"Guess what I have shot?" - some Saki stories that are stories

Saki’s first book of stories, Reginald (1904) turned out not to be a book of stories at all, despite leading off The Short Stories of Saki, but rather a collection of newspaper humor columns in which the title characters told jokes about this and that.  Reginald in Russia (1910) promises, via the title, more of the same.  A take it is a conceptual joke of Saki’s that Reginald appears only in the first “story” and is never seen or heard again, ever in the rest of Saki’s work, as if he went off a cliff with his arch-enemy Moriarty.  No, that is not the right analogy.

The Princess always defended a friend’s complexion if it was really bad.  With her, as with a great many of her sex, charity began at homeliness and did not generally progress much farther.

I am not complaining about the humor column side of Saki.  How about this one:

Reginald gave a delicate shiver, such as an Italian greyhound might give in contemplating the approach of an ice age of which he personally disapproved…

But my point is that most of the rest of this little book (my edition packs it into 62 pages) consists of genuine Saki stories, narratives with characters, movement, conclusions, and so on, not just a string of jokes.  Well, aside from a throwaway about ladies’ shopping habits that might as well include Reginald and a joke about Turks and women’s suffrage, both period pieces at best.

Otherwise, they are like “The Bag.”  The Major, who is in charge of fox-hunting, is coming to tea, along with another guest, a Russian youth, who has just shot – “’Guess what I have shot,’ he demanded.”

“Does it swim and eat fish?” asked Norah, with a fervent prayer in  her heart that it might turn out to be an otter.

“No,” said Vladimir, busy with the straps of his game-bag; “it lives in the woods, and eats rabbits and chickens.”

Norah sat down suddenly, and hid her face in her hands.

“Merciful Heaven!” she wailed; “he’s shot a fox!”

The Major enters just as they hide the fox.  Farce ensues.  I am so used to seeing farce ably enacted by humans, in plays and on screen, that I convince myself that actors are necessary for farce to work, but no, a nosey fox-terrier, a musky game bag, and prose are enough.

“The Bag” has a twist in the last line – just a single word – that does not upend what came before, but only deepens the social comedy.  “The Mouse” follows the same formula.  A man in a train compartment discovers he has a mouse in his clothes.  Can he possibly shake out or even remove some of his clothes in front of the lady in the compartment with him – when she is asleep?  For a while, his answer is No, which is funny, and after enough mousey torment he changes to Yes, which is funnier.

Farce is just comedy of manners with the manners at issues isolated or pushed to an extreme.  Why not just violate that standard, just this once?  Easy to say after the fact, or from the safety of my soft armchair at the club.

My understanding is that these stories were much read – and first read – by gentlemen at their clubs.  Did they have to stifle their laughter to maintain decorum, or could they let it out right there in the reading room?  Especially when they hit the twist words, nine words from the end of the story in “The Mouse,” seven from the end in “The Bag,” just four in the startling “The Reticence of Lady Anne.”  I am imagining little pops of laughter around the room from the men reading Saki in the Westminster Gazette.

Saki says disrespectful things about the universe - some lines from Reginald

Saki’s first book of short stories, Reginald (1904), turns out not to be a books of short stories, despite leading off the Modern Library Short Stories of Saki.  You knew this; I did not.  The Reginald “stories” are newspaper humor pieces, jokes, satire, goofing around.  The Modern Library edition compresses the “book” into 42 pages with no strain on the eye or margin.

The vehicle for Saki’s jokes is his young aesthete Reginald, who if taken seriously is a lunatic, but what fool would take him seriously.

None of the rest of his family had anything approaching Titian hair or a sense of humour, and they used primroses as table decorations.

It follows that they never understood Reginald, who came down late to breakfast, and nibbled toast, and said disrespectful things about the universe.  The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast.  (“Reginald’s Choir Treat”)

Draining the fun from that passage, I note that “weather forecast” is pretty cheap, but a joke that still looks like a joke.  “Primroses” has lost any humor it might once have had.  Almost requires a footnote.  Oscar Wilde was so obsessed with lilies that they became a trademark of English aestheticism.  I assume that helps me place the “primroses” joke, but who knows.  “[S]aid disrespectful things about the universe” is larger than a joke.  A statement of purpose.

People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity; the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.  (“Reginald on Christmas Presents”)

I give this as an example of something disrespectful, although one could argue the point.

“To have reached thirty,” said Reginald, “is to have failed in life.” (“Reginald on the Academy”)

That’s Reginald as Wilde.  Saki was of course in his early thirties when he wrote that line.

I found every one talking nervously and feverishly of the weather and the war in South Africa, except Reginald, who was reclining in a comfortable chair with the dreamy, faraway look that a volcano might wear just after it had desolated entire villages.  (“Reginald”)

That volcano is in what I think of as P. G. Wodehouse mode, which I suppose I should begin calling the Saki mode.  Christopher Morley, in his introduction, says of Saki that “[a]unts and werewolves were two of his specialties” (p. vii), which werewolves aside sounds awfully like Bertie Wooster.

A character who is not Reginald, and hopes to reform him:

And like every woman who has ever preached repentance to unregenerate youth, she dwelt on the sin of an empty life, which always seems so much more scandalous in the country, where people rise early to see if a new strawberry has happened during the night.  (“Reginald’s Choir Treat”)

That might be my favorite line in Reginald.  Cuts two ways, don’t it?

Saki’s next book seems, despite its title (Reginald in Russia), to contain short stories, which is close to but not really a shame.

He sees to things connected with his Department - short stories are stories

Byatt’s Oxford Anthology of English Short Stories is in my hands not just because I am enjoying it but because it is going to serve as the test text for an experiment run by Alex of Thinking in Fragments in which, by means of the technique of tagmemics, she is going to prove that “most so called short stories are actually nothing of the sort” because the “dénouement and/or conclusion is missing,” with readers “left to construct the elements that are missing” and, by extension, this is why people don’t “get” short stories.

By contrast, my experience has been that almost all short stories of any real quality, the only ones I am likely to read, are actually stories – most stories are light entertainment published in popular magazines, not avant garde fragments – and that readers do not like them for reasons that will sound uncharitable if I write them out.  Most novels, even many of the best, are more forgiving of a reader’s inattention, I will just say that.  I mostly read novels myself.

So I have been, like a diligent student, reading ahead.  Odds are I won’t understand a word of the tagmemicism, so the argument will be left unresolved.  If Alex does not insist on a chronological order, I suggest starting with “My Flannel Knickers” by Leonora Carrington, who was a rarity, a genuine English Surrealist.  She supplies the painting on the book’s cover as well as three pages of silliness about a saint who lives on a traffic island which, however random its contents, deliberately mimics the structure of an ordinary story. 

So here I am on the island with all size of mechanical artifacts whizzing by in every conceivable direction, even overhead.

Here I sit.  (371)

Or so it seems to me, using the technique of reading.

Another good test case is the Saki story “The Toys of Peace,” in part because its contents are so trivial and predictable.  An uncle and mother decide that the children should relinquish their tin soldiers for peaceful toys.  Presented with said toys, the little boys immediately march them off to war.  The appeal of this story lies entirely in its details.

In an awful silence he disinterred a little lead figure of a man in black clothes.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is a distinguished civilian, John Stuart Mill.  He was an authority on political economy.’

‘Why?’ asked Bertie.

‘Well, he wanted to be; he thought it was a useful thing to be.’

Bertie gave an expressive grunt, which conveyed his opinion that there was no accounting for tastes.  (156)

I included the last line because I feel it to be, as a joke, cheap and inferior.  The big laugh is in the word “Why.”

‘These little round things are loaves baked in a sanitary bakehouse.  That lead figure is a sanitary inspector, this one a district councillor, and this one is an official of the Local Government Board.’

‘What does he do?’ asked Eric wearily.

‘He sees to things connected with his Department,’ said Harvey. (157)

Sensitive readers will experience a joyous, healthful catharsis when, at the end of the story, Mill and the others have been doused with red ink.  “’He bleeds dreadfully,’ said Bertie, splashing red ink liberally on the façade of the Association building” (159).

I could use a technique which demonstrates which jokes are funny.  Regardless, I eagerly await the tagmemicist experiment, even though I am already know the results.