Word: langguth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Lord Balfour, the hapless Prime Minister, is called "Sheer Khan't." Throughout Saki's life, Celtic mysticism and foreboding, plus a raw strain of patriotism, kept trying to break through the veneer of satiric wit and comic, cultured urbanity that made him celebrated as man and writer. Langguth notes that he knew "the frustration of an adventurer's soul locked in the body of a clerk." Soon Munro left London again to become the Morning Post's correspondent in the Balkans, covering the bloody rivalry between Turks and Bulgars. He moved on to St. Petersburg, witnessing...
There were three results. The first was brilliant: The Unbearable Bassington, published in 1912, so Saki could demonstrate that he could write a novel and at the same time pour ashes upon the society he had long been part of. Says Langguth: "It could be the cry of an outsider whose thin lips ache from 40 years of smiling." The second result was his second (and last) novel, When William Came, an unsuccessful but percipient fantasy written in early 1913, about what England would be like under German occupation, and how a flabby society full of jokesters, hucksters and aesthetes...
...overage. He had to work like a dog to get in shape, and then keep refusing commissions that were offered to him, because a commission would "separate him" from other men. He became a good soldier and made corporal. Writes Langguth: "This time he would live his life the right way or he would end it." On the foggy dawn of Nov. 14, 1916, near Beaumont-Hamel, he was shot by a German sniper. During a brief pause in an advance one of his men had lit up, and Corporal Munro had just yelled, "Put that bloody cigarette...
...Langguth wastes little time trying to decide whether Saki was a literary butterfly who finally tried to stamp or some kind of shrike with a sense of humor. The book notes the Waugh-like gift for comic names (Loona Bimberton, Septimus Brope), the Wildean wit, the Wodehousean way with the featherheaded fauna of the West End and the country house party, the surprise endings self-consciously borrowed from O'Henry...
...best Saki is matchless, a storyteller, as Langguth justly puts it, with "flawless sentences on almost every page that could have been the work of no other English writer." That is why even the stories with surprise endings, like The Open Window, can be read again and again. "The humor came less from his jokes than from the . . . absolute rightness to his language." It is like watching a champion diver do a perfect half gainer. You know how it comes out, but seeing it done is still astonishing...