'A Catholic in the room': second thoughts on Hilaire Belloc

Commonweal, Oct 26, 2007 by Peter Steinfels

The Crisis of Civilization deteriorates into a blueprint of the taxes, subsidies, legal restrictions, and occupational guilds that were Belloc's pet mechanisms for redistributing property, restricting competition, and combating usury and monopoly. Yet not even these devices would work, he insists, unless civilization was reconverted to the "general spirit" or the "culture" or the "framework" or the "standpoint" of Catholicism. (Belloc stopped short of demanding a conversion of individuals to actual practice.) And to achieve that conversion he spelled out practical recommendations for Catholic publications and programs. Attractive as some of his recommendations may be ("contributors must be paid on a high scale"; no program, not even his, should be identified with the church in a way implying that other Catholics might not have reasonable alternatives), they fall woefully short of addressing a crisis of civilization.

The pathos of these lectures made me turn to Belloc's biography and the pathos of his life. While I knew, originally from The Path to Rome, of his French and English heritage and his swaggering, maverick, and evidently riveting personality, I learned now of his dramatic courtship of the American Elodie Hogan and the crushing blow delivered by her death in 1914, followed by the death of a son in the Great War. There is a tender, vulnerable side to Belloc that his public persona can easily mask.

Both this vulnerability and the carapace of opinion and bluster encasing it are much in evidence in the records of his 1937 trip to the United States. A. N. Wilson's biography reports that while Belloc was traveling to New York, the Weekly Review, of which Belloc was ostensibly editor, "was publishing articles by such fascists as A. K. Chesterton (G. K.'s cousin) urging the British government to form an alliance with Franco and Hitler against the Soviet Union." Of his trans-Atlantic voyage, Belloc wrote to a friend about "the swarm of Yids on board" and mused, "Wouldn't it be amusing if this next outburst of blind rage against the poor old Jews were to blow up in New York?... If or when the New Yorkites rise against the Jews there will be a pogrom; for the Americans yield to none in promiscuous violence and bloodletting." On the ship home after the lectures, he noted the "nigger jazz band with the niggers making loud animal barks and yelps." How much allowance can be made for the British genre of humor-by-hyperbole in letter writing?

His stay in New York was wearing. Unwilling to reside with the Jesuits ("the moment you stay with a community in the United States they fasten on to you from the first hour of day until bedtime") and unable to sleep at the hotel he tried as an alternative, he ended commuting from Long Island to the Fordham campus in the Bronx. He was soon complaining that the "Jesuits for whom I work sweat me to death," but also that "I am working myself to death" with other speaking engagements, including one in Washington speaking "for the right side in Spain." He was busy churning out about two thousand words every day. The lectures exhausted him and several times he almost stopped midlecture.