'Those Felicities of Notion and Word'

“The ideal bookcase would be that in which you could plunge a hand into in the dark and be sure of extracting something readable.”

I’ve proven that observation experimentally. Two years ago, after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, we lost power for four days. During the day I could sit on the couch by the big bay window and have enough light to read. The sky was overcast and the rain kept falling, so the lighting wasn’t generous. By late afternoon my eyes were straining. I remember reading The Poem on Nature, C.H. Sisson’s version of Lucretius, which has some convincing accounts of lousy weather. In the evening, if I wanted another book and all the flashlights were occupied or we had run out of batteries, I’d go into my library and “plunge a hand into the dark,” as Maurice Baring writes, confident I would find “something readable.” Then I would light a candle. In Baring’s sense my personal library is “ideal.” It contains no junk, no bestsellers or faddish tracts, nothing that would bore or embarrass me. I don’t even have to cull such things because I would never bring them into the house.    

The aperçu at the top is from Baring’s memoir The Puppet Show of Memory (1922), a book I have not read. I am browsing in Maurice Baring Restored (1970), a selection from his work made by Paul Horgan. At the back is a section called “Good Things,” which Horgan explains like this:

“Maurice Baring was fond of the small quotation which could give pleasure while standing apart from its context. As one who loved to hear ‘good things’ – those felicities of notion and word which outlast their casual utterance – he could also say them. It seems appropriate to include in this book a small anthology – he delighted, too, in making small anthologies of brief extracts – drawn from scattered sources throughout his whole range of work.”

Baring had a gift for aphorism. The one quoted above is somewhat compromised by the repetition of “in” and “into in.” The reader chokes. Normally, Baring is pithier and more graceful, as he is here in The Grey Stocking, a play from 1911: “Nothing is more nauseating than praise from people one dislikes.”

And this, from a letter to his friend Ethel Smyth on Sept. 2, 1922, in which he describes an experience I have had many times: “One of the greatest, the supreme pleasures in life, is, I think, to take up a book, saying to oneself, it is no use reading that now as I know and remember it too well, and then beginning it to find that you have forgotten so much of it that the second or third reading is better than the first.”

And from his novel C (1924): “Someone was playing the piano—playing Chopin with so much expression that he was scarcely audible.”

[My introduction to Baring was Joseph Epstein’s “Maurice Baring and the Good High-Brow,” published in The New Criterion in 1992. And go here to look at Baring’s travel library.]