Montgomery Belgion
Harold Montgomery Belgion (28 September 1892 – 29 October 1973) was a British journalist and literary critic. A protégé of T. S. Eliot, he wrote sixty-two reviews to The Criterion.[1]
Contents
Biography
Harold Montgomery Belgion was born in Paris, the son of John Belgion, a secretary of an American Life Insurance Company, and his wife Beatrice. Belgion was christened in the Saint George's Anglican Church of Paris in 1893. He was privately educated in France, although he rejected French nationality and remained a British subject throughout his life.
Belgion entered journalism at an early age and by 1915–1916 was in Paris as editor-in-charge of the European edition of the New York Herald. In 1916 he returned to England to volunteer for military service and became a private soldier in the Honourable Artillery Company, for whose officers and men he retained a strong affection. In July 1918 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Dorsetshire Regiment. Belgion's experiences in World War I are described in an anthology Promise of Greatness (1968).
After the war, he became sub-editor of the London Daily Mail, from which he moved in 1921 to join the editorial staff of the New York World. After working in New York for only a short time he returned to the Daily Mail. In 1924 he became chief sub-editor of the Westminster Gazette; but in the following year he went back to America and joined the staff of the publishing firm of Harcourt Brace, with whom he remained for several years. In 1930 he returned to Paris and edited a literary journal before returning to London to work for the Daily Mirror and the Daily Sketch.
In 1929 Faber and Faber published his first book Our present philosophy of life (which later appeared in French as Notre foi contemporaine) in which he analysed and attacked the influence of Gide, Bernard Shaw, Freud and Bertrand Russell. Subsequent books included The Human Parrot (1931) and News from the French plus a large number of articles, essays and book reviews.
By the time his career was again interrupted by war, Belgion had established a solid reputation as writer and literary critic. In 1939, he was 46 years old and had difficulty getting accepted again for military service; but he finally joined the Royal Engineers and was trained to undertake rail transport duties. He was made a captain and went to the Middle East, joining the ill-fated expedition to Greece in March 1941. When Anglo-Greek resistance collapsed in the face of the German forces he was involved in the chaotic retreat from Larissa to Athens, where he was captured.
While Belgion was a prisoner-of-war in Germany he gave his fellow POW's a series of lectures on English literature[2] which resulted ultimately in his most successful book Reading for profit (1945), the English edition of which sold over 100,000. In 1943, while still a prisoner, he was awarded a Diploma in English Literature by Oxford University and in 1944 was exchanged on medical grounds, thanks largely to the Red Cross, and returned to England via Sweden.
In 1945, he married Gladys Helen Mattock, who had founded Westwood House School near Peterborough and became its headmistress. Under her guidance the school expanded and became an independent public school for girls. When it was turned into a Trust, Belgion served as Secretary and Bursar until his retirement in 1961.
After the World War II, Belgion's output remained high and included an introduction to Cresset Press' Moby Dick (1947); Epitaph on Nuremberg (1947 with a new and expanded version, Victors’ Justice, 1949); Lydgate and Dorothea in New Road No 6 (1949); A Selection of Poe’s Poems with Introduction (1948); A Man After My Own Heart (1949); H. G. Wells (1953); David Hume (1965); Promise of Greatness (1968); The Worship of Quantity: a Study of Megalopolitics (1969); the chapter on André Malraux in The Politics of Twentieth-century Novelists (1971) as well as contributions to numerous reviews and other periodicals, such as The Adelphi, Human Events and The Saturday Review.
His chief activity in the immediate post-war years concerned the trial for war crimes of enemy service men and diplomats, which outraged his sense of justice; since in most cases they had done nothing worse than their adversaries. Moreover he considered that by bringing them to trial before nationally constituted courts and without any proper defence a most dangerous precedent would be established. In this campaign, Belgion joined hands with a mixed group of like-minded people including Maurice Hankey, Frederic Maugham, George Bell, the Earl of Cork and Orrery among others.[3]
In the post-war years, Belgion was a lecturer, notably for the British Council at French Universities, for the British Army and for the University Societies in Cambridge and London. He spent most of his time between 1954 and 1969 working on a book which was eventually published as The Worship of Quantity: a Study of Megalopolitics which received poor notices and sales and must have been a great disappointment to him. Belgion also translated Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World into English.
Most of Belgion's literary works were greatly influenced by his religion: he was a devoted and ardent Christian of the Anglican persuasion. His religion brought him into friendship with famous poets and writers including T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis and Alec Vidler. His military friends included Major-General J. F. C. Fuller and Captain Sir B. H. Liddell Hart.
Belgion also campaigned, ultimately unsuccessfully, for the release of the American poet Ezra Pound from a lunatic asylum. He was interested in education and opposed large, impersonal schools and was also involved in the Peterborough Great Books discussion group. Belgion was a gifted linguist. During his life his political sympathies moved from Left to Right and in the closing years of his life his outlook was that of the Conservative Party. He was a member of the Monday Club.
He died on 29 October 1973.
Notes
- ↑ Harding, Judson (2002). The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- ↑ Johnson, Bruce R. (2018). "The Efforts of C. S. Lewis to Aid British Prisoners of War during World War II," Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, Vol. XII, pp. 41–76.
- ↑ Lawson, Tom (2006). "‘To Whom Vengeance Belongueth’: The Church of England, Christianity and Opposition to War-Crimes Trials." In: The Church of England and the Holocaust. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, pp. 139–66.
References
- Burke, David (2019). The Lawn Road Flats: Spies, Writers and Artists. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer.
