“When did you last read Belloc?!” In answer to this excited question, we could only answer, in all honesty: last Christmas, when we leafed through some of his Cautionary Tales in verse, illustrated by “B. T. B.” (Lord Basil Temple Blackwood). “Matilda told such Dreadful Lies, / It made one Gasp and Stretch one’s Eyes ...”
We have never read, however, a whole collection of Belloc’s writings on Sussex, the county he regarded as his spiritual home. It was his actual home, too, for much of his life; David Arscott, who enquired after our reading habits, must have been spoilt for choice when it came to compiling A Sussex Belloc (Pomegranate Press, £8.50).
Putting a writer on the map is generally taken to entail that rather grand critical activity of boosting a reputation – bully for the critic who can manage such a feat. A more modest kind of literary mapping involves fixing authors in their particular place and time. In Belloc’s case, this means putting extracts from The Four Men, his “farrago” about a journey by foot across Sussex, next to miscellaneous essays (“In the Valley of the River Rother no hurried men ever come, for it leads nowhere”) and yet more cheery verses:
All such celebrations stand in contrast, of course, to the evils of the metropolis. Belloc reserves some words of warning, for example, for the “most detestable” House of Commons, “where men sit palsied and glower, hating each other and themselves”. How those words rang in our ears as we worked our way through 111 Literary Places in London that You Shouldn’t Miss by Terry Philpot (Emons, £13.99).
Glossily illustrated with photographs by Karin Tearle, this guide includes some locations around town that seem difficult to miss – St Paul’s Cathedral, the British Library, Clapham Common – whether or not the literary tourist should miss them. Other “literary places” lie well off the most beaten paths, such as the W. B. Yeats sculpture in Bedford Park, which was unveiled only two years ago (see NB, September 16, 2022). We are resolved to no longer overlook Sambourne House, the Kensington home of the Punch cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne; urbanite though he was, Sambourne might have nodded in agreement at Belloc’s assessment of the Commons.
And we will try to remember to salute the Clermont Hotel on the Strand if we happen to be passing that way: without her extramarital rendezvous with Morton Fullerton at what was then called the Charing Cross Hotel, would Edith Wharton ever have “drunk the wine of love to the last”, as she put it, and gone on to divorce, move to France and write The Age of Innocence ... ? That’s the stretch of a question posed by 111 Literary Places. So many literary places, so many questions.
“So there you are in Glendale, / your circuits open and hot”, the poet Henri Coulette writes in “Lines for LBG-30, Computer, Poet”
