Saki
Let me tell you a bit about him (I didn’t know this: I had to look it up.):
He enlisted at the age of 43, refusing a King’s commission; he was killed by a German sniper in 1916–a shot to the head, I suppose, and then lights out.
Before all that, before he uttered his last words, “Put that damned cigarette out!,” he was a master of the short story and a satirist of Edwardian society.
Let’s back up: He was born in Burma in 1870–the scion of a policeman. (How the hell do you end up in Burma in 1870 and then: How the hell do you then decide to become a policeman in Burma?)
His mother died when he was two. A cow charged at her; she miscarried what was to be a Saki sibling. Like all good authors, the trauma influenced the man and so Saki wrote about deadly animals later on. Yes, a cow charged at his mother and she died from that experience. That’s what the 1870s were like in Burma, I reckon. Yay!
I forgot to tell you this: Saki was his nom de plume. Oh, and this: He was probably a homosexual. Big deal, I know, I know.
What he wrote:
From Reginald on the Academy:
“To have reached thirty,” said Reginald, “is to have failed in life.”
“To die before being painted by Sargent is to go to Heaven prematurely.”
and, this: “I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.”
So he’s been dead for a while. I tried to paint him tonight–doing him a gross injustice, making him recede further into oblivion, spreading burnt umber straight from the tube onto A.C. Moore canvas that was stretched in a Thai sweatshop. No one cares–except perhaps the hereditary recipients of the royalty check for $10 by way of some pertinacious high school English teacher with a receding hairline and a raging midlife crisis who bucks the school board and refuses to have his class read The Kite Runner, opting instead for Saki’s Sredni Vashtar
“Put that damned cigarette out!” What a way to go. Can you think of your last words? Can they trump that?
Does anyone else but me see the complete incongruity in this man’s life? He wrote sardonically about a stodgy generation of foolish, self-absorbed men who, while he was an enlisted man at 43-years of age, put him in a muddy, horribly sodden trench and had him meet the receiving end of a Teutonic Gewehr 98.
I don’t get it: That’s life.