A shot of Saki

Saki can give you quite a kick. Take this line, for example: "In spite of everything that proverbs might say, poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up." Or this one: "All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's. A few gifted individuals manage to do both." Obviously, I'm not referring to the Japanese rice wine but to the British short story writer Hector Hugh Munro. He took the penname Saki, or so his sister said, from the name of the cup-bearer in Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, one of his favorite books. Saki's comedy of manners stories would lose their kick without such punchy lines as the ones I quoted. (The first from "Esme" and the second from "The Match-maker," two stories in The Chronicles of Clovis, which was published in 1911.) As with many good writers, Saki can flip a switch in your mind that gives you the shock of recognizing something you've known all along, or at least felt, without being aware of it. The first Saki story I ever read was "The Open Window," which I came across in an old pocketbook collection of horror tales in my aunt's bookshelf. I think the story was the square peg in a round hole in that book. It didn't find it scary at all but funny. It's a story built around a practical joke that a girl played on a visitor at her aunt's home. That was back in the 70s, when I was in high school and preoccupied with more pressing teenage concerns. So I soon forgot all about Saki. Then a couple of decades later, in 1998, I was browsing at a PowerBooks branch in Megamall. I was getting impatient waiting for my wife to get tired of shopping, when I spotted a solitary copy of The Collected Short Stories of Saki. On an impulse, sparked mainly by the price tag of P50, I bought the book. It's one of the few books that I've managed to hold on to, come brownout hell or Ondoy's high water. Not that it's the one book I'd want to stuck with if I should be shipwrecked all alone on an island, or more realistically, forced up my rooftop by a flash flood. In that case, I'd rather have my first edition copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which I accidentally found at a garage sale near UP Los Baños back in 1999. I bought the well-preserved hardcover for just P27, a bargain even with a missing dust jacket. Anyway, whenever I want only a brief distraction from my own writing, I'm more likely to reach out for my tattered Saki collection. Incidentally, Saki was a journalist, as were some of the other writers whose works I enjoy. There's Ernest Hemingway, who was a reporter of the Kansas City Star. And there's Ian Fleming who was Moscow correspondent of Reuters before he became personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence in World War II, after which he worked as foreign manager of The Sunday Times in London. But unlike Hemingway and Fleming, Saki didn't start out as a journalist. Following his family's military tradition, Saki joined the military police at the age of 23. And he probably wouldn't have become a journalist if he had not been stricken by malaria several times while stationed in Burma, where he was born in 1870, when it was still a British colony, long before it became Myanmar. It was while on a visit to England to recover from one of those malarial attacks that he found work as a political sketch writer at the Westminster Gazette, where most of his stories first appeared. That was in 1896, the year, incidentally, when Jose Rizal was executed. Eight years later, in 1904, Saki started getting his stories published in book form. In his stories you see his penchant for stiff-upper lip irony, which I guess is typical of the British, or at least of the British military. Back in 1990, I once met this English guy, Nick Demuth, a writer and jazz pianist who played two nights weekly at the old Camp Gourmet in Malate (on Wednesdays if I remember correctly, he would accompany Annie Brazil). In one of our chats between his sets, I learned that he served in the Royal Marines during World War II and that his unit was among those that entered Italy towards the end of that conflict. He even showed me an old photograph of himself in his uniform, and he sort of reminded me of David Niven. Anyway, I asked him: "So were you there when they hanged Mussolini?" "Oh, yes, yes," he said, taking a quick sip of his scotch. "But I assure you, I had nothing to do with it." Not a particularly brilliant line, but his delivery – in the barracks-style interior of the bar – cracked me up. I mention Nick only because writing about Saki reminded me of his sardonic sense of humor. And Saki shows a lot of that in his stories, in lines usually uttered by his iconoclastic characters, Reginald and Clovis. Here's a few more of those lines: "Never be a pioneer. It's the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion." "It's no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself." "Leonard Bilsiter was one of those people who have failed to find this world attractive or interesting, and who have sought compensation in an 'unseen world' of their own experience or imagination – or invention. Children do that sort of thing successfully, but children are content to convince themselves, and do not vulgarise their beliefs by trying to convince other people." "The fashion is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the medieval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other." "Anything that is worth knowing one practically teaches oneself, and the rest obtrudes itself sooner or later." But for me Saki's most classic line was the very last one he supposedly uttered. You see, in 1914, at the start of World War I, he once again joined the military, this time the Royal Fusiliers of the British Army. He was by then already 43 and officially overage. But he was still single, which made people speculate then that he was gay. At any rate, I guess his being without his own family might have made his decision to reenlist easier. In November 13, 1916, he was in a shell crater in France, taking shelter for the night with some of his mates. Somebody lighted a cigarette and a shot rang out, fired by a German sniper. The slug hit Saki, and according to witnesses, his last words before dying were: "Put that bloody cigarette out!"