Mr. Baring's Novels
Martindale, C. C.
38o THE COMMONWEAL August I4, I9~-9 MR. BARING'S NOVELS By C. C. MARTINDALE T SEEMS a pity that Mr. Baring s work is better appreciated in France than m England. Perhaps it is...
...Christopher, lying hard by, saw like a drowning man the events and also the texture of a whole life--yet not primarily his life, but the Coat's life, as those legends, unforgotten, had woven it for him...
...I felt: But it must be much more than that...
...At once the divine miracle took place: the man was changed...
...A critic is a limited technician who merely looks at the statue, reads the book, goes to the play...
...The diplomat wrote letters to his cousin...
...She professed not to want them to fall in love...
...Baring knows also that he could not and does not succumb to a philosophy of life which is, in the long run, mechanical...
...others (you feel) are bound to twist the facts that they observe into what cannot possibly be fact...
...It was torn into shreds...
...but it is, apparently, between accidental and disparate things...
...They fall in and out of love so often and so rapidly...
...What the wretched human creature thinks is his, suddenly is torn from him...
...The only continuity in my treatment of my coat seems to be, moreover, that I tear it progressively into shreds...
...But the screen is there, and is very hard--impermeable, in fact, as the inmost soul of the individual always is...
...So an eye is filmed that can see no further than the "work of art...
...Across two twisted lenses you had to contemplate the woman, and detect her mind, her motives, her resistances, her swervings, not only when those two onlookers did not understand what they observed, but even when she did not understand what she experienced...
...Even the doctor has to cure his patient at his own enormous cost--else, I doubt whether he really cures him at all...
...Yet ridiculous people imagine that it is an artist's business so totally to lack a "mind" about anything whatsoever that you ought not to guess whether he is glad or sorry about what happens in his book or drama, or thinks it right or wrong, or inevitable or free at any point...
...You need scissors to cut it...
...Baring is very Greek...
...You are left worried by a sense of paradox--you have been plunged into what is most certainly real life, and yet you feel yourself intolerably separated from it...
...he confessed, was absolved, died having reknitted his life ~vith truth and with reality...
...He called the cur~ and made his confession...
...It was not even to be patched...
...Then I see that there are two ways of tearing it into shreds, and that one of them somehow precedes and is necessary for the interweaving of it, and of myself, with what is better than a coat...
...Not with a Euripidean Greekness, though sometimes with even that...
...I was privileged to watch its gradual genesis...
...38o THE COMMONWEAL August I4, I9~-9 MR...
...they shine clear as a sunlit ripple...
...They rest my mind in many ways, especially by encouraging it when the heavy appearance of Fate looms over it...
...Greeks could have said nearly all of this and even have thought it...
...I derive, then, an Aristotelian "amusement" from these books...
...There will always be a Coat," agreed he, "till the end of the world...
...the plaintive comedies or the huge desperations of his loves, and his inabilities to believe or hope...
...I should like to suppose that decent folks, when they see they are likely to become disloyal, feel shocked at themselves, pull themselves together, and tell themselves to stop it...
...So I gave in, realizing that the Coat had knitted lives together, and into a seamless harmony with God...
...The cur~, with superb and terrifying audacity, tore the relic into strips and with it staunced the flowing blood...
...he has a vision and he writes...
...not a bandage...
...So people claim that Shakespeare wrote...
...If, as a French writer, M. J. Mainsard, remarks, each individual is not only woven interiorly of an indiscernible multitude of strands, but interwoven with the infinitely complex universe, not even an author, I suppose, need claim to know all that goes on inside the personages he creates, but has the perfect changes them, and yet are still themselves...
...Baring never commits himself, as he writes, to passionate emotions, and makes not the slightest effort to evoke them in his reader...
...To many who know Father Martindale chiefly as a writer on religious topics, the following paper will likewise introduce that penetrating analysis of literary personalities and works which he has often exemplified...
...It served no purpose...
...Then Mr...
...Almost in spite of the statue, the book, the play, you have to reach the reality that gives it a true unity and force...
...Perhaps when she was--surely?--fifty, she still had not really fallen in love herself, so she could not resist allowing two young men to fall in love with her during a house party...
...and you ask whether really anyone can help anything--whether anything anywhere is anyone's fault...
...He does not claim, however, to know all that goes on inside his characters but gives the reader individually opportunity to study them.--The Editors...
...Hence I finished the book not feeling in the least sure what had really happened, and not even sure Mr...
...The story is that of a young man whose boyhood was spent near a French 382 THE COMMONWEAL August I4, I929 village in whose parish church a relic existed which might or might not be the Seamless Coat...
...the wood reaches to the root of things...
...Probably he was not meant, at first, for a road at all...
...they flit in and out...
...his perverse refusals...
...he was caught by other peasants, set upon, mauled and wounded mortally...
...I first found him "come alive" in one of his Diminutive Dramas acted by the O.U.D.S...
...Anyone who knows Mr...
...Indeed, the last impression but one which Mr...
...The thing could not have happened otherwise...
...I see the inevitability of a machine: but then I am not tempted to think I am a machine...
...When I first read anything of his, I remember saying: This might almost be French, so lucid and economical is it...
...Because I iust knew that Mr...
...It is older far...
...He was brought up a Catholic, but it did not seem to "bite," and at a given moment his faith vanished "like a puff of smoke...
...Looking down on Mr...
...I did not even mention this idea...
...Baring was quite close, and not even feeling as i[ his living humans were, or survived as, marionettes...
...and so he is not really a spendthrift in words, but still "economical...
...The ambulance arrived...
...To such a book I am unwilling to succumb, partly through spiritual shyness, and also because my "first mind" is materialistic...
...the pervasive activity of the Coat is rigorously disguised by a system of making the Coat turn up at intervals in the shape of legends quoted from old books, which creates an impression of detachment, of insertion into something else, like a tooth in a jaw...
...He reveals his own philosophy more fully than usual in his latest book: The Coat without Seam...
...Finally there comes the great war...
...And he must discover what that poor man had in his heart and mind and felt he must externalize, and how his soul bled over the sight of what he had actually performed...
...Then I remembered that there are, thank heaven, rival relics...
...At the outset of C.'s life, a fog-horn had wailed lamentably through the mists...
...Baring had something to do with Russia...
...No doubt he was...
...For not only does Mr...
...It had become pads for blood, for traitor's blood indeed...
...Perhaps he is gregarious by nature: anyhow, as he writes, people flock round him...
...I want the Coat not to be merely a thing among things--one object working miracles (however spiritual) amid a crowd of imperceptive people, Romans, Byzantines, Hungarians, English- and Frenchmen...
...I see, and am appalled by, the logical, Karma-like interconnection of my acts of will--I feel as though I could not help choosing [reely what I actually do choose next...
...Baring out to be a schematic philosopher, or a propagandist theologian...
...and the bowed head is in heaven...
...But the miracle was infectious...
...Here you pass behind your French impression, and find that Mr...
...Plenty of people have made ancient stories seem funny by using modern talk: this is modern, and yet it would almost go straight back into Greek...
...For what is a coat ? Not even living skin...
...Mors immortalis," whatever one might do about it...
...men often are...
...I see in it a suggestion that the author himself is dissociated from his memories--he looks at them, but is not they...
...But the artist would be the first to say, or at least to hope, that his vision existed better in his mind than on paper or on canvas...
...They thought him weak, his own worst enemy, and so forth...
...But," said I, "so ancient a piece of stuff would simply have crumbled: you could not have signaled with it...
...Moreover, it was not so much his fault as that of his appalling family, who kept shoving the lad back into his rut whenever he struggled to get out of it...
...Baring (we were in a restaurant...
...Was C., then, doomed ever to have a guidance offered to him, and ever to be unable to have any profit from its voice...
...Here was an Irish-Canadian woman, profound and hidden soul...
...Blanche settled down into regarding herself as a fatal woman...
...whereas I bold that she could perfectly well have stopped from falling in love with her half the callow youths who did so...
...He was very bad at expressing himself to anyone else...
...Even if it had been his fault, I still would have felt that his tragedy got its claws well into my soul, and would have bled for him long before he himself knew that his life was bleeding away...
...No doubt, in one part of herself, she did not...
...Rather with a Sophoclean Greekness, since Sophocles watched laws moving about in a crystalline air very much at man's expense, yet cut across, at times, by the unpredictable behavior of passion...
...Far from me to make Mr...
...This right to study them in the reactions they occasion is what he had been tempting me to feel that I was, August 14, I929 T H E C O M M O N W E A L 38I when I read those earlier books--screened off by ice...
...Baring knew for certain...
...Baring refrain from giving you any clear statement of his meaning...
...And, said I, all this has to be done without taint of pantheism, and without daubing the poor Coat with smears of "literary style...
...here were a frivolous young diplomat and a youth whom I took to be stupider than he really was-I should have known that anyone so possessed by music could not be really stupid...
...He might have done well to strike across country altogether...
...What about mummy-cloth...
...The arms dislocated on the cross embrace the world...
...I thought: This isn't the ordinary way of modernizing these old tales...
...There is a connection...
...I confess that nothing that was said against C. came near to what critics said about Christopher Trevenen in The Coat without Seam, nor what I, at times, felt inclined to say about Blanche Clifford in Cat's Cradle...
...And if you try to break through the screen, you only make stars of splintered ice upon it, and see far less than before...
...Not I at all...
...In Daphne Adeane the system returns: it is a dead woman who sways destinies, though as to what she was, or even did, you are left guessing...
...But such was the crisis that every available piece of material had been used up---no lint...
...I felt so glad I was not the priest to whom (again if I remember rightly) she said, almost immediately after his arrival, that she wanted to tell him the story of her life...
...Baring did me the honor of sending me the proofs of Passing By, and even of discussing the story with me before it appeared...
...and there is another quality about it-The novels of Maurice Baring, having tripped gingerly before the public during many seasons, now make their first full-grown bow before a critic...
...The leading "witness" is actually blind...
...Baring, we are told, is neither a philosopher nor a propagandist...
...He begged to have his wounds bandaged, for he was rapidly bleeding to death...
...He has his vision, and he writes...
...Other claimants existed...
...I have often reread Passing By, but I am sure I shall never reread those other two books, though I hope I shall R.F.C., H.Q., where the touch is light as ever but descends no less unerringly on what is more objective...
...Christopher lies mortally wounded in the French village of his boyhood, and in fact is put in the church where the Coat is...
...said Mr...
...I want the whole texture of the play to be the Coat--I want the Coat to be each man, and to be the world, and I want all that is, God and man, to vibrate with intertwined activity9 And I want the Coat to be persistently unrecognized and indeed apparently torn into shreds, and yet triumphantly to remain its perfect self, seamless ever...
...It was about Clytemnestra and Iphigenia, and I felt as though the author, even while making me laugh so much, was looking sideways to see whether I agreed that under the absurdity of the twist given to the tale, and its affectation of modernity, the immemorial horror of things maintained itself...
...But a French peasant had stolen the Coat to signal to the Germans with...
...He showed that the napkin tore easily, and the lips of the waiter drooped...
...Baring s work is better appreciated in France than m England...
...they are eclipsed, and reappear, and are different since each hour perhaps it is Russian...
...no flecks or flaws interfere with what you see--you cannot, in fact, see the screen itself at all...
...So much for the corpse...
...So much for them...
...I mean, Euripides saw savage goddesses--Aphrodite--or impressive goddesses---Artemis--fighting a horrid battle for a lad's life ; and he angrily, bitterly, or at his worst, just irritably, or again cynically, related the spoiling of a lovely thing...
...9. . In fact, the author must be as sure as ever that the life of things needs only to be presented, not "made up...
...And that it had done so at its own expense...
...The method was continued in The Triangle, a book that seemed to me quite devoid of the charm of Passing By: and was produced to the nth, some would say --others, reduced to its absurdum--in Overlooked...
...I was completely intoxicated by the story, and by the method...
...You feel that you are watching a world divided from you by a screen of perfectly clear ice...
...The disheartening element in Maurice Baring's books seems often to me to be the unnecessary instability of his personages...
...No doubt, in Tinker's Leave, that begins so hilariously, you find the same human helplessness in the presence of vast forces, despite all warnings of common sense, of sagacity or of the spirit...
...Then he would have found his path and reached his goal...
...I thought: Why didn't the cur~ use an altar cloth ? Answer, they had been shifted out of the church: there was no time to get one: they had all been used already...
...round about themselves...
...and very tough often...
...the musician wrote a diary for himself...
...He writes with a singular lack of arri~re pens~e...
...He was placed next to Christopher and the cur~ came to them both...
...God help the artist who is pleased with his performance l The exterior thing is a work of art if, says Aquinas, it provides an "eradiation of the Form...
...Baring gives himself and us every chance of doing so...
...Baring is interested in all of them, and likes something in each of them, and scatters his pages with the details that concern them--tiny sentences, seemingly disconnected, seemingly pointless, yet building up the firm impression of those lives...
...I urged that anyway there was now no more Coat, but that there still were people who needed it...
...Being, like most of the author's young men, a rather unsatisfactory young man--very perverse, very obstinate, much swayed by events and emotions and inevitabilities--he certainly tears and retears his life into shreds...
...Again I imagined that this might be due to its Frenchness, which eliminated, which gave clean edges, which was (in short) so very Greek already...
...The Frenchman kept swearing that he had neither stolen the Coat, nor used it for signaling...
...The book has not turned out quite like thatkor rather it has, but you have to keep your eyes doubly wide open...
...I don't know whether I did see that at first...
...Are we toppled back into some Hardyism--I had almost said, some Homerism...
...whereas I would have liked to get a little closer, but above all wanted to be sure that Mr...
...Who is the Ultimate...
...Perhaps the real Coat still was somewhere and had not minded that the French one should have deputized for it...
...but it had no need to take him home, for he had died and was there already...
...at Oxford...
...Then he published C. C. did not get that enthusiastic "press" that I had hoped for it--I think, because people did not much like C. himself...
...It tears less easily than this napkin...
...Eyes of an indolent hawk--a thing of soft sleep, and then, suddenly, claws and blood...
...If he really wants to know it, he must go through it to its creator...
...Zeus, or the blind Fate behind Zeus in all his forms...
...and, what is more, a cold screen, because Mr...
...Passion, unbeaten in thy battles--passion, that on to men's possessions swoopest--that in a maid's soft cheeks dreamest thy dream...
...He said that it had done its job...
...Perhaps it is not surprising...
...And forthwith his own life fell into place: his restless journeyings...
...The sordid, the pitiful, the tragic and tremendous, the chivalrous, the cruel and the tender revealed themselves as a unity, a design, a seamless continuity...
...the delicate filaments had congealed into hard lumps that would be thrown away or buried with the corpse they stuck to...
...But (by way of those old books) the notion of the Seamless Coat keeps cropping up, though each time it does so, things seem to get worse...
...I hope I am betraying no confidence if I say that it was foreseen frankly as a drama, composed of episodes in each of which the Seamless Coat was perceived accomplishing one of its subtle miracles across the ages...
...Baring's sparklingly rippling sea, you observe that there are currents, that they swiftly or imperceptibly swerve and sweep to this side or to that...
...and also, The Puppet Show of Memory, though the name makes me anxious...
...A good riddance...
...BARING'S NOVELS By C. C. MARTINDALE T SEEMS a pity that Mr...
...Baring imposes upon one is, this inevitability...
Vol. 10 • August 1929 • No. 15
