G. K. Chesterton:A Biography
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G. K. CHESTERTON
G. K. CHESTERTON
A BIOGRAPHY
IAN KER
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In Memory of S. M. K.
PREFACE
When I began work on my book The Catholic Revival in English Literature 1845–1961 (2003), which contains a chapter on G. K. Chesterton, I knew, of course, some of Chesterton’s writings—Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, The Man who was Thursday, the Father Brown stories, and a handful of the better-known poems. But, as I read more extensively, I made several discoveries. In the first place, I realized that Chesterton was a much bigger figure than either I or the academic world that I knew was aware. Then I was struck with the parallel or parallels with John Henry Newman, a writer and thinker I had spent many years studying, and whose influence I thought I could clearly detect. Both Newman and Chesterton were converts to and apologists for Catholicism; both were pre-eminently controversialists. Chesterton was a professional journalist, but Newman edited two periodicals in his time: one of his best works from a literary point of view was his The Tamworth Reading Room, a collection of seven lengthy commissioned letters to The Times, a slim volume of fifty pages and one of his two satirical masterpieces.1 Then again, both writers’ main output lay in non-fiction prose, but both published fiction and verse, including two innovative novels and two long poems that were immensely popular in their time and that still resonate with religious believers, although neither the novels nor the poems could be called, except by uncritical enthusiasts, major or great works. Thus, just as Newman’s Loss and Gain introduced a new kind of introspective self-questioning into the English novel, while Chesterton’s nightmarish fantasy The Man who was Thursday anticipated the sinister world of Kafka; so, too, Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius was the second most widely read work on death and the future life after Tennyson’s In Memoriam2 in an age obsessed with death, as well as inspiring Elgar’s great oratorio, while Chesterton’s immensely popular The Ballad of the White Horse inspired soldiers in the trenches during the First World War, as well the famously terse leader in The Times during the Second World War that quoted two verses from it after the disastrous fall of Crete. But, whereas Newman is recognized as a major literary figure to be ranked with his contemporaries, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold, Chesterton, naturally enough—that is, if he is principally to be remembered as the author of the The Man who was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Ballad of the White Horse, ‘Lepanto’, and the Father Brown stories—is dismissed as a minor writer. However, it became increasingly clear to me as I read through Chesterton’s writings that, just as Newman’s great literary works are not Loss and Gain, Callista, The Dream of Gerontius, and ‘Lead, kindly light’, but The Tamworth Reading Room, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics, The Idea of a University, and the Apologia pro Vita sua—so, too, Chesterton’s great literary works are not the novels and poems but Charles Dickens, Orthodoxy, The Victorian Age in Literature, St Francis of Assisi, The Everlasting Man, St Thomas Aquinas, and the Autobiography. Of these seven books, it is worth noting, incidentally, in view of the common assertion that Chesterton wrote his best work as an Anglican, that four were written when he was a Catholic. Of course, one would have to add, in the case of Chesterton, that he was the author also of some of the finest nonsense and satirical verse as well as some of the most distinctive and original detective stories in the English language. In conclusion, then, I came to realize that Chesterton should be seen as the obvious successor to Newman, and indeed as a successor to the other great Victorian ‘sages’ (to borrow John Holloway’s term from his seminal study The Victorian Sage (1955)), specifically the other great non-fiction prose writers, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold (the critic).
The biographer of G. K. Chesterton, who is attempting to write not only a personal but an intellectual and literary life, is presented with both considerable difficulties and considerable opportunities. On the one hand, the biographical materials available leave a very great deal to be desired. Chesterton wrote few letters—of which there is still no edition—and the ones he himself wrote, as opposed to those he dictated to secretaries, are never dated. Apart from three early notebooks in which he entered his thoughts and reflections, particularly one that dates from 1894 to 1898 or 1899, a period of intense intellectual and spiritual development,3 he kept no diaries or journals. After his mother had died, he ‘threw away … most of the contents of his father’s study, including all family records’, his first biographer, Maisie Ward, records; later in her book she amends this to ‘half’, but her informant, Dorothy Collins, Chesterton’s last secretary and literary executor, has recorded that she was able to save only the last of four loads of papers, so in other words about three-quarters of the papers were destroyed.4 Some of the papers that Dorothy Collins lent to Maisie Ward for her biography (1944) were destroyed in an air raid in the Second World War. Other papers, particularly early love letters from Chesterton to his wife, Frances, were destroyed by Dorothy Collins at Frances’s behest. According to Aidan Mackey, a lifelong Chesterton enthusiast and collector of things Chestertonian, Dorothy Collins also freely gave away other papers, including two diaries that Frances Chesterton kept during 1904 and 1905 and the first American trip, the former of which she gave (inadvertently, it seems5) to Aidan Mackey. Mr Mackey also informs me that a particular second-hand bookseller, who obtained books for Dorothy Collins, was regularly invited to help himself from the C
hesterton papers that were haphazardly stored in the damp loft of Top Meadow Cottage, built on the kitchen garden of the Chestertons’ house Top Meadow, to which she moved after Frances’s death.6 The popular biographies by Dudley Barker (1973), Michael Ffinch (1986), and Michael Coren (1989), which appeared after Maisie Ward’s life but during Dorothy Collins’s life, clearly reveal the existence of letters and papers to which they had access but which are no longer to be found in the British Library collection of Chesterton papers that the Library purchased from the Dorothy Collins Charitable Trust after her death. Subsequent biographers, therefore, in these cases have no means of checking information and quotations, or even of knowing what the source might have been, given that only one of these three biographers, Michael Ffinch, gives any source notes, and these are scanty and vague. Along with Maisie Ward, these biographers also had the advantage of Dorothy Collins’s memories. An obvious and important example of this is Ffinch’s report of Chesterton’s last words, which, presumably, he heard from Dorothy Collins, although typically he gives no source.
The principal source for Chesterton’s life for any biographer, apart from his Autobiography, must, therefore, remain Maisie Ward’s biography, which she wrote at Frances Chesterton’s request on the suggestion of Dorothy Collins,7 and its sequel Return to Chesterton (1952). Maisie Ward was not only, like her parents, a friend of both the Chestertons, but she was able to consult and interview their contemporaries and friends and relations. Otherwise, the best-documented periods of Chesterton’s life are the times when he was travelling abroad and when Frances recorded their experiences in diaries and letters, as did Dorothy Collins in later years. I have made much more use of these papers than any previous biographer. I have also discovered an apparently hitherto unknown correspondence file in the archives of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, containing the letters that passed between the President of Notre Dame, Father Charles O’Donnell, CSC, the Chestertons, and Dorothy Collins in connection with the six weeks that Chesterton lectured at the University in 1930, and that reveal a relationship between American host and English visitors that grew from an awkward beginning to great warmth and friendship. In addition, I have been able to take advantage of some hitherto unused, if not unknown, letters from Chesterton to Hilaire Belloc, in the possession of the John J. Burns Library at Boston College, to throw new light on Chesterton’s attitude towards his sister-in-law, ‘Keith’ Chesterton, who was to launch a spiteful attack on Frances Chesterton in her book The Chestertons (1941), which was published a few years after their deaths.
So far as this biography is a personal life, I differ from my predecessors in the emphasis I place on Chesterton’s humour, a humour that was inseparable from his humility, a humility that can, I think, be suitably called heroic, particularly since a heroic humility sounds so like a Chesterton paradox. For it is one thing to retail the familiar jokes of the Market Harborough variety, but it is another to appreciate with what steadiness of humour—a steadiness that can also be called heroic in adverse circumstances—Chesterton contemplated life and the world. No doubt a lack of that appreciation is one important reason for the strange neglect by his biographers of the posthumously published Autobiography, which so wonderfully conveys that joyful humour. This great work, surely to be ranked with Newman’s Apologia and Ruskin’s Praeterita, is one invaluable resource that the biographer does have and I have not hesitated to quote generously from this vividly authentic self-portrait—although it is certainly not a book to which one would turn for chronological and documentary facts, any more than one would to any of Chesterton’s critical biographies.
When I began this Preface by saying that the biographer of Chesterton was faced with considerable opportunities as well as difficulties, I had in mind the fact that the dearth of primary biographical materials is more than matched by the lack of the kind of secondary critical literature, both in terms of quantity and quality, that one would normally take for granted in the case of a writer of such importance and significance as I have claimed. In, therefore, writing what I think can claim to be the first full-length intellectual and literary life of Chesterton, I have the challenge, more than seventy years after his death, of attempting to help establish his rightful position as the successor of the great Victorian ‘sages’, and particularly Newman.
The unfailing humour that was so significant an aspect of Chesterton’s personal life has its parallel in the enormous importance he attached in his writings to humour as a medium for comprehending and interpreting life, regarding comedy as he did as an art form at least as serious as tragedy. One can, without exaggeration, find in Chesterton a mini-philosophy, not to say mini-theology, of laughter. Chesterton’s philosophy of wonder at and gratitude for existence is well known, but I have also highlighted the complementary principle of limitation that informs all his thinking about art, literature, politics, and religion. Linked, too, to his philosophy of wonder is his concept of the role of the imagination in enabling us to see the familiar afresh, as it were for the first time. Thus in his apologetic classics, Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, Chesterton’s most effective strategy is to assail the post-Christian imagination and its stereotypes with startlingly fresh perspectives of Christianity and the figure of Christ. I have also given due weight to his specifically Catholic apologetics, which have been virtually ignored in the secondary literature, and which, at their best, recall the brilliance of Newman’s satire on the English ‘no Popery’ tradition in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics. Perhaps the most serious way in which Chesterton has been underestimated is as a literary critic: this may be because, apart from his book on Browning, his best criticism is not of poetry but of prose. Whatever the reason, it is my hope that I have set out enough evidence to show that Chesterton is one of our great literary critics, to be mentioned in the same breath as Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, and Eliot. I have passed more or less rapidly over Chesterton’s fiction, apart from The Man who was Thursday and the Father Brown stories, neither of which suffers from Chesterton’s admitted inability to bring alive his fictional characters as more than simply mouthpieces for ideas and points of view, since in both these exceptional cases it is essential that the characters should not reveal themselves. While I do not think, any more than Chesterton did, that he is a major poet, he did write a handful of good serious poems, as well as, as I have already pointed out, nonsense and satirical verse that have few parallels in the language and that I have freely quoted. I have also tried to do justice to Chesterton’s political and social writings, emphasizing in particular the remarkable way in which he differed from contemporary intellectuals in not only defending but valuing the despised ‘masses’. Finally, I should add that this book does not in any way aspire to be a chronicle of Chesterton’s career as a journalist. Even to try to do so would, in my view, be at the expense of the clear and concise intellectual and literary portrait I have attempted to draw. In fact, of course, a number of Chesterton’s books are collections of his journalism, and, apart from those collections on specific subjects, such as America or Ireland, in the other more general collections inevitably the same ideas and themes regularly reappear, as would be the case with any columnist having to produce regular articles to order. For, while Chesterton was an enormously prolific writer, he was not, needless to say, endlessly endowed with new ideas and themes.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In writing this book, I have incurred a number of debts. I am, first and foremost, indebted to Aidan Mackey, who has allowed me exceptionally generous access to his Chesterton collection, as well as sharing with me the unique knowledge he possesses as a result of personally knowing both Dorothy Collins and ‘Keith’ Chesterton. He has answered my many questions with unfailing patience, read much of my typescript, corrected my mistakes and misconceptions, and provided me with much useful information. His Chesterton collection, up to now housed in the G. K. Chesterton Study Centre at his home in Bedford, is in the process of being metamorphosed into the G.
K. Chesterton Library, which, it is hoped, will eventually be housed at the Oxford Oratory. I am grateful to Stratford Caldecott, the Director of the Oxford Centre for Culture and Faith, where a number of books and papers from Aidan Mackey’s collection are temporarily stored, for also kindly allowing me unrestricted access.
Geir Hasnes, who is preparing a comprehensive bibliography of Chesterton’s writings that will replace John Sullivan’s G. K. Chesterton: A Bibliography (1958) and its sequel Chesterton Continued: A Bibliographical Supplement (1968) as the standard bibliography, has unfailingly answered my queries and checked and corrected my bibliographical references. He has done more than that: he has read the entire typescript and saved me from a number of blunders, some minor, some major and embarrassing. I am grateful to Edward Short for testing the typescript for readability, as well as for correcting my ignorance of Irish history. I must also thank the following people who have answered specific questions or provided me with particular information I required: Dale Alquist, Wendy Butler, Judith Blincow, Stephen Boyd, Don and Matthew Briel, Nadia Cockayne, R. A. Christophers, Susan Farragher, Suzannah Goode, Kevin Hales, Donal and Julie Lowry, Peter J. Lysy, Sheila Mawhood, Dan Mitchell, Maria Queenan, James Reidy, and Martin Thompson.
David Horn, Head, Archives and Manuscripts, John J. Burns Library, Boston College, Peter J. Lysy, Senior Archivist, Archives, University of Notre Dame, Ben Panciera, Rare Books Librarian and Curator for Special Collections, Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame, and Heidi Truty, Archivist, The Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois, have kindly provided me with photocopies of Chesterton letters. For permission to quote from Father Charles O’Donnell’s letters I am grateful to Wm. Kevin Cawley, Senior Archivist and Curator of Manuscripts, Archives, University of Notre Dame. Acknowledgements are due to A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of the Royal Literary Fund for permission to quote from Chesterton’s unpublished letters, and to the Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate for permission to quote from Bernard Shaw’s unpublished letters. For the loan of photographs used as illustrations in this book, I am indebted to Aidan Mackey, Patricia Baker-Caffidy, Martin Thompson, and Tom Sullivan.