The Unbearable Bassington

The Unbearable Bassington was the first novel written by Saki (H. H. Munro). It also contains much of the elegant wit found in his short stories. Comus (The Unbearable) Bassington, is a charming young man about town. His perversity however thwarts all his mother's efforts to advance his prospects and lands him in hot water. Like many a "black sheep" he ends up being sent off to one of the colonies to fend for himself. Brilliantly witty, frequently cruel and chilling, The Unbearable...
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The Unbearable Bassington was the first novel written by Saki (H. H. Munro). It also contains much of the elegant wit found in his short stories. Comus (The Unbearable) Bassington, is a charming young man about town. His perversity however thwarts all his mother's efforts to advance his prospects and lands him in hot water. Like many a "black sheep" he ends up being sent off to one of the colonies to fend for himself. Brilliantly witty, frequently cruel and chilling, The Unbearable Bassington imaginatively portrays the culture clash between the wild and the domestic.

"H. H. Munro - he borrowed ''Saki'' from the verses of Omar Khayyam - lost his mother to a runaway cow, was repressed by awful aunts, loitered among ''ludicrous metaphors'' and died in a trench in World War I because, ''ever the noncom,'' he said ''put that bloody cigarette out'' and was shot in the dark by a German. The German who shot him didn't know that Saki had written a novel, ''When William Came,'' prophesying a German victory over England and rather admiring the putative conquerors while hoping that the British Boy Scouts would, ultimately, prevail.

"Saki, after writing a history of the Russian Empire that nobody liked, and reporting for various newspapers the bad news of a British Empire gone wrong, made a career out of parodying Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling and himself. He was a satirist who wanted to be serious, an Oscar Wilde without the social graces, a ''Celtic mystic'' who dreamed of hyenas, pole-ferrets, antler spikes and black wolves with ''gleaming fangs and cruel, yellow eyes.'' He ridiculed Ibsen, and couldn't write a stageworthy play. He was, in the fashion of his time, an anti-Semite, a misogynist and a reactionary. No wonder we loved him when most of us were 18 years old. He patched our elbows." -John Leonard, The New York Times

"At the age of 15, No#65533;l Coward was staying in an English country house and found a copy of Beasts and Super-Beasts on a table: "I took it up to my bedroom, opened it casually and was unable to go to sleep until I had finished it." I had a similar experience at about the same age, and I agree with Coward that H. H. Munro--or "Saki," the author of the book in question--is among those few writers, inspirational when read at an early age, who definitely retain their magic when revisited decades later. I have the impression that Saki is not very much appreciated in the United States. Good. That means I can put into my debt many of you who are reading these words. Go and get an edition of this Edwardian master of the short story. Begin with, say, "Sredni Vashtar" or "The Lumber-Room" or "The Open Window." Then see whether you can put the book down.

"The spellbinding quality of the stories is almost too easy to analyze and looks mawkish when set down in plain words, because Saki's great gift was being able to write about children and animals. But consider: How many authors have ever been able to pull off these most difficult of tricks? Kipling, for sure, but then, Kipling would not have been able to render the languid young princes of the drawing room, such as the exquisite Clovis Sangrail, with whom Saki peopled so many a scene.

"Creatures that essentially can never be tamed--felines and wolves pre-eminently--were Saki's emotional favorites. In his best-known novella, The Unbearable Bassington, which contains in the figure of Comus Bassington one of the two most obviously homoerotic of his protagonists (the other being the boy-werewolf Gabriel-Ernest in the story of the same name), the hero is a man named Tom Keriway, whose daredevil nature is summed up in the echoing phrase "a man that wolves have sniffed at." -The Atlantic, June, 2008