HILAIRE BELLOC (552 pp.)— Robert E — Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($6.50).
"Gentlemen, I am a Catholic," the candidate told Salford voters. "As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that he has spared me the indignity of being your representative."
There was a hush of astonishment, then a thunderclap of applause. Weeks later in the election of 1906, Liberal Party Candidate Joseph Pierre René Hilaire Belloc reaped his reward by scraping home in South Salford null a majority of 852 and becoming the first and last British M.P. to win a seat despite being a French-born Catholic, an author, a confessed radical and an avowed lover of good drink.
In matters involving courage, honesty and humor, the late Hilaire Belloc was the best judge of British character that France ever produced. But in most other aspects of life, he was one of the worst. In this authorized biography, Author-Actor Robert Speaight. an Anglo-Catholic, presents Belloc in all the fullness of flesh and mind.
Cheeky Brat. Belloc got off to a Bellocian start by being born within a fortnight of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. His father was an ailing French barrister, his mother the daughter of a Birmingham solicitor. Father Belloc kept his family with him right up to the brink of the siege of Paris, then bundled self and brood off to Britain "by the last train for Dieppe.'' Almost the first view that met young Hilaire's eyes was Southampton harbor filled with German ships dressed with flags in honor of the Prussian victory. His father died soon afterwards, so his family settled in England. Little Hilaire grew up bilingual, binational.
Belloc was sent to an English public school, but here again the insular and continental were blended. "They gave us uneatable food and there was bad bullying," Belloc said of Edgbaston Oratory. "Yet I fitted in at last." The oratory's "School Alphabet'' of 1880 shows how:
A is for Allequist, heavy and fat,
B is for Belloc, a cheeky young brat ...
Along the Rio Grande. At 17, Belloc rounded off his education at the College Stanislas in Paris, armed with a testimonial from the great Cardinal Newman himself. But by then he was in full rebellion against everything of a "stuffy" nature. Catholic or non-Catholic. He had begun to draw, paint, write stories; he yearned for action, detested orthodox stability, made the discovery that aristocrats and Jews were prime enemies of the people. "How I long for the Great War!'' he wrote in 1889. "It will sweep Europe like a broom, it will make Kings jump like coffee beans on the roaster."
Seventy years after, when such attitudes have increased the world's miseries beyond estimation, the young Belloc often seems a puerile and even despicable figure—the more so because these aspects of his character remained unchanged throughout his long life. But in a sense U.S. readers will recognize the type better than the British ever did—the second-generation citizen who despises the emigrants of other nations, the zealot of a minority religion, the betwixt-and-between man who is both of and not of his adopted country.