Gilbert: The Man Who was G. K. Chesterton

by Michael Coren

  Unfortunately it was the case for the Christians that they, with at least equal reason, felt him the oppressor; and that mutual charge of tyranny is the Semitic trouble in all times. It is certain that in popular sentiment, this Anti-Semitism was not excused as uncharitableness, but simply regarded as charity. Chaucer puts his curse on Hebrew cruelty into the mouth of the soft-hearted prioress, who wept when she saw a mouse in a trap; and it was when Edward, breaking the rule by which rulers had hitherto fostered their bankers’ wealth, flung the alien financiers out of the land, that his people probably saw him most plainly at once as a knight errant and a tender father of his people.

  An example of selective history: no mention of the infamous blood libels which plagued the Jewish community at the time, when furious and crazed mobs fired by religious superstition would murder any Jew they found; their reasons were that they believed that gentile youths were slaughtered by Jews for secret ceremonies. And the York massacre, a mass murder of English Jews in the middle ages, is entirely ignored. Again, Gilbert desired to defend the Jews, because in his personal relationships he enjoyed the company of Jewish people and admired the Jewish attitude towards education and learning; but his friends were there to put him right, to remind him of the world conspiracy. The theme permeates his books. The Man Who Was Thursday: “‘Its application is,’ said his informant, ‘that most of old Sunday’s righthand men are South African and American millionaires. That is why he has got hold of all the communications …’” The assumptions were that the media was controlled by Jews; there were some Jewish press barons, but only a small minority. Such things did not matter. As to South Africa, it was believed that the Boer War had been fought not for British Imperialism, but to aid the greed and self-interest of Jewish diamond merchants and financiers.

  It is all discredited and infantile philosophy today, in the light of the opening of the gates at Auschwitz and Treblinka. Here lies a problem. How much do we forgive Gilbert because he wrote and thought before the holocaust, before the world was forced to see that anti-Semitism was unacceptable? Very little. There have always been, always will be, the options of conforming with evil or resisting evil. Here was an age when even allegedly radical writers like Wells and Arnold Bennett were unsympathetic towards the Jews, the fashionable set of Waugh and Mitford cutting and sardonic, the conservative generation such as Buchan and Saki positively hateful. Yet there was always room for protest, always the opportunity to stand up and be counted; and Gilbert was prepared to make himself unpopular on many other issues. It was fashionable to joke about Jewish influence and Jewish characteristics, and Gilbert gave in to the meagre temptations of a vile fashion.

  In 1920 he published The New Jerusalem, an account of his travels in Palestine. Amongst the waves of settlers who were building a new home for the Jewish people he discovered Zionism, and wrote about it at great length, both in the book and in articles for various journals and newspapers. When he undertook a lecture tour in the United States after the book appeared, a boycott was arranged by Jewish organisations. In Omaha he said that it was as though “a kind of trail of wailing rabbis all across the continent” were following him. Hardly the type of comment to placate his critics. His book had been openly attacked in two New York synagogues, and in the Temple bel-Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Sixth Street synagogue Dr Samuel Schulmann said

  The worst kind of Jew-baiting is not that of the mob, but that of the false literary prophet of the age, which subtly attempts to instil poison into the minds of those who may become leaders of the mob; it is therefore a humiliating, even if a necessary task, to dissect this latest attempt of the well-known Anti-Semite. It is necessary because as Jews and as Americans, we must protest against the attempt to transplant to our country the artificially fostered animosity against the Jew which flourishes in Europe.

  Chesterton, of his own volition, undertakes to bless, if not the Jews, the Zionists, and ends by cursing them. He professes to agree with the Zionists and yet, in every line of his description of what he saw in Palestine, he bristles with suspicion, with insults, with threats, and with opposition to the Zionists’ efforts. His is a book thoroughly false, and its falsity is all the more dangerous because of its attractiveness. It is false because it is pure reactionary romanticism.

  On his tour of the Middle East Gilbert was anxious to come to terms with what he had heard about Zionism, and how it was transforming the Jewish people. He met Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist elder statesman and first President of Israel, and the two men appreciated each other’s stature. Weizmann, who embodied a form of Jewish nationalism which did not survive past his death, discussed the possibility of turning Palestine into a Swiss-style country composed of cantons, some Arab and some Jewish. Gilbert wrote

  It seems possible that there might be not only Jewish cantons in Palestine but Jewish cantons outside Palestine. Jewish colonies in suitable and selected places in adjacent parts or in many other parts of the world. They might be affiliated to some official centre in Palestine, or even in Jerusalem, where there would naturally be at least some great religious head-quarters of the scattered race and religion … I think it is sophistry to say, as do some Anti-Semites, that the Jews have no more right there than the Jebusites. If there are Jebusites they are Jebusites without knowing it. I think it sufficiently answered in the fine phrase of an English priest, in many ways more Anti-Semitic than I: “The people that remembers has a right.” The very worst of the Jews, as well as the very best, do in some sense remember.

  The tone of the book, though sometimes extremely sympathetic and even understanding, is patronising and pompous; as though Gilbert had a divine right to judge and decide on matters concerning the Jews, a people who he wished to chastise but protect, as though they were badly behaved children. The Daily News in November 1920 noted that “Mr Chesterton’s book about his travels among the Jews will be read with all the more curiosity because he is generally regarded as an Anti-Semite …” When he recounts the story of a Jerusalem snow-storm his perennial ambivalence on the issue is exposed yet again

  The English soldiers cleared the snow away; the Arabs sat down satisfied or stoical with the snow blocking their own doors or loading their own roofs. But the Jews, as the story went, were at length persuaded to clear away the snow in front of them, and then demanded a handsome salary for having recovered the use of their own front doors. The story is not quite fair; and yet it is not so unfair as it seems. Any rational Anti-Semite will agree that such tales even when they are true, do not always signify an avaricious tradition in Semitism, but sometimes the healthier and more human suggestion of Bolshevism. The Jews do demand high wages, but it is not always because they are in the old sense money-grabbers …

  “Rational Anti-Semite?” Gilbert believed that racial hatred and rational behaviour were compatible, and his Father Brown is not immune from anti-Jewish statements and descriptions. In “The Purple Wig” in The Wisdom of Father Brown, we are presented with a Jewish character who is “a guttersnipe who was a pettifogger and a pawnbroker not twelve years ago,” and in The Incredulity of Father Brown we are told that “It would be nearer the truth,” said Father Brown, “to say that they were the only people who weren’t persecuted in the Middle Ages. If you want to satirise mediaevalism, you could make a good case by saying that some poor Christian might be burned alive for making a mistake about the Homoiousian, while a rich Jew might walk down the street openly sneering at Christ and the Mother of God.” It is a ridiculous statement, and Gilbert knew it to be. Throughout the Father Brown stories there are stinging comments about “cosmopolitans,” people who “hated Jews” and descriptions of dirty, evil individuals whose gentile origins are severely in doubt. The Ball and the Cross, The Flying Inn and a host of essays contain equally disturbing references. And “The Song of Quoodle” is remembered by so many with its verse

  They haven’t got no noses,

  They cannot even tell

  When door and darkness closes

  The
park a Jew encloses,

  Where even the Law of Moses

  Will let you steal a smell

  As to the defence that Gilbert, as well as Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, were Zionists and hence not anti-Semitic, this is a fatuous and ludicrously badly-informed explanation. In the early days of the campaign for a Jewish homeland it was not only Jewish nationalists and sympathisers who believed that a state of Israel was essential; for as well as the friends of the Jewish people, who saw the proposed nation as a safeguard, there were those anti-Semites who wanted the Jews expelled from Europe and America and sent to another place, any other place. The early Nazis toyed with the idea of a Jewish homeland — Madagascar was considered — before the Final Solution was conceived. Chauvinistic intellectuals of the 1920s spent a lot of time and ink on the possibility of “resettlement,” and for a brief period felt confident that a “Jew-free Europe” could be achieved. Gilbert was less vicious, deeply concerned that both for their own good and for the good of the gentile host-culture the Jews should be given a separate land; such a belief did not expunge any traces of racism from him.

  Examples of regrettable postures are there for anybody to find if they search deeply enough. The case for the defence appears to be hopeless, but perhaps not. We cannot revive a long dead author and ask his opinions of a Jewish people who lost six and a half million of their race in the greatest horror the world has ever experienced; nor can we judge him by the standards of the more aware and tolerant 1980s. What can be said is that when Gilbert was left to relate to Jewish people away from the insidious influence of Belloc and brother Cecil he usually left a noble impression. His personal, social contact with Jewish people has a bearing on his wider attitudes. Margaret Halford, a Jewish friend, was scheduled to meet him and cooperate on a charitable endeavour, but was worried about the reception she would receive; would he “want to know her?” She wrote: “I’m a stiff-necked viper on the Jewish question. I wasn’t really ‘afraid’ about my own welcome — but though I had for years been an enthralled admirer of G.K.’s, I’d have forgone the pleasure of personal friendship, if his true attitude had not become so manifest.” She became a regular guest, and the warmth which she exhibited was reciprocated.

  His friendship with Israel Zangwill, that most Jewish of writers, was a noted literary combination of the time. On his travels to the United States and Canada Gilbert was entertained by many Jewish people, all of whom were anxious to play host to him again. In Jerusalem his one-to-one meetings with Jewish leaders were more than friendly. The Wiener Library, the archives of anti-Semitism and holocaust history in London, regard Gilbert as a friend, not an enemy

  The difference between social and philosophical anti-Semitism is something which is not fully understood. John Buchan, for example, was charming towards Jewish people he met, but undoubtedly possessed a world view of anti-Semitism. With Chesterton we’ve never thought of a man who was seriously anti-Semitic on either count. He was a man who played along, and for that he must pay a price; he has, and has the public reputation of anti-Semitism. He was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on.

  The Wiener Library refer to the coming to power of Hitler and the Nazi party in 1933 and the subsequent attacks on Jewish lives and liberty. Thousands of German Jews refused to believe that the country of Beethoven and Goethe would tolerate for long a gutter-level dictatorship of such cruelty. They remained in Germany, many until it was too late. A large part of the organised Left in Europe, Britain included, were willing to give Hitler time to prove himself, attracted by his opposition to capitalism; noted liberal and socialist leaders met with the German leader, anxious to come to an understanding. Opposition to the new order was not fashionable in the early days, and the people who stood up firmly against National Socialism were as righteous as they were few. Gilbert was such a man, confident from the beginnings of Hitlerism that here was a manifestation of evil. “They will find it difficult to persuade any German, let alone any European who is fond of Germany” he wrote, “that Schiller is a poet and Heine not;” and “thousands of Jews have recently been rabbled or ruined or driven from their homes, they beat and bully poor Jews in concentration camps,” and “heartily as I do indeed despise the Hitlerites.” He wrote an anti-Nazi pamphlet as early as 1934, pleading with the British public to take note, and take action. After his death Rabbi Wise, a major and respected figure inside the American Jewish community, paid tribute to Gilbert in a letter

  Indeed I was a warm admirer of Gilbert Chesterton. Apart from his delightful art and his genius in many directions, he was, as you know, a great religionist. He as Catholic, I as Jew, could not have seen eye to eye with each other, and he might have added “particularly seeing that you are cross-eyed;” but I deeply respected him. When Hitlerism came, he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great unabashed spirit. Blessing to his memory.

  Harold Soref, who visited the offices of the New Witness as a young man — and a young Jewish man at that — detected an “atmosphere which was not pleasant, a note of hostility.” There was without doubt a group of people around Gilbert who were dragging him, sometimes screaming in protest and sometimes not, along unsavoury paths. If he was guilty of one thing without any doubt, it was of being naïve, of being vulnerable. It was one thing to jest when the result would only be a childish giggle, quite another to laugh at a suffering people. He refused to mock anyone who was in jeopardy. He mellowed on many subjects as he matured, and his growing Christian spirit took him away from hatred, and was not used as an excuse for right-wing views; this cannot be said for all converts to the Catholic Church. Always conscious of his public image, both in its positive and negative aspects, he was aware of how Jewish people regarded him

  In our early days Hilaire Belloc and myself were accused of being uncompromising Anti-Semites. Today, although I still think there is a Jewish problem, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities. They have absolutely no reason or logic behind them. It is quite obviously the expedient of a man who has been driven to seeking a scapegoat, and has found with relief the most famous scapegoat in European history, the Jewish people. I am quite ready to believe now that Belloc and I will die defending the last Jew in Europe.

  Humbert Wolfe, the Jewish poet, had attacked Gilbert for being an anti-Semite, and later bitterly regretted his attack. His tribute was as follows

  Like a great wind after a night of thunder

  He rocked the sodden marches of the soul

  And ripped the mists of cowardice asunder

  With laughter vivid as an aureole.

  He does not need to knock against the Gate

  Who every action like a prayer ascended

  And beat upon the panels. Trumpets, wait

  For a hushed instant. We loved him. It is ended.

  IX - Trauma and Travels

  Gilbert was the dramatist who never was. His novels, even his works of non-fiction, are written with a sympathy for theatre and the dramatic, and it was no surprise that in the autumn of 1913 “Magic,” his first play, opened at the Little Theatre. Bernard Shaw had asked Gilbert to write a play, confident that it would be a success. It was praised by the critics but ran for only three weeks. It was a comedy, containing the now familiar theme that knowledge and love of God was a prerequisite to contentment and understanding, and that the supernatural is part of our lives, whether we desire such a thing or not. Gilbert wrote of a conjuror and a mysterious electric lamp, exploring the darker side of magic. Of the other characters, a Christian socialist, an atheist and a medical cynic all combine to live out the author’s theories and arguments. Gilbert appeared at the end of the first night to minimise his part in the entire production, and emphasise that it was not the artistic quality of the play which was important, but the ideas expressed in it.

  This was a frantically busy time for Gilbert. As well as the play he was completing two other books, The Flying Inn and The Wisdom of Father Brown, and
contributing poems and journalism to the New Witness. Frances was not happy with the arrangement, fearing that journalism equalled Fleet Street, which inevitably signified yet another bout of late nights and heavy drinking. She wanted her husband to do what he did best: write books. His genuine friends told him the same thing, to remain at home and write seriously; his other companions urged him to abandon the rural temptations and make his way back to London life. He was increasingly torn, and under severe pressure. The work load was huge enough, without the constant arguments which now arose whenever the future of his career was discussed with his wife or his brother. The photographs of him at this time show a man who could no longer carry his obesity. There is a sense of melancholy in his face, a sombre thoughtfulness which was not evident in earlier days.

  The Flying Inn was published by Methuen in January. In it England is governed by Moslem law, and Humphrey Pump manages to find his way round the stringent drinking laws by turning his pub into a mobile station for thirsty Englishmen. It is an extremely funny book, but does demonstrate a lack of understanding of Islam and the East which plagued Gilbert throughout his life. The Wisdom of Father Brown appeared a few months later. This was extremely popular and highly lucrative. It was not as brilliant and original as the first volume, but because Father Brown was now established as a public hero the book sold quickly. The profits from it enabled Gilbert to look ahead towards other projects. Some of the money went into the Chestertons’ savings for Top Meadow, the proposed house adjacent to Overroads. When eating gooseberries together one summer’s day Gilbert and Frances had spotted an eye-catching tree over the road. It was decided that they would build their permanent home around it. They proceeded to buy the property and land and build a studio with wood from that same tree. The Chesterton house would evolve from the studio.

  Gilbert celebrated the success of his two books with a toast, to himself, by himself. He was now an isolated drinker, a far more dangerous animal than the gregarious man who finds it difficult to leave the pub. Frances had intended to take him away from drinking by keeping him in Beaconsfield, but the contrary was the case. Speculations as to whether he was an alcoholic are redundant; he may have been, but was probably not. His addiction was to quantity, quantities of anything. Any drink which was placed in front of him, any food offered, would be consumed without a second thought. His appetite was enormous. It was only a matter of time before his health suffered. In 1913 he began to experience pain in his throat, which turned out to be a congestion of the larynx. His indigestion was chronic, interrupting his sleep and causing him a lot of discomfort in his waking hours. His teeth were bad, his joints were stiff and he felt more tired than he had ever been before. And there was a sluggishness about him, something Frances had refused to recognise earlier. She became frightened, writing to Father O’Connor that “Gilbert has been rather seedy too. A sharpish attack of bronchitis and now a stiff neck …”