God's Grumpy Man

LETTERS FROM HILAIRE BELLOC (313 pp.)--Edited by Robert Speaight--McMillan ($6).

"I myself write the best letters."

--Hilaire Belloc

These days, when getting a well-written letter in the mail is as rare as getting a refund from the tax collector, many readers will be happy to agree with Belloc's own estimate of himself. A self-described mixture of "Poverty, Papistry and Pugnacity," Belloc (who died in 1953) had a solemn high literary funeral last year in an authorized biography (TIME, April 22, 1957). Biographer Speaight found leftover material too good to forget, notably a big bundle of crotchety letters--which are a long way from the sort of garrulous guff women still write to each other or the kind of bulletin businessmen confide to the uncritical tape.

One of the heavy toll charges Alexander Graham Bell levied for his invention was a minor art form: good letter writers have no telephone. Nor should they have much modesty. Belloc had neither. Instead he had wit and character. A grumpy, opinionated man ("I want to tell the new Pope one or two things. I hope he believes them"), he also had a well-polished ego, solid as a brass in a church floor.

Poisonous Cads. As perhaps the ranking, and certainly the most rancorous, Roman Catholic man of letters in England, Belloc felt he was living in a "hostile society." Yet he confessed to an affection for England "so intense that it is actually physical" (despite the "bad cooking and the pro-bolshevist press"). When he wrote letters in verse to friends such as Diplomat-Poet Maurice Baring, he insisted that it was because he had no time to write prose. As he observed in his snaggly, almost indecipherable hand,

Men that wish to write in furious haste

Use a typewriter, careless of taste.

A small group of Catholics, including Convert Gilbert Keith Chesterton, occasionally got the best of Belloc. To this elite, as he called them, Old Gunner Belloc (he had served in the French artillery) felt free to unlimber a bristling battery of high-caliber snarls against his numerous enemies. They included "poisonous cads" (British peers), "blundering savages and cosmopolitan riff raff" (Russian Communists), "filthy greasy hot Armenians," the "German herd [who] do not reason . . . that is why they take refuge in music," "eunuchs," like Thomas Carlyle, or "screaming Eunuchs," like Hitler, and, of course, "damn fool Editors."

Wine Worship. As well he might, Belloc saw ruin coming to a divided Europe in the '20s and '30s. He was appalled by the Protestant aristocrats who ruled England's foreign policy and, he felt, knew nothing of the Catholic Continent. Things would have been different, he was sure, had the Stuarts kept their jobs. He decried also the English "illusion that the possession of wealth is an excellence, like courage, or charity." The U.S., where Belloc was a successful lecturer, fared little better; he called it "an amiable and pleasant lunatic asylum."

There is a good deal of homiletics and political woe-crying in his later letters, but Belloc was seldom a bore. With his grave devotion to his religion went a fanatical belief in wine, which he liked to drink "to the Glory of God and the confusion of my enemies." He was not halfhearted in his piety toward the stuff. Off and on, over 20 years, he polished a poem in praise of wine. He found it a symbol of the good things of life denied by Puritan religions or by "Islam, furtive enemy of the soul." He said: "May I reach the Kitchen in Heaven and drink with St. Christopher"--although he believed St. Christopher to be a "pure legend."

Belloc's faith shines through all his correspondence, but the special sparkle of the letters comes from Belloc's "great lifebuoy of humour, which is a sort of sister or companion aid to the Faith." In his gloomiest moods he could break off to twit a friend whom he had caught in a split infinitive:

Go, get your little pot of glue

And mend the wretched creature, do.

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