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In Commemoration of Hector Munro, 'Saki' Transcript The grinning shadow that sat at the feast: In commemoration of Hector Munro, 'Saki' Transcript Date: Tuesday, 14 November 2006 - 12:00AM The Grinning Shadow that sat at the Feast: an appreciation of the life and work of Hector Munro 'Saki' Professor Tim Connell Hector Munro was a man of many parts, and although he died relatively young, he lived through a time of considerable change, had a number of quite separate careers and a very broad range of interests. He was also a competent linguist who spoke Russian, German and French. Today is the 90th anniversary of his death in action on the Somme, and I would like to review his importance not only as a writer but also as a figure in his own time. Early years to c.1902 Like so many Victorians, he was born into a family with a long record of colonial service, and it is quite confusing to see how many Hector Munros there are with a military or colonial background. Our Hector’s most famous ancestor is commemorated in a well-known piece at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Tippoo's Tiger shows a man being eaten by a mechanical tiger and the machine emits both roaring and groaning sounds. 1 Hector's grandfather was an Admiral, and his father was in the Burma Police. The family was hit by tragedy when Hector's mother was killed in a bizarre accident involving a runaway cow. It is curious that strange events involving animals should form such a common feature of Hector's writing 2 but this may also derive from his upbringing in the Devonshire countryside and a home that was dominated by the two strangest creatures of all - Aunt Augusta and Aunt Tom. Even Hector's sister Edith (who wrote a valedictory for her brother in the 1920s) concedes that they were eccentric to a fault, though this almost certainly gave Hector one of his other key themes - the overbearing aunt who appears as a figure of menace. In this, of course, he is not unique, as Rudyard Kipling provides us with some harrowing insights into his own childhood and P G Wodehouse based much of his literary output on them, with titles like Aunts Aren't Gentlemen and phrases like “aunts calling to each other like mastodons across some primeval swamp”. Be that as it may, Ethel is defensive of their upbringing, crossing swords with later commentators such as Graham Greene about how bad their childhood really was. It was certainly different; Hector did not go to school till he was twelve, and left at fifteen. His education really came from his father, who retired and spent several years teaching the children and travelling round Europe with them. This would explain Hector's taste for mid-European settings, the Gothic castles, the wolves and eerie Brothers Grimm-type tales. It would explain his command of French and German, though why he should be fluent in Russian is less clear. At 23, he follows his father and brother into the colonial service in Burma, as a police officer. He writes original, witty and perceptive letters to his sister, in which he seems to be quite aware of the inconsistencies of colonial rule, the vagaries of the Far East, and the wealth of wild life to be found. There is a wonderful episode where he seems to have acquired a pet tiger cub, and he takes it back to his hotel, which upsets the old English lady in the next room: “The situation was awful – in my room a noise like the lion-house at 4p.m. while on the other side of the door rose the beautiful Litany of the Church of England. Then I heard the rapid turning of leaves, she was evidently looking for Daniel to gain strength from the perusal of the lion’s den story; only she couldn’t find Daniel so she fell back on the Psalms of David. As for me, I fled, and sent my boy to take the cage down to the stable. When I came back I heard words in the next room that never came out of the Psalms; words such as no old lady ought to use…” 3 Strangely enough, he does not seem to be attracted to colonial life as a literary theme, as Kipling is doing almost at the same time, and as Somerset Maugham will do only a few years later. Admittedly, the colonies do appear almost incidentally in the short stories of Saki, either as a destination for ne'er do well young men, or something to be remembered wistfully by older men in retirement. He tells of a military Johnny he found hanging around on a loose end at the club: “He’d spent most of his life on the Indian frontier, building roads and relieving famines and minimizing earthquakes, and all that sort of thing that one does on frontiers. He could talk sense to a peevish cobra in fifteen native languages, and probably knew what to do if you found a rogue elephant on your croquet-lawn; but he was shy and diffident with women.” 4 On occasions, however, the autobiographical element shines through, mainly in Saki's key novel The Unbearable Bassington, in which the young protagonist dies of fever. And the ne’er do well who can settle down to nothing is summed up neatly: “He had gone to grow tea in Ceylon, and fruit in British Columbia, and to help sheep grow wool in Australia.” 5 But he is also aware of the hidden human tragedies. There is Judkin, one of those men “who have breathed into their lungs the wonder of the East, have romped through life as through a cotillion, have had a thrust perhaps at the Viceroy’s Cup, and done fantastic horsefleshy things around the Gulf of Aden. And then a golden stream has dried up, the sunlight has faded suddenly out of things, and the gods have nodded “Go”. And they have not gone. They have turned instead to the muddy lanes and cheap villas and marked-down ills of life, to watch pear trees growing and to encourage hens for their eggs.” 6 Worst, and most autobiographical of all is Comus Bassington – “the Boy who never came back”. In reality, Hector Munro suffers seven bouts of malaria in fourteen months and has to be repatriated. Once he has recovered, he decides to become a writer, and chooses the rather curious theme of Russian history. It takes three years for The Rise of the Russian Empire to get published, and it was not well received. Edward Garnett, who became a commissioning editor for publishers like Unwin and Jonathan Cape, slated it, but then his wife was the first person to translate Dostoevsky and Chekhov into English. 7 It is not certain when Munro began to write his short stories, but the first seems to come in St Paul's magazine in 1899. The following year he finds a new direction when he teams up with Francis Carruthers Gould and the prestigious Westminster Gazette to produce an early form of political satire. "The Westminster Alice", a blend of clever cartoons that turn contemporary political figures into characters from Alice in Wonderland, are combined with stories that transfer the topsy turvy logic of Lewis Carroll into tales that highlight the shortcomings of the politicians of the day. 8 They cannot be understood by the modern reader without a lot of footnotes about the politics of the day, but it is curious that the complete set was re-published in the USA in the 20s, and sold far better than anyone had ever expected. This was when Munro must have come to public notice for the first time, so it is perhaps ironic that he begins to publish under his pen name Saki. Most commentators believe that this comes from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which is certainly more plausible than suggesting that the name comes from a South American marmoset or the town of Nagasaki. However, I have never been quite convinced. For a start, why should Saki be described as the cup bearer to the gods? Omar Khayyam may be described as the Heretic Poet of Persia, but Islam is monotheistic and Moslems do not drink alcohol. There seems to be a transference from Saki to Ganymede in Greek legend, but that only complicates the matter, because of Ganymede's pederastic relationship with Zeus, something which would have been immediately apparent to an educated Victorian audience. And my other problem is that Saki does not even appear in my copy of the Rubaiyat. One of Munro's biographers records that he actually found five verses of the Rubaiyat copied out among some family papers kept by relatives of Munro. The other, in a splendid piece of literary detective work, spots the fact that Ethel gave brother Charlie a copy of the verses for his wedding present. Saki himself refers quite frequently to Omar Khayyam in his stories, though with so little reverence that he hardly seems to be repaying a debt of honour or acknowledging the master in some way. On the subject of Christmas presents he remarks: “I am not collecting the cheaper editions of Omar Khayyám. I gave the last four that I received to the lift-boy, and I like to think of him reading them, with FitzGerald’s notes, to his aged mother.” 9 Now I checked my edition of the Rubaiyat and discovered that Fitzgerald actually produced four versions. The verse about Saki does not appear until version three - and does not appear at all in other English translations, which must give rise to the query as to whether the reference to Saki is key to understanding the text, or whether the word appears in the original at all.
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