The Complete Works of Saki [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION BY NOËL COWARD Now, in the year 1967, I have been asked to write an introductory preface for a reissue of the works of Hector Munro, "Saki." This most definitely belongs to the "Who could have dreamed?" department. Who could have dreamed fifty-two years ago when, at the age of fifteen, I first read "Beasts and Super-Beasts," that I should one day be in a position to reintroduce him to a reading public many of whom possibly have never heard of him. Mrs. Astley Cooper, in whose house in Rutland I happened to be staying when I made this joyful discovery, was a character who might well have been invented by Saki himself. She was an articulate, faintly eccentric old lady whose witticisms exploded like firecrackers. The explanation of why an ambitious young actor in his teens should have found himself in the unHkely atmosphere of the hunting country is given in the first volume of my autobiography. Present Indicative. In any event there I was and there, lying on a round table in the hall, w^as a copy of "Beasts and Super-Beasts." I took it up to my bedroom, opened it casually and was unable to go to sleep until I had finished it. One is weU accustomed to reading in the biographies of successful authors how they were discovered in their tender, formative years curled up on the branches of a tree with their yoimg noses buried in Oliver Twist or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This would have been difficult in my circumstances for, with the exception of rare visits to the country, the only trees shading my precocious childhood were those of Battersea Park or Clapham Common, and had I been caught perched in any of them, even with a copy of Chums or The Boys Own Paper, I should have been led away immediately to the nearest police station.