A Writer on Land and Sea

The best writers are often those who aren’t just writers: they are adventurers as well. Two of my favorite authors in this category are Hilaire Belloc and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Today, I’ll dive into the former’s exploits on land and sea.

Unlike his somewhat more famous friend G.K. Chesterton, the inimitable Belloc was a much more active man. Chesterton sat and wrote about great adventures; Belloc only wrote about them once he had been up and away and lived the adventure. 

One such example is Belloc’s journey across the United States in pursuit of his future wife. Only twenty, he sold nearly all his possessions to purchase a steamship passage. He then proceeded to alternate walking and taking trains all the way from Philadelphia to San Francisco, paying his way by reciting poetry and making sketches of the ranches he stayed on. Despite all this, his love—Elodie Hogan—turned him down and (largely due to pressure from her mother) tried her vocation at a convent. This didn’t last long, but a stress-induced illness brought her close to death. When she recovered, she and Belloc married, only to have their marriage cut short when Elodie died of cancer at the age of 45.

Belloc had an incredible stamina and a sort of “unfit fitness.” That is, he would walk incredible distances on small amounts of food and endure cold and sleeplessness; as he got older, he continued to do this, despite being rather heavily built and possessed of a paunch. In his college days, he once walked the 55 miles from Oxford to London in under 12 hours. “He was a very humble man, but he believed that contest means hard knocks,” wrote H.E.G. Rope in a commemorative piece following Belloc’s passing in 1953.

Two pastimes I think he enjoyed above all others were sailing and mountaineering. Two of his important books which deal with these subjects have been recently republished. It is, therefore, my delight to encourage you to peruse the pages of The Cruise of the ‘Nona’ and Hills and the Sea.

In the first book, Belloc’s ostensible account of a cruise in his little boat serves as a context for expansive meditations on life, the universe, and everything—but especially Europe and the influences that made it what it is.

This is also the most autobiographical that Belloc gets: the cruise he recounts followed close on the heels of the death of his wife. To a reader with a careful eye, and familiar with the writer’s life, the text suddenly deepens, and passages like this one blossom with poignant meaning:

Indeed, the cruising of a boat here and there is very much what happens to the soul of a man in a larger way. We set out for places which we do not reach, or reach too late; and, on the way, there befall us all manner of things which we could never have awaited. We are granted great visions, we suffer intolerable tediums, we come to no end of the business, we are lonely out of sight of England, we make astonishing landfalls—and the whole rigmarole leads us along nowhither, and yet is alive with discovery, emotion, adventure, peril, and repose.

This is an excellent instance of Rope’s description of Belloc as “A great man in every way, a full man, a many-sided genius, a magnificent mind and truly heroic soul.” Despite the many setbacks and sorrows of his life, Belloc embraces the fact that life is still “alive with discovery, emotion, adventure, peril, and repose” despite the “places which we do not reach, or reach too late” and the “intolerable tediums.” Belloc did not allow suffering to cloud his vision because, at the end of the day, he loves “this detestable little world which can be so beautiful when it likes.”

In Hills and the Sea, Belloc collects essays on a wide variety of travel experiences, usually either English villages, cities on the continent, or exploits over waves and peaks. A number of essays deal with various hikes through the Pyrenees Mountains. This range, unusually steep and high, separates the Iberian Peninsula from the rest of Europe: across its top straddles the Spanish-French border, so that when one climbs over them, one passes from one culture to another: 

As one so passes from the one country to the other, it is for all the world like the shutting of a door between oneself and the world. For some reason or other the impression of a civilization active to the point of distress follows one all up the pass from the French railway to the summit of the range; but when that summit is passed the new and brilliant sun upon the enormous glaciers before one, the absence of human signs and of water, impress one suddenly with silence.

“The crest of the Pyrenees is not a ridge nor an edge, but a great wall of slabs, as it were, leaning up against the sky,” pens Belloc. Thus, in “The Pyrenean Hive,” Belloc writes of a tiny town in the Pyrenees which has no road in or out of it and is, therefore, a living fossil of a town—although they do have electric lights. And in “The Wing of Dalua,” Belloc recounts how he and a friend were “bewitched for thirty hours” as they tried to pass over a part of the Pyrenees, were caught in cloud at night, saw mirages in the dimness, and, despite seeming to be going forward the whole time, arrived the next day in the valley where they started from.

While Belloc adventured alone (as in The Path to Rome), he also sought companions: and so “the two men” often climbed the Pyrenees together: 

They loved each other like brothers, yet they quarreled like socialists. They loved each other because they had in common the bond of mankind; they quarreled because they differed upon nearly all other things…The high Gods had given to one judgment, to the other valor; but to both that measure of misfortune which is their Gift to those whom they cherish.

Part of the wisdom to be gleaned from Belloc’s books results from this misfortune—because from it “proceeded in them both a great knowledge of truth and a defense of it…a devotion to the beauty of women and of this world; an outspoken hatred of certain things and men, and, alas! A permanent sadness also.” This melancholy gives Belloc’s musings the longing lilt of an Irish flute melody. 

That is why I read the half-boisterous, half-mournful, half-French, half-Englishman that is Belloc: because (as Ronald Knox said of him when preaching his funeral sermon), “No man of his time fought so hard for the good things.” This is quite evident in the thumos, in the spiritedness, that Belloc lived before he even thought to write of it in The Cruise of the ‘Nona’ or Hills and the Sea.