SAKI

Pseudonym for Hector Hugh Munro. Nationality: Scottish. Born: Akyab, Burma, of British parents, 18 December 1870; grew up in Pilton, Devon. Education: Pencarwick school, Exmouth, Devon; Bedford Grammar School, 1885-87; traveled with his father in Europe, 1887-90; tutored at home, 1891-92. Military Service: Served as a corporal in the 22nd Royal Fusiliers, 1914-16: killed in action in France, 1916. Career: Military policeman in Burma, 1893-94; returned to Devon, and moved to London, 1896; wrote political satires for the Westminster Gazette from 1900; foreign correspondent, London Morning Post, in the Balkans, 1902; foreign correspondent, Warsaw and St. Petersburg, 1904-06; foreign correspondent, Paris, 1906-08; freelance sketch writer from 1908; parliamentary columnist, Outlook, 1914. Died: 14 November 1916.

Publications

Collections

Works. 8 vols., 1926-27.

Short Stories. 1930.

The Novels and Plays. 1933.

The Bodley Head Saki, edited by J. W. Lambert. 1963.

The Complete Works. 1976.

Selected Stories. 1978.

Selected Stories 2, edited by Peter Haining. 1983.

The Complete Stories of Saki. 1993.

Short Stories and Sketches

Reginald. 1904.

Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches. 1910.

The Chronicles of Clovis. 1912.

Beasts and Super-Beasts. 1914.

The Toys of Peace and Other Papers. 1919.

The Square Egg and Other Sketches, with Three Plays. 1924.

The Stalled Ox and Other Stories. 1993.

Novels

The Unbearable Bassington. 1912.

When William Came: A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns. 1914.

Plays

The East Wing, in Lucas' Annual, 1914.

The Watched Pot, with Cyril Maude (produced 1924). In The Square Egg, 1924.

The Death Trap, and Karl-Ludwig's Window, in The Square Egg. 1924.

The Miracle-Merchant, in One-Act Plays for Stage and Study 8, edited by Alice Gerstenberg. 1934.

Other

The Rise of the Russian Empire. 1900.

The Westminster Alice. 1902.

Tobermory. 1994.

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Critical Studies:

The Satire of Saki by G.J. Spears, 1963; "The Performing Lynx" by V. S. Pritchett, in The Working Novelist, 1965; Munro (Saki) by Charles H. Gillen, 1969; Saki: A Life of Munro, with Six Stories Never Before Collected by A. J. Langguth, 1981.

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H. H. Munro was born in 1870 in Burma, where his father was a senior official in the Burma Police. Young Munro was sent back to England and brought up in Devonshire. He began writing political sketches for the Westminster Gazette and traveled in the Balkans, Russia, and France as a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post. Many of his short stories first appeared in the Westminster Gazette under the pseudonym "Saki," which he took from the last stanza of Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát. In all, Saki published five collections of short stories and also wrote three novels and several plays.

Saki's two most famous stories are "Sredni Vashtar"—sometimes regarded as an example of almost the perfect short story—and "Tobermory," both from his collection The Chronicles of Clovis. "This gifted Lynx," as V. S. Pritchett called him (in The Working Novelist) was part of the sadistic revival in English comic and satirical writing that arose during the final decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. He belonged to the world in which Wilde flourished, the world of Hilaire Belloc's A Bad Child's Book of Beasts and Harry Graham's Ruthless Rhymes.

The stories in the first two collections, Reginald and Reginald in Russia, positively cascade sardonic aphorisms, some of which were clearly inspired by Wilde. As Pritchett observed, the characters are "done in cyanide," though "the deed is touched by a child's sympathy for the vulnerable areas of the large mammals." Or, as Walter Allen puts it, in Saki's stories the real world is "ever so slightly rearranged."

The unreal social world of Mrs. Jollett, the Bromly Bomefields, Bassington, the Baroness, and Clovis Sangrail was blown to pieces by the guns in Flanders. It is as impossible to imagine the writings of a postwar Saki as it is the music of an elderly Mozart. The escapades of Saki's characters belong to an age where relationships are both superficial and artificial. Only the verbal wit survives.

"Tobermory" affords the author a brilliant device for unmasking hypocrisy. A guest at Lady Blemly's house party, Mr. Cornelius Appin, has been invited because someone has said he was clever. For 17 years he had been working on thousands of animals trying to get them to speak. At last he had succeeded with the cat Tobermory, who is brought before the company to be tested. To the consternation of all, the cat's answers to patronizing questions strip away the conventional pretenses of its questioners. Major Barfield tries to return the conversation to cat matters, asking Tobermory, "How about your carryings-on with the tortoise-shell puss up at the stables, eh?"

They agree that Tobermory would have to be disposed of, and attempts are made to induce it to eat poisoned food. The cat did, indeed, die, but in a cat-like manner: "From the bites in its throat and the yellow fur which coated his claws it was evident that he had fallen in unequal combat with the big Tom from the Rectory."

Saki's prose is crisp and economical, his debunking of human snobbery and upper class fatuity merciless, his wit sharp and seemingly inexhaustible. His gifts are displayed to their best advantage in his short stories, where what today we would call his "black" humor can be employed in a more deadly precise manner than in the more extended compass of his novels. Within his limitations the sharp-eyed chronicler of upper-class English society foibles of behavior in late Victorian and Edwardian times was undoubtedly a master of the short story, if an amusingly mannered master.

—Maurice Lindsay

See the essays on "The She-Wolf" and "Sredni Vashtar."