Saki: just a whit too smart The Penguln Complete Saki. Introduction by Noel Coward. ?4.95. Saki (H. H. Munro) was killed fighting for his country 66 Years ago. Here, in a single mighty paperback, we are offered his complete collected works: 135 short stories, three novels, anrd three plays. At least the contents pages list them so. but Saki really wrote only two novels, The Unbearable Bassington and When William Came. In the third, The Westminster Alice, Saki plunders Carroll in order to write a dozen brief political sketches. These may have had real Moet et Chandon tang in 1900 but thVir fizz has long fled. S.imilarly the three plays really boil down to one good one called The Watched Pot: the others au no mort than slight curtain-rain. The thinp to concentrte on are the short stories and one of the novels, The Unbearable Bassington, which is probably the finest single thing he ever did. Ther was deep seriousness in Saki, but he usually covered it with a high-gloss finish of flippant wit and epim, and too oftlen he allowed his gift for the smart phrase to run away with him. "The art of public life consists to a great extent of knowing exactly where to stop and going a bit further." This sort of thing is not all that diflicult to do once you get the knack and it is dangerously easy to become addicted. Saki became addicted. Bassington i5 the story of a possessive mother and a wayward, self-indulgent son. Their faults - not mon- strous ones - bring fiercest tragedy to both. The author's note says: "This story has no moral. If it points out an evil at any rate it suggests no remedy." Saki was a grim joker. The stories, too, are for the most part less than competent, though his lust for the final cotup de thedtre can sometimes topple him over into absurdity. Read for example The Reticence of Lady Anne which appeared in a collection in 1910 where he leaves his main character, and his reader as well, improbably breathless. He dwells much on the proposition that nature is red in tooth and claw and that men and animals share a common beastliness. His cer- tainty on this point, operating in concert with a marked flair for the macabre, marks his greatest pieces - a story suchl as, say, .hredni Vashtar which shakes the reader with the frisson that Saki intended. But on the whole he is inventive rather than creative. Read six short stories by Saki and then six by Chekhov to see how far a good writer can fal; short of a Rreat one. David Williams Saki: just a whit too smart