Reginald in Russia - Saki

Most of the times that I've mentioned Saki in the past few years, it's been about his novellas.  Quite a few of us were reading The Unbearable Bassington a while ago, and earlier this year I read When William Came.  It's about time that I return to the form which introduced me to Saki, and for which Saki is best known: the blackly funny short story.  I've only read Beasts and Super-beasts in full (and love it to pieces) - Reginald in Russia filled in 1911 for A Century of Books.

I haven't actually read the earlier collection called simply Reginald, so I was prepared to be rather bemused by his adventures in Russia, but it turns out that (unlike that first collection) Reginald only appears in the first story, arguing with a Princess.  The rest of Reginald in Russia covers vast territories - including someone accidentally shooting someone else's fox, a feud between next-door neighbours, a werewolf, and a man trying to extricate a mouse from his trousers in a train carriage. It's all rather mad, and often dark, but delightfully so.

My favourite story ('The Baker's Dozen') is actually in the form of a play, where a widow and widower (once in love) meet again on a boat and decide to re-marry - but realise that between them, they now have thirteen children and stepchildren.  This, naturally, is an inauspicious start to marriage for the superstitious, and one of their tactics is attempting to palm off a child on fellow passenger, Mrs. Pally-Paget:

Mrs. P.-P.: Sorry for me? Whatever for?Maj.: Your childless hearth and all that, you know.  No little pattering feet.Mrs. P.-P.: Major!  How dare you?  I've got my little girl, I suppose you know.  Her feet can patter as well as other children's.Maj.: Only one pair of feet.Mrs. P.-P.: Certainly.  My child isn't a centipede.  Considering the way they move us about in those horrid jungle stations, without a decent bungalow to set one's foot in, I consider I've got a hearthless child, rather than a childless hearth.  Thank you for your sympathy all the same.  I daresay it was well meant.  Impertinence often is.

You see the sort of frivolous style that Saki excels at - which makes the darkest topics he approaches (including a boy being eaten by a werewolf, for example) never feel remotely scary or even unsettling.  It's all just delightful, because Saki is so brilliant at that peculiarly 1910s combination of whimsy, hyperbole, and litotes - the sort of thing which Wodehouse managed to stretch out for decades, but which thrived most in those innocent pre-war days.

He reviled and railed at fate and the general scheme of things, he pitied himself with a strong, deep pity too poignant for tears, he condemned every one with whom he had ever come in contact to endless and abnormal punishments.  In fact, he conveyed the impression that if a destroying angel had been lent to him for a week it would have had very little time for private study.

These stories are between two and six pages long each - brief, fun, easy to chuckle and turn to the next one.  Reginald in Russia isn't as good as Beast and Super-Beasts, for my money, but you don't have to take my word for it - if you click on either of those, it'll take you to Project Gutenberg where you can sample them yourself.  Perfect for a winter evening.

When William Came - Saki

If I mention the author 'Saki', you probably think of darkly funny short stories, if you think of anything at all.  If you were around during the brief spate where lots of bloggers were reading The Unbearable Bassington (which is exceptionally good) then perhaps that comes to mind.  What I have yet to see mentioned is his 1913 novel When William Came, which I have just finished.  The 'William' in question is Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and the 'coming' is his invasion of Britain.  Although such an invasion never took place, of course, Saki is essentially predicting the First World War - a war in which, in 1916, he would be killed.

If you've seen Went The Day Well? - a film based on a Graham Greene story about a similar invasion in the Second World War - then you might expect When William Came to have similar resistance and trauma as its keynotes.  In fact, the invasion is over, and much is continuing as ever before.  A lot of British people have fled to the colonies, but those that remain continue their social whirl with much jollity, only some of which is forced.  Cicely Yeovil is the chief socialite here, determined that a small thing like a new monarch and official language won't prevent her surrounding herself by beautiful young pianists and gossipy older women.

"My heart ought to be like a singing-bird to-day, I suppose," said Cicely presently.

"Because your good man is coming home?" asked Ronnie.

Cicely nodded.

"He's expected some time this afternoon, though I'm rather vague as to which train he arrives by.  Rather a stifling day for railway travelling."

"And is your heart doing the singing-bird business?" asked Ronnie.

"That depends," said Cicely, "if I may choose the bird.  A missal-thrush would do, perhaps; it sings loudest in stormy weather, I believe.

Cicely's husband, Murray Yeovil, is returning from lands afar, having picked up only bits and pieces of the news.  He is rather horrified by the response of those known as the fait accompli - who may have considered resistance, fleetingly, but have instead settled down to dinner parties and modern dance.

I don't know what it says about me, but I much preferred the goings-on of the fait accompli to the anxieties of the patriotic, militaristic types.  My heart leapt within me whenever Joan Mardle appeared - she is described in one of Saki's characteristically wonderful, brief descriptive entrances:

She cultivated a jovial, almost joyous manner, with a top-dressing of hearty good-will and good-nature which disarmed strangers and recent acquaintances; on getting to know her better they hastily rearmed themselves.

Always knowing what will most wound her acquaintances, but delivering these blows with disingenuous innocence, Joan Mardle would be a terrible friend, but is a wonderful character.  I love any b*tchy exchanges in high social circles - here's another one I loved:

"I should have put on rubies and orange opals for you.  People with our colour of hair always like barbaric display -"

"They don't," said Ronnie, "they have chaste cold tastes.  You are absolutely mistaken."

"Well, I think I ought to know!" protested the dowager; "I've lived longer in the world than you have, anyway."

"Yes," said Ronnie with devastating truthfulness, "but my hair has been this colour longer than yours has."

Ouch!  But this is tempered with much more straight-faced reactions to the invasion and the possibility of Britain regaining its independent feet.  Here, for example, is someone arguing the point with Yeovil:

"Remember all the advantages of isolated position that told in our favour while we had the sea dominion is in other hands.  The enemy would not need to mobilize a single army corps or to bring a single battleship into action; a fleet of nimble cruisers and destroyers circling round our coasts would be sufficient to shut out our food supplies."

In The Unbearable Bassington, Saki ingeniously balanced the comic and tragic, letting tragedy flow as an undercurrent to comedy until the climax of the novel.  In When William Came, I found the combination of insouciance and politics rather disjointed.  Comedy and tragedy are closely aligned, of course.  Anger and resignation could have worked in the same two-sides-of-the-coin way in When William Came, but the social merry-go-round didn't really work alongside the militaristic angst.  The competing elements (in a very short novel) felt simply too different, and I ended up being a little disappointed.

Having said that, When William Came is worth reading if only for those parts of it I did love.  Nobody writes a social scene quite as bitingly as Saki, and few authors have his economy of words.  Once you've exhausted the short stories and The Unbearable Bassington, this is certainly worth reading, if only because we (sadly) have so little of Saki's work to read.