Damozel: Just Eat the Damn Peach.

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 10:28:21 GMT

I am relocating my blog to the following address:

http://theflatlandalmanack.typepad.com/ (THE FLATLAND ALMANACK)

I will continue to maintain this site and everything posted here but will do all my further posting there!

Do stop by for a visit!

The Party

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 20:14:56 GMT

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Peter Sellers rocks The Party *

*contains spoilers

Can I be honest? I am not a big fan of Peter Sellers. With the exception of one or two of The Pink Panther series, I didn't find most of his films amusing when they were made and I don't find them, including most of The Pink Panther series, amusing now. While Nick venerates Sellers, his films seem to me to be hopelessly dated. I didn't even like Being There all that much.

With one shining exception: The Party, a 1968 Blake Edwards film which many of Sellers' dedicated fans seem never to have heard of.

Now at first blush, for me to adore The Party is clearly politically incorrect. In this film, Sellers plays Hrundi V. Bhakshi, a gentle Bollywood actor (of the "Goodness Gracious me!" variety) imported to Hollywood to play Gunga Din in an epononymous film.

When I first saw the film, I thought, "Right. Here's the stereoptypical [particularly in that period] obsequious Indian who speaks in 'hilarious' sing-song and malapropisms." The only reason I sat through it was because I was watching it with friends. You might think the same thing initially if you are not warned in advance.

So wait. Seriously, wait. Give it time. There really IS more to this film than meets the eye. Mr. Bhakshi, being Indian as well as a very minor actor, really is the ultimate outsider. He's me. He's also you. He's the unpopular kid at fraternity Rush who isn't going to be chosen but doesn't seem to get it He's the poor relation at the family feast. Though overly endowed with humility and the tendency to apologize if caught out in a blunder, he really does NOT realize that he's totally out of his depth. But as the party wears on, you start to realize that he is the one person among the depthless 'celebrities' present who has anything on the window shelves behind the shop window. This happens very slowly, but it definitely happens.

The first 5 or 10 minutes of the film (before the roll of the credits) yields---to me, anyway---some of the funniest footage in history, which takes place on the set of the film in which he's starring. After he gently, naively, heedlessly destroys take after take and ultimately, the entire set, the frothing director of course bellows , "YOU'LL NEVER WORK IN THIS TOWN AGAIN".

BHAKSHI (after a moment's bemusement) "Does that.... include television, sir?"

Exit, pursued by an irate director.

Cut to the office of the humorless, cigar-chomping boss of the studio Mr. Clutterbuck. "What? What? The WHOLE DAMN THING? ...Well, what's his name?... I'll see to it he never works in this town again!" Furious at the loss of his set, he jots down the soon-to-be-fired Mr. Bhakshi's name on what he thinks is a piece of scratch paper. Instead, it's the edge of a carefully typed-out guest list for a celebrity-studded party at his mansion. He hands the list over to his secretary with an order to send out the invitations. All this before the opening credits.

So then---in what I have always thought was one of the film's most telling moments----you see Mr. Bhakshi at home. He is tuning his sitar. This, I have always thought, was the portrait of Mr. Bhakshi's true self: dignified, tranquil, apparently unabashed by his humiliating ejection from the set, intent on making music. The postman knocks; Mr. Bhakshi pads to the door to receive it. He opens it solemnly and reads it without surprise. He begins to prepare for the party. The opening credits roll, accompanied by a particularly bouncy Henry Mancini theme featuring sitars.

The rest of the film all takes place at the party. Mr. Bhakti tools up in his tiny three-wheeled car, pulls in behind the limos, and is ushered in, eagerly friendly, anxious to make a good impression, but with insufficient attention to the fact that he is out of his depth and swimming with the sharks. His fatal flaw (from the standpoint of the assembled guests) is his humility; most of them write him off as of no importance. His real fatal flaws are his self-consciousness, which is inseparable from his humility, which is inseparable from his dignity, which is inseparable from his innocence. Fortunately, he has a childlike resilience in the face of humiliation and social catastrophe and limitless good humor that see him through.

Co-starring in the film is his hosts' horrible 1970's 'house of the future,' where everything is stupidly automated; and things like a giant fireplace in the middle of the room can be activated by the push of a button. A babbling brook runs through the house. All of this is as grass before the scythe of Mr. Bhakshi's inadvertent attempts to avoid the consequences of his many naive blunders.

For example: Rebuffed by the other guests, Mr. Bhakshi removes himself from the center of the party and begins fiddling with one of those intriguing-looking buttons and nearly roasts several of the guests alive. And so on. He ultimately destroys his relentless enemy the house (though certainly not intentionally).

In the interim, no social catastrophe can daunt him, or not for long; he rises above the chaos that he constantly, invariably creates. The chaos arises not so much because of his constant social blunders as a result of his painful struggles to conceal them or to avert the consequences. Each attempt to avert disaster causes an equal reaction in the opposite direction.

The party unfolds in real time. From the time the credits end to the conclusion of the film, the whole film is the party. One of my friends found it 'slow.' I think the pace is just right. It's a party!

As Mr. Bhakshi stumbles through the evening, his superiority to those present begins to shine through. First, you notice his sweet nature and touching humility. Later on, though, you start to see his dignity and admirable character. The surface stereotype crumbles away. We witness the budding (only that) of a charming friendship between Mr. Bhakshi and a French starlet played by a luminous Claudine Longet. He stands up---albeit in a most non-western way----to C.S. Divot (Gavin McCleod)---the producer of Mr. Bhakshi's film, and a casting couch pig. (Mr. Bhakshi's display of eastern-style courage is subtly contrasted to excellent effect with the western style of courage displayed on the big screen by Mr. Bhakshi's film idol, a rhinestone cowboy called "Wyoming Bill" Kelso.)

The viewer's first impression of Mr. Bhakshi crumble away, along with the host's house and patience. Through it all, there is much MUCH music by Henry Mancini. Like it or not, the sprightly background plinking and strumming (provided in the film by the hired band) definitely conveys the feeling of a period cocktail party. You can practically smell the martini olives and the Breck shampoo.

There is one character who almost steals the whole show out from under Seller's a nameless and mainly silent martini-swilling waiter who consumes all the drinks that Mr. Bhakshi declines and stolidly soldiers on.

I stumbled on this film in the late Nineties while trolling the aisles of my local Blockbuster in search of comedy. I'm fond enough of this film that I watch it at least a couple of times a year. I watched it one dismal New Year's Eve when I was visiting my mother; my husband had just died, I didn't want to do anything but sleep, but my mother dragged me over to her friend Howard's to get me out of the house. I had brought the film with me from home because my mom had asked me to. I didn't want to see it again particularly, but since it was her evening and I didn't care much about anything, I went along for the ride.

It was an unqualified success. While I won't claim it took me out of myself, it was curiously comforting. At first I got my enjoyment, such as it was, of anticipating the moments that would make my mother laugh, but pretty soon I was laughing along too. The film reminded me, among other things, that a person with an innate sense of dignity can retain it through the worst of times, including the most egregious social embarrassments.

Unlike contemporary films, it doesn't conclude with an unambiguous triumph by Mr. Bhakshi over those who undervalued or disliked him. As in life, he doesn't win it all. But the ending is amusing and affirming and very true to life. Most important, this rather undervalued Sellers film is FUNNY ALL THE WAY THROUGH.

If you are in need of being taken out of yourself, or if you just like to laugh, or if you are a Sellers fan who missed this one, you will love this film.

Click for IMDb page

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

Sat, 15 Jul 2006 00:13:44 GMT

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It's All About the Templars: Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (translated by William Weaver)

Foucault's Pendulum is one of my favorite novels in life. My copy is dated 1990, so it's been around awhile, and I've read it at least once a year since then.

The main characters are three intellectuals, two editors and one much younger consultant for a publishing house that publishes material dealing---among other things---with occult and esoteric knowledge. They make up a game that emulates the very special reasoning processes they have learned from certain of their more eccentric authors. Using their combined learning plus one of those newfangled computers they had back in the mid 1980's, they develop a complete history of the world by a process of connecting bits of arcane information, actual historical fact, and any number of handy fictions and half-baked hypotheses. Among much else, they learn that once you begin to synthesize...uh, anything really (including "Minnie Mouse is Mickey Mouse's Fiance"), a startling pattern emerges! And when you put the patterns together, the dots all connect!

Everything proves everything else!

It's a dangerous game, it turns out: perhaps the most dangerous game, having the potential to destabilize reality itself, not to mention their personal safety and mental and physical health.

Is all of western history a creation of, or a response to, the secret machinations of a certain Secret Society dating back to the Middle Ages? If so, what secret were they guarding and where are they now? If three men make up a theory of the world that explains everything, is the theory true? Is everything connected? And does everything have something to do with the Templars?

Before we all become too credulous---before we give credence to too many synthesized versions of history or reality----we should all read it, probably again and again. Actually I do read it again and again. It's entertaining. It's extremely funny. But it is also terrifying. Among other things, the novel illustrates the type of process used in the generation of a certain genre of books which purport to shed new light on old questions (including some of which I am personally rather fond).

Here's the bit of dialogue that I make myself reread periodically, even though I naturally have decided ignore its implications; it would not be possible for me to go on blogging otherwise.

DAMOZEL: "What's a moron, Professor Belbo?"

PROFESSOR BELBO, IN BETWEEN DRINKS AT PILADE'S BAR, ANSWERS:

"Morons...get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark. Or that all Athenians are mortal, and all the citizens of Pireaus are mortal, so all the citizens of Pireaus are Athenians... Morons will occasionally say something that's right, but they say it for the wrong reason....

CASAUBON:

"All great apes evolved from lower life forms, man evolved from lower life forms, therefore man is a great ape."

BELBO:

"Not bad. In such statements you suspect that something's wrong, but it takes work to show what and why. Morons are tricky....[T]he moron reasons almost the way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of paralogism. For an editor, it's bad news. It can take him an eternity to identify a moron. Plenty of morons' books are published, because they're convincing at first glance. An editor is not required to weed out the morons. If the Academy of Sciences doesn't do it, why should we?"

CASAUBON adds:

"Philosophers don't either. Saint Anselm's ontological argument is moronic, for example. God must exist because I can conceive him as being perfect in all ways, including existence. The saint confuses in thought with existence in reality."

BELBO replies:

"True, but Gaunilon's refutation is moronic, too. I can think of an island in the sea even if the island doesn't exist. He confuses thinking of the possible with thinking of the necessary....And God loves every minute of it. He chose to be unthinkable only to prove that Anselm and Gaunilon were morons. What a sublime purpose for creation, or, rather, for that act by which God willed Himself to be: to unmask cosmic moronism."

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (BALLANTINE BOOKS 1990) at 56-57.

DAMOZEL: What's a lunatic then?

CAUSAUBON:

"It's two o'clock, Pilade's about to close, and we still haven't got to the lunatics."

BELBO:

"I'm getting there. A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn't know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic; however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he just works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idee fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars."

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (BALLANTINE BOOKS 1990) at 57-58

Highly, highly recommended. In addition to these three characters---who in the process of imaginatively making over the history of the world go a bit too far in experimenting with the lunatic's methods--- everything, including (but not limited to): mediavel history, alchemy, kabbalah, John Dee, Nicolas Flamel, publishing, Brazilian culture, syncretic religion (voodoo and candomble), Rosicrucians, Masons, the Albigensien crusade, Cagliostro, spiritualism, Atlantic, the hollow earth theory, the Priory of Sion, and---of course---the Templars. Especially the Templars.

In addition to everything else, it's a book about The Da Vinci Code, or its theoretical underpinnings, even though it was written long before it.

It is a mine of information you probably did not know. But it is also a novel. Despite their formidable intellects, the main characters are likable. They pull you right in.

CAVEAT: This book is not exactly light summer reading. It is intellectually challenging and demands a great deal of the reader. It's well worth the effort, and is a hell of a ride once you get into it, but it isn't the best book for reading while you supervise the kids at the swimming pool. It requires concentration.

Furthermore, it WILL get you thinking about the Templars. You may even end up feeling that they have something to do with everything. And you know after reading this where that leads. Proceed at your own risk. You have been warned.

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Second-Hand Bookstore Gold: The Short Stories of H.H. Munro. [book review]

Lynda Barry Rocks My World: The Greatest of Marlys, One Hundred Demons, and Cruddy. [book review; graphic novel; fiction]

Peter Sellers Rocks The Party [film review]

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Played-Out TV and Film Devices.

Lynda Barry

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 15:22:06 GMT

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Lynda Barry: The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, One Hundred Demons, and Cruddy.

The purpose of this blog/blog category is to recommend things to other people that have helped me cope with life's failure to live up to fantasy. On the list of those who have helped me along the way, Lynda Barry's name ranks near the top.

I first encountered Lynda Barry's comics (essentially short stories in graphic format) at Salon.com, where it is described as a "serial comic." If you haven't read her comics, you can find One Hundred Demons there---this link is to the last one in the series-----but if you do a search, you'll find the rest of them.

Now the "serial comic" is a genre of which I've always been particularly fond, though my preference isn't for the serial, but for the final product (the whole enchilada) after a publisher puts them all together and you can read them as an ongoing story. (I have plenty of recommendations for those adults who have never experienced the joys of 'comics as light literature.') Though the serial comic is designed to be read in daily or weekly small doses, that is not how I prefer to read them. Even when I first discovered Barry's work at Salon, I didn't read the serial in little bites (they just left me hungry for more and mildly dissatisfied). I'd wait awhile for the backlog to build up, then greedily devour a rich and pungent meal of them in one sitting. When it comes to serial comics, I always prefer to be super-sized.

At some time during the early evolution of my Barry-love, I stumbled on a Barry collection, The!Greatest!of!Marlys! at a local bookstore. Once I had it in my hungry little hands, I rushed back to my cave and disappeared until I'd read it straight through, emerging to reassure Nick that I was still alive and to demand that he make a run for sufficient chocolate and Jordan almonds to sustain me. I didn't even stop to sleep.

Barry's work evokes aspects of childhood and adolescence that I think most novels about childhood don't come close to touching. Furthermore, her novels are set in or grounded in a Seventies sensibility. Even the slang the kids use is Seventies slang.

While my childhood experiences were very different from the experience of the children in Barry's novels, I have a lot of the same points of reference. As a child and adolescent during the late Sixties and early Seventies, I suffered from vague free-floating anxiety and generalized angst for which I had words because no one had yet named it; and which in any case I assumed was the ordinary way for a child to feel (and maybe it is). I dealt with it was through drawing, keeping journals, and playing made-up games with other kids. I spent a lot of time trying to bring myself into some sort of relation with the world, trying to work out how to be.

The kids in Marlys! come from a poor family where the adults are mainly just background static. In my experience, a lot of kids growing up in that period (whether rich or poor) had parents who simply didn't factor much into their day to day experience. At mealtimes and when you couldn't avoid interacting with them; that was about it. "Soccer moms" hadn't---thank GOD---been invented in those days. We didn't have videogames or computers but we DID have the right (the lucky ones) to be left alone as long as we didn't make trouble for anyone or get sick or in trouble at school.

"Parenting"---again, thank God!---wasn't a verb in the days in which the story of Marlys and her cousins appears to be unfolding. Meals appeared and bedtimes were set without our input; but we were allowed to roam free (extraordinarily free compared to today) and to choose our friends without much interference and without having to inform our parents of our exact whereabout every damn minute as long as we stayed within a certain range. The world of the children in Marlys! is that world, a world of curious freedom, arbitrary restrictions, and remote, vaguely terrifying adults.

The children are as ordinary and extraordinary as all normal children. The ordinary part of them is what other people mainly see. Marlys is fat, freckled, and homely (though wildly imaginative and---as she often reminds the others---"gifted"). Arna is shy and withdrawn, but also sensitive and deep. Arnold is outwardly a tough guy, but has a tender side he mostly hides from his siblings and cousins (the soft side emerges when he falls in love with a silent, strange girl that he---and the other children---refer to as "the hare-lip.") Freddy is a gentle oddball. Maybonne, 'the teenager,' is pretty and puts on a convincing game face to the younger kids, but has the uncertainties and anxieties that an adolescent has and had.

A lot of the stories deal with the miseries of childhood. Since these children come from families where there is little money, gifts---from the Sears catalog! Remember the Sears Catalog?---are few and far between and when a doll or a dress is destroyed, it is gone for good; there aren't any replacements. I don't think any words could convey more effectively than Barry's drawings the grief and horror of a child who---ignoring the instructions---feeds milk to "Baby Tiny Tears" (who "came with a whole wad of accessories which is the best part of any doll"). "You were supposed to let her only drink water," Arna says, "but some of us felt sorry for Baby Tiny tears and let her drink milk. This was a big mistake, especially if it was summer and you left her take in the hot sun for about five hours afterwards." The picture portrays with breathtaking accuracy the horror and revulsion of a little girl whose favorite doll reeks irrevocably of rotted milk and it's your own stupid fault. Sears Catalog Part 1. Ah, how it takes me back!

Sears Catalog Part 2 addresses the agony of the birthday present which doesn't live up to expectation. Dispensing with the advice of her cousins, Marlys---a physically unattractive child obsessed with 'glamour'---is seduced by the photographs in the catalog into buying the "exclusive molded rubber glamour wigs for your young little miss." I remember those wigs! The little girl next door had them. My mother kept my hair cut as short as a boy's for reasons I will never know, and I remember trying to convince her to let me wear one of them to school. Arna: "When the wigs finally came they were about five hundred times worse than I ever could have imagined. Marlys started crying and for once I didn't blame her. They looked like a bathing cap with a bad infection...Like old gum in the dirt." MARLYS (crouched on the floor, spraying tears in all directions): "Can you even believe it?"

Obviously, I was less realistic than Marlys and Arna because I thought---just possibly---that someone might believe that they were real hair. The one I favored was a peculiar silvery yellow color (perhaps intended to be platinum) in a bouffant Sixties style, but when I turned it upside down, it looked--to me---like the long hair I longed to have.

The cartoons I love best are about the anxieties, jealousies, humiliations, and occasional and often inexplicable joys of young children left to their own devices. The joys were usually of your own making; the others were inflicted on you by life. In Extra Credit, Arnold, Arna's brother makes a model of South America "out of chewed-up gum. You might think that would be ugly but it came out beautiful. He said gum was perfect because ther's 13 kinds for the 13 countries and gum lasts good." (Adults everywhere, because that's what happens: EEEEEEEW.) But Arnold puts his heart into making this map. ARNA: "When he presented it to Mrs. Brogan she said it could spread disease. I had Mrs. Brogan last year and should have known to tell him the topic of her whole life is germs. Arnold said just spray it with Lysol, kills germs on contact! Don't throw it out! But no." Humiliation and heartbreak. Who doesn't remember what that was like?

There is also the matter of love, of falling in love, I mean. Children do. On this topic, the narrative of the characters can verge on poetry. Marlys falls in love with a teenager who smacks her in the butt with a tennis racket while Marlys was "bending over one day, looking at some ants." That's how love happens when you're young (meaning "under 35.") To express her love for "Richard the Teenager," Marlys insists on doing the Mexican hat dance ("It was her specialty"). "The upstairs window shoved open and Maybonne's head came out yelling Bug off Marlys, will you? But no, she couldn't. She couldn't, she couldn't, she just couldn't." Marlys' Love.

ARNOLD: "The kiss of Jeanette the hare lip was incredible...She said close your eyes. With her hand covering her mouth she said close your eyes. And she kissed me....Then I said close your eyes and it was my turn. My turn to move her shaking hand away from her mouth and kiss her strange and beautiful lips." The Kiss of the Harelip.

The children in Marlys!---Marlys in particular---often cheer themselves up with storytelling and make-believe (one of my favorite things in the book is each child's drawing of his or her dream-house), but they are exceptionally clear-eyed when it comes to other people and the behavior of other people. For this reason, one often tells the other's story

There's also sex. Barry addresses (and illustrates) a moment that I've seldom seen so aptly expressed: the innocent discovery of sexual pleasure before you have information or words to know what it is. "In my cousin Marlys's back yard was the clothes line T-pole which we loved to hang upside down on....If you hook your legs just right and swing, there's this feeling you can get like your pants are itching you in this most perfectly gorgeous way." As my friend Sarah remarked, there is no better description anywhere of, uh, that. T-Pole. And you really need to see Barry's drawing of the faces of the upside-down Marlys and Arna to appreciate their appreciation.

One Hundred Demons is similar but different. Though I read it first at Salon, I bought the hard cover version. It's a work of art, really, and---fittingly---about the size and shape of the autograph albums we used to pass around in school in the Seventies. The book is amazingly beautiful to look at, filled with gorgeous collages addressing unexpected subjects as well as Barry's cartoons. Barry painted the cartoons using the technique for painting used "by a Zen monk named Hakuin Ekaku, in 16th Century Japan. I checked out some books, followed the instructions, and the demons began to come." (DEMON: "They were not the demons she expected...At first they freaked her, but then she started to love watching them come out of her paintbrush.")

One of the recurring subjects of One Hundred Demons is Barry's relationship with her terrifying mother, but there are many others. The perspective is different from Marlys!; it's told more from the perspective of an adult looking back at childhood than from the perspective of the child, but it is equally deep and insightful and funny (sometimes horrifyingly funny, which is a good kind of funny). Some of the subjects are more overtly disturbing, but again, in a good, clean, purging way. Guess what: You are NOT alone. Whatever hurts that you can't articulate has happened to others who can.

My favorite of all the Demons is Dancing. It exactly tracks my own experience: first the sheer pleasure in movement, then the desire to dance yourself, then the perhaps well-meaning friend who lets you know that you can't dance and look stupid. "I don't blame that girl for knocking me out of my groove. I was about to start Junior High School. It was going to happen anyway. But it was a long time before I got it back." Like Barry, I'm still "secretly spaz-dancing alone in my room."

(Barry's graphic novel Cruddy is reviewed at Salon. It's an excellent review by Heidi Bell, so I've linked it here.)

Secondhand bookstore gold--Saki

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 04:14:28 GMT

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Second-hand Bookstore Gold *: H.H. Munro: Saki

*also available free on the internet.

[1] A few biographical facts about H. H. Munro.

I bought my 1930 Random House Edition of The Short Stories of Saki (with introduction by Christopher Morley) on a grey January day back in 1995. I was in a most depressed frame of mine. My husband and I were living in different cities; I had a room at the house of a friend who had just been fired and was taking it out on me; and my husband's job was looking pretty problematic. I needed diversion----I needed to contemplate someone else's troubles.

Since I've had trouble finding the collected stories of two of my favorite short story writers (L.P. Hartley and Robert Aikman), I wondered if it would be similarly difficult for an interested person to procure a copy of Saki's stories. Happily, the Penguin Classics collection of The Complete Saki (both used and new) is presently available at both Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Certainly most libraries should have all or some of his works (or even the same collection that I love so dearly).

Even better, if you're not sure you want to invest, three of his short story collections are available online at no cost to the reader , including my hands-down favorite, The Chronicles of Clovis. Most of the stories I recommend below are from the Clovis book.

According to this article at Wikipedia, Saki was born in Scotland . His real name was Hector Hugh Munro; if you want more biographical information, check out this link or this link (or read the biography his sister wrote). I always thought that his name was from the Rubaiyat, but the previously cited article indicates that its source may be in dispute. He died in France in 1916, killed by sniper fire.

Saki's best stories are gently twisted, usually infused with irony or understated malice, and sadistically witty. Many of them will leave you slightly shaken. Even the more prosaic ones are entertaining.

2. Stories you may already know.

A few of Saki's short stories are often anthologized. The ones I've seen in anthologies are: Tobermory, The Easter Egg, and Sredni Vashtar (from The Chronicles of Clovis); Laura, The Open Window, and The Story-Teller (from Beasts and Super-beasts).

The Open Window is a famous ghost story, although it is not really about ghosts. It is not very frightening ultimately, but before you get to the 'ultimately' you might well experience what Edith Wharton called 'the fun of the shudder.' It's one of his best known stories, and I imagine that most people who have finished high school have read it. I like the story, but it is not one of Saki's more powerful (by which I mean 'disturbing') stories. His best stories have a tendency to linger.

The Story-Teller isn't exactly disturbing. It's a story within a story: annoyed by the ruckus created by a pack of young children on a train, a young man offers to tell them a story to keep them quiet. Nothing terrible happens to anyone in the 'frame' story, but the story-within-the-story (about a little girl named Bertha who was very very extraordinarily good) ends on a sadistic note---to the great delight of the children. In Saki, the only good children are naughty children (sometimes psychopathically naughty, as in Hyacinth, a particular favorite of mine). Saki knew the sort of story that children would find absorbing and he knew how such a story ought to end.

Tobermory is one of his animal stories. It was featured in an anthology someone gave me as a Christmas gift of famous stories about cats, but I've seen it elsewhere. As cat stories go, it is one of the more realistic. Saki liked cats, but he was not sentimental toward them in his writing.

In Tobermory, a professor who is visitng at a country house announces that he has developed a technique for teaching animals to talk and that he has been given lessons to the hostess's cat (Tobermory). Tobermory, a stellar pupil, is invited to lunch to demonstrate his newly acquired skill. Alas, he is all too adept. (This is, after all, a Saki story).

[T]hen Miss Resker, in her best district-visitor manner, asked if the human language had been difficult to learn. Tobermory looked squarely at her for a moment and then fixed his gaze serenely on the iddle distance. It was obvious that boring questions lay outside his scheme of life.

... Major Barfield plunged in heavily to effect a diversion.

"How about your carryings-on with the tortoise-shell puss up at the stables, eh?"

The moment he had said it everyone realized the blunder.

"One does not usually discuss these matters in public," said Tobermory frigidly. "From a slight observation of your ways since you've been in this house, I should imagine you'd find it inconvenient if I were to shift the conversation on to your own little affairs."

The panic which ensued was not confined to the major.

The Easter Egg is the story of a cowardly young man's single courageous act. It is both funny and horrifying, as many of Saki's stories are. That is to say, it is at first funny and then horrifying.

In Laura, another one of his better known stories, the title character is a dying woman who believes in reincarnation. After her death, she returns in various successive animal forms for the purpose of tormenting her brother-in-law, who---failing to recognize her----kills her repeatedly. It's funny in an edgy and uncomfortable way. It seems to be frequently anthologized.

Sredni Vashtar is one of Saki's most violent and macabre stories, involving an abused and neglected child's terrible revenge against his abusive aunt. I first encountered it in my treasured book, Great Stories of Terror and the Supernatural. It's more a story of terror than the supernatural.

3. The Achievement of the Cat

I love Saki's stories for the light amoral tone and the whiplash sting of wit infused (as true wit so often is) with quiet malice. "[M]y mother never bothered about bringing me up," says Saki's Clovis Sangrail. "She just saw to it that I got whacked at decent intervals and was taught the difference between right and wrong; there is some difference, you know, but I've forgotten what it is."

If you're introduced to a tender and moralizing soul in a Saki story, or if the narrative takes a sentimental turn, watch out. Middle-class convention, particularly if accompanied by self-satisfaction, is also regularly punished. Though sometimes the punishment is probably more often than not social humiliation (particularly galling to the conventional), there are a few stories in which it is lethal. The 'sadism' in Saki to which commentators always refer is genreally not expressed as a thirst for blood, but in enjoyment of another's (often well-merited) suffering. And it is clear in most of the stories that Saki himself enjoys their suffering and expects the reader to enjoy it.

Saki's 'villains', to the extent he can be said to have them, are typically characterized by pettiness. They may even take their faults for virtues. In The Lumber Room, the nasty aunt---evidently based on the unpleasant woman who brought up Saki and his siblings----enjoys punishing the children, but is perhaps not aware that the children know this as well as she does, though the reader is aware. She may be able to convince herself that she is simply trying to bring them up properly, but it is clear to the reader that she likes causing them pain.

So his boy-cousin and girl cousin and his quite uninteresting younger brother were to be taken to Jagborough sands that afternoon and he was to stay at home. His...aunt...had hastily invented the Jagborough expedition in order to impress on Nicholas the delights that he had justly forfeited by his disgraceful conduct at the breakfast-table. It was her habit, whenever one of the children fell from grace, to improvise something of a festival nature from which the offender would be rigorously debarred; if all the children sinned collectively they were suddenly informed of a circus in a neighboring town, a circus of unrivalled merit with uncounted elephants, to which, but for their depravity, they would have been taken that very day. ...A few decent tears were looked for on the part of Nicholas when the moment for the departure of the expedition had arrived.

The tears do not appear, further illustrating to the aunt the need to punish. But in this story the tables are turned and the little boy gets revenge on his aunt. The sadistic strain that characterizes so many of these stories is played out to comic effect; no actual bloodshed ensues. But the story is funny because the reader is aware that the very astute little boy---and the likable children in Saki are always amoral and always precocious--- is relishing the opportunity to make the aunt suffer just as much as she secretly relishes making the children suffer and by using her own weapons against her.

The stories often turn on an opportunity to make someone who is smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious, greedy, manipulative, or stingy suffer a bit (usually through social or physical humiliation) or occasionally much more than 'a bit.' When the opportunity arises, the character generally seizes it. In Saki's stories, the oppressed are very seldom inclined to show mercy to their oppressors. The stories are so contrived that the reader seldom or never wishes for this to occur----though in some cases the punishment exceeds the crime. It's the dread of excess punishment that creates much of the tension for me. In Saki, you just never know.

The qualities that Saki admired (and admires in his characters) are spelled out quite clearly in one of his later stories, The Achievement of the Cat. I say 'stories' but it is not so much a story as a short essay in praise of the cat's 'achievement.'

For not as a bond-servant or dependent has this proudest of mammals entered the human fraternity; not as a slave like the beasts of burden, or a humble camp-follower like the dog. The cat is domestic only as far as suits its own ends; it will not be kennelled or harnessed nor suffer any dictation as to its going out or comings in. Long contact with the human race has developed in it the art of diplomacy, and no Roman Cardianl of medieaval days knew how to ingratiate himself with his surroundings than a cat with a saucer of cream on its mental horizons.

But the social smoothness, the purring innocence, the softness of the velvet paw may be laid aside at a moment's notice, and the sinuous feline may disappear in deliberate aloofness to a world...where the human element is distanced and disregarded. Or the innate savage spirit that helped its survival in the bygone days of tooth and claw may be summoned forth from beneath the sleek exterior, and the torture-instinct (common alone to both human and feline may find free play in the death-throes of some luckless bird or rodent.

It is, indeed, no small triumph to have combined the untrammelled liberty of primeval savagery with the luxury which only a highly developed civilisation can command; to be lapped in the soft stuffs that commerce has gathered from the far ends of the world; to bask in the warmth that labour and industry have dragged from the bowels of the earth; to banquet on the dainties that wealth has bespoken for its table, and withal to be a free son of nature, a mighty hunter, a spiller of life-blood. This is the victory of the cat.

But besides the credit of success, the cat has other qualities which compel recognition. The animal which the Egyptians worshiped as divine, which the Romans venerated as a symbol of liberty, which Europeans in the ignorant Middle Ages anathametized as an agent of demonology, has displayed to all ages two closely blended characteristics---courage and self-respect. No matter how unfavourable the circumstances, both qualities are always to the fore.Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn insintively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in object submission to the impending visitation, the kitten will brace its tiny body for frantic resistance.

And disassociate the luxury-loving cat from the atmosphere of social comfort in which it usually contrives to move, and observe it critically under adverse conditions....The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, out-cast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it placed of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside.

Perhaps it is because I am a lover of cats that Saki's stories so appeal to me. The characters in his stories that he likes himself are essentially catlike.

4. Three of my favorite stories (with excerpts)

The stories I like best are the ones which mix Edwardian drawing room manners of the drawing room with the uncanny and terrifying. With a couple of exceptions (e.g., The Soul of Laploshka"), his stories aren't ghost stories. The horror is more elemental and less prosaic. Animals (as in Laura) and elementals are particularly likely to show up and start behaving strangely. Gabriel-Ernest is one story that involves both.

Gabriel-Ernest. Van Cheele, a pompous young man discovers that a beautiful young boy (who happens to be a were-wolf) is living on his land. When Van Cheele orders the beautiful young man to leave his land, the beautiful boy turns up (naked) on his doorstep ("You told me I was not to stay in the woods," said the boy calmly).  The boy is immediately adopted by Van Cheele's well-meaning do-gooding aunt.

Clothed, clean, and groomed, the boy lost none of his uncanniness in Van Cheele's eyes, but his aunt found him sweet.

"We must call him something till we know who he really is," she said. "Gabriel-Ernest, I think; those are nice suitable names."

Van Cheele agreed, but he privately doubted whether they were being grafted on to a nice suitable child. His misgivings were not diminished by the fact that his staid and elderly spaniel had bolted out of the house at the first incoming of the boy, and now obstinately remained shivering and yapping at the farther end of the orchard, while the canary, usually as vocally industrious as Van Cheele himself, had put itself on an allowance of frightened cheeps.

After consulting a friend in London,Van Cheele becomes convinced that the boy is a were-wolf and responsible for the recent disappearance of a couple of local children. What to do? "He dismissed the idea of a telegram, "Gabriel-Ernest is a werewolf" was a hopelessly inadequate effort at conveying the situation, and his aunt would think it was a code message to which he had omitted to give her the key."  The story ends disturbingly, like all of Saki's best stories.

Esme.  Esme is a story-within-a-story told by a recurring character known simply as 'the baroness.'

During a fox hunt, the baroness and another woman, Constance, get separated from the pack and lose their way. While trying to find their way back, they encounter a hyena which has escaped from his owner (an eccentric local lord). After an unpleasant moment with some of the hounds, the hyena decides to follow the baroness and her companion, a woman whom the baroness dislikes on social grounds for general tediousness and charmlessness.

The hyenea "hailed our approach with unmistakable relief and demonstrations of friendliness. It had probably been accustomed to uniform kindness from humans, while its first experience of a pack of hounds had left a bad impression....Constance and I and the hyena were left alone in the twilight." The baroness decides that she will call him (the hyena) Esme. He trots along beside them as they ride slowly "along a faintly marked cart-track, with the best following cheerfully at our heels." Eventually they pass a gypsy encampment, where a small child, picking berries, is frightened by the sight of the hyena and begins to cry. The two women ride on.

""I wonder what that child was doing there," said Constance presently.

""Picking blackberries. Obviously."

""I didn't like the way it cried," pursued Constance; "somehow its wail keeps ringing in my ears."

""I did not chide Constance for her morbid fancies; as a matter of fact the same situation, of being pursued by a perpetual fretful wail, had been forcing itself on my rather overtired nerves. For company's sake I hulloed to Esme, who had lagged somewhat behind. With a few springy bounds he drew up level, and then shot past us.

""The wailing accompaniment was explained. The gipsy child was firmly, and I expect painfully, held in its jaws."

""Merciful Heaven!" screamed Constance, "What on earth shall we do? What are we to do?...Can't we do something?" she persisted tearfully, as Esme cantered easily along in front of our tired horses.

"Personally I was doing everything that occurred to me at the moment. I stormed and scolded and coaxed in English and French and gamekeeper language; I made absurd, ineffectual cuts in the air with my thongless hunting-crop; I hurled my sandwich case at the brute;...And still we lumbered on through the deepening dusk with that dark uncouth shape lumbering ahead of us, and a drone of lugubrious music in our ears."

I'll leave it there.  It is an excellent example of a Saki animal story (and of my favorite sort of Saki story).

The Music on the Hill. Saki wrote several stories in which people who 'escape' to what they expect will be a life of peace in the country instead find themselves sucked into a mysterious atmosphere of menace and dread. Examples are: The Blood-Feud of Toad Water, The Cobweb, The Peace of Mowsle Barton, and The Music on the Hill. My favorite is The Music on the Hill (though The Peace of Mowsle Barton is a close contender).

The Music on the Hill illustrates rather graphically the meaning of the word Pan-ic (the terror of unseen things).

Sylvia Seltoun, the main character, has through various methods overcome her husband's reluctance to move  to move to his country house. Though Saki does not say so directly, she appears to be an officious or even bossy woman, some years older than the husband she has recently married.  When the story opens, she is preening herself on her success in getting him to marry her and on "wrenching her husband away from Town."   She has apparently married the homosexual Mortimer at least partly in order to get her hands on the house in question.   "To have married, Mortimer Seltoun, "Dead Mortimer," as his more intimate enemies called him, in the teeth of the cold hostility of his family, and in spite of his unaffected indifference to women that had needed some determination and adroitness to carry through."  Her decision to get him to move to the country was apparently the result of her new "distrust of town-life" because of its (unstated) effects on Mortimer.

The land surrounding the house, Yessney, is the stock 'beautiful-but-menacing' scenery that you are told quite early on conceals a lurking danger.

"In its wild open savagery there seemed a stealthy linking of the joy of life with the terror of unseen things. Sylvia smiled complacently as she gazed with a School-of-Art apprecitation at the landscape, and then of a sudden she almost shuddered."

"It is very wild," she said to Mortimer, who had joined her; "one could almost think that in such a place the worship of Pan had never quite died out."

"The worship of Pan never has died out," said Mortimer. "Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn."

Sylvia was religious in an honest, vaguely devotional kind of way, and did not like to hear her beliefs spoken of as mere aftergrowths, but it was at least something new and hopeful to hear Dead Mortimer speak with such energy and conviction on any subject.

"You don't really believe in Pan?" she asked incredulously.

"I've been a fool in most things," said Mortimer quietly, "but I'm not such a fool as not to believe in Pan when I'm down here. And if you're wise you won't disbelieve in him too boastfully while you're in his country.

She does not take her husband's advice. The consequences for her are not pleasant. This is one of Saki's more disturbing stories.

5. Other stories

I've recommended several stories, but I could really go on and on. Though many of the stories are disturbing or have a sadistic twist, others are merely amusing in his trademarked light and malicious fashion. Often the focus is the less admirable aspects of human nature, but not all of them end disastrously for the characters. Some end quite happily. Here are some I particularly enjoyed:

The Soul of Laploshka
The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope
The She-Wolf
The Schartz-Metterklume Method
The Seventh Pullet
Cousin Teresa
The Feast of Nemesis
The Name-Day
The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat
The Toys of Peace
The Wolves of Cernogratz
Excepting Mrs. Pentherby (actually one of my all-time favorites)
Morlvera
Shock Tactics
Hyacinth

6. Quotes.

The epigrammatic quality of Saki's writing lends itself to quotations. Here are a few.

"If you're going to be rude...I shall dine with you tomorrow night as well."

Reginald on the Academy

"You are really indecently vain of your appearance. A good life is infinitely preferable to good looks."

"You agree with me that the two are incompatible. I always say beauty is only sin deep."

Reginald's Choir Treat

"Some one has observed that Providence is always on the side of the big dividends," remarked Reginald.

The Duchess ate an anchovy in a shocked manner; she was sufficiently old-fashioned to dislike irreverence toward dividends."

Reginald at the Carlton

"It's the maddest thing I ever heard of," said Lucas angrily.

"Well, there is a strong strain of madness in our family. If you haven't noticed it yourself all your friends must have."

Adrian

"I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English."

Adrian

[W]henever a massacre...is reported...., every one assumes that it has been carried out "under orders" from somwhere or another; no one seems to think that there are people who might like to kill their neighbors now and then."

Filboid Studge, The Story of a Mouse that Helped

"Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death."

The Feast of Nemesis

Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum---It’s Always About the Templars