In 1958, Robert Speaight – a Hilaire Belloc scholar, among other specialties – released a volume of Belloc’s collected letters. This puts me in the uncomfortable position of being intensely grateful in a practical sense while being filled with a seething rage in a scholarly sense.
Some of you may remember my fulminations against the editorial practices employed by the editor of the edition of George MacDonald’s Sir Gibbie that I read. Speaight’s editorial malfeasances aren’t worse than those of Ms. Yates (which almost defy belief) , but they’re still pretty horrifying in their own right.
Speaight was confronted with several choices, and he made all the wrong ones. He had access to a massive collection of Belloc’s letters, but he chose to only include some of them in the volume in question. Many were excluded for not being interesting (in his opinion), but still more were excluded because they had already been reprinted in any one of a half-dozen now-completely-obscure memoirs and biographies of Belloc that had come out prior to Speaight’s own. If I had access to those books I might not mind so much, but I don’t. Very few people do have such access. Such is the state of Belloc scholarship.
In any event, the uncollected letters — whether reprinted in other volumes or not — returned to the custody of those who had initially shown them to him, and – all of those people now being quite dead – the prospect of ever tracking them down again in such a fortuitous manner seems unlikely indeed. But hey, at least we’ve got the letters he did want to include, right? Right?
Well, mostly. Speaight was understandably limited by what letters were actually available in the first place, so the selection as it stands is oddly sparse in terms of Belloc’s most intimate relationships due to the state of other estates and their collected papers. There are almost no letters from Belloc to Chesterton in this volume, for example, and none at all from Belloc to anyone in his family – including to his wife – apart from one or two to his youngest son, Peter. All of the great tragedies of Belloc’s life are entirely glossed over in this collection. The death of his still-young and much beloved wife in early 1914, the death of his son Louis (in the Royal Flying Corps) in 1918, the death of Chesterton in 1936, the death of his son Peter (on active service as a marine in 1942) — all nowhere to be mentioned, for the most part, in any of them. It’s a crying shame.
Speaight might at least have included the rest of the available correspondence in full, but no. That would be too something. Too freaking reasonable. Instead:
Only a few of his letters are produced here in full. My aim has been to give a picture of Belloc’s versatility, and often it has seemed worth while to give a mere sentence or two when a joke, a couplet or a pregnant observation were embedded in matter which would otherwise have no interest for the reader.
Weeeeeep
I had hoped to be my own judge of what held interest for me — especially as I must now examine Belloc with the ruthless lens of the dissertation writer — but still… I am glad that we’ve got what we’ve got. Sort of.
All of which is just a prelude to the following, which is a delightful selection (I guess) from a letter Belloc sent to Lady Juliet Duff in August of 1923:
I have had such a funny experience. An old tout who writes tosh verse in the British Museum all about God and on the lowest level, sent me his tosh verse to “express an opinion which might be added to the many he had received from distinguished people.” I opened the document he enclosed — and there was half of England, all saying how much they admired his verses. Nancy Astor, the Bishop of London, Baldwin, Winston, Bottomley, Lloyd George, the Archbishop of Canterbury — at least a hundred of the people who love the limelight and all falling over each other to praise his silly stuff under a vague impression — which all such people have — that one must keep well with everyone. The only dignified reply was from Haig through a secretary to say that he had received the verses. Nancy Astor wrote saying they raised people nearer to Christ, and the Bishop of London said they were a gleam of light in a world which had, alas! forgotten Gawd.
He ought to be crushed to a pulp in a mortar and then drawn through a sieve.
Whether he means the poet or the Bishop of London is more than I can say.
Oddly enough, several weeks ago I put it to a frustrated colleague that I cared as much about what Siegfried Sassoon thought of the conduct of the Great War as I did about what Earl Haig thought of poetry. That little snippet about Haig’s reply to this poet was pretty gratifying, as a consequence.
