Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc. (Book Review).

Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc, Ignatius Press, San Francisco 2002, $24.95 U.S., pp. 320

The author of this fascinating biography, Joseph Pearce, underwent a remarkable conversion--from "angry young man" to leading Christian writer.

Pearce's rebirth politically, from a 1980s skinhead and sometime candidate for the National Front, to Christian biographer and Roman Catholic (he was received into the Church in 1989), was mid-wifed by that splendid Christian apologist, G. K. Chesterton (of whom Pearce has written an insightful life: Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton, Ignatius Press, 1995). It was while Pearce was reading Chesterton's essays (The Well and the Shallows) that the blinders began to come off and, almost without his knowing it, the process of conversion began.

Now Pearce has written a compelling biography of Chesterton's friend and ally in spiritual battles, Hilaire Belloc. I am happy to report that this biography is up to Pearce's previous standards, and, believe me, that is saying a lot.

Born of mixed parentage (English and French) at La Celle Saint Cloud, twelve miles outside Paris on July 12, 1870, Belloc loved both France and England (particularly East Sussex) all his life. The world was so different then. Belloc considered that Christianity was the bedrock of Europe; all that injured or diminished Christianity in any way was Europe's natural enemy. Europe was bound to Christianity, he was fond of saying, by "chains of duty and of love."

What would Belloc make of France ("dear and beloved country") today, when it is almost a synonym for perfidy and cowardice? For that matter, what would he make of England, where mosques are more crowded with worshippers than the Christian cathedrals and churches? By the time Belloc died in 1953, he realized that the old order had been swept away; still he did not live to see the era of postmodernism, where Christianity is reduced to an object of derision.

Belloc was educated at Cardinal Newman's Oratory House; his precocious intellect enabled him to carry off academic prizes in several subjects (one of those prizes being a signed copy of Cardinal Newman's The Dream of Gerontius, which Belloc later pawned but his mother retrieved).

Following a year of military service in France, Belloc went up to Balliol College, Oxford; again he excelled academically and was elected President of the Student Union. A contemporary, E. C. Bentley, thus described him:

"When Belloc came to Oxford, ... a little older in years and far older in the world's ways than the usual undergraduate, a fresh spirit began to work in the intellectual life of England. His immense personal magenetism, his cascade of ideas, of talk, of fervid oratory, his exuberant and irreverent humour, his love of bodily activity and adventure, carried all before them."

By graduation, Belloc was referred to as "the Balliol Demosthenes".

At 26, Belloc married a rather trite American girl, Elodie Hogan, with whom he had carried on a five-year correspondence. After her death in 1914, he canonized her memory; on the day of her death, her bedroom at Belloc's home (King's Land in Sussex) was sealed up and never entered in the succeeding forty years; Belloc would not pass it without kissing the door and making the sign of the cross.

For a temperament as bellicose as Belloc's, Parliament provided a natural outlet. In 1906 Belloc ran as the Liberal candidate in the marginal South Salford constituency where the electorate was predominantly Protestant and Belloc's Catholicism was considered a political liability. Urged by his campaign manager to make no mention of religion, Belloc began his first speech in typical fashion:

"Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This (taking a rosary out of his pocket) 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."

After a shocked silence, there was applause and Belloc won the election. He served two terms in Parliament (from 1906 until 1913) but finished up at odds with his party and disillusioned with the political process.

Belloc continued to lecture and write books (poetry, biography, fiction, and faith) but, by 1940, the four human beings who had mattered most to him were dead: his wife, mother, eldest son Peter, and GKC. Solitary, and increasingly senile and unpredictable, Belloc lived a hermit-like existence until 1953 when one day he fell off his chair and was burned in the fire grate. Two days later he was dead.

There is much to be learned about Belloc's era - and ours - from Joseph Pearce's fine biography. In a sense, I suppose, Belloc foretold his own fate when, as a young man, he wrote:

"A lost thing could I never find;

Nor a broken thing mend.

And I fear I shall be all alone

When I get to the end.

O who will there be to comfort me,

Or who will be my friend?"

Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at Western University.