I Hate Saki

Between us, it’s personal. There was a time, I was an admirer. His short stories, of course, and I even enjoyed his novels. That was the problem, I suppose.

Sometime in the mid-1990s I chanced upon a copy of Montague Summers’s posthumously published autobiography, The Galanty Show, in the James Cook University library in Townsville. In it he mentioned that Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) had given him a copy of a novel he had written called Mrs Elmsley saying, “I wrote it under the influence of Balzac.” Summers wondered why the book was not listed as his friend’s first published novel. It may have had something to do with the tropical heat but I was fascinated.

Incidentally, the library at JCU is rather special. On the shelves is (or was then) an eighteenth-century complete works of Voltaire. When you opened a volume you could smell the eighteenth century. The books could be borrowed with a student card. There was also a collection of essays which included one by Christopher Koch about his time working in the Tasmanian Archives. Reading it was behind my later move to Hobart—for the archives.

The 1990s were another world—a pre-Google backwater we all lived in. I set out to find a copy of Mrs Elmsley. A friendly librarian located one in the British Library. The matter rested there until I was in Hobart. One unfortunate day, idly messing around with the State Library catalogue, I found a copy in their Launceston branch. I made a request and it was sent down to Hobart where an officious librarian grudgingly allowed me to examine it. How wise he was. Then, either divine intervention or, given Montague Summers’s diabolic reputation, a breath of heat from Hell, interrupted my browsing as the fire alarms rang. We all tumbled out into the street. The book was still on the desk when we returned to the library. I wish it had caught fire.

Mrs Elmsley isn’t a very good novel, and that increased my interest.

Saki died on the Western Front in 1916. Before a sniper’s shot killed him his supposed and surely bowdlerised last words were, “Put that bloody cigarette out.” After his death his memory was guarded by his sister Ethel. It seemed very possible that a not very good potboiler first novel may have been tactfully ignored in favour of the much more interesting The Unbearable Bassington, published in 1912.

In 1911 Constable advertised Mrs Elmsley as six-shilling fiction and the work of Hector Munro—a “New Author”. The novel tells of the love between a single man and a married woman. The actors are conventional and dull, without the vitality of Saki’s better-known works. A plump book of 422 pages, its narrative is slowed by discussions of contemporary literature, ideas and politics; its hero, Colin Liddel, is even afflicted by a confused socialism. It is overloaded with women’s rights. It is hard to imagine Saki as a feminist but the author does try hard. You hope he was only pandering to the prejudices of the lady novel-buying public when he has Liddel say: “the eternal tragedy of life is the way fine women with high capabilities are blighted by shallow, incompetent men, who imagine themselves serious people doing serious work”.

Feeling the usual seasickness from watching swirling rolls of microfilm (Quells help to stop the nausea) I unearthed reviews and publisher’s advertisements. Constable had sliced into a review in the Times for this: “Mr. Munro has constructed the social world of his story with a truly Balzacian attention to detail. We hail gladly such sound and conscientious work.” The mention of Balzac seemed to fit in with Summers’s comment: “When he gave it to me he said: ‘I wrote it under the influence of Balzac.’ I think de Goncourts would be nearer the mark.”

What the publisher left out of the Times review was more accurate: “very extensive and hardly justifies its length … Did a business man at the present day ever write a letter to a lady friend long enough to fill 12 pages of print?”

Other reviews found it “thoughtful” and “sociological” with “solid qualities”. I was especially taken by the Athenaeum: “this novel is a characteristic specimen of the modern fiction which is being written by the feminine hand … There are suggestions, and even more than suggestions, of the making of a fine style in her writing.”

The fine style I was seeking was Saki’s wit, and Mrs Elmsley does hold some delights. A statue of a virgin and child “overawed the Philistines and gave pause to the cultured”; “what a tremendous number of females there are in the world, and how few women”; “she came from the North, where they live in fear of Heaven and the Earl of Durham”; “Didn’t some cynical critic say the Church of England is the only barrier between England and Christianity?”

I sent an essay to the Times Literary Supplement, which they published as “Saki’s Lost Novel”.

There the matter rested until a year later when I was contacted by the great-grandson of Hector Munro, no relation to Saki, and the real author of Mrs Elmsley.

Honestly, I felt like a feminist critic who has praised a ghastly novel by an Aboriginal lesbian in the Australian [Left] Book Review and then discovers the author is a white bloke born in Piraeus.

I wrote a grovelling letter to the TLS explaining all, and cursed both Saki and Summers. I accurately anticipated an unhappy future for myself as a mugging victim in vicious academic footnotes to scholarly Saki articles. Modern academia—PC on the page, bitches in the footnotes. Yet on some light-blue days, rising above my depression, I dream of a golden perch in the Guinness Book of Records—famed as the man who triggered a 93-year-old practical joke. And I blame Saki.

My mortal sin was trusting to the kindness of strangers and believing Mrs Elmsley was written by Saki. Now, with the modern ease of the internet, I would have done a quick genealogical name search which might have led me to the correct Hector Munro. Since the horrible event, academics have pointed out how obviously un-Saki the book is and thus how obviously it was not written by him. I did not hear these righteous voices until after my confessional letter to the TLS was published. Also, it was because it was poor, and supposedly by Saki, that it was interesting. Approaching the novel as a second-rate text written by Saki, it became an enjoyable puzzle. I read Mrs Elmsley not to challenge the authorship but to explore how and why Saki wrote it. It was simply my misfortune that he didn’t write it.

Saki was homosexual, Mrs Elmsley is a heterosexual love story—but so, so tepid. The lack of passion in the account of the loving interest led me to Saki. The hero, Colin Liddel, is described as having “almost beautiful features”. The married woman he loves, Catherine Elmsley, is well-born, sensitive, intellectual, longing to study medicine—her creator permits her everything but sexual passion. She is married to a brutal man and she and Liddel fall purely, and unbelievably, in love. Liddel has befriended a young woman, Dolores (Dolly) Colonbotti, and her exiled Italian father. She falls in love with him but “Liddel loved Dolly with the affection of a brother for a younger sister who has grown up exactly what she ought to be”. Because I believed that the author was Saki it was possible to assume that the language was a homosexual author straining to write a conventional love story—and not doing it very well.

This weak novel seemed to reveal more about Saki than his witty and carefully crafted tales and novels. Pieces that did not fit, ideas that jarred with what one expected of Saki seemed explainable. A dislike of decadent authors and even the mocking of a poem by Oscar Wilde did not seem out of place from a repressed gay author breaking away from the effeminacy of Wilde in the period following that writer’s trials and imprisonment. Even the interest in women’s rights and socialism, so typical of the 1900s, seemed to fit within a survey of the larger cultural life the characters were part of, and this may be what Montague Summers was referring to when he suggested the book was influenced by the journal- and novel-writing de Goncourt brothers. I read Mrs Elmsley believing it had been written by Saki, and so had Summers.

In 2008 the Oxford academic Sandie Byrne published a major new book on Saki. Christopher Hitchens called it “insightful and sprightly”. In telling the tale of my sad quest (above the footnotes) she notes a connection between the name of the book’s hero, Colin Liddel, and Alice Liddell, who had been the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, “which had influenced Saki in the past”. She had also discovered that at the beginning of the century in London a near neighbour of Saki’s had been a man called William Elmsley. Saki, she suggests, would have enjoyed these additional confusions. A teak-headed literary reviewer peevishly wondered why she called her book The Unbearable Saki—I know why.

What I did, Australian historians do. From the evidence of a single account, a single sheet of paper, they apply interpretation and imagination and find colonial bloodshed. I did something similar and fell into a joke; they get invited to Writers’ Week.

For one of us at the end of this miserable and depressing tale there has been a happier ending.

Ned Sherrin, the broadcaster, writer and theatre director who died in 2007, must have read my TLS article. He was the original compiler and editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations. Turn the pages of the fourth edition, search under religion, and there it is: “Didn’t some cynical critic say the Church of England is the only barrier between England and Christianity?” The quote is attributed to Saki, writing as Hector Munro, in Mrs Elmsley. Sorry Mr Sherrin, mea maxima culpa.

In 2013 a new and expanded fifth edition of the dictionary was published. The new editor is Gyles Brandreth—an actor, writer, former Conservative MP, indiscreet political diarist, and Saki fan. The quote has kept its place, and attribution—ditto culpa Mr Brandreth.

And congratulations Mr Hector Munro, onlie true begetter of Mrs Elmsley.