Saki is a sardonic, frequently brilliant writer whose stories are often surreal and always witty: his style embraces Wilde, Carroll and even Austen herself. If many of the tales are rather ‘through the looking glass’ of social satire, then their comedy tends to keep emotional risk at bay. Thus we enjoy Saki and laugh at the wonderfully surreal ‘excursions’ he explores, without necessarily feeling the pull of emotional investment.
In Sredni Vashtar however, something feels rather different. This difference I admit I missed when I first read the tale.However my colleague Mark Wrigley always held the story in high regard and the other week I read the tale again and found it more involving than say the satire of Esme or Tobermory (though being an animal lover I do mourn the passing of the eponymous hero in the latter tale) !
Sredni Vashtar was a surprise. The ‘stakes’ as Mark assured me, were very high. ‘Life or death’ he said.’It’s a duel.’
So where might this involvement emanate from I wondered, and how does this sympathy govern its effect?
Let’s look at the opening of Sredni Vashtar and explore how it draws us in….
Conradin was ten years old, and the doctor had pronounced his professional opinion that the boy would not live another five years. The doctor was silky and effete, and counted for little, but his opinion was endorsed by Mrs. De Ropp, who counted for nearly everything. Mrs. De Ropp was Conradin’s cousin and guardian, and in his eyes she represented those three-fifths of the world that are necessary and disagreeable and real; the other two-fifths, in perpetual antagonism to the foregoing, were summed up in himself and his imagination. One of these days Conradin supposed he would succumb to the mastering pressure of wearisome necessary things—such as illnesses and coddling restrictions and drawn-out dulness. Without his imagination, which was rampant under the spur of loneliness, he would have succumbed long ago.
Mrs. De Ropp would never, in her honestest moments, have confessed to herself that she disliked Conradin, though she might have been dimly aware that thwarting him “for his good” was a duty which she did not find particularly irksome. Conradin hated her with a desperate sincerity which he was perfectly able to mask. Such few pleasures as he could contrive for himself gained an added relish from the likelihood that they would be displeasing to his guardian, and from the realm of his imagination she was locked out—an unclean thing, which should find no entrance.
In the dull, cheerless garden, overlooked by so many windows that were ready to open with a message not to do this or that, or a reminder that medicines were due, he found little attraction. The few fruit-trees that it contained were set jealously apart from his plucking, as though they were rare specimens of their kind blooming in an arid waste; it would probably have been difficult to find a market-gardener who would have offered ten shillings for their entire yearly produce. In a forgotten corner, however, almost hidden behind a dismal shrubbery, was a disused tool-shed of respectable proportions, and within its walls Conradin found a haven, something that took on the varying aspects of a playroom and a cathedral. He had peopled it with a legion of familiar phantoms, evoked partly from fragments of history and partly from his own brain, but it also boasted two inmates of flesh and blood. In one corner lived a ragged-plumaged Houdan hen, on which the boy lavished an affection that had scarcely another outlet. Further back in the gloom stood a large hutch, divided into two compartments, one of which was fronted with close iron bars. This was the abode of a large polecat-ferret, which a friendly butcher-boy had once smuggled, cage and all, into its present quarters, in exchange for a long-secreted hoard of small silver. Conradin was dreadfully afraid of the lithe, sharp-fanged beast, but it was his most treasured possession.
Conradin is declared just ‘TEN’ years old. in the opening line. His age immediately positions us as ‘protective/guardian’ readers and immediately moulds our response to the text.This information (being a lonely child and 10) is immediately emotive (like Oliver Twist) and is intensified by his subjugation to his Aunt’s stultifying, oppressive government.
She is a totalitarian dictator in a long dress! (See Mrs Reed in Jane Eyre)
The numerical quantifiers (‘two fifths’) surrounding the intentions of Mrs De Ropp give terrible authority to her despotic ways. Conradin’s count down ‘death sentence’ seems as much due to his life with his rigidly controlled life with his Aunt , as to any dubiously announced medical diagnosis/ prognosis. Indeed the ill health of Conradin is succinctly associated with Mrs De Ropp’s restrictions.
She is Freud’s death drive- Mrs Thanatos!
For the Aunt is without playfulness:a tyrant whose controlling ways seem pathologically arid – the very antithesis of childhood’s unruly ‘wonderment.’
Mrs De Ropp gives terrible representation to Blake’s ‘mind forg’d manacles’ as she attempts to ‘rope’ in her world, so that she can inflict total authority upon it- to the point of utter suffocation.
How can anyone or anything GROW in this environment ? Note how the ‘ Dull cheerless garden’ has connotations of Miss Havisham’s garden at ‘Satis House’ in Dickens’ Great Expectations, where the protagonist Pip cannot ‘grow’ safely.
Conradin’s only escape from his blighted circumstances is through his imagination, through his secret play, where in a ‘forgotten corner’ (therefore liberating because free of his Aunt’s taint) of the garden, a ‘haven’ aka the ‘tool- shed’ becomes a ‘cathedral’ to his imagination; a den for an untrammeled mind!
Interestingly one creature(the hen) is the receptacle of nurturing ‘affection’ whilst the other (the ferret) induces a terrible fear, yet ironically ‘was his most treasured possession.’ So, when Mrs De Ropp removes the hen from the shed out of spite, nurture is defeated and only primitive nature remains. Dramatically and ironically, she has signed her death warrant without knowing it!
Conradin’s secret, lonely worship of the ferret Sredni Vashatr, seems an urgent form of idolatry which culminates in the necessary sacrifice of the Aunt, by the demi ‘god’ pole cat, after the fervently oblique ‘prayers of the young boy for salvation.
It’s a desperate duel! SOUL STUFF! Keeps us guessing right until the end.
As I mentioned in my introduction, this story is different because so much is at stake.
We fear for Conradin. We do not even know what he prays for, and whatever it is , we fear his prayers may not work. It is a life or death tale.The soul’s desperate choice – and we are relieved that Saki’s child hero defeats the wicked oppressor, through imagination taking the form of fervent faith.
As a writer could Saki allow anything else? How could he allow the Aunt/book burner to live ?!
Excellent reading, Jan, so many good points and insights!
You’ve been writing about rage in Lawrence recently, and there is much anger in Sredni Vashtar too, with its vastly different feel. There is a fury at injustice, and there is the meticulous, controlled subconcious hatred of the Aunt, an inverted, morbidly maternal controlling instinct that has its logical end point in the child’s death. ‘Care’ becomes a form of diminuition and denial, where existence is given ever narrower bounds until Conradin is erased.
This bullying calls for retribution. Imagine if Conradin had been rescued by a benign aunt, had flourished, and nothing had happened to Mrs De Ropp – what a disappointment – we feel the the bliss of the wild justice of her death! Conradin buttering in his toast becomes a delicious, sublime joke that we share – it’s the most enjloyable food in English literature. (There’s a pork pie that’s a competitor!)
Sredni Vashtar is most moral immoral story, and the most immoral moral story – its about the rightness of some hatred, and that’s still subversive. Mark