Word: sakis
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...SAKI: A LIFE OF HECTOR HUGH MUNRO by A.J. Langguth; Simon & Schuster; 366 pages...
Ancients described the tiny, sweet-singing nightingale as Vox et praeterea nihil (voice and nothing else). For more than half a century that is how it has been, too, with Hector Hugh Munro, the marvelous miniaturist who wrote under the name of Saki. His voices, silly and silky and sometimes tinged with savagery, were familiar and extravagantly praised. One belonged to a popinjay character called Reginald, who discoursed in a series of semiprecious mots: "I hate posterity. It's so fond of having the last word." Another was Clovis Sangrail, a young man much given to the kind...
...Saki was born into a Scottish family with a strong martial tradition and brought up in darkest Devon by a pair of truly Dickensian aunts before escaping to boarding school ("You can't expect a boy to be vicious until he's been to a good school"). He was homosexual, but neither Saki nor Langguth goes in for soul searching about the love that once dared not speak its name. Saki, in fact, never mentioned it. His sister merely refers to his habit of sharing digs with young men as "chumming." In the biographer's view, however...
After a brief tour in the Burma police (like Orwell), Saki turns up in London at 29, doing political lampoons for the Westminster Gazette with parodies of Lewis Carroll and Kipling. In The Political Jungle Book, 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...
...settled down in England, with a small income, a conservative club (the Cocoa Tree), a cottage in Surrey (for Ethel) and growing celebrity as a writer of comic short stories. But nobody ever takes a comic writer seriously, and, Saki complained, "a humorist is almost invariably expected to be funny for life." As World War I approached, he grew discontented with the coffee-spoon London world that had provided him with targets for satiric comedy, as well as with himself for belonging...