Neither Saki nor his world

Patrick Marn ham

Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro A.J. Langguth (Hamish Hamilton pp. 366 £12.50)

No one before has attempted a life of Saki. His older sister, Ethel, destroyed most of his papers after he was killed in the First World War, and potential biographers were dismayed by the lack of material. Now an American author has tried to achieve the impossible. The volume includes six short stories which have been omitted from previous collections of Saki's work.

What little was previously known of Hector Hugh Munro was interesting enough to explain the continuing curiosity. His mother died of shock after being charged by a cow when Hector was two. His father was in the Burma Police. Hector and his brother and sister were brought up on an eccentric plan by two maiden aunts in Barnstaple, Devon. The life the children led there was described by Ethel in a brief memoir of her brother. The aunts frequently issued contradictory instructions to the children and the dominant aunt, Augusta, was 'a woman of ungovernable temper, of fierce likes and dislikes, imperious, a moral coward, possessing no brains worth speaking of, and a primitive disposition'. Ethel also wrote, 'the look in her dark eyes, added to the fury of her voice, and the uncertainty as to the punishment, used to make me shiver'.

When he grew up Munro too joined the Burma Police but fell seriously ill with malaria and was sent home to die. Instead he recovered and became a writer of political satires for the Westminster Gazette. Then the Morning Post sent him to cover the Balkan Wars and later to Moscow. He reported the uprising in St. Petersburg in 1905 when he and Ethel were fired on by troops during the massacre in the Nevski Prospect. After a time in Paris he returned to London and it was then that he began to publish stories under the name of 'Saki'. He became a figure in Edwardian society and once gave a reception for Diaghilev and Nijinsky. His older brother Charles had meanwhile become the governor of Mountjoy Jail in Dublin. When the war came Saki enlisted immediately and was sent to France with the Royal Fusiliers, having refused several offers of a commission. He welcomed army routine. As he wrote to Ethel, 'it is like being boy and man at the same time', and he distracted himself from the disagreeable aspects of life outside Beaumont Hamel by conversing with the enemy in German, writing bogus letters to a morose and puzzled fellow soldier from his 'Aunt Agatha', and sending Ethel a revised

Christmas carol: 'While Shepherds watched their flocks by night All seated on the ground A high-explosive shell came down And mutton rained around.

While Sassoon and Owen were composing their savage commentaries Saki was contributing an article to the Westminster Gazette entitled 'Birds on the Western Front'. In his opinion the skylark's song sounded horribly forced and insincere. He once threw himself down between the shell holes and narrowly missed crushing a brood of young larks. The hen-chaffinch flitted amid splintered and falling branches despite the shrapnel and machine gun fire that swept the remains of a wood. After his final leave Ethel came to see him off and her last words to him were shouted across the barrier at Victoria Station — 'Kill a good few for me'. (Ah, the girls they left behind them.) His own last words were also shouted, from a shell hole during a night advance on Beaumont Hamel: 'Put that bloody cigarette out'. This warning to one of his men from Lance-Sergeant Munro provoked an immediate German shot which killed him. He had discharged himself from hospital to join in the attack although he was suffering at the time from a high malarial fever.

That is virtually everything that was known about Saki, and most of it has been known for years so the test of Mr Langguth's book must be the amount which he has succeeded in adding to it. The answer is, not enough. Mr Langguth had a helpful conversation with the playwright Ben Travers who knew Munro slightly, and he also discovered some papers and possessions in the attic of Munro's niece. This was certainly a start. But it has not provided sufficient new information for a full-length life. Mr Langguth has been forced to write as much about Saki's friends and his world as about the writer himself, and unfortunately he seems to have little aptitude for this task.

He finds English titles confusing. It is no help to read of one man that he 'received a created baronetcy that made him the Baron Charnwood', or to trace the nobility of another family to a baronetcy 'dated from 1641'. Even the ranks of the British army confuse Mr Langguth. At one point he is so short of material that he is forced, when setting the scene for Munro's arrival in London, to note that fawn overcoats and grey bowlers were in fashion that year, although there is no evidence that Munro possessed either garment. English readers will also be interested to learn, on page one, that Devonshire is in 'western England'. In ihort the publishers have followed the modern practice of taking an American edition and chucking it at an English readership, confident that the longer they indulge this unattractive habit the fewer complaints they will receive.

These failings, though irritating, would scarcely be important if the main task had been achieved and the book had provided us with a fuller picture of Saki's life. But due to lack of information and understan ding Mr Langguth has for much of the book chosen to quote long extracts from many of the stories, and to draw highly speculative factual conclusions from the fic

tional characters. So he will quote for page after page from `Tobermory' or The Unbearable Bassington, but when he tries to relate these stories to Munro's life with friends such as Lady St-Helier or Lady Charnwood the direct links are almost always absent.

Tthe publisher's blurb promises revelations about Saki's 'cruelty bordering on sadism, his supposed homosexuality . . . his misogyny and his antisemitism'. In truth there seems to be no evidence at all of sadistic cruelty or misogyny, and the evidence for the other two is highly selective. So when Ben Travers denies that Munro was antisemitic he is discounted. When he reports that Munro was said to be homosexual he is believed. Mr Langguth's most exciting discovery in the proverbial attic was a locket inscribed 'Hector with best love Cyril'. Even if it had read 'Cyril with best love Hector' it would have been evidence of nothing. For all we know 'Cyril' may have been Ethel. At one point Mr Langguth attempts to bolster his homosexual theory by reference to the story 'Gabriel-Ernest' in which a boy is discovered swimming naked in a pool. The boy is mistaken for an amnesiac by one of Saki's over-confident aunts, but it later turns out that he is a werewolf. Mr Langguth discerns an erotic element in this story which 'given the times in which he wrote may have been obvious only to those who shared Hector's (sexual) enthusiasm'. This is the ice-pick of amateur psychoanalysis, and there can be few biographical subjects for whom it is less appropriate. Mr Langguth also considers the probability that Munro had visited the Turkish baths in Jermyn Street to be further evidence of homosexuality, which is plain ridiculous.

Finally there is an over-excited and slightly absurd investigation into the meaning of various 'squiggles' in a very brief diary. Mr Langguth suggests that they mark the dates of homosexual encounters. One might as well conclude that they were the evenings on which Munro changed into a werewolf.

When the war came Munro wrote in the following terms of the young men who did not enlist. 'One must admit that we have al these Islands a variant from the red" blooded type. One or two young men have assured me that they are not in the least in

terested in the war . . . they would talk by the hour about . . . Florentine Art and the difficulty of getting genuine old oak furniture, but the national honour and the national danger were topics that bored them. One felt that the war would affect them chiefly as involving a possible shortage in the supply of eau-de-Cologne . . . It is inconceivable that these persons were ever boys, they have certainly not grown up into men; one cannot call them womanish — the women of our race are made of different stuff. They belong to no sex, and it seems a pity that they should belong to any nation . . . . ' Confronted at last with Munro's opinions on this subject, opinions that completely contradict his pet theory, Mr Langguth can only say that they 'confirm the maxim that no one is more intolerant than a convert'. But there was no conversion; 'the red-blooded boy' was always an ideal for both Hector and Ethel Munro.

But the real weakness of Mr Langguth's detective work is that he misses the Point. Munro's sexual inclinations may or

may not have been of importance to his writing. The evidence no longer exists, and we

shall never know. But there is extensive evidence that another aspect of his emotional life was of central importance, and that was his relationship with Ethel. When their cousin Willie Mercer Morn ford Yates') was asked to explain why Munro had neve6married he spoke not of homosexuality but said that on their father's death Munro 'probably put aside all thoughts of marriage because he knew he would have the lifelong responsibility of an increasingly eccentric sister'.

Ethel and Hector who had been pitted together against the world, or anyway against Aunt Augusta, throughout their childhood, seem never to have entirely abandoned that alliance. Their private Jokes and exclusive loyalty continued to provide them in adult life with an imaginative treasure trove that nothing else could adequately replace. Nothing outside Childhood was as menacing as Aunt Augusta's smile, 'the meaning smile'; nothing as exciting as risking her anger; nothing as absorbing as the animal world Which accepted and returned their thwarted childish affections. On Munro's last leave he and Ethel made excited plans for living after the war in Siberia. 'It would have been a remarkable life', she wrote later. 'Wild animals beyond the dreams of avarice, at our very doors, and, before long, inside them'. It was Ethel and Hector Munro's childhood which had been truly remarkable and neither of them could quite allow it to die.

Mr Langguth can make nothing of this More elusive quality in Munro's character. He is to be congratulated for attempting What so many others have baulked at, but 9ne puts the book down with a distinct feeling that Saki remains as far ahead of the hounds as ever.