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Essential Baggage

Maurice Baring – who was my godfather – once had a dream. He crossed the Styx, and there on the other side was, as he put it, ‘a Customs House, and an official who had, inscribed in golden letters on his cap, Chemins de fer de l’Enfer, who said to me “Have you anything to declare?” And he handed me a printed list on which, instead of wine, spirits, tobacco, silk, lace, etc., there was printed Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Scandinavian, Chinese, Arabic and Persian, and it was explained to me that this list referred to the literary baggage I had travelled with during my life.’ Have You Anything to Declare? was the title he gave to the best anthology of poetry and prose I know. For the past half-century I have bought any copy I see in a second-hand bookshop to give as a present. During that time at least a dozen must have passed through my hands.

I call it an anthology; but I should make it plain that the author – or should I say compiler? – does not. ‘I am not making an anthology,’ he writes, ‘nor choosing what I think best, and arranging it  in the order I think best; I am taking my notes as they come, and interrupting what is noted by what I remember, or by what the notes may suggest.’ These interruptions and asides – which take up almost as much space as the quotations themselves – are what give the book its lasting magic: we feel all the time that we are in the presence of a friend – a man of deep culture, dazzling intelligence and, above all, irresistible charm.

Dramatist, novelist, poet, travel-writer and war correspondent, Baring was, moreover, a superb linguist. He may not have mastered quite all the languages on the list proffered to him by the customs man, but Greek, Latin and most of the European ones held no secrets for him; Russian he spoke like a native. And when he knew the language you could trust him to know the literature too. I doubt whether there is

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Maurice Baring – who was my godfather – once had a dream. He crossed the Styx, and there on the other side was, as he put it, ‘a Customs House, and an official who had, inscribed in golden letters on his cap, Chemins de fer de l’Enfer, who said to me “Have you anything to declare?” And he handed me a printed list on which, instead of wine, spirits, tobacco, silk, lace, etc., there was printed Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Scandinavian, Chinese, Arabic and Persian, and it was explained to me that this list referred to the literary baggage I had travelled with during my life.’ Have You Anything to Declare? was the title he gave to the best anthology of poetry and prose I know. For the past half-century I have bought any copy I see in a second-hand bookshop to give as a present. During that time at least a dozen must have passed through my hands.

I call it an anthology; but I should make it plain that the author – or should I say compiler? – does not. ‘I am not making an anthology,’ he writes, ‘nor choosing what I think best, and arranging it  in the order I think best; I am taking my notes as they come, and interrupting what is noted by what I remember, or by what the notes may suggest.’ These interruptions and asides – which take up almost as much space as the quotations themselves – are what give the book its lasting magic: we feel all the time that we are in the presence of a friend – a man of deep culture, dazzling intelligence and, above all, irresistible charm. Dramatist, novelist, poet, travel-writer and war correspondent, Baring was, moreover, a superb linguist. He may not have mastered quite all the languages on the list proffered to him by the customs man, but Greek, Latin and most of the European ones held no secrets for him; Russian he spoke like a native. And when he knew the language you could trust him to know the literature too. I doubt whether there is a single critic writing today who would be capable of throwing his literary net, as Maurice Baring did, across seven languages, not counting his native English. But don’t, I beg you, be put off. Let me quote his very first sentence: ‘This book is not meant for scholars nor for the learned, but for those who, like myself, although they have only a smattering of letters, are fond of books and fond of reading.’ Most of the foreign quotations are translated – often, quite brilliantly, by Baring himself – and his running commentary is lively, even chatty. What shines through every page is his own enchanting personality, and his deep, all-embracing love of literature. Let’s have a quote or two: here he is talking about Racine:

What has always seemed to me one of the most poignant lines in poetry comes from Mithridate:

Mais la mort fuit encor [sic] sa grande âme trompée

which might be translated

But Death still shuns his great defrauded soul.

The line sums up the whole lives of many great men who have outlived their prime and experienced disappointment, disillusion and ingratitude in their old age. A good example is Herzen, the Russian socialist reformer, who lived to see his work misunderstood and ‘twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools’. It might apply to Racine himself; or among younger men, that is to say among the middle-aged, to the Black Prince, pining away and sick of mortal disease at Bordeaux.

He is, I think, particularly good on Dante:

Of all the landscape painters in verse, there is none who has a more magical touch than Dante, nor any who can evoke a more spacious picture with so few strokes. For instance,

E come li stornei ne portan l’ali, Nel freddo tempo, a schiera larga e piena,

And as the starlings, borne upon the wing, Fly in large flocks in the cold winter air,

or

Li ruscelletti che de’verdi colli Del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno, Faccendo i lor canali freddi e molli,

The rills, that glitter down the grassy slopes Of Casentino, making fresh and soft The banks whereby they glide to Arno’s stream.

Other lines (Baring writes) which are marvellous in their beauty and Homeric completeness are:

A noi venia la creatura bella, Bianco vestita, e nella faccia quale Par tremolando mattutina stella.

Then came that lovely being from afar, Clothed in white robes, and bearing on his brow The trembling glory of the morning star.

This last passage reminds me inescapably of those lovely lines from Lycidas:

And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

Oddly enough, Baring doesn’t mention this. On the other hand he wonders whether Shakespeare (as opposed to Milton) ever read Dante. I can’t think it likely, since there is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare knew a word of Italian, and I doubt whether the Divine Comedy had yet been translated into English. But he refers us to the great speech in Act III of Measure for Measure (‘Ay, but to die, and go we know not where . . .’) and points out that

you could find no better description or summary of the punishments which Dante tells us of in the Inferno than some of those lines; it is not unreasonable to believe that when Shakespeare wrote

To be imprison’d in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world

he may have had in mind Dante’s

La bufera infernal, che mai non resta,

and Paolo and Francesca

Together on the never-resting air.

Does anyone today read John Oliver Hobbes? And, if they have heard of her at all, do they know that she was a woman? Among the under-sixties, the answer to both questions is, I suspect, very few. ‘For the moment,’ Baring writes in 1936, ‘her work has been forgotten, but I cannot help thinking that a time will come when some modern will have the great fun of rediscovering her. Rediscovered she is bound to be; for her work has a historical interest. It carries on the panorama of English country and county life which was begun by Miss Austen and carried on until the end of the Seventies by Anthony Trollope.’ To give us a flavour of that work, he quotes a short passage from the beginning of The Sinner’s Comedy, describing the death of the ninth Lord Middlehurst:

He did not speak again till just before he died, when he kissed his wife’s hand with a singular tenderness, and called her Elizabeth. She had been christened Augusta Frederica, but then, as the doctors explained, dying men often make these mistakes.

Elsewhere in the same book we find an unforgettable pen portrait, drawn in a few deft lines:

Mrs Digby Vallence was tall and spare, with a small face, big eyes, and a large mouth. Digby was fond of saying that his wife’s face was geometrically impossible. The parts were greater than the whole. She was a very amiable, intelligent woman, who played Schumann with a weak wrist, and was noted for her cooking recipes.

After three-quarters of a century, Baring’s prophecy has still not come to pass; we can only hope that he may yet be proved right. Have You Anything to Declare? is not his only anthology, though it is, I believe, his only published one. He compiled several more, which he had printed and bound and gave as presents to his friends – including, I am delighted to say, my mother. I possess hers, and have seen two or three others; and I have been struck by the fact that he never – or hardly ever – repeats himself. He had plenty of material to choose from: bedridden with Parkinson’s disease for the last fifteen years of his life, he spent many hours a day with his books, and the breadth of his reading was apparently limitless. After a quotation about Xanthus, the talking horse of Achilles, he throws in a short parenthesis:

There are other talking horses in literature. In Grimm’s story The Goose Girl there is a horse called Falada, who not only talks, but talks after its head has been cut off, and in rhyme. There is also Anstey’s Talking Horse whose name was Brutus, and who was ridden disastrously by Mr Gustavus Pulvertoft.

Even more than most anthologies, here is the ideal bedside book, to be opened at random in the certainty of finding a treasure with every dip. And if I may end on a personal note, I have to say that Have You Anything to Declare? has been one of the most lasting influences on my life. It was thanks to it, and to it alone, that I began my first commonplace book – I am now on my eleventh – in 1958; and when in 1970 I started producing a little 24-page Christmas anthology of my own, I followed its admirable example of giving each item, even if only two or three lines long, a page to itself. I have now produced forty of those little anthologies, and the forty-first is on the way; but when my turn comes to face the infernal customs officer, I only wish that I had a tenth of the amount of baggage to declare.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 28 © John Julius Norwich 2010


About the contributor

John Julius Norwich has published three ten-year collections of his annual anthology A Christmas Cracker; the fourth, The Big Bang, was published in October.

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