The Great French Englishman

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 Rene 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.

The good side of Belloc was his freshly un-English point of view and the strength of character that went with his narrowness. His marriage is an extraordinary example of his tenacity. Kept dangling by Elodie Hogan, a Catholic girl from California whom he had met in London, Belloc followed her home. He traveled steerage to New York, then "gambled his way across the plains." When his luck and money gave out, he continued on foot "along the Denver and Rio Grande,'' on to San Francisco. Mother Hogan was far from pleased to see the "tattered and penniless Frenchman." Nor could Belloc overcome Elodie's resistance (she wanted to be a nun) until five years of relentless courtship--by mail --persuaded her at last into happy marriage. Eighteen years later, when he was 43, his wife died. For the rest of his life he wore black broadcloth, and used black-edged writing paper.

On the Spot. Out of his blended love for "the Guns," scholarship and French history came his brilliant biographies of Danton, Robespierre, Marie Antoinette and his vivid studies of warfare. During World War II, recalls Author Speaight, General Bedell Smith, Chief of Staff to General Eisenhower, asked for a copy of Belloc's Six British Battles. "That is the man I want to read," he said; "he has studied the thing on the spot."

This was true: Belloc studied his battlefields on foot, marching as the armies had marched, waking and sleeping as they had done. His great purple passages describing the storm or sunshine that had attended great events were not Bellocian inventions. Weather and walking were his passions, and it is no accident that they are at the heart of two of his most popular books, The Path to Rome and The Four Men.

Once his steps ranged beyond his favored places--Sussex, France, Rome--Belloc's zeal turned to disgust. He described Germany as "an odd filter through which civilization gets to the Slavs." He despised the Tyrol ("detestable"), the Kremlin ("quite insignificant"). Angry, this mind spewed along. Max Beerbohm said, "like a Roman river full of baskets and dead cats"; fixed, it set in hard grooves. "I suppose," said Beerbohm, on hearing that Belloc had witnessed cricket, "he would have said that the only good wicket-keeper in the history of the game was a Frenchman and a Roman Catholic."

The Reasons Why. Belloc was far from an unquestioning Catholic. Much as he respected the church's authority in theory, he tormented it mercilessly in practice. "Are we all Catholics here?" he asked, coming down to Friday breakfast in a Catholic country house. "Very well, I shall help myself to a large slice of ham." Proof of the Catholic Church's divine inspiration, he once said, "might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight."

To his dying day (1953) Belloc never understood why Oxford's All Souls had refused to make him a Fellow, why editors were reluctant to put him on their staff, why people thought him biased, why Catholics were upset by his behavior, why Englishmen thought him un-English. Author Speaight's book tells the reasons why frankly and fully, but without ever belittling the genius of the man best remembered for his verse who wrote so prophetically in his ardent youth:

The spring's superb adventure calls

His dust athwart the woods to flame;

His boundary river's secret falls

Perpetuate and repeat his name.

He rides his loud October sky;

He does not die. He does not die.

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