Sandie Byrne, The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H. H. Munro.

Abstract

SANDIE BYRNE'S study of ‘Saki’ divides its attention between the work and the life, a useful approach in two respects: that, by work, she includes all his work, not just the short stories; and by life, she means simply what is intelligible by sourced evidence, without speculation to more ambiguous (but no less important) aspects such as his sexuality. The logic of this approach is understandable, and if one assesses Byrne's book on what it purports to cover, then one finds a significant and satisfying restoration of some forgotten thematic concerns. The challenge in approaching Munro/Saki is how to penetrate beneath the ‘pose of sangfroid … impeccable dress and phlegmatic poise’ (89) especially when the biographical pose seems to be duplicated in fictional characters. Byrne tackles this by drawing attention to his later role as a soldier during World War 1, and the parallel shift away from the dapper dandies of his early satiric fiction to the politics and unambiguous heroism of his 1913 novel, When William Came. Despite his cosmopolitan early life (France, Russia, the Balkans), Munro subscribed to and closely identified himself with Kiplingesque notions of England and Empire, which Byrne shrewdly traces back into his earlier satires. Reginald, Clovis, and Bertie do not deplore action or even violence in an approved cause; indeed, their comic perspective is underwritten by a sense of superiority afforded by the vantage of Empire. Munro's post-1913 renunciation of the ‘effete, degenerate aesthetes’ does not constitute a ‘radical change of heart or volte-face of personality, politics or assumed personae’ (8). Rather it is a continuation in his genuine belief in England's pre-eminence. His sense of superiority over everyone—servants, colonial subordinates, untouchables, Jews—fed his early short stories, and remained untouched by the ironies of war. An interview in The Bodleian claims ‘the personality of the man is frankly baffling’ (108) and so it is. Saki has the insight that Empire allows into itself but not beyond itself. Had he survived the war, he might have swiftly found his world-view anachronistic. The war he fought was not that of Sassoon or Graves. To write ‘The Unrest-Cure’, a comedy involving a massacre of Jews in English society, or to envision a Germany-occupied England struggling with an influx of German Jews, is both strangely perceptive and deeply blind at the same time.