Time and time again students ask how can they improve their writing and I always reply with the same imperative. READ!

How simple and how empowering!

Reading inspires you to write and to write effectively. If you read, you have access to so many different minds, minds equipped with alternative perceptions and new ways of using language. Shifting our word patterns creates fresh writing.

No one writes well without reading well

I love reading short stories as they are so unforgiving of waffle. You have to get it right, you have to intrigue the reader NOW not later. And nothing has to be resolved absolutely or finally. All is suggestiveness. All has to PAY creatively. All has to MEAN.

One of the best stylists in the English language is Saki. I would love to be able to draw out a mind map of his head-brimming with his anarchic ideas, his strange meetings and subversive resolutions.

Saki loves irony. He knows its power to unsettle and to heal. Irony unearths uneasy yet often liberating truths!

“Good gracious!  Have any lives been lost?”

“Heaps, I should say.  The second housemaid has already identified three bodies that have floated past the billiard-room window as being the young man she’s engaged to.  Either she’s engaged to a large assortment of the population round here or else she’s very careless at identification.  Of course it may be the same body coming round again and again in a swirl; I hadn’t thought of that.”

Irony has an alternative fairness in Saki and this keeps the reader reading.I love the throwaway pretense at self correction: ‘I hadn’t thought of that’. But surely she will! Vera’s mind is a mind on fire with improvised possibilities. She is a consummate story teller like so many of Saki’s heroines:adaptable, circumspect and provocative.

She appreciates the value of alternative irony!

When we read these two extracts from Saki’s two short stories, ‘The Lull and Tobermory,  we find that Saki uses irony rather ‘alternatively’ and that we enjoy such alternatives heartily. Saki’s mind is very much a mind at play!

‘So what do I mean by his alternative use of irony then?

By ‘alternatively’ I mean that the expectations generated through the use of a more conventional form of prediction/foreshadowing are subverted radically through the intervention of the surreal.

We definitely find that spending time with Saki’s protagonists leads us to explore maps of the mind previously unknown!

In other words Saki has a most unusual sense of reality and a wicked interest in punishing hypocrisy or rigid modes of behaviour through the intervention of the eccentric, the surreal,and the fantastical.

For when Vera promises (The Lull) that things remain to be  ’seen’ we have no idea what these ‘seen’ things might be  let alone what they might lead to! Ordinarily we trust the ‘seen’ or the visible’. This seems to make things credible and available for our judgment.

 

Look at the use of the adverb ‘moderately’ in the first extract from The Lull below. The word ‘moderately’ reinforced by another adverb ‘tactfully’ reflects Latimer’s staid, dull character and communicates his self seeking  neutrality where animals are concerned. Such a man would never be enthusiastic we guess, about anything. And it is his dullness that provokes Vera- the -teenager, who enjoys making Latimer forget his political pamphlets in favour of a ‘small black pig’ and a ‘game cock’.

 

 

“I know he’s going to sit up half the night working up points for his final speeches,” said Mrs. Durmot regretfully; “however, we’ve kept politics at arm’s length all the afternoon and evening.  More than that we cannot do.”

“That remains to be seen,” said Vera, but she said it to herself.

Latimer had scarcely shut his bedroom door before he was immersed in a sheaf of notes and pamphlets, while a fountain-pen and pocket-book were brought into play for the due marshalling of useful facts and discreet fictions.  He had been at work for perhaps thirty-five minutes, and the house was seemingly consecrated to the healthy slumber of country life, when a stifled squealing and scuffling in the passage was followed by a loud tap at his door.  Before he had time to answer, a much- encumbered Vera burst into the room with the question; “I say, can I leave these here?”

“These” were a small black pig and a lusty specimen of black-red gamecock.__

Latimer was moderately fond of animals, and particularly interested in small livestock rearing from the economic point of view; in fact, one of the pamphlets on which he was at that moment engaged warmly advocated the further development of the pig and poultry industry in our rural districts; but he was pardonably unwilling to share even a commodious bedroom with samples of henroost and stye products.

“Wouldn’t they be happier somewhere outside?” he asked, tactfully expressing his own preference in the matter in an apparent solicitude for theirs.

“There is no outside,” said Vera impressively, “nothing but a waste of dark, swirling waters.  The reservoir at Brinkley has burst.”

“I didn’t know there was a reservoir at Brinkley,” said Latimer.

“Well, there isn’t now, it’s jolly well all over the place, and as we stand particularly low we’re the centre of an inland sea just at present.  You see the river has overflowed its banks as well.”

“Good gracious!  Have any lives been lost?”

“Heaps, I should say.  The second housemaid has already identified three bodies that have floated past the billiard-room window as being the young man she’s engaged to.  Either she’s engaged to a large assortment of the population round here or else she’s very careless at identification.  Of course it may be the same body coming round again and again in a swirl; I hadn’t thought of that.”

 

 Tobermory is one of Saki’s best stories and this extract introduces the talking Tobermory to his flabbergasted audience in the drawing room. Saki wickedly enmeshes cat like features,’ velvet tread’  within the characterisation of his eavesdropping hero. The insouciance of Tobermory, ‘studied unconcern’  perfectly fits his world weary superiority and arrogance.

The nervous incompetence of Lady Blemley’s milk pouring is ironically converted into a human fault and human neglect of a much valued carpet make, Axminster’. This shift from the ordinary to the extraordinary is seamless, ironically alternative  and superbly sardonic. 

We believe Tobermory would talk in this way. We adore him immediately  He is the embodiment of our secret urges to tell the truth and to shock. 

If only we had the swagger of Tobermory! 

In the midst of the clamour Tobermory entered the room and made his way with velvet tread and studied unconcern across the group seated round the tea-table.

A sudden hush of awkwardness and constraint fell on the company. Somehow there seemed an element of embarrassment in addressing on equal terms a domestic cat of acknowledged dental ability.

“Will you have some milk, Tobermory?” asked Lady Blemley in a rather strained voice.

“I don’t mind if I do,” was the response, couched in a tone of even indifference. A shiver of suppressed excitement went through the listeners, and Lady Blemley might be excused for pouring out the saucerful of milk rather unsteadily.

“I’m afraid I’ve spilt a good deal of it,” she said apologetically.

“After all, it’s not my Axminster,” was Tobermory’s rejoinder.