G. K. Chesterton:A Biography
Page 11
Political disillusionment there may have been, but canvassing certainly had its amusing moments. At another election in the countryside—‘I saw more of the country life than a Londoner like myself had yet imagined, and encountered not a few entertaining country types’—he met an old woman in Somerset, ‘with a somewhat menacing and almost malevolent stare’,
who informed me on her own doorstep that she was a Liberal and I could not see her husband, because he was still a Tory. She then informed me that she had been twice married before, and both her husbands had been Tories when they married her, but had become Liberals afterwards. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder towards the invisible Conservative within and said, ‘I’ll have him ready by the ‘lection.’ I was not permitted to penetrate further into this cavern of witchcraft, where she manufactured Liberals out of the most unpromising materials; and (it would appear) destroyed them afterwards.86
5
In October 1900 Chesterton published his first book, Greybeards at Play. The publisher was R. Brimley Johnson, who had become engaged to Frances’s sister Gertrude before Chesterton and Frances became engaged, a fact that Gertrude had teasingly reminded Chesterton of when writing to congratulate him on his engagement: ‘I feel just centuries older than you two!’87 The book consists of three long nonsense poems, a dedication, and ‘envoy’, with accompanying illustrations by Chesterton. W. H. Auden maintained that the book, which sold very well, contained ‘some of the best pure nonsense verse in English, and the author’s illustrations are equally good’. Auden also thought that Chesterton was ‘essentially a comic poet. Very few of his “serious” poems are as good as these.’88 Chesterton presumably did not agree, since he neither included Greybeards at Play in his Collected Poems nor even mentioned the book, which is a little gem, in his Autobiography, where he says that his next book of verse, The Wild Knight, was his ‘introduction to literature’.89
The best of the three poems is as clever and witty as its title, ‘Of the Dangers Attending Altruism on the High Seas’, suggests, and is worth quoting in full to illustrate Auden’s point.
Observe these Pirates bold and gay,
That sail a gory sea:
Notice their bright expression:—
The handsome one is me.
We plundered ships and harbours,
We spoiled the Spanish main;
But Nemesis watched over us,
For it began to rain.
Oh all well-meaning folk take heed!
Our Captain’s fate was sore;
A more well-meaning Pirate,
Had never dripped with gore.
The rain was pouring long and loud,
The sea was drear and dim:
A little fish was floating there:
Our Captain pitied him.
‘How sad’, he said, and dropped a tear
Splash on the cabin roof,
‘That we are dry, while he is there
Without a waterproof.
‘We’ll get him up on board at once;
For Science teaches me,
He will be wet if he remains
Much longer in the sea.’
They fished him out; the First Mate wept,
And came with rugs and ale:
The Boatswain brought him one golosh,
And fixed it on his tail.
But yet he never loved the ship:
Against the mast he’d lean;
If spoken to, he coughed and smiled,
And blushed a pallid green.
Though plied with hardbake, beef and beer,
He showed no wish to sup:
The neatest riddles they could ask,
He always gave them up.
They seized him and court-martialled him,
In some excess of spleen,
For lack of social sympathy,
(Victoria xii. 18).
They gathered every evidence
That might remove a doubt:
They wrote a postcard in his name,
And partly scratched it out.
Till, when his guilt was clear as day,
With all formality
They doomed the traitor to be drowned,
And threw him in the sea.
The flashing sunset, as he sank,
Made every scale a gem;
And, turning with a gracious bow
He kissed his fin to them.90
Greybeards at Play received few reviews, although Bentley reviewed it at length on 6 October 1900 in the Speaker, pointing out that the verse and the drawings went together like Gilbert’s librettos and Sullivan’s music.91 As Bentley put it, it was a ‘feast of [Chestertons’s] own peculiar sort of nonsense, rhymes and drawings full of extravagant fun’.92 The author himself dismissed it with a somewhat curious analogy: ‘To publish a book of my nonsense verses seems to me exactly like summoning the whole of the people of Kensington to see me smoke cigarettes.’93
A month later The Wild Knight and Other Poems was published. Brimley Johnson was not prepared to publish that as well but passed it on to another publisher, Grant Richards, who said that ‘he could not see his way to “venturing” the book—as a refusal was in those days delicately put—but would be prepared to publish it at the author’s expense’. The money was put up by Chesterton’s father.94 Letters from him to the publisher show him trying to do business on behalf of his unworldly son. He suggested that, as his son ‘has now become so widely known’, it ought to be possible to ‘push’ sales. When Grant Richards pointed out that Chesterton had failed to come and see him or write to him ‘as arranged’, he agreed that ‘it must be admitted that he (like many of his craft) is quite unbusinesslike to his disadvantage in practical affairs’. It had therefore been decided that in future the literary agent A. P. Watt would act for him.95 Sales had been poor.96
Some of the poems had already appeared in the Speaker and one in the Outlook, but the majority were appearing for the first time in print.97 It was widely and favourably reviewed (unlike Greybeards at Play, which was scarcely noticed), although the poet John Davidson (to whom T. S. Eliot acknowledged a debt for his use of dingy urban images and colloquial idiom) dismissed it as ‘frantic rubbish’.98 One reviewer had, in fact, attributed the work to Davidson on the ground that the name G. K. Chesterton must be a nom de plume, since the poems were clearly ‘not that of a novice but a successful writer’. ‘This naturally brought an indignant denial from … Davidson. That spirited poet very legitimately thanked the Lord that he had never written such nonsense; and I for one very heartily sympathised with him.’99 Brimley Johnson sent a copy to Rudyard Kipling, who had been Johnson’s intended wife’s employer. In his diplomatic letter thanking the author’s prospective brother-in-law, Kipling remarked that he had already read some of the poems, ‘notably, The Donkey which stuck in my mind at the time I read it’. He thought the collection was very promising, although he had two criticisms, the first of which is very Chestertonian: ‘We all begin with arrainging [sic] and elaborating all the Heavens and Hells and stars and tragedies we can lay our poetic hands on—Later we see folk—just common people under the heavens—‘. He also noted too many uses of the word ‘aureole’: ‘I think every one is bound in each book to employ unconsciously some pet word but that was Rossetti’s’, as well as too many ‘“wans” and things that “catch and cling”’.100 Kipling had picked out the best poem in the book, which contained none of the words he had objected to, and is one of a handful of Chesterton’s serious, as opposed to comic or satirical, poems that are still read.
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born;
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
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p; Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.101
The opening poem of the book, ‘By the Babe Unborn’, expresses Chesterton’s philosophy of gratitude for life itself: ‘If only I could find the door, j If only I were born.’102 ‘The Wild Knight’ itself, a brief but tedious verse drama, recalls in its villain Lord Orme Chesterton’s encounter with the diabolist student. But the truth is that the collection was ‘an incongruous ragbag of work’ that Chesterton had been ‘collecting over the previous five years; it recalls the raw anti-clericalism of his schoolboy verse, and the intermittent but traumatic pessimism of his time of crisis as a student at the Slade School of Art; it also contains poems which reflect the recovery of his underlying optimism, though these do not predominate’. Worse still, Chesterton ‘had fatally undermined such utterly flat and humourless writing as predominates (despite some striking exceptions) in his first volume of “serious” poetry’ with his inspired comic verse of the previous volume: to go from the one to the other is indeed ‘to proceed from the absurd to the would-be sublime in a way which can only make the young Chesterton’s attempts at high seriousness look dangerously like self-parody:
My eyes are full of lonely mirth
Reeling with want and worn with scars,
For pride of every stone on earth,
I shake my spear at all the stars.’103
Again, curiously, one poem, ‘An Alliance’, was included that contained four lines that suggested not so much an early ‘reluctant’ imperialism as an imperialism that even Kipling, his brother Cecil pointed out, ‘might have thought a trifle extravagant’.104
6
On Christmas Eve 1900, Chesterton went to Midnight Mass with Belloc and his wife. This was almost certainly the first time he had attended Mass in a Catholic church.105 The death of Queen Victoria on 22 January 1901 brought the long Victorian era to a close. Like the rest of the nation Chesterton was very upset and apparently wept when he heard the news. He did not watch the funeral procession, he wrote to Frances, partly because he had an appointment with the editor of the Speaker and partly because ‘I think I felt the matter too genuinely’ and preferred to mourn alone. It was a great and serious hour, and it is felt so completely by all England that I cannot deny the enduring wish I have … to do my best for this country of mine which I love with a love passing the love of Jingoes’. He saw his mission as being ‘to give her truth’ (‘Sometimes the hardest thing of all’).106
On 19 February he sent a letter in a very different key to Frances:
I am, for the first time in my life, thoroughly worried, and I find it a rather exciting and not entirely unpleasant sensation. But everything depends just now, not only on my sticking hard to work and doing a lot of my very best, but on my thinking about it, keeping wide awake to the turn of the market, being ready to do things not in half a week, but in half an hour …
The reason for his nervousness was that he had an appointment next day with the editor of the Daily News, ‘and many things may come of it’:
I cannot express to you what it is to feel the grip of the great wheel of real life on you for the first time. For the first time I know what is meant by the word ‘enemies’—men who deliberately dislike you and oppose your career—and the funny thing is that I don’t dislike them at all myself.
Perhaps they had the same reason as himself for desperately wanting more money: ‘Poor devils—very likely they want to be married in June too.’ A couple of weeks later he wrote to tell Frances that arrangements’ with the Daily News had been ‘again put off’. However, he was optimistic that they could get married that year. Not only had the Speaker nearly doubled what they had been paying him, and was ready to pay him for any extra writing he did, but the editor, J. L. Hammond, had pushed’ him so strongly’ with the editor of the Daily News ‘for the post of manager of the literary page’ that he thought it was probable’ he would get it. Hammond had assured him that the salary should be at least £200 a year, more than the £150 he hoped he could earn altogether at the Speaker. Even without the prospective job at the Daily News, he thought that he could earn £144 a year from his writing for the paper—indeed he had ‘just started a set of popular fighting articles on literature’. Besides, his name was getting known and so other opportunities would arise. He promised Frances that he had calculated the minimum rather than the maximum income he could earn.107 Writing for the Daily News was the ‘turning-point of his journalistic fate’ in Chesterton’s view. Like the Speaker, the paper had been bought by Liberals opposed to the Boer War, who included Lloyd George and George Cadbury, the chocolate manufacturer, who provided most of the financial backing. Chesterton’s first review for the paper had appeared unsigned on 6 January, the first of regular book reviews, mostly unsigned, for the Saturday issue. February saw the publication in the Speaker of ‘In Defence of Nonsense’, the first of such articles (the last appeared in August) that he would later collect in The Defendant.108
In an undated letter to his mother, which presumably was written after the one to Frances, Chesterton raised his estimated income to £470 a year, which he pointed out to her was only £30 less than the £500 which she had said was necessary to enable him to marry. Again, he assured her that his sums had been carefully done: ‘I have been doing nothing but sums in my head for the last months.’ He calculated that he could make £192 from the Speaker, at least £100 from the Daily News and more if he got the job of literary editor. He also now had a contract with the Manchester Sunday Chronicle that was worth £72 a year. ‘The matter now, I think, largely depends on Reynolds’s Newspaper. If I do, as is contemplated, weekly articles and thumbnail sketches, they cannot give me less than £100 a year.’ That would bring the total close to the income considered necessary by his mother. He realized that earning one’s living by journalism was more precarious than other kinds of occupation: ‘But we should live a long way within this income, if we took a very cheap flat, even a workman’s flat if necessary, had a woman in to do the laborious daily work and for the rest waited on ourselves, as many people I know do in cheap flats.’ At any rate, even if journalism did have its ‘downs’, it also had its ‘ups’, ‘and I, I can fairly say, am on the upward wave’. His name was becoming well known, and it was a ‘remarkable fact’ that the papers he wrote for had come to him, not the other way round. He concluded by telling his mother that it was not his financial prospects that worried him:
But I am terribly worried for fear you should be angry or sorry about all this. I am only kept in hope by the remembrance that I had the same fear when I told you of my engagement and that you dispelled it with a directness and generosity that I shall not forget. I think, my dear Mother, that we have always understood each other really. We are neither of us very demonstrative: we come of some queer stock that can always say least when it means most.
Chesterton knew it was not only the financial aspect that bothered his mother; he knew that Frances would not have been her choice as a wife for him. But he asked her to trust him when he thought that something was ‘really right’, even if he could ‘hardly explain why’—for that would be to ‘communicate the incommunicable’. ‘The most I can say is that I know Frances like the back of my hand and can tell without a word from her that she has never recovered from a wound and that there is only one kind of peace that will heal it.’ Marriage was the only cure for Frances’s grief for her sister Gertrude. Once again Chesterton had fallen back on writing to his mother. I have tried to explain myself in this letter: I can do it better in a letter, somehow, but I do not think I have done it very successfully. However, with you it does not matter and it never will matter, how my thoughts come tumbling out. You at least have always understood what I meant.’ His mother might not approve, but he relied on her understanding.109
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