'ON MAKING THE BEST OF A BAD JOB' - Roderick Blyth (Belloc's great grandson)

 

Out of my father’s copy of A.N.Wilson’s biography of Hilaire Belloc slips a cutting from ‘The Tablet’ dated 21/28 April 1984. The reviewer there writes:

‘I first met Belloc when I was 19 and he was in his fifties [between 1920/1930]. He seemed to me then immensely aged and awesome. I had read most of his travel books which at the time were an inspiration to any adventurous youth and wrote to him as a total stranger to tell him that I wanted to walk across the Pyrenees and would like further guidance after reading his book on the subject. He invited me to the Reform Club and drew careful sketch maps of mountain paths leading to a certain inn on the border of Andorra, where, he said, the mention of his name would work wonders.

‘It did, but not in the way he expected. ‘Ah!’ said the host, ‘Mr Belloc - that charming German gentleman’. Belloc, whose views about Germans derived from the Franco-Prussian war, would have exploded. I never told him of the incident or how his sketch maps had later misled me into regions where I was alone and totally lost. In my inexperience I had not taken a compass, so I did not blame my revered cartographer. Years later, at Sheed & Ward, I had frequent contact with him in the course of publishing. As his views on matters religious and political became increasingly unattractive and irrelevant to me, so a certain affection and admiration grew for the man himself.

‘He was ever pressed for time and money, working against the clock, irritable, obtuse, savage in his dislikes, and even cruel in his condemnations, but to me he also had his endearing qualities. A faraway look often came to his pale blue eyes, as if he were elsewhere in reality and it was long ago. There is no nearer nearness than the felt absence of a loved one and the letters to his wife before and after their marriage of 17 years, newly published in this book, give a hint of a great love, and of a sombre condition following its loss, which explains so much about his excesses. At heart he was solitary and in deep melancholy but on the slightest pretext he would bustle into cheerfulness and be the best of companions.

‘Once I remember, he treated me to oysters at Bentleys and a fine dinner at the Escargot Bienvenu in Soho and an endless flow of stories. He had just delivered the typescript of ‘Essays of a Catholic’ and had handed it over at the Cafe Royal ‘as a preliminary to good dinner’, as he said with his rolling R’s. On the title page he had wrote ‘Truth comes by conflict’ in inverted commas. I personally doubted the validity of the dictum and asked him who said it. “I do,” he replied. “But why the inverted commas?” “They will think it is quoting Tertullian”.

(T.F (‘Tom’) Burns (1906-1995) was a publisher and journalist - his first meeting with Belloc would therefore have taken place in 1925. ‘Essays of a Catholic’ was published in 1931, which helps date the anecdote set at the ‘Escargot Bienvenu’. Burns was later associated with Hollis & Carter, and later still, I imagine, with the well known Catholic publishers, Burns and Oates. My guess is that in the Spanish Civil War, that watershed of Catholic Opinion, he would have been more inclined to the Republican than the Nationalist cause: most of his generation were.

This humanely appreciative review, written by an 84 year old Catholic, includes the following:

‘There are some remarks and conversations.... reported at second and third hand which, I would say, were quite uncharacteristic of the man and inconsistent with his views. Perhaps his biographer should have omitted them. In any case anybody so full of vitality, so gifted with words, with such a sense of fun, so volatile and passionate as Belloc, would be bound to let slip words and phrases and even random ideas unweighed, and in a sort of code to friends. To pin all this down like a collection of dead butterflies gives no indication of the true significance of the words in flight... There is a general tendency nowadays to disregard the sanctity of private talk and letters and to ignore the fact that a man’s words to a friend are meant to be received ‘secundum modum recipientis’ as the Dumb Ox would sagely say.’

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

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