The Wall Street Journal-20080119-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Books -- Writer-s Block- The Munro Doctrine of Humor
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080119
WEEKEND JOURNAL; Books -- Writer's Block: The Munro Doctrine of Humor
The Unbearable Saki
By Sandie Byrne
Oxford, 314 pages, $39.95
Saki, the British master of the comic story, died in the grimness of the trenches in World War I. Ever since, his glitteringly amoral morality tales have remained an acquired taste -- though these days one acquired by too few. Like some other chroniclers of early 20th- century society, Saki (1870-1916; real name, Hector Munro) is too easily dismissed as a minor litterateur, a man who made light comedy of a cloistered and prejudiced world that is no longer familiar to us. But in fact Saki bristled at that milieu's rigid imperatives, and attacked them with a range of wild conceit and with a delicate savagery that could not have been more modern.
Dyspeptic epigrams glint from the surface of his highly polished prose. Here is Saki on "food reformers": "to think of all the adorable things there are to eat in the world, and then to go through life munching sawdust and being proud of it." On going first: "Never be a pioneer. It's the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion." Perhaps most relevantly, here he is on posterity: "There always have been men who have gone about despairing of the Future, and when the Future arrives it says nice, superior things about their having acted according to their lights. It is dreadful to think that other people's grandchildren may one day rise up and call one amiable."
And then there are Saki's inimitable plots: A society hostess attempts to domesticate a werewolf; a cat acquires the power of speech and proceeds to disclose the secrets and hypocrisies of a group of house guests; two boys deprived of war toys quickly transform their John Stuart Mill doll into the 18th-century French army commander Marshal Saxe.
Like the literary worlds of P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, writers he no doubt influenced, Saki's world is an ever-so-slightly askew version of the real one. Garden parties exist to be thrown into disarray. Young children are never pacific cherubs but rather cruel pagans; infants are apt to be eaten by a hyena. Saki was a master of the surprise ending, and the starkness of these denouements, their refusal to extend sympathy to a joke's victims, helped make his stories mildly scandalous in their day.
Radical changes in society separate the first decade of the 20th century from the first decade of the 21st. But England's Edwardian age, as portrayed in Saki's stories, sometimes seems uncannily similar to our current American one. The world's most powerful nation, struggling under the weight of empire and preoccupied by news from the Balkans and the unsettled Middle East, prefers the distractions of shopping, gossip and silly fashions. Saki does not criticize these pursuits so much as expose them by pushing them into farce.
The ironical tone of the stories is so double-edged that Saki at times may seem to endorse what he is also satirizing. That is how Sandie Byrne, the author of a literary study titled "The Unbearable Saki," appears to read the stories. Her unpleasant book argues more or less what its title implies: that the author was cruel, imperialist, misogynist. Munro was without doubt a typical Edwardian Tory, prone to snobbery, elitist condescension and other predilections of the type. (His apparent anti-Semitism is a particularly knotty issue, as Ms. Byrne recognizes, and among the most worthwhile parts of her analysis is her discussion of how certain Saki stories both promote and pillory the biases of the day.)
But the voice that comes through these stories is hardly that of an establishment paragon. Most are steeped in a strong distaste for convention and a distrust of appearances. Though a close observer of privileged society, Saki was not really concerned with anatomizing it. But he occasionally hints at its malign influence on individuals' souls. The Edwardian upper class lived what he called "The Mappined Life" -- by which he meant Mappin Terrace, the enclosure where bears were kept in the London Zoo. A posh house, Saki felt, could be no less constraining. His aim was to throw open the gates, however briefly.
A large number of Saki's early stories take as their protagonists witty, slightly effete young men who mock the dull and drab and middle-class while unleashing wicked practical jokes at social gatherings. Ms. Byrne often speaks of these men as if they were Saki's mouthpieces. But that is not the case. There is a comic, distancing intent in these tales of misbehaving young layabouts who seem bored by their aphorisms even before uttering them.
The stories are collectively a portrait of a certain kind of enervated sophistication that even the enervated sophisticates yearn to see upended. In Saki's later tales -- and many of his best -- an element of disorder is introduced by the arrival of a wild animal or a supernatural emissary. Compared with the cold splendor of a wolf or the divine indifference of a cat, Saki's young men seem mere purveyors of petty cruelties.
Saki skewered his stultified society with a degree of affection, so perhaps it isn't surprising that he rushed to defend it when the war came. By that time, he had already outgrown his early style. His first novel, "The Unbearable Bassington" (1912), presented a sustained study of the social poses that his stories merely mocked.
The young Comus Bassington is a typically mean, languid Saki youth, a spoiled and self-centered lost boy here presented with unsparing authorial honesty. His mother, more concerned with maintaining her position than with preserving her son's well-being, embodies the moral costs of a comfortably Mappined life. Saki's second novel, "When William Came" (1913), extended the critique, bitterly conjuring a German-conquered England where the rounds of society and frivolity continue nevertheless.
Had Saki lived, we can imagine his writing being further transformed and altered -- as that of his admirer Waugh would later be -- by the experience of war. In several pieces he wrote at the front, an odd hybrid seemed to be forming: a sensibility recognizable from Edwardian drawing rooms finding comedy in a bleak new world.
One of the stories, called "A Square Egg," quickly turns from describing "badger-like" life in the trenches to observing the ad hoc social arrangements at a "shell-nibbled" estaminet, or ersatz bar, near the front lines. A talkative French soldier recounts how the war prevented him from making the fortune he hoped for after having taught his chickens to lay square eggs; instead, the chickens have made his aunt rich. The skeptical narrator agrees to seek out the woman, when his fighting is done, to see for himself if the nephew's tale of being so heartlessly exploited is true.
"And if you find that what I have told you about the square eggs is true, Monsieur, what then?"
"I shall marry your aunt."
---
Mr. Propson is a deputy editor at The Week.
