Gilbert: The Man Who was G. K. Chesterton

by Michael Coren

  Gilbert now was as content and joyous as ever he was to be in his life. Not so Frances. She had asked Gilbert about leaving London for months, and was able to bring a subtle pressure to bear on him with practised ease. They agreed to leave the city and find a permanent home elsewhere. How they found their house was recounted in his Autobiography

  I remember that we strolled out one day, for a sort of second honeymoon, and went upon a journey into the void, a voyage deliberately objectless. I saw a passing omnibus labelled “Hanwell,” and, feeling this to be an appropriate omen, we boarded it and left it somewhere at a stray station, which I entered and asked the man in the ticket-office where the next train went to. He uttered the pedantic reply: “Where do you want to go to?” And I uttered the profound and philosophical rejoinder, “Wherever the next train goes to.”

  The train went to Slough, and when the couple arrived there they began walking in any direction which their feet took them.

  And in that fashion we passed through the large and quiet cross-roads of a sort of village, and stayed at an inn called the White Hart. We asked the name of the place and were told that it was called Beconsfield (I mean of course that it was called Beconsfield and not Beaconsfield), and we said to each other: “This is the sort of place where some day we will make our home.”

  He lived in the town for the rest of his life, becoming as much a part of the area as Benjamin Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) and Edmund Burke, who had lived there in the eighteenth century. He saw it turn from a village into a virtual suburb.

  It would be truer to say that the two things in some sense still exist side by side; and the popular instinct has recognised the division by actually talking about the Old Town and the New Town. I once planned a massive and exhaustive sociological work, in several volumes, which was to be called “The Two Barbers of Beaconsfield,” and based entirely upon the talk of the two excellent citizens to whom I went to get shaved. For those two shops do indeed belong to two different civilisations. The hairdresser of the New Town belongs to the new world and has the spotlessness of the specialist; the other has what may be called the ambidexterity of the peasant, shaving (so to speak) with one hand while he stuffs squirrels or sells tobacco with the other. The latter tells me from his own recollection what happened in Old Beaconsfield; the former, or his assistants, tell me from the Daily Mail what has not happened in a wider world …

  They moved in the summer of 1909, and rented a small house known as Overroads. Up until the 1930s Beaconsfield was still semi-rural, and from the windows of their new home the Chestertons could see fields and light farm-land for miles. By the time Gilbert died no such view existed. That was nothing to the urbanisation which has taken place in the last twenty years, but some of the charm and mystery of that house, and Top Meadow, their second home in the area, still remains. In spite of the short distance between London and Beaconsfield — twenty-five miles — there is still an overwhelming feeling of being outside of and away from the business of London; detachment and solitude fill the air. It was this which so outraged his friends: being in Beaconsfield, how could he remain a companion, leader and amuser of the Fleet Street irregulars? Both Belloc and Cecil were hurt and angry, criticising Gilbert, and especially Frances. Their response was selfish to the extreme, and smacked of a complete misunderstanding and ignorance of the ties and loyalties of married life. Gilbert’s concept of marriage was equally unusual: he was content for his wife to take complete charge of finances, organisation, planning of meals and meetings, and the day-to-day running of the house. At times the arrangement became pathetic, with Gilbert being awarded pocket money, due to his irresponsible attitude towards his earnings and outgoings. His friends resented the new administration, and stored up most of their wrath for Frances. Here began the belief that she was a moody, possessive woman who took Gilbert away from London, friends and work. On the last point the contrary is true, and more work was completed in Beaconsfield than in busy London. Frances did have her moods, but her simple and understandable desires were to make Gilbert more of a husband and less of a man-about-town, and to ensure that his health and state of mind were kept in a fine condition. That meant less huge meals in the middle of the night and far fewer drinking sessions which began in the morning and ended in the evening. She loved her husband, and for this was blamed and attacked by a generation of bullish, mildly misogynistic men who never in their married lives came close to achieving such devotion and care.

  There were regrets from Gilbert; London was more than a city to him, it was parent, inspiration and safety. His journeys back to Kensington and Fleet Street were frequent and busy, but always short stays rather than prolonged sojourns. He wrote a poem about the London he left behind, and the flavour of lament is pungent

  When I came back to Fleet Street,

  Through a sunset nook at night,

  And saw the old Green Dragon

  With the windows all alight,

  And hailed the old Green Dragon

  And the Cock I used to know

  Where all good fellows were my friends

  A little while ago;

  I had been long in meadows,

  And the trees took hold of me,

  And the still towns in the beech-woods,

  Where men were meant to be.

  But old things held; the laughter,

  The long unnatural night,

  And all the truth they talk in hell,

  And all the lies they write.

  The men in debt that drank of old

  Still drink in debt today;

  Chained to the rich by ruin,

  Cheerful in chains, as then

  When old unbroken Pickwick walked

  Among the broken men …

  All that I loved and hated,

  All that I shunned and knew …

  It took time for Gilbert to establish himself in Beaconsfield, to come to terms with the more parochial humour and talk of the country dwellers. He was shocked initially by how provincial the local people were, and how limited and limiting his style of life would have to be. He turned to routine for support, relying on the regularity of his days to sustain him.

  Most of the anecdotes concerning him in the early years in Buckinghamshire are mundane, even a little pathetic. They are of small events and small matters, and Gilbert was not a man who was meant to deal in small things. His befriending of the local children was a charming insight into his character. As the years passed by in Beaconsfield Gilbert and his home became regular entries in every local child’s calendar. He would entertain them, individually and in groups. The games he conceived for them were refreshing and sometimes worrying to the conservative parents. Various people, often adults, would be asked to adopt certain strange and outrageous positions, and the children would be asked to explain how such poses came about. On one occasion the mother of Monsignor Bartlett — the senior priest today at one of London’s Catholic churches — was said to be “dancing on a table with a rose in her mouth outside a notorious Paris Left Bank restaurant”; hardly a likely circumstance. The children would scream with delight at such games, dancing around the huge Gilbert as though he were a never-ending source of fun and amusement.

  Nor was it only children who appreciated the humour, and the absurdities, of Gilbert. When he stated that “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly,” or that he would like to die by driving over a cliff in the last horse-drawn cab in London, his readers and supporters both enjoyed and understood him. During the First World War a society lady would ask him why he “wasn’t out at the front?” “If you go round to my side Madam,” he replied, “you will see that I am.” He was always willing to laugh at his own failings. His susceptibility to alcohol was parodied, in disguise, in the poem “Wine and Water”

  Old Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale,

  He ate his egg with a ladle in an egg-cup big as a pail,

  And the soup he took was Elephant Soup and the fish he took was Whale
,

  But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to sail,

  And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,

  “I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.”

  Gilbert’s love for children grew as he realised that it was most unlikely that he would ever be a father. As he came to terms with that painful reality he devoted his energies towards other people’s offspring, seldom demonstrating any feelings of sorrow. His sword-stick, never far from his side, fascinated the small people. Seeing their eyes widen when they realised that inside the decorated cane was a hidden weapon, he would expose the blade and lunge at nearby bushes or flowers. Games of cowboys and Indians would be organised, and Gilbert would enthuse as much as the wildest child. When arrows flew and charges were made at Fort Apache the ring-leader was invariably a large, tall, sweating gentleman with ink on his cuffs. Animals began to fill the house. Scottish terriers were favourites of Frances and Gilbert, given the names of Quoodle and Winkle; the cat was awarded the title Perky. Friends came to stay, but detected a coldness in Frances which turned them away. Gilbert was lonely, and found it impossible to explain this to his wife. Walking in the country and playing with the local children was not sufficient for such a gregarious and energetic man. Once again he turned to work, employing as a secretary Nellie Allport. Her work load was enormous, simply taking dictation. Gilbert was also writing in his own hand. The result was a total output which staggered even other busy and industrious writers. Articles, essays, introductions to other works, contributions to debates and speeches occupied his working day. When he wasn’t writing for payment or commission he wrote and drew for his own recreation, or to help plan future projects which often failed to materialise. Before he left for Beaconsfield he had been working on his George Bernard Shaw, a very personal book about a very personal subject. “Most people either say that they agree with Bernard Shaw or that they do not understand him” he wrote, “I am the only person who understands him, and I do not agree with him.” In September his understanding of other matters was demonstrated with the publication of Tremendous Trifles, a collection of essays and articles which had previously appeared in the Daily News. The famous “What I Found In My Pocket” was reproduced in the book

  I have only once in my life picked a pocket, and then (perhaps through some absent-mindedness) I picked my own. My act can really with some reason be so described. For in taking things out of my own pocket I had at least one of the more tense and quivering emotions of the thief; I had a complete ignorance and a profound curiosity as to what I should find there. Perhaps it would be the exaggeration of eulogy to call me a tidy person. But I can always pretty satisfactorily account for all my possessions. I can always tell where they are, and what I have done with them, so long as I can keep them out of my pockets. If once anything slips into those unknown abysses, I wave it a sad Virgilian farewell. I suppose that the things that I have dropped into my pockets are still there; the same presumption applies to the things that I have dropped into the sea. But I regard the riches stored in both these bottomless chasms with the same reverent ignorance. They tell us that on the last day the sea will give up its dead; and I suppose that on the same occasion long strings and strings of extraordinary things will come running out of my pockets. But I have quite forgotten what any of them are; and there is really nothing (excepting the money) that I shall be at all surprised at finding among them.

  What’s Wrong With The World followed shortly afterwards, in which Gilbert outlined his political and social beliefs, many of them clearly moulded or at least influenced by Cecil Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Women and the liberation movement received a strong attack, the evils of Calvinism were held up to criticism, and the development of his later Distributist ideas can be seen throughout the volume. Gilbert was taking a greater political interest in the years leading up to and following his departure from London, falling under the spell of those around him who were keenly political animals. His beliefs had ranged from liberal conservatism to conservative liberalism, and his brief period as a would-be socialist was an aberration; he was moved by the sufferings of the poor, but nothing else in the state socialist credo attracted him. Political issues began to enter his writings, and he was increasingly of the opinion that religious orthodoxy was not enough. Politically he was a child, in a world of strident adults. Here was such a magnificent vacuum, such a source of potential support for the cause which captured it; he would not hold out for long.

  Returning to biography, his William Blake appeared in 1910. The extent of Gilbert’s other commitments showed in the book, it was written in a hurry and without sufficient consideration. He admitted to not understanding his subject a great deal of the time, and critics pointed out this defect. Alarms and Discursions, another anthology of essays, was more of a success, with its highly praised pieces on “Cheese,” “The Nightmare,” “The Long Bow,” and “The Anarchist,” all familiar themes in his writings. There were throughout Gilbert’s life fallow periods, when it appeared that he was taking time to prepare himself for a massive burst of energy and creation. This was just such a time. A beacon of the forthcoming genius was lit with The Ball and the Cross, a stylised novel concerning the struggle of two men, one atheist and one Catholic, to fight a duel; and the revelation that real evil is something greater and more powerful than mere mortal disagreement and wrong-thinking. The book incorporated several of his established ideas — faith, chivalry, the defence of the sword, honour, humanity — and, at least according to the most recent introduction to it, “is the best novel … ever made out of an argument.”

  The special triumph for Gilbert was the publication in July 1911 of The Innocence of Father Brown. The first Father Brown story, “The Blue Cross,” had appeared in September 1910 in the Storyteller magazine, and is still considered by many to be the best in the canon. It introduces its hero, a diminutive Catholic priest, and the king of criminals, Flambeau. It also gave readers a glimpse of things to come, with chases over London fields and plots revealing flashes of genius from Father Brown, and touches of pure evil from his opponents. Gilbert did not think particularly highly of his new creation, but to others it appeared that a new Sherlock Holmes had arrived. Nor was the character the preserve of a Catholic readership; non-Catholics were fascinated by the mysteries and wit of this Roman man of God, at a time when to those outside the Catholic Church Catholicism was still a religion of dark corners and secret practices.

  Father Brown matured as a character in the course of the first book, as did Gilbert as a writer of detective stories. Though the first tale retains its popularity, the construction of the later mysteries is technically superior. Flambeau, who was becoming far too attractive to both writer and readers, repents in the fourth story and by the time of the fifth is on the side of Father Brown, as a private detective. The fifth tale, “The Invisible Man,” is a fine example of what the Father Brown stories represented. In a beautifully described London setting a millionaire receives death letters. The man’s home is watched, but nobody is seen to enter. Yet the letters continue to appear. The explanation? The postman is in fact the culprit in disguise. Everyday people and things are in reality capable of being the most extraordinary. Father Brown, as a reflection of Gilbert’s imagination, noticed and relished the strange within the normal; a postman may be “invisible” to most people, but to the inquisitive eye there is much to see. “The little Suffolk dumpling from East Anglia” would maintain Gilbert’s lifestyle, earning him enough money to be able to indulge in less lucrative affairs, including giving lectures to enthusiastic but often impoverished clubs and societies. It was during one lecture journey that Gilbert telegraphed his wife “Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?” Her answer? “Home.” It would always be her response.

  Travel presented him with the opportunity to indulge in some of his finest offerings of description. He was a gifted setter of scenes, letting his imagination take control of
his pen. Sometimes this involved a lot of hard work for his editors, having to come to terms with long, rambling journeys into dark forests which smothered the actual story. With the Father Brown stories this rarely happened. His use of language was beautiful, sometimes captivating. He began the first story as follows

  Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous — nor wished to be. There was nothing notable about him, except a slight contrast between the holiday gaiety of his clothes and the official gravity of his face. His clothes included a slight, pale grey jacket, a white waistcoat, and a silver straw hat with a grey-blue ribbon. His lean face was dark by contrast, and ended in a curt black beard that looked Spanish and suggested an Elizabethan ruff. He was smoking a cigarette with the seriousness of an idler. There was nothing about him to indicate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver, that the white waistcoat covered a police card, or that the straw hat covered one of the most powerful intellects in Europe. For this was Valentin himself, the head of the Paris police and the most famous investigator of the world; and he was coming from Brussels to London to make the greatest arrest of the century.

  His public debates had established a large following amongst the public, the most popular being together with George Bernard Shaw. The intellectual quality of their discussions was of the highest; just as entertaining was the evident friendship which the two exhibited. Spectators knew that the smoke of animosity would never obscure the points made by them, both men were reaching the peak of their reputations, Gilbert’s becoming international at the end of August with The Ballad of the White Horse. This was a work which had taken Gilbert the longest time, a pet project which he had laboured over with love. It was the story of King Alfred’s defeat of the Danes at the battle of Ethandune, also the story of England and its nature. From the jaws of defeat, victory. It was the story of the Peninsular War, of Balaclava, the Dunkirk to come; the story of a people who take time to awake, but as long to sleep again once roused. He had been driven to write the poem by a dream, which provided him with a complete stanza