Literary Criticism: The Unbearable Saki: The Work of HH Munro By Sandie Byrne Oxford University Press, 314pp. £19.99There's a story by Graham Greene, A Shocking Accident, in which a death occurs off-stage as a consequence of a falling pig. Greene was a Saki enthusiast, and it's possible that he has taken a cue here, not only from Saki's darkly comic tone, but from a couple of incidents connected with the earlier writer's life.
The author of Beasts and Super-Beasts(1914), in which some avenging animals play a part, had an ancestor who was eaten by a tiger. And what may have had an even more powerful effect on Saki's literary imagination, the death of his mother, was an appalling tragedy which - like the Graham Greene episode above - carried an irresistibly comic overtone. Home from Burma where her husband was a lieutenant colonel in the Burma police, she met her end in the form of a runaway cow in a country lane.
Hector Hugh Munro, the future Saki, was then less than two years old. Along with his older brother and sister, he was promptly dispatched to England to undergo an upbringing at the hands of his paternal grandmother and aunts. The effect of this relocation was to breed in him a lifelong horror of "managing women and suburban life", as Sandie Byrne puts it - a horror subsequently tied up with his strongest literary impulse.
BYRNE, THOUGH, REJECTS the accepted view of Saki as "a writer of polished black comedy in upper-class settings", arguing for a more judicious and complicated assessment of his achievements. Her close reading of the stories and novels is, for the most part, persuasive and illuminating. But she isn't especially alive to the tonic effect of Saki's blackest humour, the "ruthless rhymes" aspect of his insouciance. One might have wished for a lighter touch, for instance, in connection with the character Clovis's tongue-in-cheek musings on an about-to-be-eaten oyster, which she describes as "bordering on autism". Where does this leave the Walrus and the Carpenter, then, one might wonder?
In fact, Byrne's distaste for the stories' lack of humanity is extended in some measure to their author: she really doesn't find Hector Hugh Munro an especially sympathetic subject. You get her recoiling in dismay from some of the non-politically-correct elements she uncovers in his writings. Even a letter to his sister Ethel, sent from Belgrade in 1903, in which he refers to his rescue of a kitten in danger of being trampled during a stampede on the telegraph office, is turned against him. Byrne's gloss on this is that Munro is parading his superiority to foreigners in the matter of kindness to animals (and other things). She refers dismissively to his "pose" of sangfroid in the face of dangers and discomforts, as though a more heartfelt engagement with local iniquities and inequities were to be expected. But a foreign correspondent's job - Saki at the time was employed by the Morning Post - is to observe and report, not to empathise.
This is not, or not predominantly, a biographical study. Byrne's emphasis falls on Saki's work, including his lesser known political satires and full-length novels along with the celebrated shorter fiction. Saki's life was comparatively brief (1870-1916), and the primary source of information about it is the account written by his sister Ethel, with whom Byrne takes issue on several points. Was his childhood "hell" or was it not? Ethel says no, though the evidence of the stories would seem to suggest otherwise. Whatever the truth of the matter, Saki the short-story writer emerged from it with his uniqueness unimpaired.
BYRNE IDENTIFIES THE complementary strands of urbanity and ferocity informing Saki's work. "The men that wolves have sniffed at" co-exist with the drawing-room jesters. She also points out the almost complete reversal of attitude that came about as a species of gung-ho patriotism overtook the steely frivolity and wondrous subversiveness of Saki's most characteristic work. The novel When William Came, for example, which envisages a German invasion of Britain, is a paean to Englishness and an endorsement of militarism. Once war had broken out, "Saki" became Lance-Sergeant Munro and made his final journey to the Front in 1916, setting off from Victoria Station in London with his sister's bloodthirsty rallying cry - "Kill a good few for me!" - resounding in his ears. He was killed himself in France by a German sniper in November of the same year.
Saki has always had his admirers and his influence on certain of his contemporaries and successors was profound. Byrne lists most of these - Noël Coward, PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and so on - but doesn't mention one of the most striking. Saki's "William" is of course the Kaiser, but another, more innocent William, who appeared full-fledged in 1919 in the story Rice-Mould, has quite a bit in common with a few of Saki's more memorable creations, such as Reginald or Clovis.
When Richmal Crompton invented William Brown and chronicled his escapades under headings like "William's Christmas Eve" and "The Cure", she was clearly holding in mind such Saki episodes as Bertie's Christmas Eveand The Unrest Cure. Claude in The Boar-Pig, getting his come-uppance, reminds us of Georgie in Crompton's Georgie and the Outlaws. William's Truthful Christmasharks back to Tobermoryand other hilarious instances of inflexible veracity.
There are differences, of course. Both authors uphold the disruption of decorum, but one (Crompton) goes about the business with a merry alacrity, while the other treats mischief-making and worse with an incomparable aplomb.
Patricia Craig is a critic, biographer and anthologist. Her memoir, Asking for Trouble, was recently published by Blackstaff