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—”

“And so silly. In these days of the over-education of women she’s quite refreshing. They say some people went through the siege of Paris without knowing that France and Germany were at war; but the Beauwhistle aunt is credited with having passed the whole winter in Paris under the impression that the Humberts5 were a kind of bicycle … Isn’t there a bishop or somebody who believes we shall meet all the animals we have known on earth in another world?6 How frightfully embarrassing to meet a whole shoal of whitebait you had last known at Prince’s!7 I’m sure in my nervousness I should talk of nothing but lemons. Still, I daresay they would be quite as offended if one hadn’t eaten them. I know if I were served up at a cannibal feast I should be dreadfully annoyed if anyone found fault with me for not being tender enough, or having been kept too long.”

“My idea about the lecture,” resumed the Duchess hurriedly, “is to inquire whether promiscuous Continental travel doesn’t tend to weaken the moral fibre of the social conscience. There are people one knows, quite nice people when they are in England, who are so different when they are anywhere the other side of the Channel.”

“The people with what I call Tauchnitz morals,”8 observed Reginald. “On the whole, I think they get the best of two very desirable worlds. And, after all, they charge so much for excess luggage on some of those foreign lines that it’s really an economy to leave one’s reputation behind one occasionally.”

“A scandal, my dear Reginald, is as much to be avoided at Monaco or any of those places as at Exeter, let us say.”

“Scandal, my dear Irene—I may call you Irene, mayn’t I?”

“I don’t know that you have known me long enough for that.”

“I’ve known you longer than your god-parents had when they took the liberty of calling you that name. Scandal is merely the compassionate allowance which the gay make to the humdrum. Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people. Tell me, who is the woman with the old lace at the table on our left? Oh, that doesn’t matter; it’s quite the thing nowadays to stare at people as if they were yearlings at Tattersall’s.”9

“Mrs. Spelvexit? Quite a charming woman; separated from her husband—”

“Incompatibility of income?”

“Oh, nothing of that sort. By miles of frozen ocean, I was going to say. He explores ice-floes and studies the movements of herrings, and has written a most interesting book on the home-life of the Esquimaux; but naturally he has very little home-life of his own.”

“A husband who comes home with the Gulf Stream would be rather a tied-up asset.”

“His wife is exceedingly sensible about it. She collects postage-stamps. Such a resource. Those people with her are the Whimples, very old acquaintances of mine; they’re always having trouble, poor things.”

“Trouble is not one of those fancies you can take up and drop at any moment; it’s like a grouse-moor or the opium-habit—once you start it you’ve got to keep it up.”

“Their eldest son was such a disappointment to them; they wanted him to be a linguist, and spent no end of money on having him taught to speak—oh, dozens of languages!—and then he became a Trappist monk. And the youngest, who was intended for the American marriage market,10 has developed political tendencies, and writes pamphlets about the housing of the poor. Of course it’s a most important question, and I devote a good deal of time to it myself in the mornings; but, as Laura Whimple says, it’s as well to have an establishment of one’s own before agitating about other people’s. She feels it very keenly, but she always maintains a cheerful appetite, which I think is so unselfish of her.”

“There are different ways of taking disappointment. There was a girl I knew who nursed a wealthy uncle through a long illness, borne by her with Christian fortitude, and then he died and left his money to a swine-fever hospital. She found she’d about cleared stock in fortitude by that time, and now she gives drawing-room recitations. That’s what I call being vindictive.”

“Life is full of its disappointments,” observed the Duchess, “and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as illusions. But that, my dear Reginald, becomes more difficult as one grows older.”

“I think it’s more generally practised than you imagine. The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened. It’s only the middle-aged who are really conscious of their limitations—that is why one should be so patient with them. But one never is.”

“After all,” said the Duchess, “the disillusions of life may depend on our way of assessing it. In the minds of those who come after us we may be remembered for qualities and successes which we quite left out of the reckoning.”

“It’s not always safe to depend on the commemorative tendencies of those who come after us. There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the mediæval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets. And now, if you can tear yourself away from the salted almonds, we’ll go and have coffee under the palms that are so necessary for our discomfort.”

Image

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).

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

Forthcoming: ‘Saki (H.H. Munro): Original and Uncollected Stories’

Saki (H.H. Munro): Original and Uncollected Stories CoverI’m delighted to announce that my edited collection of Saki’s stories will be appearing soon as a real book and in a number of electronic formats, thanks to Open Book Publishers.

The book is a follow up to my article on the genesis of The Chronicles of Clovis and contains the original periodical versions of the following stories:

  1. Esmé
  2. Tobermory
  3. Mrs Packletide’s Tiger
  4. The Background
  5. The Jesting of Arlington Stringham
  6. Adrian
  7. The Chaplet
  8. Wratislav
  9. Filboid Studge
  10. Ministers of Grace

It also includes three hitherto uncollected stories:

  1. Mrs Pendercoet’s Lost Identity
  2. The Optimist
  3. The Romance of Business (only recently rediscovered, as revealed on this blog)

I’ve written an introduction, setting the stories in context, and as you’d expect there are plentiful annotations as well. The volume also includes a chronology of Munro’s life, suggestions for further reading, and a list of textual variants for the Chronicles of Clovis stories.

At the minute I’m correcting the proofs, and once that’s done publication shouldn’t be too far away. I will of course post the publication date here as soon as I know it.

More details can be found here: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0365

Saki in Japanese

I’ve been looking into the topic of Saki in translation and recently I got hold of a copy of a selection of the stories in Japanese: サキの思い出: 評伝と短篇. (“The Memories of Saki with his Short Stories”).

Cover of サキの思い出: 評伝と短篇. (“The Memories of Saki with his Short Stories”.) Translated by 花輪涼子, 彩流社, published 2017)
It’s an attractive little hardback, with some of Munro’s own drawings on the cover. These are taken from Ethel Munro’s memoir of her brother (first published in The Square Egg and Other Sketches in 1924). Ethel’s reminiscences actually make up of the bulk of the book (more than half). These remaining pages contain:

 

  1. Rothsay Reynold’s memoir of Munro (originally the introduction to The Toys of Peace)
  2. Sredni Vashtar
  3. The Saint And The Goblin
  4. The Old Town of Pskoff
  5. Karl-Ludwig’s Window
  6. A Jungle Story
  7. Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Business
  8. A Young Turkish Catastrophe
  9. The Sex That Doesn’t Shop
  10. The Soul of Laploshka
  11. Judkin Of The Parcels
  12. The Mappined Life
  13. The Image of the Lost Soul

Which I think most Saki aficionados will admit contains some rather strange choices.

For me, there’s only one 24-carat classic there: ‘Sredni Vashtar’. ‘The Mappined Life’ and ‘Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Business’ are both good too, but there are (in my opinion) better Clovis stories (for example, ‘The Stampeding of Lady Bastable’, or ‘The Unrest-Cure’, or ‘The Secret Sin Of Septimus Brope’, or…). The others are definitely minor Saki: for example, ‘Judkin Of The Parcels’ and ‘The Image of the Lost Soul’ are both apprentice work, written before Munro really found his vein. Some of them don’t even fit the description of them as “stories”: most noticeably ‘Karl-Ludwig’s Window’, which is a one-act play, but also ‘The Old Town of Pskoff’ and ‘The Sex That Doesn’t Shop’, which are probably best described as pieces of journalism.

And as far as I can see, there’s not a unifying theme (e.g animals) which might have justified putting these tales together in one volume. Perhaps the publishers were aiming at showing as wide a range of Munro’s invention as possible?

Nor is Ethel Munro’s selective biography of her brother essential reading, though I suppose it does the job of a kind of introduction to his work.

All in all, I can’t help feeling that a Japanese reader who bought this would go away at the end with a fairly poor opinion of Munro as a writer.

Bibliography:

Munro, Ethel M., et al. サキの思い出: 評伝と短篇. (“The Memories of Saki with his Short Stories”.) Translated by 花輪涼子, 彩流社, published 2017)

‘The Optimist’

In the gathering twilight Richard Duncombe rode a tired horse through a seemingly endless succession of fields in what he guessed to be a more or less homeward direction. After the crowd and movement and liveliness of a good day with the hounds there was something still and ghostly about this long, slow ride through a misty world of plough-land, grass-land, and fallow, in which he and his horse seemed to be the only living things. Even when he struck into a road it seemed a deserted highway bordered by long stretches of hedge and coppice, with never a farm-gate or signpost to break its reticence or relieve its sameness. It was with a sense of pleasure that he came suddenly into the glow of lighted windows and drew rein hopefully outside the garden gate of a substantial-sized dwelling. A tall, red-haired girl stood in the doorway of the house, as though keeping watch along what could be seen of the dusky roadway. She returned Duncombe’s greeting with a pleasant “Good evening.”“I see you have a stable there,” he called out; “do you think you could let me put my horse up there for an hour’s rest and give him a little flour and water? He’s fairly done up, and I don’t think there’s an inn within five miles.”“Mother will be delighted,” said the girl, and in a few minutes she had helped Duncombe to stable and water his tired animal.“We are just sitting down to tea,” she said shyly, “and mother hopes you will kindly come in and take a cup.”It was not the first time that Duncombe had partaken of pleasant wayside hospitality during homeward rides, and he gladly accepted the invitation. The house was evidently one belonging to fairly comfortable yeoman owners, and its mistress was a kindly faced woman, with quiet, friendly manners, who sat in her parlour at a table well laid out with the furnishing of a substantial middle-class tea. Seated also at the table when Duncombe entered was a red-haired boy of about seventeen, evidently the brother of the girl who had played the part of stable-help. Continue reading

Saki in Brazilian Portuguese

Following my blog post about a new translation of Saki into Spanish, I was contacted by Francisco Araujo da Costa, who has translated some of Saki’s stories into (Brazilian) Portuguese. It seems that Saki is known not just in Spanish-speaking South America!

Francisco had already translated 20 of the stories in 2008; they were published in a collection entitled Um Gato Indiscreto e Outros Contos. (Readers ought to have no difficult working out who the “Indiscreet Cat” is.)

That edition had gone out of print but has now been reissued with an additional seven stories. It’s already available for Kindle:

https://www.amazon.com/Tigre-Mrs-Packletide-outros-contos-ebook/dp/B09WNFB8DL/

A print version should be available soon.

Here’s the description from the website:

O Tigre de Mrs. Packletide e outros contos reúne uma série de histórias que satirizam a sociedade inglesa na primeira década do século XX, permeadas às vezes de um certo teor fantástico ou sobrenatural.
O humor ferino e politicamente incorreto de Saki está representado aqui em vinte e sete contos publicados originalmente em jornais e revistas britânicas e em seis coletâneas: Reginald (1904), Reginald in Russia (1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), Beasts and Super-Beasts (1912), The Toys of Peace (1919) e The Square Egg and Other Sketches (1924).
Vinte dos contos foram publicados originalmente sob o título de Um Gato Indiscreto e Outros Contos (Editora Hedra, 2009). Os sete inéditos são A reticência de Lady Anne, O santo e o duende, A dúzia de frade, Hermann, o Irascível: Uma história do Grande Choro, Laura, O quarto de guardados e O ovo quadrado.

Francisco also translated Saki’s second novel When William Came, and you can find this on Amazon too:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D2CIVVI/

A sample chapter can be read by anyone here:

https://ciscocosta.medium.com/o-retorno-ao-lar-um-cap%C3%ADtulo-de-saki-5e26a97d3d5c

Finally, a sample of the aforementioned collection, the translation of ‘The Background’, was put online at:

https://medium.com/cabine-literaria/a-tela-um-conto-de-saki-ce2967a8e74b

Link

Article link: Reconstructing the Original Beasts and Super-Beasts by “Saki,” or How a Short Story Collection Took Shape

I completely forgot to mention that my article on the genesis of The Chronicles of Clovis (which was originally to be called Beasts and Super-Beasts) was published last October in the journal Articles, Notes and Queries (ANQ).

It examines the differences between the versions of stories published in periodicals and the revised versions collected in the book. I trace the writing and publication history and speculate a little on the reasons for the changes.

The article can be found here, though access is unfortunately not free: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0895769X.2021.1979929

Gaston, Bruce. “Reconstructing the Original Beasts and Super-Beasts by ‘Saki,’ or How a Short Story Collection Took Shape.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews. 12 Oct. 2021. Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2021.1979929 (08.02.22)

El ala este : Y otros cuentos (Saki in Spanish)

Saki fan, researcher and contributor to this blog Juan Facundo Araujo has published a book of Spanish translations, including (if I understand correctly) the previously untranslated ‘The East Wing’ and ‘A Jungle Story’. He also wrote an introductory essay.

Here’s the Spanish description from Amazon:

“El ala este” incluye tres relatos inéditos en español del genial autor inglés, con un estudio preliminar de Facundo Araujo y una elegante selección anotada de cuentos, ilustrados por los artistas Néstor Martín y Pablo Castillo.

‘Reginald on Christmas Presents’

I wish it to be distinctly understood (said Reginald) that I don’t want a “George, Prince of Wales” Prayer-book1 as a Christmas present. The fact cannot be too widely known.

There ought (he continued) to be technical education classes on the science of present-giving. No one seems to have the faintest notion of what anyone else wants, and the prevalent ideas on the subject are not creditable to a civilised community.

There is, for instance, the female relative in the country who “knows a tie is always useful,” and sends you some spotted horror that you could only wear in secret or in Tottenham Court Road.2 It might have been useful had she kept it to tie up currant bushes with, when it would have served the double purpose of supporting the branches and frightening away the birds—for it is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder æsthetic taste than the average female relative in the country.

Then there are aunts. They are always a difficult class to deal with in the matter of presents. The trouble is that one never catches them really young enough. By the time one has educated them to an appreciation of the fact that one does not wear red woollen mittens in the West End, they die, or quarrel with the family, or do something equally inconsiderate. That is why the supply of trained aunts is always so precarious. Continue reading