Books

Strutting certainty

P. J. Kavanagh

Hilaire Belloc A. N. Wilson (Hamish Hamilton £12.95)

It is a pity to have to begin talking about Hilaire Belloc by mentioning G. K. Chesterton; the two men are so closely link- ed in the public imagination — misleading- ly, in my view — it would be better to prise them apart. But Mr Wilson's attitude to Belloc's friend is so odd that it has to be remarked upon. He loses no opportunity of diminishing Chesterton: he calls him 'asex- ual' (but Chesterton and his wife longed for children, and in Orthodoxy he laments his inability to understand the Church's ad- miration of celibacy), he is 'pouting' (no mention of a pout by biographers, or evidence of it in photographs). He is `malleable, soft-centred', looking for a hero, and in Belloc he found one. This is a half-truth, Chesterton was no disciple. Shaw, who invented the Thesterbelloc', deplored it; he loved Chesterton and con- sidered him by far the greater man. Chester- ton's praise of Belloc is a part of his praise for all his friends, and all his foes too for that matter. Mr Wilson describes Chester- ton waiting pathetically for Belloc to turn up at the ceremony of his reception into the Roman Catholic Church, but it was known that Belloc was not coming — he had even tried a trick to prevent the officiating priest from getting there. For some unspecified reason he did not want Chesterton to become a Catholic. There is no reference to this awaiting of Belloc in Chesterton's two latest biographers, and if Mr Wilson knows otherwise he should mention how.

But there is worse, in this odd diminish- ment. At Christmas, 1914, Chesterton col- lapsed. His life was despaired of, he lay in a more or less speechless coma until Easter and emerged a changed man; but as eager for battle as he had ever been. It was a vast collapse and a heroic recovery, described

thus by Mr Wilson: .. there is appro- priateness about that fey and childish figure sinking into an obese and comatose sleep for three months when hostilities began to destroy Europe.' That is unworthy, even by the polemical standards of his hero, Belloc.

But it is perhaps a clue to Mr Wilson's difficulty, in this otherwise entertaining book: he is afraid of the unattractiveness of his subject. Most people loved Chesterton; few, except for a circle of friends who un- doubtedly found him one of the most enter- taining men alive, could stand Belloc. 'I can't imagine anyone more odiously bad mannered or charmless' said Anthony Powell after an encounter in 1928, quoted here. But Mr Wilson need not have wor-

ried. He manages to put across the endear- ing nature of the beast very well.

Belloc was born in France in 1870, of an English mother and a French father, and in- to the literary upper-middle class. His father died when he was two, and he was brought up by women, who laughed and applauded whenever the infant male grew fierce. This, Mr Wilson suggests, may have had a profound effect on his subsequent theatrical fierceness. 'The very qualities which made some people dislike him were the ones with which he had learnt to charm the grown-ups when he was a little boy, the strutting certainties, the rumbustious com- bativeness, the banging of the drums.'

His mother was a convert Roman Catholic. Belloc was therefore a European in the spiritual, as well as in the genetic, sense, and had a lifelong detestation of the `suffocations' of Protestant England. His upbringing was wholly English (educated at Cardinal Newman's Oratory), but he was legally a French citizen as a young man and to remain one he had to do French military service. The family name derived from a certain Moses Belloc, or Bloch (`scarcely the most gentile of names', as Mr Wilson coolly remarks) and this may have caused him difficulty in the French Army — it was

the time of l'affaire Dreyfus. Certainly this 12 months in the army gave Belloc the idea that he was an expert in matters military.

Within a fortnight of the outbreak of war in 1914 he was lecturing England, and the military, about it. (There soon circulated

among the soldiers a volume entitled What I Know about the War by Blare Hilloc; it

had blank pages.) There is something so ludicrous about Belloc's confidence in himself that the reader at last begins to like him. He talked himself out of an All Souls' Fellowship by, literally, talking the other Fellows down.

About Belloc's preoccupation with 'the Jewish question' Mr Wilson is frank and sensible. Anti-semitism is our last, un- breakable taboo; of course. It was part of a disease of Belloc's time, and lie certainly did nothing to allay it. Some of his 'Jewish preoccupation' is funny, as when he dismisses the Old Testament as 'Yid folklore'; some of it is not, as when he talks in a letter of ... the swarm of Yids on board this sparsely populated craft ... in- credible monsters of the deep' and hopes for a pogrom when he and they reach New York. But the hilarity of Hilaire is something the reader has to bear in mind, and it is this which Mr Wilson despairs of communicating. What may read as detest- able in print made friends laugh delightedly when in his company. There is an account

here of Belloc at his worst, storming through a wood in France, cursing, blas- pheming, chiding, and his young cornPa- nions rolling about helpless with laughter. His efforts to return England to Pre" Reformation Catholicism were certainly (unintentionally) funny. Observing that the English were snobs, he decided to make Catholicism 'smart'. So when his well connected friends were killed in France, he caused memorials to be raised to them French cathedrals; electing them, as it were,

L

uamt Catholic Cats, p ahr eonl i tcs tsoo n eet hf iunr yg of their of this npoosnt dreadful taint — half-club, half-conspiracy — still lingers in English Catholicism- did Even his own faith sounds daft. He di"; not think much of Christ Ca milksop') arlu, as for Saint Paul, 'the old Yid had a most turgid and muddly mind'. So much for the New Testament, and we know what he thought of the Old. He was left with 'the Church': the priest, the altar, the (then) un- changing liturgy. 'It was not as though had any vision, comprehension or sense of tthhee dDeiavtihneoof order' he ihfee.wmroalteeoilnmdiveistrir, after con- sidered his own religion 'desiccate', but he eisridligfee: meeting him towards the end ofghg found very little religion in him. But it was not for show to visitors. 'I was content to keep the door and fight the crowd outside, the church.' There is something noble, an humble, in that. He told Chesterton he con- stuck to it, and we remember this while the sounds of all his fights outside the door have faded. He wrote more than a hundred books, for money ('my children cry for oysters and pearls'), but he will be knowll. for the comparatively private ones in IA° he is hardly fighting at all: The Path to Rome, The Cruise of the Nona, andunr, Wilson recommends The Four Men, which Wilson shall read. There is also the brilliant, Cautionary Tales and other light verse, an dais for It is a sufficiently As for the `Chesterbelloc', it seems hardly to have existed. He could not read Chester; ton, preferring P. G. Wodehouse, but, Mr Wilson cannot leave Chesterton alone: • • ; that vast bulk was separated from that charmingly childish soul on June 14.' (143.! Mr Wilson read Chesterton?) However,' after such a remark it cheers us to learn that old Belloc managed to sell the obituary D his unread friend to four different

That ' t is before the Requiem Mass was over. what Belloc was — a card, a character --us and Mr Wilson, despite his fears, helPshat to laugh with him as well as at him;

Belloc t

when a terrible Gallic dismissal of vais

comes (from an unnamed source), Va. l'impression d'un prophete qui se tront_e p! toujours', we can laugh at that too. We remember the aggressive little boy band his his drum to the delight of his mama an " s life, nurse, which he continued to do all his not giving a damn for anybody; a vigor.or a invigorating presence presentedthe sbwaoadoyl book that ar drawn wm n a od ue t t hmer one end, wg, hain n, tifr9too5rn3re. aldrtohitsoi,,

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