Hilaire Belloc

Extract

It is not yet four years since Mr Belloc died. He left a vast and varied opus; a collection of friends almost as diverse as his books; a legend; and an enormous quantity of diaries and papers. It is astonishing that in so short a time Mr Speaight should have been able to work through so many sources of information, assess their relevance, extract what was of value, bring the legend into focus in the man, and write this admirable study, objective, affectionate, detailed and just. He has handled his great and complex task with detachment, and has succeeded in doing something which must have been very difficult indeed; that is, in describing the multifarious events and labours and interests and adventures of Belloc’s torrential, centrifugal life, without ever obscuring his unity of character, centripetal in religious loyalty. He is seen, first and last, as a single human being; not as a volcano in ceaseless highly unpredictable eruption. This means, of course, that some of his personal impact is diminished; but many vivid impressions or that impact are available, with J. B. Morton’s memoir as the most intensely vital of them all. The present biography is the first to give the facts, the documents, the time sequences, which form the bony structure of that long and vigorous life. For the most part Mr Speaight stands well away from his subject matter, and records without comment both the attractive and the unsympathetic aspects of Belloc. His childlike goodness and generosity and loyalty emerge, his overwhelming vitality, ‘the spouting well of joy within’, his capacity for friendship and singing and laughter; and so do his anti-semitism (neither soft-pedalled nor excused, but traced to French influences in his youth, especially that of the Collège Stanislaus where he spent some formative months) and his lack of imaginative sympathy.