G.K. Chesterton, Writer Sui Generis

I first discovered Chesterton when I was twelve and I discovered the Father Brown stories in the Morningside Library. That is the posh end of Edinburgh, as anyone who has read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie will know. I first read The Wisdom of Father Brown, then The Innocence of Father Brown soon after. They are the two best Father Brown books, but The Incredulity of Father Brown is not far behind, containing the story “The Dagger with Wings”, with the devil-worshipping figure of John Strake, who wears a cloak too long for him to walk in because he flies everywhere, a sort of devilish Superman. Amyas Aylmer, his potential victim, speaks of black magic and supernatural happenings, but Father Brown will have none of it. His Catholicism is essentially down to earth and of this world. We are reminded of a remark of Chesterton’s that when a man stops believing in God, he does not believe in nothing but rather in anything, spirits or mumbo-jumbo.

The first story in The Wisdom of Father Brown is “The Absence of Mr Glass”, so that was the first I read, and I was hooked instantly. Its pattern is often repeated. First, we have an expert, in this case Doctor Orion Hood, a criminologist, who solves crimes on strictly scientific principles. Next, we have a crime, a disappearance and possible death at the hands of Mr Glass, a man nobody has ever seen but only heard in heated conversation with Mr Todhunter. “One and two, Mr Glass.” “That’s right, Mr Glass.”

Mr Todhunter is in love (well of course he is) with a beautiful girl. In Chesterton’s eyes all girls are beautiful. His own wife was beautiful. And the girl is in love with Mr Todhunter, who is imprisoned in his own room. Doctor Hood suggests very reasonably that they break down the door. They do, and what a sight meets their eyes! Tables are overturned, broken glasses are everywhere, on the floor is a huge hat, and Mr Todhunter is tied up in the corner with a curious expression in his eyes. What is the answer? Hood does not know.

But Father Brown does. And he now knows the profession of Mr Todhunter. Do you? Let us start with the hat, too big for any human head. It cannot be Mr Todhunter’s hat. But it is a hat that is his. And what is its purpose? Why, to draw rabbits from, and bunches of flowers, and white mice. Mr Todhunter is a magician. And the glasses? Mr Todhunter is a juggler too, but as yet an inexpert one. He juggles with glasses and occasionally he breaks them. And why is he tied up? Because he is also an escapologist. He is not really tied up at all. And what of the absent Mr Glass? Ah yes. He is indeed absent. Like Godot, he was never really there at all. Those little conversations really go like this. “One and two, missed a glass” (smash). “That’s right, missed a glass” (crash). And the expression in Mr Todhunter’s eyes? He is laughing. At whom? Why at you, Doctor Hood. At that Mr Todhunter rises to his feet and takes a bow. And marries the girl? Of course he does.

The fifty-odd stories of Father Brown have been ably brought to life by a genial Kenneth More (in a thirteen-part television series in 1974) and once by Alec Guinness, playing opposite Peter Finch in a full-length film in 1954. Guinness said it was playing Father Brown that brought him back into the Catholic Church. And it is true that if I had any religion it would be the Catholicism portrayed by Chesterton.

Chesterton wrote many other stories, of which my favourite collection is The Club of Queer Trades. One man’s trade is to hire himself out at a nightly fee to be the butt of the Wildean sallies of others. But he writes the scripts so that dull dogs may become little Oscars. And a very lucrative trade it is. It is possible that Chesterton got the idea of a club from R.L. Stevenson, who must have been an author who appealed to Chesterton, with his wild romances—but The Suicide Club belongs to an altogether darker universe. Chesterton’s novels do not seem to me to be so successful. The best is The Man Who Was Thursday, a sort of spoof on the thrillers of Buchan, Sapper and the like, but Chesterton seems to run out of puff before the end.

Chesterton wrote a good deal of poetry. He was a poet before he became a prose writer, just as he was an artist before he became a poet. Among his poems the ballades bulk very large. His friends Bentley and Belloc wrote them too. Belloc’s “Ballade of Genuine Concern” begins:

A child in Brighton has been left to drown:

A railway train has jumped the line at Crewe;

I haven’t got the change for half a crown:

I can’t imagine what on earth to do …

Three bisons have stampeded from the Zoo,

A German fleet has anchored in the Clyde.

By God the wretched country’s up the flue!

The ice is breaking up on every side.

It’s just like that in England today. Down with the wretched EU!

Chesterton’s ballades are altogether jollier, more life-affirming. When he had a breakdown at the age of sixteen most people believed it was because he had bad thoughts of homosexual lust and so forth. But I do not. I think he had bad thoughts of death, like Young Werther, and was drawn to suicide. I would like to quote in full his “Ballade of Suicide”:

The gallows in my garden, people say

Is new and neat and adequately tall.

I tie the knot on in a knowing way

As one that knots a necktie for a ball.

But just as all the neighbours—on the wall—

Are drawing one long breath to shout, “Hurray!”

The strangest whim has seized me … After all

I think I will not hang myself today.

 

Tomorrow is the time I get my pay—

My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall—

I see a little cloud all pink and grey—

Perhaps the Rector’s mother will not call—

I fancy that I heard from Mr Gall

That mushrooms could be cooked another way—

I never read the works of Juvenal—

I think will not hang myself today.

 

The world will have another washing day;

The decadents decay; the pedants pall;

And H.G. Wells has found that children play,

And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;

Rationalists are growing rational—

And through these words one finds a stream astray—

So secret that the very sky seems small—

I think I will not hang myself today.

Prince, I can hear the trumps of Germinal,

The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;

Even today your royal head may fall—

I think I will not hang myself today.

Chesterton also has a strain of whimsy, as in “The Song of Quoodle”:

They haven’t got no noses,

The fallen sons of Eve;

Even the smell of roses
Is not what they supposes:
But more than mind discloses
And more than men believe.

He also wrote such poems as “The Ballade of the White Horse”:

Lady, by one light only

We look from Alfred’s eyes.

We know he saw athwart the wreck

The sign that hangs about your neck,

Where One more than Melchizedek

Is dead and never dies.

On the first page of his autobiography Chesterton writes:

I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge.

In her biography of Chesterton, Maisie Ward concurs, adding that the Waterworks Tower impressed his imagination and that when his brother Cecil was born five years later Gilbert announced, “Now I shall always have an audience.” She says this prophecy was “remembered by all parties because it proved so singularly false. As soon as Cecil began to speak he began to argue, and the brothers’ intercourse thenceforward consisted of unending discussion. They always argued, they never quarrelled.”

Michael Coren’s biography disagrees: “Actually the specific place of his birth was 32 Sheffield Terrace, a hauntingly quiet and attractive little road.” Coren observes that it was in this area that Father Brown operated in many of the stories. He says that there was a family tradition that the Chestertons originated in a Cambridgeshire village but Gilbert was sceptical about the claim, aware that many other small towns and villages made similar claims to the name Chesterton. He said, “I have never been to Cambridge and I have never seen Chesterton at all.”

Chesterton’s autobiography brings up his fascination with toy theatres:

I liked the toy theatre when I knew it was a toy theatre. I liked the cardboard figures even when I found that they were cardboard. The white light of wonder that shone in the whole business was not any sort of trick … It was the same with the puppet show of Punch and Judy. I was pleased that a piece of wood was Punch’s face, and pleased that it always was of wood. I loved my illusions so long as I knew they were illusions.

Coren says Gilbert’s illusions led him away from the humdrum reality of life, that he overbalanced in favour of the dream. But Cecil had none of his brother’s generosity of mind. He was narrow and self-righteous, and like the protagonist in Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right he came to a bad end.

It may be thought surprising that Chesterton went to school at all. Many a child at the time with his angelic expression and golden locks did not do so. (We know about these because of the picture opposite page 48 of his autobiography.) Often such children were tutored at home. There was the case of the devil-possessed boy Miles in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. He was tutored by a governess, who may or may not have been off her head. But Gilbert not only went to school (at Saint Paul’s School, on the south bank of the Thames), he actually enjoyed it. This could not have been because of his scholastic eminence. He remained happily ensconced at the bottom of the class where he kept company, as it were, with Anthony Trollope (there he is again) and Winston Churchill. But Trollope hated school and Churchill was ambivalent.

By the time Gilbert was fifteen the whole angelic thing had given way to an awkward hobbledehoy youth, all knuckles and knees. Look at some of the pictures in Coren’s book. He was still a string-bean sort of a chap. The ever-increasing bulk which probably killed him came later.

At Saint Paul’s he met his great friends Lucian Oldershaw and Edmund Clerihew Bentley. Bentley wrote poems and novels, just like Gilbert. His novels were detective stories and the most famous is Trent’s Last Case, where Trent comes up with the wrong solution for all the right reasons. That second name gave rise to the clerihew, a rhymed four-line poem in which the first or second line is a name, and the rest comments on the person:

Sir Christopher Wren

Said, “I am going to dine with some men.

If anyone calls,

Say I’m designing Saint Paul’s.”

This clerihew may be found on page 27 of Maisie Ward’s book. The whole thing is very easy. I have done many myself and some have won prizes. Here is one:

Martial

Was sexually impartial

But everybody swung both ways

In the old Roman days.

 

And with that we say goodbye to childhood.

Gilbert needed money to live. How was money to be got? Hilaire Belloc wrote:

And even now, at twenty-five,

He has to work to keep alive!

Yes! All day long from 10 till 4!

For half the year or even more.

Journalism seemed the answer, though journalists have a poor record, being pushy, forward fellows, which Gilbert emphatically was not. He himself said:

On the whole I think I owe my success to listening, respectfully and rather bashfully, to the very best advice given by all the best journalists who had achieved the best sort of success, and then doing the exact opposite.

In other words he was a journalist sui generis. Gilbert wrote for two reasons. One was for money, for himself and for Frances, his wife; the other was to subsidise his own magazine, GK’s Weekly, which was of a political nature. It was not conservative. It was not socialist. It was Distributist, which my computer fails to recognise as a word. It means that every man, or woman presumably, should be able to enjoy his own pasture with his own pig on it. One has to ask what Gilbert would have done with a pig, but you get the general idea, which is by no means silly. It is true equality, not the false equality of socialism and state ownership, where everybody is equal in having nothing at all. It is a pity that Gilbert was known as a fantastic with a liking for paradox. Distributism is a deeply held and practical idea. We should try it. Perhaps once out of the EU we might make a go of it.

Meanwhile Cecil Chesterton, together with Belloc, had launched The Eye Witness, soon to become The New Witness when Cecil took over the reins himself. It was then disaster struck. There had been some share-rigging in Marconi, which involved the prime minister and several cabinet ministers, most of whom happened to be Jewish. This moved Cecil Chesterton and Belloc, both profoundly anti-Semitic, to publish inflammatory articles. Cecil was arraigned for libel, even though most of what he said was true. He was found guilty and fined £100 and given the most awful wigging.

Cecil claimed this as a triumph but he was not as tough as he gave out and probably the strain hastened his death in 1918 in an army hospital. He had fought bravely during the war. Gilbert, of course, never went to the war. His health was too bad. He was too old, too short-sighted and far too fat. He could never have clambered out of a trench.

For a long time, though Gilbert was ill, he went on his travels, which were wide-ranging and frequent. France, Italy and Canada all fell to his oratory and to his knife and fork. Frances went with him, both to look after him and to act as his diary. Gilbert was notoriously vague about where he should be and whom he should be addressing. There is a notorious telegram: Am in Godalming. Where should I be?

His health worsened. It was plain he was dying. He was given the last rites by a priest he knew, and died on June 14, 1936, the Sunday of the Feast of Corpus Christi, the feast on which, fourteen years earlier, he had entered the Catholic Church.

John Whitworth died in England in April after a short illness. Over the past twenty years he was one of Quadrant’s most prolific and best-loved poets. A brief tribute by Peter Jeffrey appears on page 87.