Maurice Baring: Letters | selected and edited by Jocelyn Hillgarth and Julian Jeffs

With Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, Baring made up a triumvirate of Catholic writers. In his letters to Ethel Smythe included in this collection there is a succinct apologia for his Catholic faith:

Anglicanism seemed to me a lopped off branch and ten years in Russia convinced me that the Orthodox Church (more attractive to me outwardly than R.C.dom) was not a lopped but a bent schismatic branch.

However, he advised Belloc, never, never, never talk theology or discuss the Church with those outside it ... People simply do not understand what you are talking about and they merely (a) get angry and (b) come to the conclusion that one doesn’t believe in the thing oneself and that one is simply doing it to annoy.

Baring never married and, though he clearly loved women, there is no record of any affairs. Prematurely bald, he may have decided that he was not attractive to women, or discovered from experience that this was the case: ‘There is not one unqualifiedly happy affair in his fiction,’ his biographer Emma Letley observed, ‘and I am reasonably certain this is also true of his life.’ His friend Laura Lovat said that he ‘had the mind of a child’ and others that he was ‘a schoolboy for life’; but he could be earnest and adult when circumstances required. Jocelyn Hillgarth and Julian Jeffs, the editors of this fascinating collection of Baring’s letters, include a long and serious one from Baring about the strengths and deficiencies of the Royal Flying Corps in which he served as adjutant to the commander, Lord Trenchard. After Baring’s death Lord Trenchard wrote, ‘He was the most unselfish man I have ever met or am likely to meet. The Flying Corps owed to this man much more than they know or think.’

‘If Baring were alive today,’ Joseph Epstein wrote in The New Criterion in 1992, ‘publishers would have nothing to do with him; he would find no place in any university; it is doubtful that he could command even a few hundred readers.’ This is probably still true, but it says as much about today’s reading public as it does about Maurice Baring.