Hector Hugh Munro was born in Burma in 1870 to an official of the British Raj. Aged 23 he followed his father into the Burmese police, which he stuck at for two years before getting ill and chucking it in the 1890s. He returned to London to scrape a living by journalism and began writing comic sketches about an Oscar Wilde-style aesthete and provocateur, named Reginald, using the pen name ‘Saki’. These sketches were published in a short book titled Reginald in 1904. By this time Munro was working as a foreign correspondent for several London newspapers, a job which took him to the Balkans, Warsaw, Russia and Paris, before he returned to London to concentrate on being a writer.
The result was this, his second volume of short stories, Reginald In Russia, collected & published in 1910. Only the first story actually features Reginald – maybe the title was chosen to lure in fans of the first book – but it’s not just that: the whole feel of the stories is different. Whereas the original Reginald pieces were little more than comic monologues and all centred on the eponymous languid aesthete, the stories in RiR a) really are stories b) feature a wide cast of characters.
Above all, they mark the arrival of the macabre in Saki’s work. Some truly gruesome incidents take place, and the humour – or the effect – derives from the dead-pan, upper-class sang-froid with which they’re described.
Reginald in Russia
1. Reginald in Russia
Reginald in witty conversation with i.e. making sardonic remarks at the expense of, a Russian princess.
‘I always refused to learn Russian geography at school,’ observed Reginald; ‘I was certain some of the names must be wrong.’
2. The Reticence of Lady Anne
The timid Egbert tiptoes into the dining room at tea-time as the light is fading and makes numerous apologies to his wife for their argument at lunch-time. She sits frigid and silent, until, humiliated by her refusal to respond, he tiptoes out.
To get the worst of an argument with her was no new experience. To get the worst of a monologue was a humiliating novelty.
At which point the narrator reveals that Egbert’s wife is, in fact, dead. (Without a big deal being made of the fact, we realise that this is the first of Saki’s stories which does not feature the egregious Reginald. We are out and about in the wider world now, although, admittedly, still very much in the circumscribed world of the English upper classes.)
3. The Lost Sanjak
The prison chaplain hears the confession of a hanged man who swears it wasn’t him and tells his story. He is an educated man who made a pass at the chemist’s wife who spurned him and asked him to disappear from her life. On the way back from her house he came across the body of a Salvation Army officer who had been brutally murdered, and it occurred to him he could swap identities, dressing the corpse in his clothes, and thus ‘disappearing’ from his beloved’s life. He does so, changing into the Sally Army man’s outfit, only for it to become clear that the dead man was not, as he thought, the victim of a traffic accident, but had been brutally bludgeoned, smashing in his head.
What happens now is that, finding the corpse wearing his clothes they think that he, the narrator of the tale, has been murdered and witnesses report a shifty-looking Salvation Army officer leaving the scene of the crime. And so he, the narrator of the story, becomes accused of his own murder and the target of a nationwide murder hunt, finally being caught by bloodhounds and convicted of his own murder.
A well-educated man and something of an expert on the Balkans, he is asked at his trial, as a trst of his knowledge, to prove he really is who he claims he is, to specify the location of Novibazar and, in his fluster, says Baker Street. And so he was hanged – for a mistake in geography.
Although it has a few spasms of Reginaldesque wit:
With considerable difficulty I undressed the corpse, and clothed it anew in my own garments. Any one who has valeted a dead Salvation Army captain in an uncertain light will appreciate the difficulty.
… this story is clearly quite a departure from Reginald territory in that it is mostly fairly serious and at its heart is an act of gruesome violence.
4. The Sex that Doesn’t Shop
A Reginald-style frivolous essay about women’s peculiar dilatoriness when it comes to shopping, for example always managing to run out of household necessities at just the vital moment, refusing to shop at the nearest store but always fetishising the most distant ones. He tells the anecdote of a friend named Agatha who prevented him from buying perfectly good blotting paper at a nearby shop and insisted he accompany her to a place where ‘they know me’, that being the prime consideration, more than convenience or price.
5. The Blood-Feud of Toad-Water
So-so story about a country feud between Mrs Crick who keeps hens and Mrs Saunders who keeps a vegetable patch, after one of the Crick hens gets in among the onion seedlings. It is told in Saki’s characteristic sardonic and ironic style, but is a definite departure from metropolitan high society.
6. A Young-Turkish Catastrophe
The Turkish Minister For Fine Arts visits the Grand Vizier and persuades him to give women the vote. The progressive Young Turkish party will approve. Later, when the election is called, in one particular region the local candidate is ahead by 300 votes – until his rival, Ali the Blest, turns up with his 600 wives!
I think the point is meant to be that so-called progressive politicians will be undone by their own policies. It is the first of several jibes against the suffragettes in Saki’s oeuvre. And it is topical:
The Young Turks was a political reform movement in the early 20th century that favoured the replacement of the Ottoman Empire’s absolute monarchy with a constitutional government. They led a rebellion against the absolute rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II in the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. (Wikipedia)
7. Judkin of the Parcels
Not a story at all, a rather depressing portrait of a homely man who the narrator sees trudging down his local rural lanes, carrying parcels, and later digging up the roots of a tree. The narrator fantasises about his gilded youth, adventures in Imperial provinces under the stars but how life for old Judkin has now dwindled to rural tedium. It’s elegantly written but… well… sad.
8. Gabriel-Ernest
Cunningham remarks after a weekend stay with his friend Van Cheel that there is a beast in his woods. Next day, out walking, Van Cheele comes across a naked 16 year-old boy sunning himself by the waterfall. The boy is cheeky and slips into the water with an uncanny slinkiness. Next day Van Cheele finds the boy, again naked, in his morning room. His aunt wanders in and is much taken with the poor waif, and bathes and dresses him and whimsically names him Gabriel-Ernest.
The boy’s wildness, uncanny air and tasteless remarks about man-flesh disconcert Van Cheele so much he takes a train to visit Cunningham and ask him just what did his remark about a beast mean? Cunningham replies that he saw a boy lazing on a hillside at dusk and, just as the sun set, he transformed into a wolf! At this revelation, Van Cheele realises the boy is alone in his house with his aunt!!
Van Cheele runs out of the room, catches the next train home, rushes out the station and into a taxi, gets home to find… his aunt is perfectly alright, phew! But where is the boy? Walking one of the many local toddlers home, she replies. Without waiting, Van Cheele dashes back out the house and down the country lane but, as the sun sets, he hears a blood-curdling scream of terror.
Neither Gabriel-Ernest nor the toddler are ever found, though the former’s clothes are found in a pile by the mill stream. The locals assume the little toddler fell in the stream and Gabriel-Ernest stripped and jumped in to rescue him. Van Cheele knows better but tells no-one. The Saki note comes right at the very end:
Van Cheele gave way to his aunt in most things, but he flatly refused to subscribe to the Gabriel-Ernest memorial.
It is as if Oscar Wilde has been crossed with Bram Stoker. There is the genuinely macabre and horrific – but rounded off with the cheeky insouciance of Reginald.
9. The Saint and the Goblin
A kind of fable, slightly like Wilde’s fairy stories, of two neighbours in a medieval cathedral, a stone saint and a carved goblin. They have opposite philosophies: the saint thinks the world is bad and he ought to do something about it; the goblin thinks the world is bad and should be left to its own devices. Both of them use the church mice as an example. The church mice are poor and the saint thinks something should be done about them, whereas the goblin thinks it is their function to be poor in a world which can never be changed or improved.
When a jackdaw drops a silver thaler near the saint he tells the goblin he is going to send the verger’s wife a dream to instruct her to a) find the coin and b) spend it on corn to place on his altar which the mice can eat.
Part one of the dream works and the vergeress finds the silver coin, but all she does is tie it round the neck of the carved saint as an offering. Thus the carved saint’s noble aim of improving the lot of the poor mice is defeated. A Conservative fable?
10. The Soul of Laploshka
Laploshka is a famous miser who sponges off those richer than him. Meanly, the narrator has dinner with him but is then called away on an appointment and yells back for Laploshka to pay the bill. He does so with terrible grace but next day tracks down the narrator for the owed two francs, but the narrator cheerily says he’ll have to owe it since he has no ready cash and is going away for six months.
That night Laploshka dies of a heart attack. The narrator has the whimsical indifference of Reginald, but feels he still owes the 2 francs: should he give it to the poor? In church he drops it in the collection bag ‘for the poor’. But a few days later he is struck to see the ghost of Laploshka in a restaurant near him. From then on, for weeks, Laploshka’s ghost mournfully follows him.
Eventually the narrator realises he should have given the 2 francs to the deserving rich. In another church in Paris he comes across Baron R, one of the richest men in the city, pretends to be an American and asks naive questions about the place and, at the end of the tour, gratefully gives the rich man the 2 francs. Exiting, he sees Laploshka’s ghost tip his hat to him, and then disappear.
Saki’s humorous similes, the comic comparisons and insights which more or less made up the Reginald stories, are now much rarer and deployed with more restraint among the more mundane matter of the plot. It is the plot which acts out the sardonic mentality previously conveyed by dialogue alone. But there are still witty mots:
Laploshka said nothing, but his eyes bulged a little and his cheeks took on the mottled hues of an ethnographical map of the Balkan Peninsula.
Note the highly topical reference to the Balkans which were just about to undergo another spasm of wars.
11. The Bag
A Russian boy, Vladimir, aged 19, is staying with a posh landed family, the Hoopingtons, namely Mrs Hoopington and her niece Norah. The local Major is having the devil of a time keeping the local fox hunt going, what with foxes getting scarcer and people fencing off their property.
Vladimir comes home from a shoot with a full bag and, from his description of having bagged a reddish furry animal that hides among trees and eats vermin, Norah is horrified – Vladimir must have shot a fox, one of the ever-dwindling band of foxes which Major Pallaby is always complaining about !
They hear the Major and Mrs Hoopington coming into the dining room and chuck the bag onto the top of a dresser but the strap catches on an antler and the wretched bag hangs there, just above the alcove in which the foursome settle down for tea.
But then the Major’s dog starts barking and then leaping up to get the bag, the elders ask what the devil’s in it, Norah confesses it’s got one of the rare foxes in it, and the Major bursts into a fury, phones the head of the hunt and resigns, casts insults in every direction and storms out.
Vladimir is shamefacedly sent with his bag to the woods, where he buries – a polecat! Not a fox at all. Norah made a mistake, all the rest is comic over-reaction.
12. The Strategist
A party of children are invited to Mrs Jallatt’s. Rollo is outnumbered by his horrible cousins, the Wrotsleys, and so he tries to use strategy to avoid being beaten up by the bullies. And they really are little brutes: on their first visit to the library to confer on the word for charades the Wrotsleys hold him down and horsewhip him for a minute. The girls in the party call for another word and Rollo is taken back out and subjected to whipping with a whalebone riding switch. The other focus of the story is malicious, fat Agnes who will do anything to lay her hands on food, her personality described at repellent length.
All the time Mrs Jallatt is thinking her little charges are having a lovely time. In other words it is a story about what utter, untamed beasts and greedy sadists children are. Reminiscent of the deliberate sadism in Kipling’s stories about children, for example the entire Stalky and Co series.
13. Cross Currents
Quite a complex tale of the snobbish Vanessa Pennington who is married to a worthy but poor man, but worshipped by an adventurer, Clyde, much given to travelling the wastes of Asia.
When the husband dies and Clyde eventually hears about it in the wastes of Asia, he invites Vanessa to join him in the back of beyond, but she doesn’t take to it:
- Vanessa was well enough educated to know that all dusky-skinned people take human life as unconcernedly as Bayswater folk take singing lessons.
- It was one thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its virtue when one practised it in a tent.
It all turns out to be very boring for a girl and she ends up running off with another man, Dobrinton, who is actually half-Russian. Alas, they are captured and held to ransom by Kurdish bandits. Clyde not very enthusiastically follows on their trail and he too is captured.
Stuck in a hut and under guard they are not a happy trio, till Clyde escapes, the other two are ransomed by their governments, Dobrinto is bitten by a rabid dog and dies of fright, and Vanessa limps back to London very relieved to get a job in a hotel restaurant. Still, it’s in quite a fashionable address, so things have turned out alright, really.
Once again, the humour is in the plot more than the witticisms, though there are plenty of one-liners. More interesting, maybe, is the setting and the fact that the kidnapping requires the various governments to ransom their citizens i.e. the inclusion of diplomacy as a subject, something which Munro knew about because of his extended stays as a journalist in Russia and environs.
14. The Baker’s Dozen (A Playlet)
The Major and Mrs Carewe meet on an eastern steamer and declare that, their respective spouses being dead, they are free to pursue their love. Except that, when they stop to tot up their accumulated children they find they have 13 (!). It would be dreadfully unlucky to marry and have thirteen children! Maybe they can get rid of one.
Just then an acquaintance, Mrs Paly-Paget, comes by. She only has the one little girl so the Major tries to interest her in adopting a few others for her to play with. Mrs P-P is shocked and storms off. Is there no hope? But then the Major counts again and realises he only has four children. They are saved!
At one point they are discussing whether any of the boys, with a bit of luck, might turn out completely depraved so they can disown him and bring the numbers down:
Emily: There’s always a chance that one of them might turn out depraved and vicious, and then you could disown him. I’ve heard of that being done.
Major: But, good gracious, you’ve got to educate him first. You can’t expect a boy to be vicious till he’s been to a good school.
15. The Mouse
Theoderic Voler is nervous and shy and is returning by train from a visit to a country vicarage where he had the indignity of having to help harness the pony the trap himself, in a mouse-ridden stable, when he realises a stray mouse has got into his clothing.
He is in a railway carriage with no corridor and one other inhabitant, a young lady who is, mercifully, asleep. Nervously, Theoderic pins up a rug to the overhead baggage compartment and is halfway through stripping off to get at the mouse when the rug falls down with a bang and wakes the young lady.
Almost hysterical with embarrassment, Theoderic grabs the rug up to his neck and spends the next half hour in an agony of embarrassment at his predicament, which gets worse as they approach London and he realises a whole station full of onlookers will at some point see him en deshabillé. So he plucks up his guts to do the bravest thing in his life, drops the rug and hastily gets dressed in front of the young lady, stuttering and fumbling and red with embarrassment.
It is only as the train arrives at the station that the young lady says would he mind helping her; it always makes her feel so helpless at railway stations – being blind! So it’s a comedy, but with a bitter twist.
Commentary
By the last of these stories we have come a long, long way from Reginald’s sub-Wildean epigrams, into much more varied territory.
What had been carefully dealt out one-liners in the Reginald stories have now expanded to become actual plots. The irony and paradox which were once embodied in witty sentences has been expanded into ironic and paradoxical storylines.
Some are silly drawing room comedies such as A Baker’s Dozen. But the memorable ones tend to be those with a touch of the macabre, the one in which the husband talks to Lady Anne for half and hour then storms out without realising she’s dead. And of course Gabriel-Ernest sticks out, as the most shockingly gruesome.
The odd thing is the way Saki’s dryly, super-sophisticated, ironic tone allows you to accept anything: yes, the boy is a werewolf, yes, they were captured by Kurdish bandits, yes, the Edwardian couple are so upset by the thought of having 13 children that they start planning trying to get rid of one. You have entered a world of malicious fairy tales.
But not all of them. As a collection it’s a mixed bag, some harking back to the monologues of Reginald, such as the superficial essay about women shopping, some feel like experiments in trying out unusual subject matter, like Judkin and The Water-Feud and The Bag, not coincidentally all set in the country.
But rearing up among them is a new tone of voice, vivid experiments with shock and bewildered amusement – Gabriel-Ernest and The Mouse. These point towards the finished ‘Saki’ effect.
Witticisms
Reginald sat in a corner of the Princess’s salon and tried to forgive the furniture, which started out with an obvious intention of being Louis Quinze, but relapsed at frequent intervals into Wilhelm II.
The Princess always defended a friend’s complexion if it was really bad. With her, as with a great many of her sex, charity began at homeliness and did not generally progress much farther.
‘I hope you will come and see me again,’ she said, in a tone that prevented the hope from becoming too infectious…
He could sing ‘Yip-I-Addy’ and spoke of several duchesses as if he knew them – in his more inspired moments almost as if they knew him.
Related links
Saki’s works
- Reginald (1904)
- Reginald in Russia, and other sketches (1910)
- The Chronicles of Clovis (1911)
- The Unbearable Bassington (novel) (1912)
- When William Came (novel) (1913)
- Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914)
- The Toys of Peace (1919)
- The Square Egg and Other Sketches (1924)
Books & Boots 
Praveen Narayanan
/ June 23, 2021Marvelous. One can see how saki might have influenced Wodehouse or the rather violent tom Sharpe.