Laughter and the love of friends
Anthony Powell
MAURICE BARING: A CITIZEN OF EUROPE by Emma Letley Constable, £18.95, pp.269 Maurice Baring (1874-1945) was essentially an Edwardian in the sense that Max Beerbohm, only two years older, was essentially of the Nineties, a period which Baring himself went on record as thinking Just like any other for someone who lived through those years. That was certainly not what Beerbohm (who wrote a splendid parody of Baring in A Christmas Garland) thought about the Nineties.
Emma Letley, a great-niece, has written a biography that is a bit uninspired in never quite welding her subject together, but Baring is not an easy man to put on paper. One wonders how many people under 50 remember his name, so much was he associated with his own personal charm that extended from being invited to stay at her house on a remote Breton island by Sarah Bernhardt (whose biography he later wrote) when he was 27, to being in his for- ties (Lord) Trenchard's favourite staff- officer in the Royal Flying Corps, without any military training. This power of charm- ing extended to all persons, classes, and races.
Maurice Baring came from the enormously successful banking family of that name. His father, younger son of another Baring peer, had himself been created 1st Lord Revelstoke. He was extremely rich, but in 1890 there was a financial crisis, owing to over-optimistic South American investment. The situation was only saved at great cost. Two years later Lady Revelstoke died, a dread- ful blow to Maurice, one of which he could never speak or write.
Now began a period of indecision as to what he ought to do, a condition from which Baring never wholly emerged. Clearly banking was not his forte, his mathematics being unusually bad. Indeed, this gap caused a serious obstacle to entering the Diplomatic Service, where, having passed at last, Baring remained ten years. His talent for languages was prodigious. By the end of his life he is said to have spoken 18 or 20. Baring found the life of a diplomat degrading', but was still not at all clear what he wanted to do. By this time his brother John had succeeded to the title and put the family fortunes on a firm basis. John Revelstoke was always extremely gen- erous to his younger brother, but did make constant efforts to persuade Maurice to get a regular job, be less extravagant, anyway earn some money, over and above writing a few books.
This is a familiar story. Maurice Baring deviates from its more usual form by being intensely anti-intellectual, which he remained throughout life. He was, however, keen on music.
In 1903 he went to Russia, a country which made an immense impression on him. He possesses some claim to have introduced Chekhov to the Western world. This seems curious for someone who never had the smallest sympathy for the incisive changes that were to take place in writing in the near future, in which Chekhov plays some part. Baring was a war- correspondent for the Morning Post in the Russo-Japanese war, a job he performed with courage and efficiency.
In 1909 he became a Roman Catholic; this was to lead to friendship with those two other equally Edwardian figures, Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. Baring, still writing miscellaneously, varied life with travel in the Near East with fashionable life in a smart London world. He tried to write verse dramas and poetry.
He seems to have been as unprepared as everyone else in this country for the out- break of war in 1914, in spite of extensive experience in Europe, and intimate study of Russia, even from the third-class railway-carriage angle. Baring surprisingly did not grasp that in Eastern Europe many subject races actively wanted a world con- flict to effect their own independence, one of the real keys to the causes of the War. Now in his forties, Baring managed to get himself appointed interpreter in French to Colonel Hugh Trenchard, head of the Flying Corps, from which the RAF was eventually to emerge. This momentous work Baring did with great effect, the col- lating of aircraft matters being an entirely new problem for the Allies, at a stage when the opinion was held that flying-machines might be a considerable help to improve intelligence for cavalry.
After the war Baring settled down as a novelist. By this time he had written a lot of books of one kind and another (finally over 60). C, Cat's Cradle, and Daphne Adeane were well received, especially in France. His novels have faint early Jamesian overtones, all heavily influenced by his religious conversion. They are as good an example as any novels of their period of how necessary was the modern upheaval in writing and the other arts that was already taking place.
But what was Maurice Baring really like? An important side of him was frenzied practical joking, extending from balancing a glass of port on his bald head while making a speech, to breaking up the furniture and crockery. When he was stay- ing in the country house of a friend, (Bar- ing now in his fifties), she unwisely left her new driving licence about. Baring filled in `Endorsements & Collisions if any' with five imaginary ones. Having paid a consid- erable fine to be allowed a new licence, she left it about again. Once more Baring found it, and filled it up with imaginary accidents, such as running into trains.
Admittedly, practical jokes were more popular at the beginning of the century than now. Perhaps two world wars have vitiated people's taste for that sort of humour. Even so, it suggests, as with all habitual practical jokers, that there was something a bit uneasy in Baring's psychological make-up.
This was undoubtedly so. The author does not make much of that side of him, even leaving the mystery of Baring's emotional life to the end of the book. Did he die a virgin? There is no evidence to the contrary, unlikely as that might seem. He had a great taste for amities amoreuses with famous beauties. There was a vague rumour that, when an attaché in Copen- hagen, he might have had a broken engage- ment with a French girl of which nothing whatever is known. He liked smart lesbians like Vernon Lee or Dame Ethel Smyth. In this category Emma Letley includes Edith Somerville, almost certainly wrongly, there being overwhelming evidence to suggest otherwise, Lady Diana Cooper, a great friend; gives the most revealing glimpse in the book. She admits that Baring's devotion to herself was a strain. The season was
... really ruined for me by Maurice . . . I think no one was ever M love with Maurice, and, curiously enough, 1 never felt absolutely comfortable with him. t think it was his own nervosity that infected me.
No doubt it was this never explained neurotic strain in him which led to the tragic end in Parkinson's disease.
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