Weirdo Writers #4: Saki -- by Garbo
"Among the yeomen and peasantry of the west of England, where Christianity in its most rigid and dogmatic form flourishes ... there still lingers a genuine and practical belief in witches and black and white magic, presumably a relic of a much earlier cult."
If you've ever read Saki's short story The Peace of Mowsle Barton, you might "remember" the quote which opens this post as perhaps something one of the story's characters said to a fellow train passenger, but no.
The passage is actually from a work of nonfiction written by H. H. Munro before he took the pen name Saki.
Some years before Saki went on to write the pieces of short fiction for which he's best known, the author spent three years researching and writing a history of Russia. The quote about England's pagan roots is actually meant to be a connection to ancient Russian beliefs.
Or something. Saki didn't exactly shake up the world with his historical analysis, and after this first lackluster effort, he gave up his vocation as amateur historian. But he more than made up for it by writing fiction which is truly amazing stuff. Though Saki died in 1916, his work has never gone out of print and several of this stories can be found in "best of" anthologies centered on nearly every theme.
Like other writers who worked within the genre known as the Weird, Saki (the fourth author in this series) created tales which are hard to categorize.
For example, the oft-anthologized "The Open Window." Is it just a joke? Spooky humor? Just spooky? Or.. . Weird?
Saki's stories can certainly make me feel weird. In more thn one plotline, harm comes to children -- they are usually eaten by wolves -- while in other tales, children do harm (often to elderly aunts) and as I read. . . I laugh, then wonder what the hell is wrong with me.
Saki's on the list of writers of Weird fiction who suffered childhood trauma: when he was young, his again-pregnant mother miscarried because of a scare she received in the English countryside -- where, ironically, she'd been brought to keep her safe during her pregnancy. After Saki's mother lost the baby, she went into a mental and physical decline and then died. After this, Saki's father sent the children off to be cared for a pair of stern and religious aunts.
In the stories in which little children are stolen away by wild animals, adults often hardly notice or they feel relieved to have a smaller, more manageable family. The young Saki clearly felt that being shipped off by his father indicated that children were simply burdens and obligations to parents.
And what of the new guardians? In other tales, including "The Lumber Room" and (most famously "Sr Vashtar") Saki shows us exactly how, as a boy, he felt about his aunts.
The badly-behaved children in these two stories are not exactly like monstrous Rhonda in the 1956 novel The Bad Seed, but not unlike her either. If you're read The Bad Seed (or seen the movie version) you'll remember that Rhonda's troubles come out of anger and jealousy that she wasn't given a medal for penmanship and another child was chosen instead. Rhonda's envious rage plus the desire to make things right (as Rhonda sees things) reminds me, as a reader, of the misbehaving boys in Saki's stories. They too have their own sense of justice, of the free use of rectifying power, and of a God/god who supports and empowers evil actions if the victim is just as evil than the dangerous child.
(Spoiler ahead!) At the end of the film "The Bad Seed," murderous Rhonda is struck by lightning. But in the novel, her self-sacrificing mother is the one who dies, and Rhonda is free to keep doing things like setting people's beds on fire and then locking them into the burning room if they've dared to confront her about her choices.
Within Saki's tales, childish revenge on adults can range anywhere on the sliding scale of morality from a mild scare and serious inconvenience (in "The Lumber Room," being left in an empty water cistern for thirty-five minutes) to violent death by animal attack, as in "Sredni Vashtar."
In "The Bad Seed," Rhonda benefits from the indulgence and muddleheadedness of landlady Monica Breedlove, who has mystical / psychological leanings:
Similarly, Saki's children often learn bad behavior from the adults in their lives, especially how to use denial to avoid consequences and how to force one's will on others. All the adults see themselves as excellent role models and teachers, by the way.
So far in this consideration of Saki's work, we have some elements --scary events, dark emotions -- of The Weird, but there's more. Saki didn't just write dark fairy tales or psychological horror. For me, there is a frightening, unfathomable depth to the darkness in Saki's weirdest tales. Of the authors covered so far in this series, I find Saki's outlook to be the most Lovecraftian.
The evoking of a fierce animalistic demon-god in "Sredni Vashtar" reminds me of those worshipers within Lovecraft's stories who summon Cthulhu from the murkiest watery depths. And a story like "The Peace of Mowsle Barton, in which witches chant to some power the main character calls "The Evil One" explicitly takes the ritual behaviors of the old women in the village out of the British ancient-cult model (the one Saki mentions in his history book), and defines it as a creation of an evil force by repetition plus a will to evil. The prayers aren't so much a form of communication as they are forms of creation. Hate goes from being a feeling to being -- well, a Being.
There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigour and intensity where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay. And the uncanny part of it was that some horrid unwholesome power seemed to be distilled from their spite and their cursings...he felt that he had come suddenly into contact with some unguessed-at and very evil aspect of hidden forces. Miles away, down through an opening in the hills, he could catch glimpses of a road where motor-cars sometimes passed, and yet here, so little removed from the arteries of the latest civilization, was a bat-haunted old homestead, where something unmistakably like witchcraft seemed to hold a very practical sway.
This kind of communion, wanted or unwanted, is the outcome of a damaged psyche. The death of his mother and the move into his aunts' household explains part of Saki's deep pain. To these unhappinesses, let us take a moment to consider Saki's father. Take a moment, if you will, to examine this photograph of Charles Munro, who spent spent his life in a brass-buttoned uniform as the head of the military police at a colonial outpost.
You won't find it hard to believe that Saki spent his youth and early adulthood rebelling, sometimes using vague medical diagnoses to avoid settling into first his studies, then a career. For years he received financial support from his father so he could pursue his quest to emulate Edward Gibbon, famed author of the multi-volume classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Then Saki spent most of his twenties and thirties writing fiction which lampooned his family and his social set. It can't have been comfortable to go to the club and know the other fathers have been reading one's son's mocking stories.
But then came the Great War, and Saki, like his father, donned a military uniform.
Too old to be called up to fight in the First World War, Saki enlisted. He refused an easy berth as a commissioned officer, and instead worked his way up to the rank of Lance Sergeant in the 22nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. During his military service, Saki insisted on returning to the battlefield even after bouts of serious illness. In 1916, while fighting in France, 43-year-old Saki was killed by a German sniper. (This article from a sci-fi and fantasy site has detailed information about Saki's military career.
Writers of The Weird are often outsiders, and Saki was doing the bulk of his work just fifteen years after Oscar Wilde was sent to Reading Gaol. Complicating things, Saki was a Tory, a mocker of peace-seeking, and someone who thought liberals were fuzzy thinkers. Thus he kept company with people who were intolerant of nontraditional relationships.
Take for instance his aunt's response to a rent boy -- I mean attractive nude young werewolf -- who appears in the main character's home in the story "Gabriel-Ernest."
Though the man who interacted with the cute wolf-boy out in the wild is appalled and embarrassed that the young creature has shown up at the house in town, the do-gooder aunt takes up the cause of the poor homeless youth. Even when a local child disappears, the aunt refuses to acknowledge how werewolves keep themselves fed, and she reconfigures the predator into a hero. Shades of The Bad Seed's Monica Breedlove!
Every time I encounter "Gabriel-Ernest," I think of the recurring Scott Thompson skit on "The Kids in the Hall" where the mean gay-ish guys pretend to be nice to the neighbor lady while destroying her stuff and she falls for it every time because she sees what she wants to see. So Saki rejected the kindhearted person who would have let him be himself, seeing the acceptance or refusal to criticize or the conflict avoidance as weakness. And that made his own life very hard. Was it internalized homophobia or a choice for him? I've always felt it was more the latter. To quote Patti Smith: "Outside of soc-i-ety, that's where I wanna be!!"
Next week: Joyce Carol Oates
If you've ever read Saki's short story The Peace of Mowsle Barton, you might "remember" the quote which opens this post as perhaps something one of the story's characters said to a fellow train passenger, but no.
The passage is actually from a work of nonfiction written by H. H. Munro before he took the pen name Saki.
Some years before Saki went on to write the pieces of short fiction for which he's best known, the author spent three years researching and writing a history of Russia. The quote about England's pagan roots is actually meant to be a connection to ancient Russian beliefs.
Or something. Saki didn't exactly shake up the world with his historical analysis, and after this first lackluster effort, he gave up his vocation as amateur historian. But he more than made up for it by writing fiction which is truly amazing stuff. Though Saki died in 1916, his work has never gone out of print and several of this stories can be found in "best of" anthologies centered on nearly every theme.
Like other writers who worked within the genre known as the Weird, Saki (the fourth author in this series) created tales which are hard to categorize.
For example, the oft-anthologized "The Open Window." Is it just a joke? Spooky humor? Just spooky? Or.. . Weird?
Saki's stories can certainly make me feel weird. In more thn one plotline, harm comes to children -- they are usually eaten by wolves -- while in other tales, children do harm (often to elderly aunts) and as I read. . . I laugh, then wonder what the hell is wrong with me.
Saki's on the list of writers of Weird fiction who suffered childhood trauma: when he was young, his again-pregnant mother miscarried because of a scare she received in the English countryside -- where, ironically, she'd been brought to keep her safe during her pregnancy. After Saki's mother lost the baby, she went into a mental and physical decline and then died. After this, Saki's father sent the children off to be cared for a pair of stern and religious aunts.
In the stories in which little children are stolen away by wild animals, adults often hardly notice or they feel relieved to have a smaller, more manageable family. The young Saki clearly felt that being shipped off by his father indicated that children were simply burdens and obligations to parents.
And what of the new guardians? In other tales, including "The Lumber Room" and (most famously "Sr Vashtar") Saki shows us exactly how, as a boy, he felt about his aunts.
The badly-behaved children in these two stories are not exactly like monstrous Rhonda in the 1956 novel The Bad Seed, but not unlike her either. If you're read The Bad Seed (or seen the movie version) you'll remember that Rhonda's troubles come out of anger and jealousy that she wasn't given a medal for penmanship and another child was chosen instead. Rhonda's envious rage plus the desire to make things right (as Rhonda sees things) reminds me, as a reader, of the misbehaving boys in Saki's stories. They too have their own sense of justice, of the free use of rectifying power, and of a God/god who supports and empowers evil actions if the victim is just as evil than the dangerous child.
(Spoiler ahead!) At the end of the film "The Bad Seed," murderous Rhonda is struck by lightning. But in the novel, her self-sacrificing mother is the one who dies, and Rhonda is free to keep doing things like setting people's beds on fire and then locking them into the burning room if they've dared to confront her about her choices.
Within Saki's tales, childish revenge on adults can range anywhere on the sliding scale of morality from a mild scare and serious inconvenience (in "The Lumber Room," being left in an empty water cistern for thirty-five minutes) to violent death by animal attack, as in "Sredni Vashtar."
In "The Bad Seed," Rhonda benefits from the indulgence and muddleheadedness of landlady Monica Breedlove, who has mystical / psychological leanings:
Similarly, Saki's children often learn bad behavior from the adults in their lives, especially how to use denial to avoid consequences and how to force one's will on others. All the adults see themselves as excellent role models and teachers, by the way.
So far in this consideration of Saki's work, we have some elements --scary events, dark emotions -- of The Weird, but there's more. Saki didn't just write dark fairy tales or psychological horror. For me, there is a frightening, unfathomable depth to the darkness in Saki's weirdest tales. Of the authors covered so far in this series, I find Saki's outlook to be the most Lovecraftian.
The evoking of a fierce animalistic demon-god in "Sredni Vashtar" reminds me of those worshipers within Lovecraft's stories who summon Cthulhu from the murkiest watery depths. And a story like "The Peace of Mowsle Barton, in which witches chant to some power the main character calls "The Evil One" explicitly takes the ritual behaviors of the old women in the village out of the British ancient-cult model (the one Saki mentions in his history book), and defines it as a creation of an evil force by repetition plus a will to evil. The prayers aren't so much a form of communication as they are forms of creation. Hate goes from being a feeling to being -- well, a Being.
There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigour and intensity where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay. And the uncanny part of it was that some horrid unwholesome power seemed to be distilled from their spite and their cursings...he felt that he had come suddenly into contact with some unguessed-at and very evil aspect of hidden forces. Miles away, down through an opening in the hills, he could catch glimpses of a road where motor-cars sometimes passed, and yet here, so little removed from the arteries of the latest civilization, was a bat-haunted old homestead, where something unmistakably like witchcraft seemed to hold a very practical sway.
This kind of communion, wanted or unwanted, is the outcome of a damaged psyche. The death of his mother and the move into his aunts' household explains part of Saki's deep pain. To these unhappinesses, let us take a moment to consider Saki's father. Take a moment, if you will, to examine this photograph of Charles Munro, who spent spent his life in a brass-buttoned uniform as the head of the military police at a colonial outpost.
You won't find it hard to believe that Saki spent his youth and early adulthood rebelling, sometimes using vague medical diagnoses to avoid settling into first his studies, then a career. For years he received financial support from his father so he could pursue his quest to emulate Edward Gibbon, famed author of the multi-volume classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Then Saki spent most of his twenties and thirties writing fiction which lampooned his family and his social set. It can't have been comfortable to go to the club and know the other fathers have been reading one's son's mocking stories.
But then came the Great War, and Saki, like his father, donned a military uniform.
Too old to be called up to fight in the First World War, Saki enlisted. He refused an easy berth as a commissioned officer, and instead worked his way up to the rank of Lance Sergeant in the 22nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. During his military service, Saki insisted on returning to the battlefield even after bouts of serious illness. In 1916, while fighting in France, 43-year-old Saki was killed by a German sniper. (This article from a sci-fi and fantasy site has detailed information about Saki's military career.
Writers of The Weird are often outsiders, and Saki was doing the bulk of his work just fifteen years after Oscar Wilde was sent to Reading Gaol. Complicating things, Saki was a Tory, a mocker of peace-seeking, and someone who thought liberals were fuzzy thinkers. Thus he kept company with people who were intolerant of nontraditional relationships.
Take for instance his aunt's response to a rent boy -- I mean attractive nude young werewolf -- who appears in the main character's home in the story "Gabriel-Ernest."
Though the man who interacted with the cute wolf-boy out in the wild is appalled and embarrassed that the young creature has shown up at the house in town, the do-gooder aunt takes up the cause of the poor homeless youth. Even when a local child disappears, the aunt refuses to acknowledge how werewolves keep themselves fed, and she reconfigures the predator into a hero. Shades of The Bad Seed's Monica Breedlove!
Every time I encounter "Gabriel-Ernest," I think of the recurring Scott Thompson skit on "The Kids in the Hall" where the mean gay-ish guys pretend to be nice to the neighbor lady while destroying her stuff and she falls for it every time because she sees what she wants to see. So Saki rejected the kindhearted person who would have let him be himself, seeing the acceptance or refusal to criticize or the conflict avoidance as weakness. And that made his own life very hard. Was it internalized homophobia or a choice for him? I've always felt it was more the latter. To quote Patti Smith: "Outside of soc-i-ety, that's where I wanna be!!"
Next week: Joyce Carol Oates
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| Garbo |
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