang with insistent mockery through his brain:

"Better loved you canna be,
Will ye ne'er come back again?"

If it was love that was to bring him back he must be an exile for ever. His epitaph in the mouths of those that remembered him would be, Comus Bassington, the boy who never came back.

And in his unutterable loneliness he bowed his head on his arms, that he might not see the joyous scrambling frolic on yonder hillside.

The next chapter is the last chapter and his mother receives a telegram which she knows will inform her of his death. She puts off opening it, hoping to delay the news a little while longer (he is still alive so long as she does not know he is dead). Her brother comes in to deliver some bad news of a relatively trivial nature and mistakes her anguished expression, prattling on and on in an attempt to cheer her up.

Francesca sat in stricken silence, crushing the folded morsel of paper tightly in her hand and wondering if the thin, cheerful voice with its pitiless, ghastly mockery of consolation would never stop.

And that's the end of the book. Dismal stuff.

From what I can gather after reading all of his writings, I would say this: Saki was a fairly cynical individual, but he was also an idealist and his intellect was offended more and more by what he saw of both the social and the political atmosphere of England as he got older. He knew that the world was changing very drastically and he was frustrated by two large segments of the population: 1) Those who were stagnating in the past, refusing to let go of the old ways even though the results of holding on were potentially disastrous. 2) Those who were stupidly happy about a forthcoming "modern age" and were ready to welcome it in for all the wrong reasons and banish the past entirely without learning anything from it. As you can imagine, this accounted for a rather large percentage of the population . . .

There's a deeper sense of melancholia buried in there somewhere as well, and I don't know where it comes from. I suspect that he . . . well:

"The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think."
-Horace Walpole

That about sums it up, really. Anyway . . .

Here's to a great author who died before his time . . .

*raises glass of Japanese rice wine*

Posted by Jared at June 8, 2004 05:35 PM | TrackBack