Maurice Baring

Biography

Maurice Baring came from a family of dignitaries. His father was the 1st Baron Revelstoke of Membland; his mother also came from the noble class. This allowed him to have a good education from well-thought-of governesses and tutors. His favorite subject seems to have been French, as some of his tutors felt that he spoke French better than English. He studied for diplomatic service at both Oxford and Cambridge but never received a degree from either university. After his studies, he held posts in many countries from 1898-1904. He was first stationed in France for his abilities with the language, but the most notable of these countries for Baring was Russia, where he developed a taste for Russian literature and realized that he would be better suited for a literary career (Irvine 5). He did not write creatively, though, until after World War I, fifteen years after he had this realization. He was then known mostly as a novelist and a dramatist, with his two most successful novels being titled C and Cat’s Cradle. They were both criticized for giving the characters that only went to parties.

Following his time in Russia as a diplomat, Baring accepted a position as a military correspondent for the London Morning Post so he would be able to write. He covered the Russo-Japanese and did not shy away from his favoritism for Russia. After the war, he wrote many novels about Russia and literary criticism on Russian literature, particularly praising Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Additionally, he was the first critic to write about Anton Chekhov as a playwright. At this time as a correspondent, specifically in 1909, he was baptized a Roman Catholic, which greatly influenced his life and writing, and was considered one of the great Catholic writers of his time. However, he did not seem to want to overtly push his Catholicism onto his readers, believing that those outside the church couldn’t possibly understand it. Additionally, when World War I broke out, Baring served as adjutant to the commander of the Royal Flying Corps, Lord Trenchard, who 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” (Read).

Baring’s biography provides interesting context for one of his stories, “Habent Sua Fata Libelli.” The frame of the story is that an adjutant in WWI, a position that Baring held, needs to wait for two hours while the commanders of the army have a conference. While he is waiting, he finds an officer who was not attending the meeting and they wait together. Before the war, this officer had studied Greek and Latin at Oxford and Cambridge but never earned a degree. While the field is different, it is certainly a related field and the same experience in terms of time spent as Baring’s university experience. However, the officer did not work as a diplomat like Baring, but as a curator of Greek and Latin artifacts. Through events that are next explained in the story, the officer is pegged as a forger and needs to find a new line of work. He finds it with a man who wants to start an empire in northern Africa. However, this man quickly returns to London after an illness, and the officer is left with another man that had been hired for the expedition, a mysterious Russian, whose ethnicity was likely chosen because of Baring’s liking for Russians. There are very few elements in this story that do not seem to come directly from Baring’s biography.