Saki was one of the greatest satirists of Christmas

CLOVIS SANGRAIL, the protagonist of the short story “The Feast of Nemesis” (1914), is not in a festive mood. Swamped by Christmas shopping, he suggests that everyone ditch the season of goodwill and instead dedicate a day to “demonstrating your feelings towards people whom you simply loathe”. On “Nemesis Day”, Clovis suggests, you might sneak into the gardens of your vexatious neighbours and “dig for truffles on their tennis court with a good gardening fork”. Even if you don’t find truffles, “you would find a great peace, such as no amount of present-giving could ever bestow.”

Equal parts whimsical and wounding, Clovis’s musings are typical of his creator. Born 150 years ago on December 18th 1870, Saki—the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro—was a brilliant social satirist and one of the great virtuosos of the short story. Like his contemporary P.G Wodehouse, he was a sharp observer of haute monde buffoonery. But Saki’s satire is cattier, and his tales are darker and wilder. Saki’s characters contend not only with amusing social mishaps but with fierce animals and supernatural goings-on. If Saki anatomises his social world with the precision of a surgeon, he is also just as comfortable with a bit of gore.

The macabre absurdity of his plots mirrors his own life. After his mother was killed by a charging cow, he was brought up by two severe aunts; there is a preponderance of crabbed old aunts in his stories as well as frequent attacks by elk, tigers and—improbably—ferrets. As an adult, his social position made him the perfect satirist. He was close enough to his targets to observe them keenly: as Salman Rushdie wrote of one of Saki’s creations, “only a man steeped in the nuances of aristocratic life could have invented a name like Loona Bimberton”. But as a gay man in the wake of the trial of Oscar Wilde, the necessity of secrecy regarding his private life made him an outsider looking in, always maintaining a critical distance.

This is a felicitous time of year to remember Saki, because Christmas was one of his favourite themes. Christmas heightens the social sins which are his principal targets: mawkish morality, strained familial amity and contrived ritual. The protocols of gift-giving and thank-you-card sending come in for particular contempt. In “Reginald on Christmas Presents” (1904) the narrator receives an outmoded pair of gloves from a loathed aunt, which he promptly re-gifts to “a boy I hated intimately”—an act “nearly as consoling as sending white flowers to his funeral”. Still, Reginald writes a gushing letter of thanks: “I wrote and told my aunt that they were the one thing that had been wanting to make existence blossom like a rose.”

The gloves are emblematic of shallow materialism, another bugbear of Saki’s. His is a world of tea-sets, trinkets and triviality. In “Down Pens” (1914) Janetta sends the Froplinsons a Christmas gift of markers for playing bridge. The Froplinsons don’t actually play bridge, but “one is not supposed to notice social deformities of that sort,” Janetta reminds the reader; “it wouldn’t be polite.” The greatest Christmas sin of all, however, is to be a bore. As Reginald puts it, “they say that there’s nothing sadder than victory except defeat. If you’ve ever stayed with dull people during what is alleged to be the festive season, you can probably revise that saying.” The “dull people” in question are subjected to a flurry of casually withering put-downs: “There was a Major Somebody who had shot things in Lapland, or somewhere of that sort; I forget what they were, but it wasn’t for want of reminding.”

Saki is not a misanthrope, however: there is kindness in his tales but it is reserved for naughty children and other rebels. In his finest Christmas story, “Bertie’s Christmas Eve” (1911), Bertie Steffink contrives to lock up his stern family and stuffy house guests in a cowshed. In a random act of generosity he invites a passing group of fashionable young men “in a high state of conviviality” to spend Christmas night polishing off the household’s stock of sparkling Moselle. It was, the reader is assured, “the happiest Christmas Eve he had ever spent”.