Have You Anything to Declare by Maurice Baring

My first introduction to Maurice Baring was in a book called Literary Converts by Joseph Pearce which was sent to me by my friend Paul. The book is about men and women who converted to the Catholic faith during the Catholic Intellectual Revival of the early 20th century. I remember thinking at the time that I would like to read something by Baring, but not why, and so I was very glad when Paul also sent me Have You Anything to Declare? I was so excited that I read about three pages and then put it on the shelf for something like nine years.

The book begins with a description of a dream. 

I dreamed once that, like Clarence, I had "pass'd the melancholy flood, with that grim Ferryman that poets write of", and that, when we reached the other side, there was 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?"

I want to pause here for a minute to note that in the first sentence Baring expects us to know who Clarence is (I knew it was the Duke of Clarence and from Shakespeare and figured it must be Richard III, so I passed.), that the "grim Ferryman" was Charon (That's pretty easy.), and how to translate that French (I'm sure I knew at some point that chemins de fer was a train, but I couldn't remember. Hell, I recognized.) At any rate, this gives you some idea of what might be ahead.

The Customs House official from the Trains of Hell wasn't interested in objects that Baring was bringing along, but in literary gleanings that he had brought with him through his life: both things he had written down, and things he had committed to memory. On awakening, Baring decided that it would be a good thing to make this declaration. The result is a sort of commonplace book that begins with Homer, and proceeds to authors who were contemporaries of Baring, closing with several passages on death, ultimately:  

Et à l’heure de ma mort soyez le refuge de mon âme étonnée et recevez-la dans sein de votre miséricorde.

Which translated (although he doesn't translate it) is:

And at the hour of my death be the refuge of my astonished soul and receive it into the midst of Thy mercy.

This, though Baring doesn't cite it, is St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.

So that you can see how the book is laid out (You can see this better if you click once on the picture):

Sometimes a comment from Baring

The quote in the original language

Sometimes a translation which may be Baring's, because he was a translator, or may be from someone else

Perhaps a closing comment from Baring or someone else

This is the general layout of the pages. Many are this short, and some are shorter, for instance, the last page contains only the two French lines quoted above. Sometimes the whole page will be filled and very occasionally part of the next page also.

The quotes contained in the book may be in Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German, Russian, or even English. There may be other languages that I have forgotten. Some are translated; others are not. If I am remembering correctly he always translates the Greek, Latin, and Russian, and seldom the French. Sometimes I would try to work out the French, but other times, I just passed on to the next thing.

The first section from Homer pretty much left me cold. I'm not sure why this is because I like Homer, but it has been a good while since I read it and perhaps I just couldn't connect with the disembodied fragments. I couldn't help thinking that at another time, I might enjoy this section more. 

As we moved on to other Greeks and Romans, it got a bit better, and about the time we got to George Eliot I was hooked. There are three pages about George Eliot. Apparently, she had gone out of style in 1937 when Baring was writing, but he liked her very much. He also wrote here about George Meredith, who was also out of fashion. If you have read Elizabeth Goudge you may remember that her characters love Meredith.

Pretty soon after this, I was reading the book a with highlighter and sticky flags close at hand as you can see from the picture above. I had originally planned to get rid of the book, but now I plan to keep it, flags attached.

Baring talks about the 20th century rediscovery of Trollope, but he isn't sure that Trollope is much read because:

I only know that whenever I have asked for a volume of Trollope at the London Library, I have never failed to get it, except once or twice when I have been told the book was being read by Mr. Belloc, and he has told me that the only time that he has failed to get a Trollope from the London Library is when the book has been in my hands. 

Baring was a friend of Belloc and Chesterton. I read somewhere that there was a portrait of the three of them in the National Portrait Gallery. While looking for this portrait, which is very nice, I found a similar photograph that I liked even better.

One thing I learned from Baring is that there was an author, one John Oliver Hobbes (a pen-name. Her real name was Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie), about whose work he says:

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. 

Baring thinks she will be rediscovered and that people will be surprised at her wit. From The Sinner's Comedy on the death of one of the characters:

He did not speak again until 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 mistakes.

I have found that some of John Oliver Hobbes's novels are available on Google books and am looking forward to investigating them sooner or later.

A few quotes. 

There are some lovely descriptions of nature in the book, but when I go looking for them I find that most of them are in French. Here is one from Robert Louis Stevenson in The Ebb-Tide that is not. It reminds me of something I once saw.

There was little or no morning bank. A brightening came in the east; then a wash of some ineffable, faint nameless hue between crimson and silver; and then coals of fire. These glimmered a while on the sea-line, and seemed to brighten and darken and spread out, and still the night and stars reigned undisturbed; it was as though a spark should catch and glow and creep along the foot of some heavy and almost incombustible wall-hanging; and the room itself be scarce menaced. Yet a little after, and the whole east glowed with gold and scarlet, and the hollow of heaven was filled with daylight.

I find that most of the quotes that I have marked have to do with the Church. I didn't do this on purpose. It just happened.

Here is one from Is Life Worth Living? by William Hurrell Mallock that brings to mind a conversation I am trying to have with someone, and which is difficult for the very reason Mallock is discussing.

. . . and the explanation or the account of anything is always far more intricate than the apprehension of the thing itself. Not only does the intricacy of Catholicism described blind them to the simplicity of Catholicism experienced, but they confuse with the points of faith not only the scientific accounts of them which theologians give, but the mere rules of discipline and pious opinions.

And from Fr. Vincent McNabb

Into the great Temple of Truth, the Church of God, there are two gates--the gate of wisdom and the gate of beauty. I am inclined to think that the narrow gate is the gate of wisdom, and the wide gate, through which millions pass, is the gate of beauty. The Catholic Church has these portals ever open. She welcomes from time to time the few philosophers and thinkers who crucify themselves by thought, but she welcomes unceasingly the countless numbers who come for her colour, for her song, for her smile--as they go afield for the warmth and light of the spring sun. I believe the way of beauty is the wiser as well as the wider way. It is God's own most perfect thoroughfare--God's way to Himself.

At the end of almost every book review, I find myself wanting to say something like, "I would recommend this book to anyone who likes this sort of thing." And it is true. Sifting through page after page of quotes, especially when some of them are in languages one does not understand, will not be everybody's cup of tea, but I found it delightful.

AMDG

P. S. I have an extra copy of the book, and if you would like it, especially if you live 

        close to me, I would be glad to give it to you. 

Home: a Short History of an Idea by Witold Rybczynski

When I was teaching my youngest daughter, someone in my homeschool support group told me that World Magazine had a publication for children that was something like Weekly Reader, so I subscribed to both the adult and children's publications. I remember liking the magazine, but not much about it except that it had great book reviews, and one of the books they reviewed was Home by Witold Rybczynski. So, I picked it up when I saw it at a book sale, and have started it three or four times over the past 20 years or so. I don't really know why I never finished it before, because I always thought it was interesting. I guess life just intervened--or maybe there was a novel I really wanted to read.

Rybczynski says on his website that he . . .

. . . studied architecture at McGill University in Montreal, where he also taught for twenty years. He is Emeritus Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. Rybczynski has designed and built houses as a registered architect, as well as doing practical experiments in low-cost housing, which took him to Mexico, Nigeria, India, the Philippines, and China. He has written for the Atlantic, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and the New York Times, and has been architecture critic for Saturday Night, Wigwag, and Slate. From 2004 to 2012 he served on the U. S. Commission of Fine Arts.

I've always wondered how to pronounce his name, so I decided to see if I could find out on a YouTube video. In the first two videos, the person who introduced Rybczynski muffed his name, but in the third, I heard Rib-chin-ski, and lo and behold, that is what he says on the webpage. First name is pronounced Vee-told, by the way.

He has written (I believe) eighteen books, most of which deal with architecture, cities, furniture, and technology; and how they affect our lives both negatively and positively. There's a list here. At this point, I would like to read all of them, but I only have one on my shelf, The Most Beautiful House in the World, which tells the story of the building of his own house, and many rabbit trails that he followed in the process.

St. Jerome in his Study, Albrecht Dürer, 1514

In Home Rybczynski tells how houses developed from the very public halls of the Middle Ages where family, servants, and apprentices lived, worked, ate, and slept in the same large room, to the sort of living conditions that we expect in our homes today. The unifying theme of the book is comfort, a word which was unknown in its present-day sense until Sir Walter Scott used it in the 18th century. Rybczynski says that before this there was no word that means what we mean by comfort, because the concept was not present in the minds of people who lived in earlier times.

Interior with a Woman Playing the Virginals, Emanuel de Witte, 1660

In his discussion of this development of the concept of home as opposed to house, Rybczynski includes the size, number and placement of rooms; and the types and placement of furniture; and how the change in the outward environment reflects the change in familial relationships, and vice versa. He shows how these changes spring from and lead to more intimacy, more privacy, and more comfort.

One of the most interesting parts of the book to me is the section on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Until this time, there had been many changes in architectural style, and furnishing, but very few technological advances. This was due in part to the number of servants, even in middle class homes, who took care of all the inconvenient things, but it was also due to the fact that houses were built and furnished under the auspices of two groups of people: architects, who were more interested in the outside of the home and the way it looked, and upholsterers, who later came to be called interior designers, and who were contractors who took care of all the furniture and decoration of the inside. There just wasn't anyone in charge of making the house more convenient or comfortable.

A couple of things happened to bring about change. One was that there were fewer people--women mostly--who were willing to work as servants, and another was that women started writing books about house design. One of the most influential of these women was Christine Frederick, who believed in smaller, and servantless homes, and another was Catherine E. Beecher, the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe. These women wrote about ways to make keeping house simpler. They designed kitchens that would work. They wanted furnaces in the basement and no fireplaces that had to be cleaned every day. They wanted electricity. Things started to change.

In chapter eight we learn about The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs en Industriels Modernes, a world exhibition in Paris in which, ". . . . nearly two hundred buildings covered a seventy-five acre site . . . ." The name of the exhibit was the origin of the term Art Deco, and it was at this exposition that the style was introduced to the public. One pavilion that was not highly thought of was designed by Charles-Edouard and Pierre Jeanneret. Charles-Edouard was known as Le Corbusier, one of the first of the modern architects. You can see some of buildings here. 

Rybczynski describes the pavilion.

Visitors to the pavilion would have found the interior as bare and unfinished as the exterior. There were no ornaments, no draperies, no wallpaper. There was no mantelpiece to display the family photographs, no paneling in the study. There was no polished wood, let alone lapis lazuli. The color scheme was stark: predominantly white walls contrasted with a blue ceiling; one wall of the living room was painted brown; the storage cabinets that served as room dividers were painted bright yellow. The effect was distinctly unhomey, and was heightened by the staircase, which was made out of steel pipes and looked as if it had been plucked directly from a ship's boiler room.

While the pavilion did not attract much attention at the exposition, between the wars the minimalist fashion gained more traction. Rybczynski gives a few reasons for this. One was the stock market crash which left people without the means to spend money on decoration. The other was political. Neo-classicism was preferred by both Hitler and Mussolini. The new stripped-down style acquired an almost moral imperative. Modern German architects who came to the United States to escape the Nazis, became very influential in the architectural world. The ordinary American wasn't that impressed, Rybczynski says.

Buildings in the stripped-down style were grudgingly accepted on the assumption that they were "functional" and "efficient." . . . Although the architectural profession and its supporters extolled the moral virtues of the New Spirit, to the man on the street it was just another unpleasant, but inevitable by-product of modern life, like traffic jams or plastic forks.

 Here are a couple of examples of the furniture of the New Spirit.

The Hardoy Butterfly Chair designed by Jorge Ferrari Hardoy

Still on the market from a blue plush one at $40 up to a leather original for a couple of thousand.

The Wassily Chair designed by Marcel Breuer. You can still get these, too.

I saw an original for $33,000, and the high quality new ones run in the thousands,

but don't worry, you can get on from Walmart for $221.06.

Think how useful they would be during Lent.

Rybczynski pushes back against this New Spirit style because of its retreat from the comfortable and intimate. You can't really imagine snuggling into these chairs with a cup of coffee and good book, or a congenial conversation around the fire. His objections aren't just with the look of things, but with the way they affect the way we relate to one another, and the way we live. 

There was one thing about the book that really frustrated me, and that was the lack of pictures. The only illustrations are pictures at the beginning of each chapter, two of them are above. We have all this talk about different types of architecture, and woodwork, and furniture, etc., and no pictures. I found myself constantly reaching for my Kindle Fire to look them up. Pity the poor reader who bought the book in 1986 when there was no such thing as a search engine. Maybe this was because it was Rybczynski's first book and the publisher didn't want to pay for illustrations.

I really enjoyed this book. I guess that's obvious. I'm looking forward to reading more of Rybczynski's work.

AMDG

The Shelf

I have filled a shelf with books that I am going to read. I won't necessarily read them in this order, and I might replace some of them with other books of the same size. I just want to be able to see my progress.

AMDG

A Thousand Summers by Garson Kanin

I know I must have picked up A Thousand Summers at a library sale, but I have no idea why or when. I recognized the name Garson Kanin as one I'd seen before, but I couldn't even remember who he was until I looked him up while reading the book, and saw that he was the writer and/or director of many romantic comedies in the 30s and 40s, many of which I have seen more than once.

When I read the first few pages of the book, I thought, "Nah," but a little further in I found that the characters have an interest in Japan, an interest which I share, so I thought I would see where the story went. Then, I was pretty bored with where it went, and was just going to say, "No reason to read this," but I thought the last third of the book got better, so I thought I'd write a bit.

The story is told from the point of view of a man, Freeman Osborn, who is living in a retirement home and remembering his life with Sheila Van Anda, the love of his life. One of my favorite passages in the book is the one where we first meet the aging Freeman.

. . . Remembering all this, the old man began to cry.

His porch-mate, who had been rocking in the chair beside him, rose discreetly and shuffled away to the other side of the long porch. This is the established protocol at the Falmouth Sunset House on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The privacy of misery is respected, and it has long been understood, by guests and attendants alike, that there is nothing, in any case, to be done. They know that old people weep at many things . . .

Here it has been learned that they cannot be comforted. They cry themselves out, as they did when they were infants and cried for more innocent reasons.

The book begins, however, on the day that Sheila walks into Freeman's Pharmacy in Martha's Vineyard asking if he can remove a speck from her eye. Apparently at that time, pharmacies functioned as a sort of minor medical clinic. He is overwhelmed by her beauty, and her closeness while he is taking care of her eye. Then she leaves, and he realizes he is terribly distraught because he doesn't know her name.

A few days later when her eye is better, she comes back, and they immediately kiss (See, this is the beginning of my not liking the book.), and then she tells him that she came back to see his collection of Japanese kokeshi dolls. They then discover that they are both lovers of Japanese culture: Sheila because she lived in Japan when her husband was stationed there after the war, and Freeman because he has read everything he can find about Japan, and has even bought a piece of property that looks like a Japanese landscape, and is planning to build an authentic Japanese house there. No one else knows that he has this property, not even his wife. So despite the fact that they are married, they immediately begin to plan their life together, and how they will live in the Japanese house. (I'm not thrilled about this.)

A great part of the rest of the book is about their secretly meeting in one place or another. There is, occasionally, some dialogue that sounds like it is straight out of a screwball movie, which isn't surprising since Kanin made plenty of those. I'm not crazy about it in movies, but it really doesn't work here. So, why am I writing this?

Big Spoiler Alert

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When Freeman and Sheila, after many years, about 20 I think, are finally about to dump their spouses and build their house, Sheila has to go on a trip that has something to do with her husband's prominent position, and she has a heart attack and dies on the ship. Freeman is devastated, of course, but this is where the book begins to get better. 

As Freeman ages, his character begins to grow. He isn't just the guy having an adulterous affair anymore. He is still thinking of Sheila all the time, but he is also thinking of others, too. It is as though he has lived his whole life focused on one thing and now he is turning outward. He develops a wonderful relationship with his daughter and her husband, and their three children. He does one very noble thing which I don't want to mention here. He makes some unlikely friends. In the whole of his life, he doesn't seem to have had friends.

Eventually, he begins to get a bit disoriented--not too much at first--but he finally reaches the point where he tells his daughter that it's time for her to take over his affairs, and he moves to the retirement home. I think that Kanin has some real insight into the mind of someone who is still fairly capable, but whose memories and sense of time are becoming more and more muddled, and who can no longer do the things they once excelled at. I'm experiencing a bit of that myself. I have to confess I was a bit jealous when he just turned everything over to someone else.

I wouldn't really recommend this book, but on the other hand, if you happen to be staying in someone else's house and it's there and there isn't much else to read, you might get some enjoyment out of it.

A couple of side notes:

When Sheila said she had been in Japan before the war, I assumed it was World War II, but then came the day that they were excited about Lindbergh making a transatlantic flight. I completely changed the images that I had in my mind.

I don't know why there is a moth on the front of the book. I don't remember there being on in the book, but every time I look at that book cover it makes me think of Silence of the Lambs.

AMDG