Author Archives: Bruce Gaston

‘Reginald at the Carlton’

Reginald at the Carlton1

London, the Carlton Hotel

London, the Carlton Hotel, from Leonard A. Lauder collection of Raphael Tuck & Sons postcards; Curt Teich Postcard Archives Collection via archive.org

“A most variable climate,” said the Duchess; “and how unfortunate that we should have had that very cold weather at a time when coal was so dear! So distressing for the poor.”

“Someone has observed that Providence is always on the side of the big dividends,”2 remarked Reginald.

The Duchess ate an anchovy in a shocked manner; she was sufficiently old-fashioned to dislike irreverence towards dividends.

Reginald had left the selection of a feeding-ground to her womanly intuition, but he chose the wine himself, knowing that womanly intuition stops short at claret. A woman will cheerfully choose husbands for her less attractive friends, or take sides in a political controversy without the least knowledge of the issues involved—but no woman ever cheerfully chose a claret.

“Hors d’œuvres have always a pathetic interest for me,” said Reginald: “they remind me of one’s childhood that one goes through, wondering what the next course is going to be like—and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d’œuvres. Don’t you love watching the different ways people have of entering a restaurant? There is the woman who races in as though her whole scheme of life were held together by a one-pin despotism which might abdicate its functions at any moment; it’s really a relief to see her reach her chair in safety. Then there are the people who troop in with an-unpleasant-duty-to-perform air, as if they were angels of Death entering a plague city. You see that type of Briton very much in hotels abroad. And nowadays there are always the Johannes-bourgeois, who bring a Cape-to-Cairo3 atmosphere with them—what may be called the Rand Manner, I suppose.”4

“Talking about hotels abroad,” said the Duchess, “I am preparing notes for a lecture at the Club on the educational effects of modern travel, dealing chiefly with the moral side of the question. I was talking to Lady Beauwhistle’s aunt the other day—she’s just come back from Paris, you know. Such a sweet woman—” Continue reading →

Aside

“He is taking the little Toop child home”

“The little Toop child” is (as many readers no doubt know) devoured by the werewolf Gabriel-Ernest in the story of the same name (Reginald in Russia).

I had always assumed that “Toop” was another of Saki’s invented names (like “Spoopin” in ‘The Talking-Out of Tarrington’), and that it was deliberately ridiculous-sounding in order to minimise any sympathy one might feel for the wholly undeserving victim.

But then yesterday I was talking with a small group of people about surnames and one of them happened to mention that his mother’s maiden name was Toop. So it does exist after all!

It is (the Internet informs me) Viking in origin. I fear I may be about to embark on a long quest to find out whether Packletide, Bimberton, Throckmorton, Thropplestance etc. etc. are also real…

[Edit 23/04/2025: a correspondent kindly writes that Throckmorton is absolutely a real last name, but there seem to be no references on findagrave.com to Bimbertons, Packletides, or Thropplestances. (Nor for that matter are there any Sangrails, but I didn’t really expect to find any!)]

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The First Page of ‘The Recessional’

I thought readers might be interested to see the only known manuscript of a Munro story (“The Recessional” from The Chronicles of Clovis).

The first page of 'The Recessional' by Saki (H.H. Munro)

The first page of ‘The Recessional’ by Saki (H.H. Munro)

Munro’s sister Ethel disposed of most of his papers once she had compiled and published The Toys of Peace, The Square Egg and her memoir of her brother. The J. W. Lambert archive, held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains a copy of the manuscript of “The Recessional” (published 8 July 1911 in the Westminster Gazette), which allows us probably the only glimpse we will ever get into Munro’s working practices (MS. Eng. c. 2347, fols. 265–75). Presumably Lambert acquired it while compiling The Bodley Head Saki (published 1963), though how and from whom remains unknown.

There are eleven pages in total. At times the copy has cut off the very final letter or two of a line. The manuscript is very clean and corroborates what fellow journalist A. Rothay Reynolds wrote in a memoir written in September 1918 (published as an introduction to The Toys of Peace): “His writing-pad was usually propped up with a book to make it slant and he wrote slowly in a very clear hand, rarely erasing a word or making a correction” (xx).

Link

A Handful of Dust and The Unbearable Bassington

In an article for Evelyn Waugh Studies (the newsletter for the Evelyn Waugh Society), Martin Stead suggests that Saki was one influence on Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust:

One other likely influence is the novel The Unbearable Bassington (1912) by Saki (H. H. Munro). The bulk of this work takes place in London, and, like Waugh’s novel, shows up the shallowness of the characters in the fashionable world. Then, at the end, the action shifts abruptly to the jungle, to where the hero, Comus Bassington, has been exiled, and where he dies, hopelessly mourning his former life. Waugh admired Saki, and wrote the 1947 introduction for a reprint of Bassington, although he felt the novel to be less successful than the short stories. Waugh and Saki certainly share a number of points, such as a clipped, pared-down style, some extremely dark humour, and the habit of telling much of their stories in dialogue.

If you haven’t read A Handful of Dust, you should! (I am assuming my readers have read The Unbearable Bassington.)

Source: Evelyn Waugh Studies Vol. 54, No. 2

Link: https://mcusercontent.com/8c668cf57e3f057438f69a6fa/files/df948699-ca27-9b19-6ebc-4c6a84fedc10/Evelyn_Waugh_Studies_54.2.pdf

Link

“The Identity of the Narrator in Saki’s first Reginald Story”

Prompted by the thought of translating the first Reginald story into Russian, Lora Sirufova has written a short but fascinating article about the identity of the narrator, that unknown “I” who introduced Reginald to the world thus:

I did it—I who should have known better. I persuaded Reginald to go to the McKillops’ garden–party against his will.

https://www.academia.edu/112374550/The_Identity_of_the_Narrator_in_Sakis_first_Reginald_Story

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New book! Saki (H.H. Munro): Original and Uncollected Stories

Saki (H.H. Munro): Original and Uncollected Stories CoverThis is just a quick post to say that my new book has been published and is now available in both electronic and paper form. Titled Saki (H.H. Munro): Original and Uncollected Stories, it reprints the original versions of tales that were later changed when collected together in The Chronicles of Clovis (see here for some information on that), and also includes three other stories that haven’t appeared in any collections up to now: ‘Mrs. Pendercoet’s Lost Identity’, ‘The Romance of Business’ and ‘The Optimist’. I have blogged here already about the rediscovery of a couple of these.

The book is published under an Open Access license, which means that you can read it online or download a PDF version for free. I would urge you though, if you can afford it, to buy either the EPUB, the paperback, or the hardback version, and help to support the publishers.

You can find it here: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0365

Writer Eley Williams recommends Saki in The Guardian newspaper

My comfort read
Anything by Saki. You have time to read one of his short stories right now. Some are nasty little acts of mischief, some lugubriously camp fancies. There’s satire, folklore, sass and starch. Put this thing aside; go find some Saki.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/12/eley-williams-i-trusted-people-far-less-once-id-finished-that-novel?CMP=share_btn_url

The Carlton Hotel

London, the Carlton Hotel
London, the Carlton Hotel, from Leonard A. Lauder collection of Raphael Tuck & Sons postcards; Curt Teich Postcard Archives Collection via archive.org

As featured in ‘Reginald at the Carlton’ (which I ought to post here some time…)