
The Plays of Oscar Wilde
'The Importance of Being Earnest' and 'Lady Windermere's Fan' are the two most popular of a quartet
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Jan
08
Jan
15
‘For wit and
absurd invention these clever and cynical pages are not to be matched by
anything that our disillusioned post-war gentlemen have been able to give us.
He was an unflagging and unsparing wit, and an extraordinarily deft craftsman’.
J. B. Priestley
It is often
claimed that the environment and regimes a writer experiences in his childhood
inform his fiction. This certainly would seem to be the case with Hector Hugh
Munro who took on the pseudonym of Saki for all his writings. He was born in
1870 in
However Saki’s
championing of children against tyrannical adults does not preclude his ill
treatment of them in several stories, although he leavens the violence with humour
that is dark and often satiric as in ‘The Story Teller’, which tells of a girl
who is revoltingly good. She is devoured by a wolf who discovers her hiding
place because he hears the chinking sound made by the girl’s medals which she
has won for being so good.
In ‘Esme’ it
is a hyena that does the devouring. Saki seems to take great pleasure in
assuring the reader that ‘[Esme] was firmly and I expect painfully held in his
jaws.’
Munro was a
fellow of strange contradictions. On the one hand he had strict views on how
the human race should conduct itself and often appeared tight-lipped and
humourless. He has been described as a misogynist, an anti-Semite and a
reactionary. He was also a repressed homosexual and he did not take himself too
seriously. It was as though the world and the people in it infuriated him but
at the same time he was aware of the farcical and often preposterous nature of
our existence. As a result his stories are bursting with wit and slightly crazy
humour. He is able to conjure tales that can be both hilarious and frightening.
He focuses on society to expose its hypocrisies, its petty arrogances and its
self-deceptions with a perceptive and biting satire. Saki has been compared to
Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse and Noel Coward.
Munro
considered that his stories were ‘true enough to be interesting and not true
enough to be tiresome.’ He wished to
expose foolishness and arrogance through a series of farcical situations. ‘The
Interlopers’ is a fine example of Saki’s ideas on the pettiness of society and,
as in many stories, he wreaks a harsh and fiercely ironic revenge on the two
main characters. The families of George Znaeyem and Ulrich von Gradwitz have
fought over a forest in the
Rather like Rudyard
Kipling, with whom he is sometimes compared because their narratives are rather
like dark parables, Saki often featured animals in his tales. This may be because both men spent a lot of
time in India where animals were given great respect and in some instances
worshipped.
One of Saki’s
favourite literary experiments was to introduce a wild animal into the stuffy
and so-called civilised surrounding of an elegant English home. He is in
essence contrasting the artificial conventions and hypocrisies of Edwardian
England with the straightforward, ruthless and unfettered struggles of nature. To
identify just a few – we have a leopard occupying a spare room in ‘The Guests’;
a wolf is released into the parlour of a country house in ‘The She-Wolf’; we
have a werewolf in the guise of a naked teenage boy in a primly ordered household in ‘Gabriel Ernest’; ‘a small long-tailed
monkey’ who wreaks a remarkable personality change on a quiet scholar in ‘The
Remoulding of Groby Lington’.
Saki’s stories are brief, written as though
he doesn’t want to outstay his welcome. It would be wrong to say his plots are
simple for they are often surprising, shocking even, but they are certainly not
convoluted or complicated. They contain one glittering idea which is presented
with clarity and a biting wit.
At the
outbreak of World War One, despite being forty-three he volunteered to fight in
France. He refused to take the commission that was offered to him and he served
as a Sergeant in the Royal Fusiliers. He was shot in the head while in a
shallow trench in 1916. It is strangely typical that his last words, according
to several sources, were, ‘Put that damned cigarette out.’