Saki (Hector Munro)

Saki (Hector Munro) born 18 December 1870 (d. 1916)

Saki was the pen name of British author Hector Hugh Munro, whose witty and sometimes macabre stories satirised Edwardian society and culture. Saki's world contrasts the effete conventions and hypocrisies of Edwardian England with the ruthless but straightforward life-and-death struggles of nature. Nature generally wins in the end.

Saki is considered a master of the short story. His stories are always short and the good ones are exquisitely memorable, with delicately drawn characters and finely judged narratives.

H. H. Munro was born in Burma (now known as Myanmar), the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an inspector-general for the Burmese police when that country was still part of the British Empire. His mother died in 1872, killed, essentially, by a runaway cow. It charged at her, the shock of which caused her to miscarry, losing her life and that of the baby. It was an incident that may have influenced the sometimes deadly animals of his later stories. He was brought up in England with his brother and sister by his grandmother and aunts in a straitlaced household whose comic side he appreciated only later in life. He used the severity of these domestic arrangements in many stories.

Munro was educated at school in Exmouth and the Bedford Grammar School. In 1893 he followed in his father's footsteps by joining the Burma police. Three years later, failing health forced his resignation and return to England, where he started his career as a journalist.

In 1900 Munro's first book appeared, The Rise of the Russian Empire, a historical study modelled upon Edward Gibbon's famous The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was followed in 1902 by Not-So-Stories, a collection of short stories and a clear reference to Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Stories.

From 1902 to 1908 Munro worked as a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post in the Balkans, Russia, and Paris, then settled in London. Many of the stories from this period feature the elegant and effete Reginald and Clovis, young men-about-town who take heartless and cruel delight in the discomfort or downfall of their conventional and pretentious elders.  On the eve of the Great War, he published a 'what-if" novel, When William Came, imagining the eponymous German emperor conquering Britain.

At the start of World War I, although officially over age, Munro joined the Army as an ordinary soldier, refusing a commission. He returned to the battlefield more than once when officially still too sick or injured to fight. He was killed in France, near Beaumont-Hamel, in 1916. Munro was sheltering in a shell crater when he was killed by a German sniper. His last words, according to several sources, were, 'Put that damned cigarette out!' After his death, his sister Ethel destroyed most of his papers and wrote her own account of their childhood.

He never married. A J Langguth in his biography produces strong evidence to support the hypothesis that Munro was homosexual. Munro was guarded except in one or two of his stories and most of his readers would probably have been shocked had they known that his pen name refers to a cupbearer or beautiful boy and carries esoteric homoerotic connotations.

In the social climate of Edwardian Britain, in the years after the downfall of Oscar Wilde, Munro would have had every reason, social and psychological, to keep silent about 'the love that dares not speak its name'.