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On November 14, 1916 Saki, British writer, died. From the article:
"Saki
Hector Hugh Munro (December 18, 1870 – November 14, 1916), better known by the pen name Saki, was a British writer, whose witty and sometimes macabre stories satirized Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story and is often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. His tales feature delicately drawn characters and finely judged narratives. "The Open Window" may be his most famous, with a closing line ("Romance at short notice was her speciality") that has entered the lexicon.
In addition to his short stories (which were first published in newspapers, as was the custom of the time, and then collected into several volumes) he also wrote a full-length play, The Watched Pot, in collaboration with Charles Maude; two one-act plays; a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire, the only book published under his own name; a short novel, The Unbearable Bassington; the episodic The Westminster Alice (a Parliamentary parody of Alice in Wonderland), and When William Came, subtitled A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, an early alternative history. He was influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, and Kipling, and himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward, and P. G. Wodehouse
Name
The name Saki is often thought to be a reference to the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, a poem mentioned disparagingly by the eponymous character in "Reginald on Christmas Presents" and alluded to in a few other stories. It may, however, be a reference to the South American primate of the same name, "a small, long-tailed monkey from the Western Hemisphere" that is a central character in "The Remoulding of Groby Lington" and that, like Munro himself, hid a vicious streak beneath a gentle exterior.
Biography
H. H. Munro was born in Akyab, Burma (now known as Sittwe, Myanmar), the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an inspector-general for the Burmese police when that country was still part of the British Empire. His mother, the former Mary Frances Mercer, died in 1872, killed, essentially, by a runaway cow. It charged at her and the shock caused her to miscarry. She never recovered and soon died[2]. It was an incident that may have influenced the sometimes deadly animals of Saki's later stories. He was brought up in England with his brother and sister by his grandmother and aunts in a straitlaced household whose comic side he appreciated only later in life. He used the severity of these domestic arrangements in many stories, notably "Sredni Vashtar", in which a young boy keeps a pet polecat ferret without the knowledge of his spiteful and domineering female guardian who is eventually killed by the animal, to the boy's great satisfaction.
Munro was educated at Pencarwick School in Exmouth and at Bedford Grammar School. When his father retired to England, he travelled on a few occasions with his sister and father between European watering holes (fashionable society drinking venues) and tourist resorts. In 1893 he followed in his father's footsteps by joining the Indian Imperial Police, where he was posted to Burma (as, coincidentally, was another acerbic and pseudonymous writer a generation later: George Orwell}. Two years later, failing health forced his resignation and return to England, where he started his career as a journalist, writing for newspapers such as the Westminster Gazette, Daily Express, Bystander, Morning Post, and Outlook.
In 1900 Munro's first book appeared: The Rise of the Russian Empire, a historical study modelled upon Edward Gibbon's magnum opus The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
From 1902 to 1908 Munro worked as a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post in the Balkans, Warsaw, Russia (where he witnessed Bloody Sunday), and Paris; he then gave that up and settled in London. Many of the stories from this period feature the elegant and effete Reginald and Clovis, young men-about-town who take heartlessly cruel delight in the discomfort or downfall of their conventional, pretentious elders. In addition to his well-known short stories, Saki also turned his talents for fiction into novels. Shortly before the Great War, with the genre of invasion literature selling well, he published a "what-if" novel, When William Came, subtitled "A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns", imagining the eponymous German emperor conquering Britain.
At the start of World War I, although 43 and officially over age, Munro joined the Army as an ordinary soldier, refusing a commission. More than once he returned to the battlefield when officially still too sick or injured to fight. He was sheltering in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France in November 1916 when he was killed by a German sniper. His last words, according to several sources, were "Put that damned cigarette out!" After his death, his sister Ethel destroyed most of his papers and wrote her own account of their childhood.
Munro never married. A. J. Langguth in his biography produces strong evidence to support the hypothesis that Munro was homosexual. Sexual activity between men was a crime, and the Cleveland Street scandal in 1889, followed by the downfall and disgrace of Oscar Wilde, convicted in 1895 after cause celebre trials, meant that "that side of [Munro's] life had to be secret".
In recognition of his contribution to literature, a blue plaque has been affixed to a building in which he once lived on Mortimer Street in central London. One of his social-climber young characters lived in a similar "roomlet which came under the auspicious constellation of W" [4] (i.e. within the postal district of the West End of London, where the fashionable set lived in Edwardian times).
Controversy
Some believe that Munro wrote misogynistic and anti-Semitic stories. See, for example, "The Unrest-Cure", in which Clovis perpetrates a hoax to the effect that the local bishop is going to massacre every Jew in the neighbourhood. Compared with such contemporaries as Belloc or Chesterton, Munro appears mild.
Rather than the blanket term 'misogyny', it might be more correct to say that he disliked and disapproved of childless women, probably from his own negative experience of growing up in the care of his strict aunts. Some stories give voice to his irritation with aspects of female psychology, such as the middle-class conventionality epitomised by the ceremony of afternoon tea, or the inability to shop efficiently. He was persistently and derisively anti-suffragette.
Despite his lampooning of suffragettes and aunts, several of his stories feature sympathetic portrayals of admirably cool and self-possessed schoolgirls. Others feature strong-willed, independent women in a positive manner. One of his best childhood friends was his sister Ethel, who also never married, and they remained close until his death - a sign of Munro's personal forbearance, as she had a powerful and difficult personality.
[edit] Short stories
Saki's world contrasts the effete conventions and hypocrisies of Edwardian England with the ruthless but straightforward life-and-death struggles of nature. Nature generally wins in the end.
Saki's work is now in the public domain, and all or most of these stories are on the Internet.
Some of his best-known short stories are listed below.
"The Interlopers"
"The Interlopers" is a story of two men, Georg Znaeym and Ulrich von Gradwitz, whose families have fought over a forest in the eastern Carpathian Mountains for generations. Ulrich's family legally owns the land, but Georg – feeling it truly belongs to him – hunts there anyway. One winter night, Ulrich catches Georg hunting in his forest. The two would never shoot without warning and soil their family’s honor, so they hesitate to acknowledge one another. As an “act of God,” a tree branch suddenly falls on them, trapping the men next to each other under the log. Gradually, they realize the futility of their quarrel and become friends to end the family feud. They call out for their men’s assistance, and after a brief period, Ulrich makes out ten figures approaching over a hill. The story ends with Ulrich’s realization that the "interlopers" on the hill are actually wolves.
"The Schartz-Metterklume Method"
At a railway station, an arrogant and overbearing woman mistakes the mischievous Lady Carlotta for the governess she expected. Lady Carlotta, deciding not to correct the mistake, presents herself as a proponent of "the Schartz-Metterklume method" of making children understand history by acting it out themselves, and chooses a rather unsuitable historical episode for her first lesson.
"The Toys of Peace"
Rather than giving her young boys gifts of toy soldiers and guns, their mother instructs her brother to give the children "peace toys" as an Easter present. When the packages are opened, young Bertie shouts "It's a fort!" and is disappointed when his uncle replies "It's a municipal dust-bin". The boys are initially baffled as to how to obtain any enjoyment from models of a school of art and a public library, or from little toy figures of John Stuart Mill, poetess Felicia Hemans, and astronomer Sir John Herschel. Youthful inventiveness finds a way, however.
"The Storyteller"
"The Storyteller" is a cynical antidote to crude didacticism. An aunt is traveling by train with three of her nieces and nephews; a bachelor is sitting opposite. The aunt starts telling a story, but is unable to satisfy the curiosity of the children. The bachelor intervenes and tells a different kind of story which feeds their curiosity and imagination. The central character is unbearably good and in the end is devoured by a wolf, much to the delight of the bored children in the railway carriage.
"The Unrest-Cure"
Saki's recurring hero Clovis Sangrail, a sly young man, overhears the complacent middle-aged Huddle complaining of his own addiction to routine and aversion to change. Huddle's friend makes the wry suggestion of the need for an "unrest-cure" (the opposite of a rest cure) to be performed, if possible, in the home. Clovis takes it upon himself to "help" the man and his sister by involving them in an invented outrage that will be a "blot on the twentieth century".
"Esmé"
In a hunting story with a difference, the Baroness tells Clovis of a hyena she and her friend Constance encountered alone in the countryside, who cannot resist the urge to stop for a snack. The story is a perfect example of Saki's delight in setting societal convention against uncompromising nature.
The wailing accompaniment was explained. The gypsy child was firmly, and I expect painfully, held in his jaws.
The child is shortly devoured.
Constance shuddered. "Do you think the poor little thing suffered much?" came another of her futile questions.
"The indications were all that way,' I said; 'on the other hand, of course, it may have been crying from sheer temper. Children sometimes do."
"The Open Window"
A man with the unlikely name of Framton Nuttel comes to a country village for some peace and rest. He calls upon a lady his sister used to know; for a few minutes he is left alone with her niece, who has quite an active imagination. She tells Framton a story about the tragedy of the lady's husband and two younger brothers, who had gone hunting one day three years earlier and never returned. The bodies were never found, and because of this the window from which they left is always kept open. When indeed they do return that very night, Framton, who has suffered from nerves in the past, runs out of the house, and the niece explains his sudden departure to her relatives with an equally imaginative fiction.
"Sredni Vashtar"
The story of a young, sickly child, Conradin. His aunt, Mrs. De Ropp, "would never... have confessed to herself that she dislike Conradin, though she might have been dimly aware that thwarting him for 'his own good' was duty which she did not find particularly irksome." When she finds Conradin's beloved Houdan hen and pet polecat/ferret, which he reveres as "Sredni Vashtar", she calls the exterminator to get rid of the pets. On the morning of the dreaded visit, Mrs. DeRopp enters the shed in which the ferret lies in his hutch, in full view of Conradin. As the time slips by without a stirring from the shed, Conradin begins to pray to Sredni Vashtar — and receives his darkest wish.
"Tobermory"
At a country house party a visiting professor announces to the guests that he has perfected a procedure to teach animals human speech. He demonstrates this on his host's cat. Soon it is clear that he omitted to teach the animal to be silent about certain facts...
"The East Wing"
A 're-discovered' short story, previously cited as a play and therefore less well known. A house party with its typical social mix of bumbling Major Boventry, the precious Lucien Wattleskeat, the wordy Canon Clore and a breathless hostess, Mrs Gramplain, is beset by a fire in the middle of the night in the east wing of the house. Begged by their hostess to save "my poor darling Eva – Eva of the golden hair," Lucien demurs on the grounds that he has never even met her. It is only on discovering that Eva is not a flesh and blood daughter, but Mrs Gramplain's painting of the daughter that she wished that she had had and which she has faithfully updated with the passing years, that Lucien declares a willingness to forfeit his life to rescue her, since "death in this case is more beautiful," a sentiment endorsed by the Major. As the two men disappear into the blaze, Mrs Gramplain recollects that she "sent Eva to Exeter to be cleaned." Thus the two men have lost their lives for nothing. (Compare with Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.)
Quotes
From "Reginald on Besetting Sins":
The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went.
The stage, with all its efforts, can never be as artificial as life.
From "Reginald on the Academy":
"To have reached thirty," said Reginald, "is to have failed in life."
To die before being painted by Sargent is to go to Heaven prematurely.
From "The Jesting of Arlington Stringham":
Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the yearning of a woman who had no children of her own.
From "Reginald on Christmas Presents":
People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity; the religion that produced Green Chartreuse can never really die.
From "The Square Egg"- (In the short story; "Clovis On The Alleged Romance Of Business"):
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.
From "Reginald at the Carlton":
"Hors d'oeuvres have always had a pathetic interest for me," said Reginald, "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'oeuvres."
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened. It's only the middle-aged who are really conscious of their limitations — that is why one should be so patient with them. But one never is.
From "Reginald's Choir Treat":
I always say beauty is only sin deep.
From various other short stories:
""There are more ways of killing a cat than by choking it with cream,’ he quoted, ‘but I’m not sure,’ he added, ‘that it’s not the best way."
"Forbidden fizz is the sweetest."
He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
Addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts.
Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people.
Every reformation must have its victims. You can't expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal's return."
"Saki
Hector Hugh Munro (December 18, 1870 – November 14, 1916), better known by the pen name Saki, was a British writer, whose witty and sometimes macabre stories satirized Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story and is often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. His tales feature delicately drawn characters and finely judged narratives. "The Open Window" may be his most famous, with a closing line ("Romance at short notice was her speciality") that has entered the lexicon.
In addition to his short stories (which were first published in newspapers, as was the custom of the time, and then collected into several volumes) he also wrote a full-length play, The Watched Pot, in collaboration with Charles Maude; two one-act plays; a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire, the only book published under his own name; a short novel, The Unbearable Bassington; the episodic The Westminster Alice (a Parliamentary parody of Alice in Wonderland), and When William Came, subtitled A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, an early alternative history. He was influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, and Kipling, and himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward, and P. G. Wodehouse
Name
The name Saki is often thought to be a reference to the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, a poem mentioned disparagingly by the eponymous character in "Reginald on Christmas Presents" and alluded to in a few other stories. It may, however, be a reference to the South American primate of the same name, "a small, long-tailed monkey from the Western Hemisphere" that is a central character in "The Remoulding of Groby Lington" and that, like Munro himself, hid a vicious streak beneath a gentle exterior.
Biography
H. H. Munro was born in Akyab, Burma (now known as Sittwe, Myanmar), the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an inspector-general for the Burmese police when that country was still part of the British Empire. His mother, the former Mary Frances Mercer, died in 1872, killed, essentially, by a runaway cow. It charged at her and the shock caused her to miscarry. She never recovered and soon died[2]. It was an incident that may have influenced the sometimes deadly animals of Saki's later stories. He was brought up in England with his brother and sister by his grandmother and aunts in a straitlaced household whose comic side he appreciated only later in life. He used the severity of these domestic arrangements in many stories, notably "Sredni Vashtar", in which a young boy keeps a pet polecat ferret without the knowledge of his spiteful and domineering female guardian who is eventually killed by the animal, to the boy's great satisfaction.
Munro was educated at Pencarwick School in Exmouth and at Bedford Grammar School. When his father retired to England, he travelled on a few occasions with his sister and father between European watering holes (fashionable society drinking venues) and tourist resorts. In 1893 he followed in his father's footsteps by joining the Indian Imperial Police, where he was posted to Burma (as, coincidentally, was another acerbic and pseudonymous writer a generation later: George Orwell}. Two years later, failing health forced his resignation and return to England, where he started his career as a journalist, writing for newspapers such as the Westminster Gazette, Daily Express, Bystander, Morning Post, and Outlook.
In 1900 Munro's first book appeared: The Rise of the Russian Empire, a historical study modelled upon Edward Gibbon's magnum opus The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
From 1902 to 1908 Munro worked as a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post in the Balkans, Warsaw, Russia (where he witnessed Bloody Sunday), and Paris; he then gave that up and settled in London. Many of the stories from this period feature the elegant and effete Reginald and Clovis, young men-about-town who take heartlessly cruel delight in the discomfort or downfall of their conventional, pretentious elders. In addition to his well-known short stories, Saki also turned his talents for fiction into novels. Shortly before the Great War, with the genre of invasion literature selling well, he published a "what-if" novel, When William Came, subtitled "A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns", imagining the eponymous German emperor conquering Britain.
At the start of World War I, although 43 and officially over age, Munro joined the Army as an ordinary soldier, refusing a commission. More than once he returned to the battlefield when officially still too sick or injured to fight. He was sheltering in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France in November 1916 when he was killed by a German sniper. His last words, according to several sources, were "Put that damned cigarette out!" After his death, his sister Ethel destroyed most of his papers and wrote her own account of their childhood.
Munro never married. A. J. Langguth in his biography produces strong evidence to support the hypothesis that Munro was homosexual. Sexual activity between men was a crime, and the Cleveland Street scandal in 1889, followed by the downfall and disgrace of Oscar Wilde, convicted in 1895 after cause celebre trials, meant that "that side of [Munro's] life had to be secret".
In recognition of his contribution to literature, a blue plaque has been affixed to a building in which he once lived on Mortimer Street in central London. One of his social-climber young characters lived in a similar "roomlet which came under the auspicious constellation of W" [4] (i.e. within the postal district of the West End of London, where the fashionable set lived in Edwardian times).
Controversy
Some believe that Munro wrote misogynistic and anti-Semitic stories. See, for example, "The Unrest-Cure", in which Clovis perpetrates a hoax to the effect that the local bishop is going to massacre every Jew in the neighbourhood. Compared with such contemporaries as Belloc or Chesterton, Munro appears mild.
Rather than the blanket term 'misogyny', it might be more correct to say that he disliked and disapproved of childless women, probably from his own negative experience of growing up in the care of his strict aunts. Some stories give voice to his irritation with aspects of female psychology, such as the middle-class conventionality epitomised by the ceremony of afternoon tea, or the inability to shop efficiently. He was persistently and derisively anti-suffragette.
Despite his lampooning of suffragettes and aunts, several of his stories feature sympathetic portrayals of admirably cool and self-possessed schoolgirls. Others feature strong-willed, independent women in a positive manner. One of his best childhood friends was his sister Ethel, who also never married, and they remained close until his death - a sign of Munro's personal forbearance, as she had a powerful and difficult personality.
[edit] Short stories
Saki's world contrasts the effete conventions and hypocrisies of Edwardian England with the ruthless but straightforward life-and-death struggles of nature. Nature generally wins in the end.
Saki's work is now in the public domain, and all or most of these stories are on the Internet.
Some of his best-known short stories are listed below.
"The Interlopers"
"The Interlopers" is a story of two men, Georg Znaeym and Ulrich von Gradwitz, whose families have fought over a forest in the eastern Carpathian Mountains for generations. Ulrich's family legally owns the land, but Georg – feeling it truly belongs to him – hunts there anyway. One winter night, Ulrich catches Georg hunting in his forest. The two would never shoot without warning and soil their family’s honor, so they hesitate to acknowledge one another. As an “act of God,” a tree branch suddenly falls on them, trapping the men next to each other under the log. Gradually, they realize the futility of their quarrel and become friends to end the family feud. They call out for their men’s assistance, and after a brief period, Ulrich makes out ten figures approaching over a hill. The story ends with Ulrich’s realization that the "interlopers" on the hill are actually wolves.
"The Schartz-Metterklume Method"
At a railway station, an arrogant and overbearing woman mistakes the mischievous Lady Carlotta for the governess she expected. Lady Carlotta, deciding not to correct the mistake, presents herself as a proponent of "the Schartz-Metterklume method" of making children understand history by acting it out themselves, and chooses a rather unsuitable historical episode for her first lesson.
"The Toys of Peace"
Rather than giving her young boys gifts of toy soldiers and guns, their mother instructs her brother to give the children "peace toys" as an Easter present. When the packages are opened, young Bertie shouts "It's a fort!" and is disappointed when his uncle replies "It's a municipal dust-bin". The boys are initially baffled as to how to obtain any enjoyment from models of a school of art and a public library, or from little toy figures of John Stuart Mill, poetess Felicia Hemans, and astronomer Sir John Herschel. Youthful inventiveness finds a way, however.
"The Storyteller"
"The Storyteller" is a cynical antidote to crude didacticism. An aunt is traveling by train with three of her nieces and nephews; a bachelor is sitting opposite. The aunt starts telling a story, but is unable to satisfy the curiosity of the children. The bachelor intervenes and tells a different kind of story which feeds their curiosity and imagination. The central character is unbearably good and in the end is devoured by a wolf, much to the delight of the bored children in the railway carriage.
"The Unrest-Cure"
Saki's recurring hero Clovis Sangrail, a sly young man, overhears the complacent middle-aged Huddle complaining of his own addiction to routine and aversion to change. Huddle's friend makes the wry suggestion of the need for an "unrest-cure" (the opposite of a rest cure) to be performed, if possible, in the home. Clovis takes it upon himself to "help" the man and his sister by involving them in an invented outrage that will be a "blot on the twentieth century".
"Esmé"
In a hunting story with a difference, the Baroness tells Clovis of a hyena she and her friend Constance encountered alone in the countryside, who cannot resist the urge to stop for a snack. The story is a perfect example of Saki's delight in setting societal convention against uncompromising nature.
The wailing accompaniment was explained. The gypsy child was firmly, and I expect painfully, held in his jaws.
The child is shortly devoured.
Constance shuddered. "Do you think the poor little thing suffered much?" came another of her futile questions.
"The indications were all that way,' I said; 'on the other hand, of course, it may have been crying from sheer temper. Children sometimes do."
"The Open Window"
A man with the unlikely name of Framton Nuttel comes to a country village for some peace and rest. He calls upon a lady his sister used to know; for a few minutes he is left alone with her niece, who has quite an active imagination. She tells Framton a story about the tragedy of the lady's husband and two younger brothers, who had gone hunting one day three years earlier and never returned. The bodies were never found, and because of this the window from which they left is always kept open. When indeed they do return that very night, Framton, who has suffered from nerves in the past, runs out of the house, and the niece explains his sudden departure to her relatives with an equally imaginative fiction.
"Sredni Vashtar"
The story of a young, sickly child, Conradin. His aunt, Mrs. De Ropp, "would never... have confessed to herself that she dislike Conradin, though she might have been dimly aware that thwarting him for 'his own good' was duty which she did not find particularly irksome." When she finds Conradin's beloved Houdan hen and pet polecat/ferret, which he reveres as "Sredni Vashtar", she calls the exterminator to get rid of the pets. On the morning of the dreaded visit, Mrs. DeRopp enters the shed in which the ferret lies in his hutch, in full view of Conradin. As the time slips by without a stirring from the shed, Conradin begins to pray to Sredni Vashtar — and receives his darkest wish.
"Tobermory"
At a country house party a visiting professor announces to the guests that he has perfected a procedure to teach animals human speech. He demonstrates this on his host's cat. Soon it is clear that he omitted to teach the animal to be silent about certain facts...
"The East Wing"
A 're-discovered' short story, previously cited as a play and therefore less well known. A house party with its typical social mix of bumbling Major Boventry, the precious Lucien Wattleskeat, the wordy Canon Clore and a breathless hostess, Mrs Gramplain, is beset by a fire in the middle of the night in the east wing of the house. Begged by their hostess to save "my poor darling Eva – Eva of the golden hair," Lucien demurs on the grounds that he has never even met her. It is only on discovering that Eva is not a flesh and blood daughter, but Mrs Gramplain's painting of the daughter that she wished that she had had and which she has faithfully updated with the passing years, that Lucien declares a willingness to forfeit his life to rescue her, since "death in this case is more beautiful," a sentiment endorsed by the Major. As the two men disappear into the blaze, Mrs Gramplain recollects that she "sent Eva to Exeter to be cleaned." Thus the two men have lost their lives for nothing. (Compare with Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.)
Quotes
From "Reginald on Besetting Sins":
The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went.
The stage, with all its efforts, can never be as artificial as life.
From "Reginald on the Academy":
"To have reached thirty," said Reginald, "is to have failed in life."
To die before being painted by Sargent is to go to Heaven prematurely.
From "The Jesting of Arlington Stringham":
Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the yearning of a woman who had no children of her own.
From "Reginald on Christmas Presents":
People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity; the religion that produced Green Chartreuse can never really die.
From "The Square Egg"- (In the short story; "Clovis On The Alleged Romance Of Business"):
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.
From "Reginald at the Carlton":
"Hors d'oeuvres have always had a pathetic interest for me," said Reginald, "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'oeuvres."
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened. It's only the middle-aged who are really conscious of their limitations — that is why one should be so patient with them. But one never is.
From "Reginald's Choir Treat":
I always say beauty is only sin deep.
From various other short stories:
""There are more ways of killing a cat than by choking it with cream,’ he quoted, ‘but I’m not sure,’ he added, ‘that it’s not the best way."
"Forbidden fizz is the sweetest."
He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
Addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts.
Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people.
Every reformation must have its victims. You can't expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal's return."
Saki
Posted from biographies123.blogspot.com
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The Double Life of Saki (2007) Part 1 of 4
For more information see: http://my-nepenthe.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/double-life-of-saki.html See also: http://www.rogerdavenport.co.uk/page8.html http://www....
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on November 14, 1916 British writer Hector Hugh Munro better known by the pen name Saki died at 45.
The Double Life of Saki (2007) Part 1 of 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13oTSiIxAwk
Images:
1. British Expeditionary Force soldier Hector Hugh Munro
2. Hector Hugh Munro 'Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.''
3. Héctor Hugh Munro in 1881 [colorized]
4.
Biographies:
1. online-literature.com/hh-munro
2. schoolbag.info/literature/world/397.html
1. Background from {[http://www.online-literature.com/hh-munro/]}
Hector Hugh Munro was born 18 December, 1870 in Akyab, Burma, son of Scotsman Charles Augustus Munro, an inspector-general in the Burma police and his mother, Mary Frances (née Mercer) who died in a tragic accident in England with a runaway cow in 1872. He had a brother Charles and sister Ethel (who like Hector would never marry).
After the death of Munro's mother, the children were sent to Broadgate Villa, in Pilton village near Barnstaple, North Devon to be raised by aunts who frequently resorted to corporal punishment. It is said that they were most likely models for a few of his characters, notably Sredni Vashtar. Undoubtedly the days of his youth would provide much fodder for his future career. Leading slightly insular lives Munro and his siblings were initially educated under tutelage of governesses. At the age of 12 young Hector was sent to Pencarwick School in Exmouth and Bedford Grammar School.
In his early 20s, Munro went to Burma in 1893 to join the Colonial Burmese Military Police (an occupation which George Orwell would later pursue as well) until ill-health caused him to return to England a year later. Munro would then embark on his career as a journalist, writing for various publications including the Daily Express, the Bystander, The Morning Post, the Outlook and his Lewis Carroll-esque "Alice in Westminster" political sketches for the Westminster Gazette. He often satirised the then Edwardian society with veiled and cruel innuendo, sometimes bitter and often unconventional.
"I might have been a goldfish in a glass bowl for all the privacy I got". "The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience; you get the mediaeval picturesque-ness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other".
Munro's first book, a historical treatise called The Rise of the Russian Empire was released in 1900. His collection of short stories Not-so-Stories came out in 1902.
From 1902 to 1908 Munro worked as a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post in the Balkans, Russia and Paris. He would publish The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) a collection of his short stories and Unbearable Bassington (1912) shortly after. The heartless and cruel Reginald and Clovis are two of his most famous heroes. He deals with the theme of what would happen if the German emperor conquered England in When William Came. (1914) Beasts and Super-Beasts was published the same year.
World War I started and while he was officially too old, at age 44 Munro volunteered as a soldier, enlisting in the 22nd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. He was offered a commission but refused, saying he could not expect soldiers to obey him if he did not have any experience. He wrote a number of short stories from the trenches and promoted to Lance Sergeant (full Corporal) in September of 1916.
Just a month later, on 16 November 1916, while serving near the French town of Beaumount-Hamel, Hector Hugh Munro was fatally shot by a German sniper's bullet. According to several sources his last words were: "Put that damned cigarette out!" It is alleged that Munro's sister Ethel had destroyed his personal papers.
Biography written by C.D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc 2005. All Rights Reserved.
2. Background from {[https://schoolbag.info/literature/world/397.html]}
World Literature
Hector Hugh Munro – penname Saki
BORN: 1870, Akyab, Burma
DIED: 1916, Beaumont-Hamel, France
NATIONALITY: Scottish
GENRE: Fiction
MAJOR WORKS:
Reginald in Russia (1910)
The Chronicles of Clovis (1912)
Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914)
The Watched Pot (1914)
Overview
The reputation of Hector Hugh Munro (pen name: Saki) rests primarily on his short stories, which convey whimsical humor, fascination with the odd and eerie, and worldly disillusionment with hypocrisy and banality. Written between the end of Queen Victoria’s reign and the beginning of World War I, Munro’s works memorialize the luxurious world of the upper class. The stories present characters who, through capriciousness or eccentric behavior, get into odd situations from which they usually escape by means of their quick wits; at the same time, their clever remarks and cynical views expose the arbitrariness and artificiality of their society.
Works in Biographical and Historical Context
From the Far East to Victorian England. Munro was born in the Far East, where his father was a colonel in the British military police. Upon the death of his mother, Munro and his two siblings were sent to live with their grandmother and aunts in Devon, England. The aunts, Charlotte and Augusta, squabbled endlessly over trivialities, involved the children in their petty jealousies, and enforced on their young charges a strict Victorian regimen. Munro, being the youngest, quite delicate and pale, escaped the worst of the aunts’ tyranny, and he soon became adept at devising ways to bend their inflexible and contradictory rules. Reginald, Clovis Sangrail, and Comus Bassington, witty and self-absorbed comic heroes in Munro’s future work as Saki, clearly developed from his own experiences.
Government Service. When Munro was seventeen years old, his father retired and returned to England to look after his nearly grown children. Over the next few years, they traveled as a family throughout the Continent. Munro followed in his father’s footsteps and subsequently spent about a year as part of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He returned to England in 1894 because of failing health. He worked at the British Museum and published only a short story, ‘‘Dogged,’’ during the next six years. Munro wrote a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire, in 1900 and, from 1902 to 1909, was a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post in the Balkans and Paris.
Career as a Writer. While working as a foreign correspondent, Munro published his first collection of stories, titled Reginald (1904). In 1910, his second collection of short fiction was published, misleadingly titled Reginald in Russia—only the title story concerns Reginald. The rest of the tales continue Saki’s satiric examination of upper-class country life or venture into fable-like lessons. This successful collection was followed by The Chronicles of Clovis (1912), which introduced two of his more popular characters, Clovis Sangrail and Bertie Van Tahn.
In 1912, Munro published a novel, The Unbearable Bassington, whose hero, Comus Bassington, resembles Reginald with an undeniable mean streak. Munro continued writing stories for newspapers. These works were collected in Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914); as the title suggests, animal stories take up a large part of the collection. Munro’s second novel, When William Came: A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns (1914), is a fantasy about life in England under German occupation led by Kaiser Wilhelm. It is one of the first examples of ‘‘invasion literature,’’ a genre that emerged with the onset of World War I and dealt with the anxieties of invading foreign powers.
The Watched Pot and Other Drama. Although he is best known for his fiction, drama seems to be the genre best suited to Munro’s abilities. His plays show his strengths—witty dialogue, complexity of plot, and energetic pace—to advantage, while his weaknesses, which appear in his fiction as gratuitous witticisms and pompous asides in the narrative, are absent. For example, in 1914, he wrote The Watched Pot, a comedy of manners centered on several women who are determined to marry a wealthy man and are thwarted by his territorial aunt.
World War I. Less than a month after war was declared in early August 1914, Munro enlisted in the cavalry. Munro saw the declaration of war as a chance to act nobly and heroically in an unquestionably good cause. Hoping to get into the fighting more quickly, Munro transferred into the infantry, joining the Royal Fusiliers. He enjoyed being a soldier, hiking for miles with heavy backpacks, serving long hours as camp orderly, and expressing contempt for those who had not enlisted. Proud of his ability to keep up with much younger men, Munro rose to the rank of corporal and eventually lance sergeant, but he refused offers of a commission as an officer, content to be a simple soldier among his comrades.
He was shipped off to France in 1915, and his wit and macabre sense of humor survived the horrific conditions he found on the battlefield. In her ‘‘Biography of Saki,’’ Ethel Munro recalled that at Christmas 1915 her brother sent her this version of a carol: ‘‘While Shepherds watched their flocks by night / All seated on the ground / A high- explosive shell came down / And mutton rained around.’’
In June 1916, Munro spent a short leave in London with his sister and brother. He then returned to the front to fight in several battles, during which time he suffered a return of his old malaria. On November 14, he received a fatal wound while in no man’s land during a night march. Two collections of Munro’s stories appeared posthumously, The Toys of Peace (1919) and The Square Egg (1924).
LITERARY AND HISTORICAL CONTEMPORARIES
Saki's famous contemporaries include:
Wilhelm II (1859-1941): The last German kaiser (emperor), Wilhelm reversed the careful diplomacy of his grandfather Wilhelm I and his advisor Otto von Bismarck in favor of a more forceful, bellicose policy. These changes upset the diplomatic of the European powers and led to the outbreak of World War I. At the end of the war, he abdicated the throne and lived out his life in exile.
L. Frank Baum (1856-1919): American author of children's fantasy, Baum is most noted for the Oz series, which began with the classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919): The twenty-sixth President of the United States and a leading Progressive politician, Roosevelt made a name for himself with his exploits as a soldier and naturalist. His larger-than-life personality made him a popular and much-admired public figure; the teddy bear was created in his honor.
Hermann Hesse (1877-1962): A German author, Hesse wrote about the pursuit of enlightenment in such books as Siddhartha (1922) and Journey to the East (1932). These themes led to a revival of interest in his work among American counterculture readers during the 1960s.
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939): The first Irishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yeats stands as one of the central figures of Irish literature in the twentieth century. Both his poetry and his work with the Abbey Theatre as dramatist and manager were hugely influential in their respective fields.
COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE
These works, like those of Munro/Saki, are considered by many critics to be paragons of the short-story genre:
''Big Blonde'' (1929), a short story by Dorothy Parker. One of the icons of the Jazz Age, Parker turned her famous caustic intellect towards examining the role of women at the end of a decade that supposedly saw their liberation, instead finding sadness and bitterness.
''Gift of the Magi'' (1906), a shorty story by O. Henry. This story features a classic O. Henry ''twist ending'' and a moral message on the power of love and the transient importance of material possessions.
''The Garden of Forking Paths'' (1941), a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. The first of Borges' works to be translated into English, this story of espionage and literary adventures through time-space anticipates later theories in quantum mechanics.
''Bernice Bobs Her Hair'' (1920), a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Before he made his name as a novelist, Fitzgerald developed a following as a short story author; this tale, which was a featured cover story in The Saturday Evening Post, anticipates Fitzgerald's later tales of flappers and ''liberated women.''
Works in Literary Context
Respected as a master of the short story during his own lifetime, Munro has been ranked with the Frenchman Guy de Maupassant and the American O. Henry as a craftsman of the first order. As A. J. Langguth has pointed out in Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro, With Six Short Stories Never Before Collected, some of Munro’s efforts reflect the influence of the master of the trick ending, O. Henry. However, Saki’s stories are not innocent or sentimental like O. Henry’s, but mix wit with outrageousness, humor with seemingly justified malice.
Wit and Irony, with a Touch of Lyric. Epigrammatic wit, a strong dramatic sense, and a satiric concern with the ironies of social life mark Munro’s stories, in which the traditions of the comedy of manners give dialogues central importance. However, in turning to the uncanny, Munro at times moved beyond satire altogether, yet even then he often returned to irony and further extended the comedy of manners by transforming the supernatural and the animal into subjects of a social wit. The descriptive developments in Munro’s later fiction likewise accommodate a pervasive sense of the ironies of human life—even if a lyrical voice emerges briefly, at the end, from the battlefield.
Suppressed Sexuality. Significantly, women in Munro’s work are usually hateful guardian aunts or elderly duchesses; they only rarely are young attractive girls of sexual interest to the main characters. Munro remained a bachelor throughout his life, and this fact, plus some suggestiveness in his work, has led modern readers to conclude he was homosexual. Moreover, rumors of Munro’s homosexuality circulated in publishing circles during his lifetime. But sexuality is kept far below the surface in Munro’s work. While the artist in Munro learned much from Oscar Wilde’s writing, he also may have learned from Wilde’s notorious trial and imprisonment in 1895—which concerned Wilde’s homosexuality—what kind of public behavior would not be tolerated by English society.
Fairy Tale Cruelty? Readers and critics often mention the apparent cruelty and heartlessness in Munro’s stories. Writing in 1940 in the Atlantic Monthly, Elizabeth Drew explained and justified this lack of fellow feeling: ‘‘The cruelty is certainly there, but it has nothing perverted or pathological about it.... It is the genial heartlessness of the normal child, whose fantasies take no account of adult standards of human behaviour, and to whom the eating of a gypsy by a hyena is no more terrible than the eating of Red Ridinghood’s grandmother by a wolf. The standards of these gruesome tales are those of the fairy tale; their grimness is the grimness of Grimm.... He deliberately chose a pseudonym for his writings—Saki, the cupbearer whose ‘joyous errand’ was to serve the guests with wine in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He never sought intimacy with his readers, or gave them his confidence.’’ To see the cruelty in Saki as fantasy, and to set it next to the unsparing details of nursery rhymes and fairy tales, is to understand that even though in Saki’s stories terribly unfair things happen, he provides a satisfying sense of justice done and human decency restored that can appeal to children and adults alike.
Influence. Popular and respected as a master of the short story during his lifetime, throughout the twentieth century Saki has been ranked with the Frenchman Guy de Maupassant and the American O. Henry as a craftsman of the first order. Funny, original, sometimes bizarre, and at times creepily frightening, Saki’s work clearly has left its mark on the British writer P. G. Wodehouse, whose farcical stories of well-heeled, empty-headed young men about town are reminiscent of the Reginald stories. The world of Wodehouse’s characters Bertie and Jeeves is essentially the same as that of Reginald and Clovis. In these worlds, it is always about the turn of the century; England is the unquestioned center of the universe; life has been made comfortable for one by others; and a young man need only think about his social life, the quality of the food, drink, and entertainment provided, and the fun he can dream up.
Works in Critical Context
Some literary critics in the 1960s and 1970s argued that there is a serious side to Munro that goes beyond mere entertainment to explore weighty moral issues. Certainly some of his stories can be analyzed to discover serious concerns. But it would be misleading to maintain that Saki’s greatness rests on the breadth of his moral imagination. For better or worse, his genius resides in his stories, in which the qualities defined by Coward as ‘‘the verbal adroitness of Saki’s dialogue and the brilliance of his wit’’ shine most brightly.
Perhaps responding to the strain of seriousness in Munro’s writings, the English critic J. W. Lambert, in a 1956 essay in the Listener, noted Saki’s affinities to Kipling and to two other English writers, William Makepeace Thackeray and, surprisingly, George Orwell: ‘‘All four had Anglo-Indian backgrounds and divided childhoods. They were all fascinated by the social display and organization of life ‘at home’; their works [express] the colonial mentality, a little disappointed, sometimes more than a little embittered. Thackeray’s self-conscious moralizing bubbled up often in Saki; so did Kipling’s emotional afflatus.... The same feelings, in different generations, drove Orwell to prodigies of bleak panache and turned his snobberies upside down, and drove Saki in 1914 not only to join the Army when well over age but consistently to refuse a commission.’’
Responses to Literature
1. Contrast Munro's use of irony to that of O. Henry's. Choose a story from each author that features an ironic twist or ending and, in an essay, discuss how their literary techniques— in both the build-up to and the payoff of the ironic twist—are similar and different.
2. With a classmate, discuss how Munro's journalistic experience seems to inform his literary style. Use examples from a text to support your ideas.
3. Choose two Munro stories that feature eerie or supernatural elements. In an essay, analyze his use of these elements in his story and compare them to supernatural elements used in two stories by H. P. Lovecraft, another master of short horror.
4. With a classmate, discuss the significance of the hyena in Munro's “Esme.” What do you feel the author is satirizing in this tale? Report your findings to the rest of the class.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Gillen, Charles H. H. H. Munro (Saki), Boston: Twayne, 1969.
Langguth, A. J., Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro, With Six Short Stories Never Before Collected, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981.
Ullmann, Carol, ed. “The Interlopers.” Short Stories forStudents, vol. 15. Detroit: Gale, 2002.
Wilson, Kathleen, ed. “The Open Window.” Short Stories for Students, vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1997.
Periodicals
Atlantic Monthly (July 1940).
English Literature in Transition, vol. 9, no. 1(1966), vol. 11, no. 1 (1968).
Modern British Literature, vol. 4 (1979).
New York Times (August 25, 1981).
Spectator (May 30, 1952; December 21, 1956).
Times Literary Supplement (November 21, 1963; May 13, 1989).
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick] SSG Stephen Rogerson LTC (Join to see) LTC Greg Henning Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant TSgt David L. SMSgt David A Asbury MSgt Paul ConnorsSPC Michael Terrell Maj Wayne Crist PO3 Charles StreichCPL Cadrew Strickland
The Double Life of Saki (2007) Part 1 of 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13oTSiIxAwk
Images:
1. British Expeditionary Force soldier Hector Hugh Munro
2. Hector Hugh Munro 'Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.''
3. Héctor Hugh Munro in 1881 [colorized]
4.
Biographies:
1. online-literature.com/hh-munro
2. schoolbag.info/literature/world/397.html
1. Background from {[http://www.online-literature.com/hh-munro/]}
Hector Hugh Munro was born 18 December, 1870 in Akyab, Burma, son of Scotsman Charles Augustus Munro, an inspector-general in the Burma police and his mother, Mary Frances (née Mercer) who died in a tragic accident in England with a runaway cow in 1872. He had a brother Charles and sister Ethel (who like Hector would never marry).
After the death of Munro's mother, the children were sent to Broadgate Villa, in Pilton village near Barnstaple, North Devon to be raised by aunts who frequently resorted to corporal punishment. It is said that they were most likely models for a few of his characters, notably Sredni Vashtar. Undoubtedly the days of his youth would provide much fodder for his future career. Leading slightly insular lives Munro and his siblings were initially educated under tutelage of governesses. At the age of 12 young Hector was sent to Pencarwick School in Exmouth and Bedford Grammar School.
In his early 20s, Munro went to Burma in 1893 to join the Colonial Burmese Military Police (an occupation which George Orwell would later pursue as well) until ill-health caused him to return to England a year later. Munro would then embark on his career as a journalist, writing for various publications including the Daily Express, the Bystander, The Morning Post, the Outlook and his Lewis Carroll-esque "Alice in Westminster" political sketches for the Westminster Gazette. He often satirised the then Edwardian society with veiled and cruel innuendo, sometimes bitter and often unconventional.
"I might have been a goldfish in a glass bowl for all the privacy I got". "The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience; you get the mediaeval picturesque-ness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other".
Munro's first book, a historical treatise called The Rise of the Russian Empire was released in 1900. His collection of short stories Not-so-Stories came out in 1902.
From 1902 to 1908 Munro worked as a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post in the Balkans, Russia and Paris. He would publish The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) a collection of his short stories and Unbearable Bassington (1912) shortly after. The heartless and cruel Reginald and Clovis are two of his most famous heroes. He deals with the theme of what would happen if the German emperor conquered England in When William Came. (1914) Beasts and Super-Beasts was published the same year.
World War I started and while he was officially too old, at age 44 Munro volunteered as a soldier, enlisting in the 22nd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. He was offered a commission but refused, saying he could not expect soldiers to obey him if he did not have any experience. He wrote a number of short stories from the trenches and promoted to Lance Sergeant (full Corporal) in September of 1916.
Just a month later, on 16 November 1916, while serving near the French town of Beaumount-Hamel, Hector Hugh Munro was fatally shot by a German sniper's bullet. According to several sources his last words were: "Put that damned cigarette out!" It is alleged that Munro's sister Ethel had destroyed his personal papers.
Biography written by C.D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc 2005. All Rights Reserved.
2. Background from {[https://schoolbag.info/literature/world/397.html]}
World Literature
Hector Hugh Munro – penname Saki
BORN: 1870, Akyab, Burma
DIED: 1916, Beaumont-Hamel, France
NATIONALITY: Scottish
GENRE: Fiction
MAJOR WORKS:
Reginald in Russia (1910)
The Chronicles of Clovis (1912)
Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914)
The Watched Pot (1914)
Overview
The reputation of Hector Hugh Munro (pen name: Saki) rests primarily on his short stories, which convey whimsical humor, fascination with the odd and eerie, and worldly disillusionment with hypocrisy and banality. Written between the end of Queen Victoria’s reign and the beginning of World War I, Munro’s works memorialize the luxurious world of the upper class. The stories present characters who, through capriciousness or eccentric behavior, get into odd situations from which they usually escape by means of their quick wits; at the same time, their clever remarks and cynical views expose the arbitrariness and artificiality of their society.
Works in Biographical and Historical Context
From the Far East to Victorian England. Munro was born in the Far East, where his father was a colonel in the British military police. Upon the death of his mother, Munro and his two siblings were sent to live with their grandmother and aunts in Devon, England. The aunts, Charlotte and Augusta, squabbled endlessly over trivialities, involved the children in their petty jealousies, and enforced on their young charges a strict Victorian regimen. Munro, being the youngest, quite delicate and pale, escaped the worst of the aunts’ tyranny, and he soon became adept at devising ways to bend their inflexible and contradictory rules. Reginald, Clovis Sangrail, and Comus Bassington, witty and self-absorbed comic heroes in Munro’s future work as Saki, clearly developed from his own experiences.
Government Service. When Munro was seventeen years old, his father retired and returned to England to look after his nearly grown children. Over the next few years, they traveled as a family throughout the Continent. Munro followed in his father’s footsteps and subsequently spent about a year as part of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He returned to England in 1894 because of failing health. He worked at the British Museum and published only a short story, ‘‘Dogged,’’ during the next six years. Munro wrote a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire, in 1900 and, from 1902 to 1909, was a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post in the Balkans and Paris.
Career as a Writer. While working as a foreign correspondent, Munro published his first collection of stories, titled Reginald (1904). In 1910, his second collection of short fiction was published, misleadingly titled Reginald in Russia—only the title story concerns Reginald. The rest of the tales continue Saki’s satiric examination of upper-class country life or venture into fable-like lessons. This successful collection was followed by The Chronicles of Clovis (1912), which introduced two of his more popular characters, Clovis Sangrail and Bertie Van Tahn.
In 1912, Munro published a novel, The Unbearable Bassington, whose hero, Comus Bassington, resembles Reginald with an undeniable mean streak. Munro continued writing stories for newspapers. These works were collected in Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914); as the title suggests, animal stories take up a large part of the collection. Munro’s second novel, When William Came: A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns (1914), is a fantasy about life in England under German occupation led by Kaiser Wilhelm. It is one of the first examples of ‘‘invasion literature,’’ a genre that emerged with the onset of World War I and dealt with the anxieties of invading foreign powers.
The Watched Pot and Other Drama. Although he is best known for his fiction, drama seems to be the genre best suited to Munro’s abilities. His plays show his strengths—witty dialogue, complexity of plot, and energetic pace—to advantage, while his weaknesses, which appear in his fiction as gratuitous witticisms and pompous asides in the narrative, are absent. For example, in 1914, he wrote The Watched Pot, a comedy of manners centered on several women who are determined to marry a wealthy man and are thwarted by his territorial aunt.
World War I. Less than a month after war was declared in early August 1914, Munro enlisted in the cavalry. Munro saw the declaration of war as a chance to act nobly and heroically in an unquestionably good cause. Hoping to get into the fighting more quickly, Munro transferred into the infantry, joining the Royal Fusiliers. He enjoyed being a soldier, hiking for miles with heavy backpacks, serving long hours as camp orderly, and expressing contempt for those who had not enlisted. Proud of his ability to keep up with much younger men, Munro rose to the rank of corporal and eventually lance sergeant, but he refused offers of a commission as an officer, content to be a simple soldier among his comrades.
He was shipped off to France in 1915, and his wit and macabre sense of humor survived the horrific conditions he found on the battlefield. In her ‘‘Biography of Saki,’’ Ethel Munro recalled that at Christmas 1915 her brother sent her this version of a carol: ‘‘While Shepherds watched their flocks by night / All seated on the ground / A high- explosive shell came down / And mutton rained around.’’
In June 1916, Munro spent a short leave in London with his sister and brother. He then returned to the front to fight in several battles, during which time he suffered a return of his old malaria. On November 14, he received a fatal wound while in no man’s land during a night march. Two collections of Munro’s stories appeared posthumously, The Toys of Peace (1919) and The Square Egg (1924).
LITERARY AND HISTORICAL CONTEMPORARIES
Saki's famous contemporaries include:
Wilhelm II (1859-1941): The last German kaiser (emperor), Wilhelm reversed the careful diplomacy of his grandfather Wilhelm I and his advisor Otto von Bismarck in favor of a more forceful, bellicose policy. These changes upset the diplomatic of the European powers and led to the outbreak of World War I. At the end of the war, he abdicated the throne and lived out his life in exile.
L. Frank Baum (1856-1919): American author of children's fantasy, Baum is most noted for the Oz series, which began with the classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919): The twenty-sixth President of the United States and a leading Progressive politician, Roosevelt made a name for himself with his exploits as a soldier and naturalist. His larger-than-life personality made him a popular and much-admired public figure; the teddy bear was created in his honor.
Hermann Hesse (1877-1962): A German author, Hesse wrote about the pursuit of enlightenment in such books as Siddhartha (1922) and Journey to the East (1932). These themes led to a revival of interest in his work among American counterculture readers during the 1960s.
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939): The first Irishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yeats stands as one of the central figures of Irish literature in the twentieth century. Both his poetry and his work with the Abbey Theatre as dramatist and manager were hugely influential in their respective fields.
COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE
These works, like those of Munro/Saki, are considered by many critics to be paragons of the short-story genre:
''Big Blonde'' (1929), a short story by Dorothy Parker. One of the icons of the Jazz Age, Parker turned her famous caustic intellect towards examining the role of women at the end of a decade that supposedly saw their liberation, instead finding sadness and bitterness.
''Gift of the Magi'' (1906), a shorty story by O. Henry. This story features a classic O. Henry ''twist ending'' and a moral message on the power of love and the transient importance of material possessions.
''The Garden of Forking Paths'' (1941), a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. The first of Borges' works to be translated into English, this story of espionage and literary adventures through time-space anticipates later theories in quantum mechanics.
''Bernice Bobs Her Hair'' (1920), a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Before he made his name as a novelist, Fitzgerald developed a following as a short story author; this tale, which was a featured cover story in The Saturday Evening Post, anticipates Fitzgerald's later tales of flappers and ''liberated women.''
Works in Literary Context
Respected as a master of the short story during his own lifetime, Munro has been ranked with the Frenchman Guy de Maupassant and the American O. Henry as a craftsman of the first order. As A. J. Langguth has pointed out in Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro, With Six Short Stories Never Before Collected, some of Munro’s efforts reflect the influence of the master of the trick ending, O. Henry. However, Saki’s stories are not innocent or sentimental like O. Henry’s, but mix wit with outrageousness, humor with seemingly justified malice.
Wit and Irony, with a Touch of Lyric. Epigrammatic wit, a strong dramatic sense, and a satiric concern with the ironies of social life mark Munro’s stories, in which the traditions of the comedy of manners give dialogues central importance. However, in turning to the uncanny, Munro at times moved beyond satire altogether, yet even then he often returned to irony and further extended the comedy of manners by transforming the supernatural and the animal into subjects of a social wit. The descriptive developments in Munro’s later fiction likewise accommodate a pervasive sense of the ironies of human life—even if a lyrical voice emerges briefly, at the end, from the battlefield.
Suppressed Sexuality. Significantly, women in Munro’s work are usually hateful guardian aunts or elderly duchesses; they only rarely are young attractive girls of sexual interest to the main characters. Munro remained a bachelor throughout his life, and this fact, plus some suggestiveness in his work, has led modern readers to conclude he was homosexual. Moreover, rumors of Munro’s homosexuality circulated in publishing circles during his lifetime. But sexuality is kept far below the surface in Munro’s work. While the artist in Munro learned much from Oscar Wilde’s writing, he also may have learned from Wilde’s notorious trial and imprisonment in 1895—which concerned Wilde’s homosexuality—what kind of public behavior would not be tolerated by English society.
Fairy Tale Cruelty? Readers and critics often mention the apparent cruelty and heartlessness in Munro’s stories. Writing in 1940 in the Atlantic Monthly, Elizabeth Drew explained and justified this lack of fellow feeling: ‘‘The cruelty is certainly there, but it has nothing perverted or pathological about it.... It is the genial heartlessness of the normal child, whose fantasies take no account of adult standards of human behaviour, and to whom the eating of a gypsy by a hyena is no more terrible than the eating of Red Ridinghood’s grandmother by a wolf. The standards of these gruesome tales are those of the fairy tale; their grimness is the grimness of Grimm.... He deliberately chose a pseudonym for his writings—Saki, the cupbearer whose ‘joyous errand’ was to serve the guests with wine in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He never sought intimacy with his readers, or gave them his confidence.’’ To see the cruelty in Saki as fantasy, and to set it next to the unsparing details of nursery rhymes and fairy tales, is to understand that even though in Saki’s stories terribly unfair things happen, he provides a satisfying sense of justice done and human decency restored that can appeal to children and adults alike.
Influence. Popular and respected as a master of the short story during his lifetime, throughout the twentieth century Saki has been ranked with the Frenchman Guy de Maupassant and the American O. Henry as a craftsman of the first order. Funny, original, sometimes bizarre, and at times creepily frightening, Saki’s work clearly has left its mark on the British writer P. G. Wodehouse, whose farcical stories of well-heeled, empty-headed young men about town are reminiscent of the Reginald stories. The world of Wodehouse’s characters Bertie and Jeeves is essentially the same as that of Reginald and Clovis. In these worlds, it is always about the turn of the century; England is the unquestioned center of the universe; life has been made comfortable for one by others; and a young man need only think about his social life, the quality of the food, drink, and entertainment provided, and the fun he can dream up.
Works in Critical Context
Some literary critics in the 1960s and 1970s argued that there is a serious side to Munro that goes beyond mere entertainment to explore weighty moral issues. Certainly some of his stories can be analyzed to discover serious concerns. But it would be misleading to maintain that Saki’s greatness rests on the breadth of his moral imagination. For better or worse, his genius resides in his stories, in which the qualities defined by Coward as ‘‘the verbal adroitness of Saki’s dialogue and the brilliance of his wit’’ shine most brightly.
Perhaps responding to the strain of seriousness in Munro’s writings, the English critic J. W. Lambert, in a 1956 essay in the Listener, noted Saki’s affinities to Kipling and to two other English writers, William Makepeace Thackeray and, surprisingly, George Orwell: ‘‘All four had Anglo-Indian backgrounds and divided childhoods. They were all fascinated by the social display and organization of life ‘at home’; their works [express] the colonial mentality, a little disappointed, sometimes more than a little embittered. Thackeray’s self-conscious moralizing bubbled up often in Saki; so did Kipling’s emotional afflatus.... The same feelings, in different generations, drove Orwell to prodigies of bleak panache and turned his snobberies upside down, and drove Saki in 1914 not only to join the Army when well over age but consistently to refuse a commission.’’
Responses to Literature
1. Contrast Munro's use of irony to that of O. Henry's. Choose a story from each author that features an ironic twist or ending and, in an essay, discuss how their literary techniques— in both the build-up to and the payoff of the ironic twist—are similar and different.
2. With a classmate, discuss how Munro's journalistic experience seems to inform his literary style. Use examples from a text to support your ideas.
3. Choose two Munro stories that feature eerie or supernatural elements. In an essay, analyze his use of these elements in his story and compare them to supernatural elements used in two stories by H. P. Lovecraft, another master of short horror.
4. With a classmate, discuss the significance of the hyena in Munro's “Esme.” What do you feel the author is satirizing in this tale? Report your findings to the rest of the class.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Gillen, Charles H. H. H. Munro (Saki), Boston: Twayne, 1969.
Langguth, A. J., Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro, With Six Short Stories Never Before Collected, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981.
Ullmann, Carol, ed. “The Interlopers.” Short Stories forStudents, vol. 15. Detroit: Gale, 2002.
Wilson, Kathleen, ed. “The Open Window.” Short Stories for Students, vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1997.
Periodicals
Atlantic Monthly (July 1940).
English Literature in Transition, vol. 9, no. 1(1966), vol. 11, no. 1 (1968).
Modern British Literature, vol. 4 (1979).
New York Times (August 25, 1981).
Spectator (May 30, 1952; December 21, 1956).
Times Literary Supplement (November 21, 1963; May 13, 1989).
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The Double Life of Saki (2007) Part 2 of 4
For more information see: http://my-nepenthe.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/double-life-of-saki.html See also: http://www.rogerdavenport.co.uk/page8.html http://www....
The Double Life of Saki (2007) Part 2 of 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbACaKGFaHM
Images:
1. Henry Hector Munro while young
2. Hector Hugh Munro 'I hate posterity – it’s so fond of having the last word.
3. Hector Hugh Munro 'The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.'
4. When William Came by H.H. Munro (Saki)
Biographies:
1. fantastic-writers-and-the-great-war.com/the-writers/h-h-munro-saki
2. bookofdaystales.com/saki/
1. Background from {https://fantastic-writers-and-the-great-war.com/the-writers/h-h-munro-saki/]}
Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916) wrote his short stories under the pseudonym Saki. He wrote a future war story about a German invasion, leading to the capture of London, only just before the outbreak of war: When William Came: a Story of London under the Hohenzollerns (1913). But he is best known for his short stories, many of which were weird and fantastic: these were collected in books such as Reginald (1904), Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914) and other posthumous volumes. Almost all of them were collected together as The Short Stories of Saki (H.H. Munro) (London: John Lane / The Bodley Head, 1930), which has been reprinted many times. For more information, see the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
Munro was born in Burma, the youngest of the three children of the inspector-general of police in Burma. He was brought up with his brother and sister by two aunts near Barnstaple, Devon. (He has several stories in which stern unpleasant aunts are outwitted by children.) He was educated at Exmouth and at Bedford Grammar School, until Colonel Munro returned from Burma in 1887 and took the children travelling. In 1893 Munro joined the Burma police, but his malaria forced him to return home. He decided to move to London to become a writer.
In 1900 Munro began writing short satires, using the pseudonym Saki, the name of the “cypress-slender Minister of Wine” in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. In 1901 the first of his short stories about an exquisite young man named Reginald was published.
In 1902 Munro went to the Balkans for the Morning Post in 1902, then to Warsaw, St Petersburg, and Paris; his reports show his right-wing convictions and his hatred for socialism. He returned to London in 1908. He had relatively few friends; some of those friends knew about his associations with young men. He soon started publishing his short stories, originally for the Westminster and then for The Morning Post and elsewhere, and wrote scores between 1909 and 1914. He only wrote two novels: his wit and imagination were better suited to the short form. His war service ultimately brought his writing career to an end."
2. Background from {[https://www.bookofdaystales.com/saki/]}
BOOK OF DAYS TALES
Today [December 18] is the birthday (1870) of Hector Hugh Munro, who usually wrote under the pen name Saki, but also as H. H. Munro. His works are not nearly as well known now as those of Oscar Wilde, who influenced his style, or P. G. Wodehouse who followed him. He satirized Edwardian society in short stories that were usually witty and mischievous, but also often had a dark, macabre side absent from Wilde and Wodehouse. Beside his short stories (which were first published in newspapers and then collected into several volumes), he wrote a full-length play, The Watched Pot, in collaboration with Charles Maude; two one-act plays; a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire, the only book published under his own name; a short novel, The Unbearable Bassington; the episodic The Westminster Alice (a parliamentary parody of Alice in Wonderland); and When William Came: A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, a fantasy about a future German invasion and occupation of Britain.
Munro was born in Akyab in British Burma, which was then still part of the British Raj, governed from Calcutta. He was the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an Inspector General for the Indian Imperial Police and Mary Frances Mercer (1843–1872), the daughter of Rear Admiral Samuel Mercer. In 1872, on a home visit to England, Mary Munro was charged by a cow, and the shock caused her to miscarry. She died soon after. After the death of Munro’s mother, Charles Munro sent his children, including two-year-old Hector, home to England. The children were sent to Broadgate Villa, in Pilton village near Barnstaple, North Devon to be raised by their grandmother and paternal aunts Charlotte and Augusta in a strict and puritanical household. It is said that they were most likely models for a few of his characters, notably ‘The Lumber Room’ and ‘Sredni Vashtar’. Leading slightly insular lives Munro and his siblings, during their early years were educated under tutelage of governesses. At the age of 12 Munro was educated at Pencarwick School in Exmouth and then as a boarder at Bedford School. In 1887, after his retirement, his father returned from Burma, and embarked upon a series of European travels with Hector and his siblings.
Munro followed his father in 1893 into the Indian Imperial Police and was posted to Burma, but successive bouts of fever caused his return to England after only 15 months. Munro started his writing career as a journalist for newspapers such as the Westminster Gazette, Daily Express, and Morning Post, and magazines such as the Bystander and Outlook. His first book The Rise of the Russian Empire, a historical study modelled upon Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, appeared in 1900, under his real name, but proved to be something of a false start.
Whilst he was writing The Rise of the Russian Empire, he made his first foray into short story writing and published a piece called ‘Dogged’ in St Paul’s in February 1899. He then moved into the world of political satire in 1900 with a collaboration with Francis Carruthers Gould entitled “Alice in Westminster”. Gould produced the sketches, and Munro wrote the text accompanying them, using the pen-name “Saki” for the first time. The series lampooned political figures of the day (‘Alice in Downing Street’ begins with the memorable line, ‘”Have you ever seen an Ineptitude?”‘ – referring to a zoomorphised Arthur Balfou, and was published in the Westminster Gazette.
In 1902 he moved to The Morning Post, to work as a foreign correspondent, first in the Balkans, and then in Russia, where he was witness to the 1905 revolution in St Petersburg. He then went on to Paris, before returning to London. In the intervening period his first collection of short stories (as opposed to collections of political satires), Reginald had been published in 1904, the stories having first appeared in the Westminster Gazette. He had also been contributing pieces for the Morning Post, Bystander, and Westminster Gazette. He kept a place in Mortimer Street, wrote, played bridge at the Cocoa Tree Club, and lived simply. Munro was gay, and because male homosexuality was illegal in England at the time, he kept his sexuality a secret.
The collection, Reginald in Russia, appeared in 1910, and The Chronicles of Clovis was published in 1911, and Beasts and Super-Beasts in 1914, along with many other short stories that appeared in newspapers not published in collections in his lifetime.
At the start of the First World War Munro was 43 and officially over-age to enlist, but he refused a commission and joined the 2nd King Edward’s Horse as an ordinary trooper. He later transferred to the 22nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, in which he rose to the rank of lance sergeant. More than once he returned to the battlefield when officially still too sick or injured. In November 1916 he was sheltering in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France, during the Battle of the Ancre, when he was killed by a German sniper. According to several sources, his last words were “Put that bloody cigarette out!” Munro has no known grave. He is commemorated on Pier and Face 8C 9A and 16A of the Thiepval Memorial.
The pen name “Saki” is most commonly assumed to be a reference to the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. Both close friend Rothay Reynolds and sister Ethel Munro confirm this in their published accounts of Munro.
I was not particularly taken with Saki’s short stories when I was a teenager because the Edwardian world they were satirizing was alien to me. To be fair, I felt the same way about Wilde, but I warmed to him later on. Saki got lost in the shuffle. Here’s some quotes that restore my interest, to a degree:
He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.”
Romance at short notice was her specialty.
The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.
Every reformation must have its victims. You can’t expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal’s return.
Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.
I hate posterity – it’s so fond of having the last word.”
To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.
I’m living so far beyond my means that we may almost be said to be living apart.
The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats’s poems, but her family denied both stories."
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbACaKGFaHM
Images:
1. Henry Hector Munro while young
2. Hector Hugh Munro 'I hate posterity – it’s so fond of having the last word.
3. Hector Hugh Munro 'The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.'
4. When William Came by H.H. Munro (Saki)
Biographies:
1. fantastic-writers-and-the-great-war.com/the-writers/h-h-munro-saki
2. bookofdaystales.com/saki/
1. Background from {https://fantastic-writers-and-the-great-war.com/the-writers/h-h-munro-saki/]}
Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916) wrote his short stories under the pseudonym Saki. He wrote a future war story about a German invasion, leading to the capture of London, only just before the outbreak of war: When William Came: a Story of London under the Hohenzollerns (1913). But he is best known for his short stories, many of which were weird and fantastic: these were collected in books such as Reginald (1904), Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914) and other posthumous volumes. Almost all of them were collected together as The Short Stories of Saki (H.H. Munro) (London: John Lane / The Bodley Head, 1930), which has been reprinted many times. For more information, see the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
Munro was born in Burma, the youngest of the three children of the inspector-general of police in Burma. He was brought up with his brother and sister by two aunts near Barnstaple, Devon. (He has several stories in which stern unpleasant aunts are outwitted by children.) He was educated at Exmouth and at Bedford Grammar School, until Colonel Munro returned from Burma in 1887 and took the children travelling. In 1893 Munro joined the Burma police, but his malaria forced him to return home. He decided to move to London to become a writer.
In 1900 Munro began writing short satires, using the pseudonym Saki, the name of the “cypress-slender Minister of Wine” in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. In 1901 the first of his short stories about an exquisite young man named Reginald was published.
In 1902 Munro went to the Balkans for the Morning Post in 1902, then to Warsaw, St Petersburg, and Paris; his reports show his right-wing convictions and his hatred for socialism. He returned to London in 1908. He had relatively few friends; some of those friends knew about his associations with young men. He soon started publishing his short stories, originally for the Westminster and then for The Morning Post and elsewhere, and wrote scores between 1909 and 1914. He only wrote two novels: his wit and imagination were better suited to the short form. His war service ultimately brought his writing career to an end."
2. Background from {[https://www.bookofdaystales.com/saki/]}
BOOK OF DAYS TALES
Today [December 18] is the birthday (1870) of Hector Hugh Munro, who usually wrote under the pen name Saki, but also as H. H. Munro. His works are not nearly as well known now as those of Oscar Wilde, who influenced his style, or P. G. Wodehouse who followed him. He satirized Edwardian society in short stories that were usually witty and mischievous, but also often had a dark, macabre side absent from Wilde and Wodehouse. Beside his short stories (which were first published in newspapers and then collected into several volumes), he wrote a full-length play, The Watched Pot, in collaboration with Charles Maude; two one-act plays; a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire, the only book published under his own name; a short novel, The Unbearable Bassington; the episodic The Westminster Alice (a parliamentary parody of Alice in Wonderland); and When William Came: A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, a fantasy about a future German invasion and occupation of Britain.
Munro was born in Akyab in British Burma, which was then still part of the British Raj, governed from Calcutta. He was the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an Inspector General for the Indian Imperial Police and Mary Frances Mercer (1843–1872), the daughter of Rear Admiral Samuel Mercer. In 1872, on a home visit to England, Mary Munro was charged by a cow, and the shock caused her to miscarry. She died soon after. After the death of Munro’s mother, Charles Munro sent his children, including two-year-old Hector, home to England. The children were sent to Broadgate Villa, in Pilton village near Barnstaple, North Devon to be raised by their grandmother and paternal aunts Charlotte and Augusta in a strict and puritanical household. It is said that they were most likely models for a few of his characters, notably ‘The Lumber Room’ and ‘Sredni Vashtar’. Leading slightly insular lives Munro and his siblings, during their early years were educated under tutelage of governesses. At the age of 12 Munro was educated at Pencarwick School in Exmouth and then as a boarder at Bedford School. In 1887, after his retirement, his father returned from Burma, and embarked upon a series of European travels with Hector and his siblings.
Munro followed his father in 1893 into the Indian Imperial Police and was posted to Burma, but successive bouts of fever caused his return to England after only 15 months. Munro started his writing career as a journalist for newspapers such as the Westminster Gazette, Daily Express, and Morning Post, and magazines such as the Bystander and Outlook. His first book The Rise of the Russian Empire, a historical study modelled upon Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, appeared in 1900, under his real name, but proved to be something of a false start.
Whilst he was writing The Rise of the Russian Empire, he made his first foray into short story writing and published a piece called ‘Dogged’ in St Paul’s in February 1899. He then moved into the world of political satire in 1900 with a collaboration with Francis Carruthers Gould entitled “Alice in Westminster”. Gould produced the sketches, and Munro wrote the text accompanying them, using the pen-name “Saki” for the first time. The series lampooned political figures of the day (‘Alice in Downing Street’ begins with the memorable line, ‘”Have you ever seen an Ineptitude?”‘ – referring to a zoomorphised Arthur Balfou, and was published in the Westminster Gazette.
In 1902 he moved to The Morning Post, to work as a foreign correspondent, first in the Balkans, and then in Russia, where he was witness to the 1905 revolution in St Petersburg. He then went on to Paris, before returning to London. In the intervening period his first collection of short stories (as opposed to collections of political satires), Reginald had been published in 1904, the stories having first appeared in the Westminster Gazette. He had also been contributing pieces for the Morning Post, Bystander, and Westminster Gazette. He kept a place in Mortimer Street, wrote, played bridge at the Cocoa Tree Club, and lived simply. Munro was gay, and because male homosexuality was illegal in England at the time, he kept his sexuality a secret.
The collection, Reginald in Russia, appeared in 1910, and The Chronicles of Clovis was published in 1911, and Beasts and Super-Beasts in 1914, along with many other short stories that appeared in newspapers not published in collections in his lifetime.
At the start of the First World War Munro was 43 and officially over-age to enlist, but he refused a commission and joined the 2nd King Edward’s Horse as an ordinary trooper. He later transferred to the 22nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, in which he rose to the rank of lance sergeant. More than once he returned to the battlefield when officially still too sick or injured. In November 1916 he was sheltering in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France, during the Battle of the Ancre, when he was killed by a German sniper. According to several sources, his last words were “Put that bloody cigarette out!” Munro has no known grave. He is commemorated on Pier and Face 8C 9A and 16A of the Thiepval Memorial.
The pen name “Saki” is most commonly assumed to be a reference to the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. Both close friend Rothay Reynolds and sister Ethel Munro confirm this in their published accounts of Munro.
I was not particularly taken with Saki’s short stories when I was a teenager because the Edwardian world they were satirizing was alien to me. To be fair, I felt the same way about Wilde, but I warmed to him later on. Saki got lost in the shuffle. Here’s some quotes that restore my interest, to a degree:
He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.”
Romance at short notice was her specialty.
The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.
Every reformation must have its victims. You can’t expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal’s return.
Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.
I hate posterity – it’s so fond of having the last word.”
To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.
I’m living so far beyond my means that we may almost be said to be living apart.
The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats’s poems, but her family denied both stories."
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LTC Stephen F.
The Double Life of Saki (2007) Part 3 of 4
For more information see: http://my-nepenthe.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/double-life-of-saki.html See also: http://www.rogerdavenport.co.uk/page8.html http://www....
The Double Life of Saki (2007) Part 3 of 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrkgyQnZcNo
Images:
1. H.H. Munro ('Saki') and members of his family 1908 from Left Charles Arthur Munro (1869-1952), Prison governor; brother of H.H. Munro; (Inez) Mary Muriel Munro (née Chambers) (1881-1967), Wife of Charles Arthur Munro.; Felicia Mary Muriel Crawshaw (née Munro) (1905-), Niece of Hector Hugh Munro and Ethel Mary Munro (1868-1955), Sister of H.H. Munro. then H.H. Munro
2. Hector Hugh Munro 'Every reformation must have its victims. You can’t expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal’s return.'
3. Hector Hugh Munro 'No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian Apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.'
Background from {[https://courses.lumenlearning.com/englishlitvictorianmodern/chapter/biography-14/]}
Biography: Saki
Hector Hugh Munro (“Saki”) was born in Burma in 1870. His father was an inspector-general in the Burma police, and when Hector was only two, his mother died following complications from a miscarriage. After their mother’s death, he and his two older siblings were raised in Devon by two strict and puritanical maiden aunts. In 1893, when he was in his early twenties, Munro joined the Colonial Burmese Military Police—just as the young Eric Blair (George Orwell) was to do years later. Malaria caused his return to England a year later, where he soon became a successful journalist and, by 1909, a popular writer of fiction. Many of his stories satirize Edwardian attitudes to the class structure – the nobility, the new rich, and the working classes. His pen name “Saki” is probably an allusion to the cup-bearer in the Edward Fitzgerald translation of the Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám, a very popular poem at the time.
His biographer describes his method: “Characters are defined with a bizarre name and a deft phrase or two, the wit depends on perfect wording and unexpected turns, and the action is often some kind of practical joke, aimed at deflating pretension or exposing cowardice….His epigrammatic style and witty, amoral young men such as Clovis Sangrail derive from Oscar Wilde, his fantastical humour owes much to Lewis Carroll, and some of his grimmer stories, like his politics, put him close to Kipling” [ Dominic Hibberd, “Munro, Hector Hugh [Saki] (1870–1916),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/view/article/35149, accessed 18 May 2014].
Even though at the beginning of World War I, he was 44 and officially too old to serve as a soldier, Munro enlisted in the 22nd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. He refused a commission but was soon promoted to Lance Sergeant. On November 16, 1916, while serving in France, he was killed by a German sniper’s bullet. Allegedly, his last words were, “Put that damned cigarette out!”
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrkgyQnZcNo
Images:
1. H.H. Munro ('Saki') and members of his family 1908 from Left Charles Arthur Munro (1869-1952), Prison governor; brother of H.H. Munro; (Inez) Mary Muriel Munro (née Chambers) (1881-1967), Wife of Charles Arthur Munro.; Felicia Mary Muriel Crawshaw (née Munro) (1905-), Niece of Hector Hugh Munro and Ethel Mary Munro (1868-1955), Sister of H.H. Munro. then H.H. Munro
2. Hector Hugh Munro 'Every reformation must have its victims. You can’t expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal’s return.'
3. Hector Hugh Munro 'No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian Apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.'
Background from {[https://courses.lumenlearning.com/englishlitvictorianmodern/chapter/biography-14/]}
Biography: Saki
Hector Hugh Munro (“Saki”) was born in Burma in 1870. His father was an inspector-general in the Burma police, and when Hector was only two, his mother died following complications from a miscarriage. After their mother’s death, he and his two older siblings were raised in Devon by two strict and puritanical maiden aunts. In 1893, when he was in his early twenties, Munro joined the Colonial Burmese Military Police—just as the young Eric Blair (George Orwell) was to do years later. Malaria caused his return to England a year later, where he soon became a successful journalist and, by 1909, a popular writer of fiction. Many of his stories satirize Edwardian attitudes to the class structure – the nobility, the new rich, and the working classes. His pen name “Saki” is probably an allusion to the cup-bearer in the Edward Fitzgerald translation of the Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám, a very popular poem at the time.
His biographer describes his method: “Characters are defined with a bizarre name and a deft phrase or two, the wit depends on perfect wording and unexpected turns, and the action is often some kind of practical joke, aimed at deflating pretension or exposing cowardice….His epigrammatic style and witty, amoral young men such as Clovis Sangrail derive from Oscar Wilde, his fantastical humour owes much to Lewis Carroll, and some of his grimmer stories, like his politics, put him close to Kipling” [ Dominic Hibberd, “Munro, Hector Hugh [Saki] (1870–1916),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/view/article/35149, accessed 18 May 2014].
Even though at the beginning of World War I, he was 44 and officially too old to serve as a soldier, Munro enlisted in the 22nd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. He refused a commission but was soon promoted to Lance Sergeant. On November 16, 1916, while serving in France, he was killed by a German sniper’s bullet. Allegedly, his last words were, “Put that damned cigarette out!”
FYI LTC John Shaw SPC Diana D. LTC Hillary Luton
1SG Steven ImermanSSG Pete FishGySgt Gary CordeiroPO1 H Gene LawrenceSPC Chris Bayner-CwikSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerMSG Tom EarleySSgt Marian MitchellSGT Michael HearnPO2 Frederick DunnSP5 Dennis LobergerCPO John BjorgeSGT Randell RoseSSG Jimmy CernichSGT Denny EspinosaMSG Fred Bucci
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