by Ian Ker
Mr Fisher Unwin’s face, however lit up by sunset, I cannot accept as any substitute. Mr Nutt the publisher [Chesterton was hoping he would publish his first book, Greybeards at Play] may go down week after week and stand by the hedge [‘the broken hedge in the little lane at Eltham’ where Chesterton saw Frances’s face ‘lit up by the sunset’] and endeavour to look equally lovely, but I advise him to desist.
There was a beauty ‘which one must be good in order to have’: ‘I know that there was a Cleopatra of Egypt, who, in your temporary but unavoidable absence, attracted the male sex to a large extent.’ But hers was merely ‘animal regularity’, whereas Frances’s kind of beauty ‘begins inside and works out … Any actress with a pot of rouge and a stick of grease paint could make herself like Helen of Troy. But no one could look like you, without having a benediction in her heart …’.41
The happy suitor was anxious to share his good news with friends. To Mildred Wain, who was engaged to a member of the J.D.C., Waldo d’Avigdor, he wrote:
On rising this morning, I carefully washed my boots in hot water and blacked my face. Then assuming my coat with graceful ease and with the tails in front, I descended to breakfast, where I gaily poured the coffee on the sardines and put my hat on the fire to boil. These activities will give you some idea of my frame of mind. My family, observing me leave the house by way of the chimney, and take the fender with me under one arm, thought I must have something on my mind. So I had.
After announcing he was engaged, the question then arose: to whom? ‘I have investigated this problem with some care, and, as far as can make out, the best authorities point to Frances Blogg. There can I think be no reasonable doubt that she is the lady. It is as well to have these minor matters clear in one’s mind.’42 In a later letter, he thanked her for providing a topic of conversation on his first visit to the Blogg family, ‘with which I have since formed a dark and shameful connection’.43 To Annie Firmin he wrote to say that one of his earliest memories was of her helping him to build a house with bricks:
I am building another one now, and it would not have been complete without your going over it. It is indeed, as you say, quaint to think of me with a wife. As to the bull fights on the landing, I think of instructing my wife in that valuable pastime and think it would form a most pleasing diversion in domestic life.’
Frances was quite right (as she is occasionally)’ about Annie’s lovely’ letter. It was very nice’ of Annie
to say that you mean to like Frances. I think (pardon the ardour of the observation) that there are toils even more difficult. I did it myself with great neatness. As for her, she will certainly like you, which is, in my humble and perhaps partial opinion, another way of saying that she is not a born fool. Really she is not though you might think so from—well, from a recent act on her part.44
Frances’s sister Gertrude, who was Kipling’s secretary, wrote: ‘of course you are quite unworthy of Frances, but the sooner you forget it the better!’45
The conventional love poems he wrote at the time are not nearly as effective in conveying Chesterton’s feelings as his surviving love letters, some of which were destroyed or cut as being too intimate after Frances’s death, at her insistence.46 They display that seriousness of humour that was to be one of the most prominent themes in his writings. In one letter he signs himself as ‘always your own adoring nuisance’, adding as a postscript: ‘By the way,—I love you. I thought the fact might interest you.’47 Writing to Frances from the seaside in Suffolk, he attempts ‘to reckon up the estate I have to offer you’. It includes the ‘admirable relic’ of a straw hat, a walking stick ‘admirably fitted to break the head of any denizen of Suffolk who denies that you are the noblest of ladies, but of no other manifest use’, a copy of Whitman’s poems, a packet of letters from a young lady, containing everything good and generous and loyal and holy and wise that isn’t in Whitman’s poems’, a pocket knife with a device to take stones out of a horse’s hoof (given a horse with a lame foot, ‘one stands prepared, with a defiant smile’), a ‘heart … mislaid somewhere’. As a reminder of his financial situation, he included also ‘about three pounds in gold and silver, the remains of Mr Unwin’s bursts of affection: those explosions of spontaneous love for myself, which, such is the perfect order and harmony of his mind, occur at startlingly exact intervals of time’. But, as a hope of better things to come, the inventory also included ‘a book of Children’s Rhymes, in manuscript, called the “Weather Book” about ¾ finished, and destined for Mr Nutt’, the publisher.48 On a more solemn note in another letter, he wonders if death may not be like love, a transformation … as beautiful and dazzling’. In the presence of Frances’s mother he says he feels like a ‘thief’. She would have had every right to be ‘worried if you had been engaged to the Archangel Michael (who, indeed, is bearing his disappointment very well): how much more when you are engaged to an aimless, tactless, reckless, unbrushed, strange-hatted, opinionated scarecrow who has suddenly walked into the vacant place’. The adjective Chesterton should have included, indeed emphasized, in this derogatory catalogue was poor’, since it was not so much his appearance as his poverty that bothered his prospective mother-in-law.49
In another letter, he draws a light-hearted autobiographical sketch for Frances that includes an account of his introduction to her family:
One pleasant Saturday afternoon Lucian [Oldershaw] said to me, ‘I am going to take you to see the Bloggs’—‘The what?’ said the unhappy man. ‘The Bloggs,’ said the other, darkly. Naturally assuming that it was the name of a public-house he reluctantly followed his friend. He came to a small front-garden—if it was a public-house it was not a businesslike one. They raised the latch—they rang the bell (if the bell was not in its close time just then). No flower in the pots winked. No brick grinned. No sign in Heaven or earth warned him. The birds sang on in the trees. He went in.
He becomes more serious in the description of his second visit:
he was plumped down on a sofa beside a being of whom he had a vague impression that brown hair grew at intervals all down her like a caterpillar. Once in the course of conversation she looked straight at him and he said to himself as plainly as if he had read it in a book: ‘If I had anything to do with this girl I should go on my knees to her: if I spoke with her she would never deceive me: if I depended on her she would never deny me: if I loved her she would never play with me: if I trusted her she would never go back on me: if I remembered her she would never forget me’ …
If not love it was trust at first sight. For his part, Chesterton can promise Frances that he has not, with all his faults, “gone after strange women”. You cannot think how a man’s self-restraint is rewarded in this.’ He can also promise her that ‘he has tried to love everything alive: a dim preparation for loving you’. The little mini-autobiography ends with the words: ‘Here ends my previous existence. Take it: it led me to you.’50
3
Their happiness was suddenly shattered by the death in the summer of 1899 of Gertrude, Frances’s favourite sister, whom she had offered to her fiance as his sister too. She had been knocked down and run over by a bus while she was riding her bicycle. She was engaged to a young man called R. Brimley Johnson, who had just set up as a publisher. Frances was devastated, unable to go to work or to stay in the house where she had grown up with Gertrude. Immediately after the funeral she went to Italy, not only grieving for her sister but inevitably tormented as a believing Christian with the problem of how to reconcile tragic loss with a loving God. Only recently Chesterton, who had been shielded from illness and death when he was growing up, had written to her about the death of an old friend, assuring her of his belief that somehow the death must be for the good:
It seems terrible to think of so much force going out of the world suddenly, to say nothing of the blacker void left to those to whom that great heart was more thoroughly known … Somewhere, doubtless, in the million problems of new stars and unfinished creations, in the c
ampaigns of God, some good thing was wavering or at bay and in the dark hour that strong name was remembered…. But we have to lose her. Still, I like to think of this—rather to be sure of it.51
All the wreaths on Gertrude’s coffin were white flowers except Chesterton’s, which were scarlet and orange; the card on his wreath bore the words ‘He that maketh His angels spirits and His ministers a flame of fire’.52 He had ‘this sense of a great power that, hidden from us for awhile, was energising in eternity’. This faith’ Frances shared with him. He thought that sorrow for the dead should above all not be a matter of conventional expression, should not stifle human mirth’.53 ‘If there occurs to anyone’, he wrote to Frances, ‘a really good joke about the look of my coffin, I command him by all the thunders to make it. If he doesn’t I’ll kick the lid up and make it myself … No, darling, if we are picking flowers we will not hide them if a hearse goes by.’54
His first letter to Frances in Italy began with a joke about his appearance: ‘I am black but comely at this moment: because the cyclostyle has blacked me. Fear not. I shall wash myself. But I think it my duty to render an accurate account of my physical appearance every time I write: and shall be glad of any advice and assistance …’. But the humour is deadly serious as Chesterton finds consolation in his ‘inchoate and half-baked’ philosophy of gratitude:
I like the cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people. … When we call a man ‘manly’ or a woman ‘womanly’ we touch the deepest philosophy.
He refuses to apologize for his ‘rambling levity’: ‘I have sworn that Gertrude should not feel, wherever she is, that the comedy has gone out of our theatre.’ Whatever else, his future wife’s concern about his untidy appearance was a useful source of humour in distracting her from her grief. In another letter posted next day, he boasts:
My appearance …is singularly exemplary. My boots are placed, after the fastidious London fashion, on the feet: the laces are done up, the watch is going, the hair is brushed, the sleeve-links are inserted, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. As for my straw hat, I put it on eighteen times consecutively, taking a rush and a jump to each try, till at last I hit the right angle. I have not taken it off for three days and nights lest I should disturb that exquisite poise. Ladies, princes, queens, ecclesiastical processions go by in vain: I do not remove it. That angle of the hat is something to mount guard over.
In the same letter he returns to his philosophy of gratitude, seizing on a remark by Frances that it is good for us to be here’:
The same remark, if I remember right, was made on the mountain of the Transfiguration. It has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the long Vision we call life …
Two days later he returned to the same theme. He had made a discovery’ or rather seen a vision’ between two cups of black coffee in a French restaurant in Soho—‘that all good things are one thing’. And this ‘one thing’ was merely disguised in all the good things of this world, including Gertrude. This was the great discovery of the savage old Hebrews’, who, unlike the polytheistic Greeks and Romans, were thrilled … by the blazing idea of all being the same God: an idea worthy of a detective story’. A few days later, again writing from Felixstowe, he told Frances that he had written some verses for her about her sister’s death—‘but for real strength (I don’t like the word “comfort”) for real peace, no human words are much good except perhaps some of the unfathomable, unintelligible, unconquerable epigrams of the Bible’. One such text was ‘precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of one of his saints’—except that in accord with the philosophy of gratitude he thought it was ‘a miraculous remark about anybody’. That was the one word to describe Gertrude’s death: it was certainly not ‘happy or providential or sweet or even perhaps good’—but it was ‘precious’. For her death awoke in one ‘a passionate sense of the value”’ of her life, so that even her death was ‘a thing of incalculable value and mysterious sweetness: it is awful, tragic, desolating, desperately hard to bear—but still “precious”.’55
In a letter to Frances at the end of September, Chesterton acknowledged that he was not good at giving many practical details’ about himself; when he had time to think he thought of ‘the Kosmos [sic] first and the Ego afterwards’. However, this was not much help to Frances, he admitted, since she was not engaged to the Kosmos:
dear me! What a time the Kosmos would have! All its Comets would have their hair brushed every morning. The Whirlwind would be adjured not to walk about when it was talking. The Oceans would be warmed with hot-water pipes. Not even the lowest forms of life would escape the crusade of tidiness: you would walk round and round the jellyfish, looking for a place to put in shirt-links.
If Frances wanted to know what he did every day he could tell her in either of two ways. He could describe a day in his life in the normal way one does: get up, dress, breakfast, take the train, then work on manuscripts at the office till two o’clock, then go out to lunch—‘have—(but here perhaps it would be safer to become vague), come back, work till six … have dinner at home, write the novel till 11, then write to you and go to bed’. But there was another, altogether different and more real way of describing his day. This was to look at everything he did with the kind of astonished wonder at ‘the sacred intoxication of existence’ that his philosophy of gratitude demanded. He can say that he is going to post the letter in a red pillar box; but alternatively and more really he can say that he is going to drop it into ‘the mouth of a little red goblin at the corner of the street’. Because he was so completely convinced of ‘the spirituality of things’, in other words that the universe is ‘good or spiritual’, and only of that—he did not claim to know ‘on what principle the Universe is run’—he knew that Gertrude’s death was ‘beautiful’. The reason it did not seem beautiful to them was that ‘we do not see it now. What we see is her absence: but her Death is not her absence, but her Presence somewhere else.’56
Chesterton was now anxious to hasten the date of their marriage: this was the only cure for Frances’s grief. In the meantime he could only offer his love as consolation with an attempt to make her laugh: ‘I love you dear—even in the British Museum. That is the climax of the triumph of romance.’ But he was becoming hopeful of improving his prospects:
I think I feel myself ‘getting on’: I have come out of all the worrying jobs I had to do and I am having quite a lot of chances, or half-chances, opening round me. The senior reader here, for example (a novelist and a large person), urges me to collect a book of serious poems and offers to put them before another publisher of his acquaintance.57
The publisher’s reader referred to here was Edward Garnett, who encouraged and advised some of the most prominent writers of the period, including Conrad, Lawrence, and Forster, as well as being himself a novelist, playwright, and critic. Garnett also took Chesterton out to lunch and, when he heard that Chesterton was trying his hand at fiction, asked if he could see what he had written. I certainly cannot complain’, Chesterton gratefully acknowledged, ‘of not being sympathetically treated by the literary men I know. I wonder where the jealous, spiteful, depreciating man of letters we read of in books has got to.’58 At the beginning of October 1899 Chesterton wrote to Frances to say that he was hoping that the first number of the Speaker, under its new management, would shortly contain an article by him. Meanwhile his father was corresponding with Fisher Unwin about raising his son’s salary. The publishers offered an immediate rise of five shillings and a further but undisclosed one in January, together with a royalty of 10 per cent for a book Chesterton had been commissioned to write about Paris, as well
as expenses for a fortnight’s research in Paris. Chesterton did not need his father to point out the flaw in this offer: the lack of any assurance that he would not have to write the book on Paris outside the working hours for which he was paid. He may have been impractical and unworldly, but even he could see that the net result would be that instead of gaining more liberty to rise in the literary world’, he would be ‘selling the small liberty of rising that I have now for five more shillings’. His father had therefore declined the offer and asked for a better one: The diplomacy is worrying, yet I enjoy it: I feel like Mr Chamberlain [Joseph Chamberlain the imperialist Colonial Secretary] on the eve of war.’ He was prepared to stay at Fisher Unwin for nothing less than £100 a year—which probably meant that he would not be staying. In another letter he emphasized, perhaps because he knew how impractical Mrs Blogg in particular thought he was, how interested he had become in making money: