Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc by Joseph Pearce

Author:Joseph Pearce [Pearce, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781618906571
Publisher: Saint Benedict Press
Published: 2015-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

As ever, Belloc sought practical relief from the melancholy musings of his mind and soul in the love and laughter of friends and family. Apart from regular meetings with old friends, such as Baring, Blackwood, and the Chestertons, he was making new acquaintances during his frequent sorties to London. The young Duff Cooper, who was just going in for the Foreign Office examination, Lady Diana Manners, Lady Juliet Duff, Arnold Lunn, the Jesuit C. C. Martindale, and the Dominican Vincent McNabb were all new acquaintances destined to become lifelong friends. Belloc travelled to Lullenden, where the Churchills were then living, to help Winston Churchill bottle a barrel of wine he had recently purchased. He renewed his acquaintance with the prodigiously gifted priest-novelist R. H. Benson during a visit to Cambridge, where he sat between Benson and Cardinal Bourne at a gathering of Catholic undergraduates. Sadly, his friendship with Benson, with whom he had much in common, would be extinguished almost before it had begun by Benson’s untimely death in the following year. His early death (he was 43, a year younger than Belloc) robbed English literature in general, and Christian literature in particular, of one of its finest novelists.

On the other extreme, politically and theologically, was Belloc’s delightful friendship-in-enmity with George Bernard Shaw. At the start of the year he debated publicly with Shaw on the subject “Property or Slavery?” at a sell-out public meeting, attended by Rupert Brooke and Arnold Bennett among others, organized under the auspices of the Fabian Society. “Crammed, at concert prices,” Bennett recorded in his diary. “Not a seat unsold. Shaw very pale with white hair, and straight. His wife beside him. Effect too conjugal for a man at work. Sidney and Beatrice Webb next to him. Effect also too conjugal here. Maurice Baring supporting Belloc, both very shabby … I have never seen Shaw emotional before, as he was then.”15 Belloc’s high regard for Shaw, as distinct from his low opinion of Bennett and Wells, was recalled amusingly by J. B. Priestley: “Belloc once said that Wells was a cad who didn’t pretend to be anything but a cad; that Bennett was a cad pretending to be a gentleman; that Shaw was a gentleman pretending to be a cad.”16

Back home in Sussex, the seventh anniversary of the family’s arrival at King’s Land was celebrated on 3 September 1913 by a fireworks party in the garden, much to the delight of the Belloc children. “A piece called ‘Jack-in-the-Box,’ the point of which is an immense explosion, behaved like a speech by the late Duke of Devonshire and was disappointing in the extreme,” Belloc informed Baring.17

Belloc’s friendship with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, which stretched back a quarter of a century to his youthfully precocious attempts to persuade Blunt to write for the Paternoster Review, had deepened considerably since the two men had become neighbors. Belloc’s frequent visits probably brought him into contact with other members of the literati, such as Yeats, Sturge Moore, Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington, all of whom were regular visitors to Blunt’s home at Newbuildings.

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