“Right Ho, Jeeves” after Saki

Saki (1, 2, 3)—pen name of Hecto Hugh Munro (1870–1916)—was a writer, known for his short stories that are often biting satires sometimes veering to the macabre. P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) needs no introduction. Some people find it obvious to mention them together, and list Saki as one of the obvious influences on Wodehouse, e.g. the lede of the Wikipedia article on Saki says, citing Saki’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (to which I don’t have access):

Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, Munro himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse.

As much as I love them both, and despite the similar society (and aunts) they describe, this is not so well-established to me; certainly I have not seen words to the effect that Wodehouse even read Saki. And of course there are many differences both in achievement and temperament. Saki would never be considered part of the literary establishment; Wodehouse was an undisputed master of his craft. Saki wrote a small number of short stories (all fits in a single book) and a couple of novels (that I have never been tempted to read) and won no awards. Wodehouse wrote 71 novels(!) and several plays, collections of stories, and whatnot. Though he could not go to Oxford as he had wanted to—his family’s financial condition at just about the time he would enter university forced him to take up a job in a bank—he would get an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1939, and a knighthood just before his death in 1975.

Saki was great with his choice of words. He could sometimes do in a single word what Wodehouse could do in a sentence. But Wodehouse was a glorious master of the English sentence, of entire scenes. Saki both in his life and work was all cynicism and bitterness, born of a childhood separated from his parents, raised by domineering aunts. Despite similar circumstances of his upbringing, Wodehouse could not recall a single unhappy moment in his life, and in the world of Wodehouse there is no malice, only sunshine. This is a big difference: as much fun as Saki’s mocking can be, and shows one path that some clever people take, Wodehouse teaches us that being kind is perfectly enough, as Stephen Fry wrote in 2000 and 2025.

Anyway, having recently read all of Saki’s short stories (for at least the third time), and then more recently having read Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) by Wodehouse, here are a couple of things in the book that reminded me of Saki. I’m not saying these are indications of influence; just sharing things I noticed.

Scriptural knowledge

Saki’s “The Seventh Pullet” (1911) has a character who won a prize for scriptural knowledge at school:

“Invent something,” said Gorworth. Since winning a prize for excellence in Scriptural knowledge at a preparatory school he had felt licensed to be a little more unscrupulous than the circle he moved in. Much might surely be excused to one who in early life could give a list of seventeen trees mentioned in the Old Testament.

It’s just a throwaway line for Saki and given to a minor character in a story, but Wodehouse conferred this attribute on his main character Bertie Wooster, and made the utmost use of it in this book, including centrally in that immortal scene, about which Stephen Fry said in 2000:

The masterly episode where Gussie Fink-Nottle presents the prizes at Market Snodsbury grammar school is frequently included in collections of great comic literature and has often been described as the single funniest piece of sustained writing in the language. I would urge you, however, to head straight for a library or bookshop and get hold of the complete novel Right Ho, Jeeves, where you will encounter it fully in context and find that it leaps even more magnificently to life.

The eyes of…

Saki’s The Dreamer (1913) has a boy called Cyprian:

Cyprian was a boy who carried with him through early life the wondering look of a dreamer, the eyes of one who sees things that are not visible to ordinary mortals, and invests the commonplace things of this world with qualities unsuspected by plainer folk – the eyes of a poet or a house agent.

Wodehouse RHJ (1934), “eyes a bit too keen and piercing”:

I eyed him narrowly. I didn’t like his looks. Mark you, I don’t say I ever had, much, because Nature, when planning this sterling fellow, shoved in a lot more lower jaw than was absolutely necessary and made the eyes a bit too keen and piercing for one who was neither an Empire builder nor a traffic policeman.

Complexion

Saki, Esme (1910), a hunting story:

Constance is one of those strapping florid girls that go so well with autumn scenery or Christmas decorations in church. ‘I feel a presentiment that something dreadful is going to happen,’ she said to me; ‘am I looking pale?’

“She was looking about as pale as a beetroot that has suddenly heard bad news.

[…]

“ ‘How can you let that ravening beast trot by your side?’ asked Constance. She was looking more than ever like an albino beetroot.

Wodehouse RHJ (1934):

Aunt Dahlia’s face grew darker. Hunting, if indulged in regularly over a period of years, is a pastime that seldom fails to lend a fairly deepish tinge to the patient’s complexion, and her best friends could not have denied that even at normal times the relative’s map tended a little toward the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on so pronounced a richness as now. She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.