by Ian Ker
Marriage and Fame
1
THE wedding finally took place on 28 June 1901 at St Mary Abbots Church in Kensington. It was Frances’s birthday: she was 31, and the bridegroom 27. Predictably, Chesterton arrived at the church without a tie. The day was saved by a brother of Rhoda Bastable, who was a bridesmaid and a cousin of Frances, and for whom Chesterton had written the best poem in Greybeards at Play, ‘Of the Dangers Attending Altruism on the High Seas’. A tie was hastily obtained from a shop nearby, and it was round Chesterton’s neck before the bride arrived. The Revd Conrad Noel, with whom Chesterton and his brother had become friends, officiated. When Chesterton’s mother and Annie Firmin saw the price tag on the sole of one of his new shoes that the kneeling bridegroom had bought for the occasion, they looked at each other and laughed. Annie seemed to remember that at the reception afterwards for once in their lives Chesterton and his brother did not argue. Faced with all the wedding presents, Chesterton remarked to Annie: ‘I feel like the young man in the Gospel, sorrowful, because I have great possessions.’ Lucian Oldershaw went ahead to the station with the luggage for the honeymoon, which he put on the train the couple were supposed to be catching. Chesterton, however, and his wife arrived only after another train had also left the station. They took the next train, which was a slow one. On arrival at the White Horse inn in Ipswich, on their way to the Norfolk Broads, Chesterton noticed that his new wife looked tired and told her to lie down and rest after drinking a glass of wine with him. He himself took a walk in the countryside and managed to get lost. But ‘in the end he found his way back to his wife under the sign of the White Horse—that supreme symbol since his earliest childhood of romance and adventure’.1
In his Autobiography, Chesterton admitted that there were a number of family legends surrounding ‘such a highly comic wedding-day’. Apart from missing trains and losing luggage:
It is alleged against me, and with perfect truth, that I stopped on the way to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in another. Some have seen these as singular wedding-presents for a bridegroom to give to himself; and if the bride had known less of him, I suppose she might have fancied that he was a suicide or a murderer, or, worst of all, a teetotaller. They seemed to me the most natural things in the world. I did not buy the pistol to murder myself or my wife; I never was really modern. I bought it because it was the great adventure of my youth, with a general notion of protecting her from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads, to which we were bound … I shall not be annoyed if it is called childish; but obviously it was rather a reminiscence of boyhood, and not of childhood.
As for the glass of milk, ‘I had always drunk a glass of milk there when walking with my mother in my infancy. And it seemed to me a fitting ceremonial to unite the two great relations of a man’s life.’ There was something else that was important symbolically for Chesterton in this visit to the dairy: the figure of a white cow outside, ‘standing’, as it were, ‘at the beginning of my new journey’, a journey that would end ‘under the sign of the White Horse at Ipswich’, the inn where he was to spend the first night of his honeymoon. It recalled that very early powerful childhood memory of the white head of a hobby horse.2
There is no record of the newly married Chestertons being attacked by pirates during their brief honeymoon on the Norfolk Broads. But, like his sword-stick that had so amused his colleagues at Fisher Unwin’s, the revolver reflected that boyish love of adventure that drew Chesterton so strongly to the romances of Stevenson and that he delighted in expressing (rather less successfully) in his own stories. His first letter to his parents did not mention the revolver, however, but began with the following inventory: ‘I have a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a knife: what more can any man want on a honeymoon.’3 The honeymoon was very brief, no doubt because of financial considerations: ‘I only stole six days,—six days | Enough for God to make the world,’ as he put it in a poem for Frances, called ‘Creation Day’,4 dated July 1901 and so written not long after the honeymoon.5
Unfortunately for the couple, creation was not to follow in their marriage. According to Ada Jones, who was to become Cecil’s wife in 1917, this was because of Frances’s frigidity. Ada was a hard-bitten journalist who had been a reporter since the age of 16 and who, appropriately at a time when journalism was a male preserve, used a male pseudonym, John Keith Prothero, being known to her friends as ‘Keith’. A veteran of Fleet Street, who drank in its taverns like any man, she could hardly have been more unlike Frances, and indeed makes it clear in her book about the Chestertons (published long after her husband’s death) that they ‘did not find much mutual ground of understanding’. According to ‘Keith’, on the first night of their honeymoon, Frances ‘shrank’ from her husband’s ‘touch and screamed when he embraced her’. For his part, the husband ‘was haunted by the fear that his brutality and lust had frightened the woman he would have died to protect’. His younger brother, to whom he went ‘quivering with self-reproach and condemnation’, attempted to reassure him ‘and suggested that some citadels must be taken by storm, while others yield only to long siege’. At any rate there was nothing for his brother to fear—‘But the mischief had been done. Gilbert hated himself for what had happened, and Frances could not reconcile herself to the physical realities of marriage.’ ‘Keith’ concluded bluntly that Chesterton was thus ‘condemned to a pseudo-monastic life, in which he lived with a woman but never enjoyed one’.6 It suited ‘Keith’, who must have resented she had been married to the much less famous brother who died tragically young, to portray their married life as less than happy. But her account is simply refuted by the fact that, after a few years of marriage, Frances underwent an operation in the hope that she might have children, whom, as ‘Keith’ allows, she desperately wanted to have.7 Of course, ‘Keith’ was writing some four decades after the event (her book was published in 1941), and the memory of an old woman cannot altogether be trusted, especially when it is prejudiced. What may well have happened on that first night was that the young couple, both virgins and brought up in all the proprieties of the Victorian age, found their first sexual contact very difficult: the young husband, who was as inexperienced as his wife, was no doubt clumsy, and Frances may well have shrunk away in embarrassment and panic. Such an experience would have been common to many newly married middle-class couples at that time.8 ‘Keith’s’ account, therefore, of what happened may be substantially true, but what was not true was what she took it upon herself to deduce from it: she claimed to be reporting what her husband had told her, but her account of what he had said did not include the claim that Cecil had also told her that her brother was thereafter condemned to a life of celibacy.9
On their return from the honeymoon, the Chestertons moved into a small house, 1 Edwardes Square, Kensington, close to his parents in Warwick Gardens, which they rented on a temporary basis from an old friend of Frances. Asked what wallpaper he would prefer, he asked for brown paper to draw on. Bentley remembered the house
with its garden of old trees and its general air of Georgian peace. I remember too the splendid flaming frescoes, done in vivid crayons, of knights and heroes and divinities with which G.K.C. embellished the outside wall at the back, beneath a sheltering portico. I have often wondered whether the landlord charged for them as dilapidations at the end of the tenancy.10
While the young couple were in Edwardes Square, Chesterton wrote to 8-year-old Doris Child, who had been a bridesmaid along with Rhoda Bastable at the wedding and who was living with her mother with Mrs Blogg at the time: ‘I myself have become terribly good to please Frances.’11
I never read at meals now; the mere sight of a book near the table makes me quite ill. I brush my hair without stopping all day: I am brushing it with one hand while I write to you with the other. This is a symbolic approximation, which means something that is not true. But I cannot help feeling that I should be better still if you were here to help Frances to make me behave well.
It is very funny, but I will tell you a secret—I really want to behave well now. You must come and see us and our house and show me how. I am young and strong and can behave well for 17½ minutes on end without the least fatigue.12
Below the letter were five drawings of a figure progressively brushing his hair down.13
After a few months the young couple moved to Overstrand Mansions, Battersea, where they were to remain for the rest of their life together in London. According to ‘Keith’, Chesterton did not like flats—certainly he had never lived in one before—but the name ‘Over-Strand Mansions’ appealed to him.14 The red-brick block was attractively situated beside Battersea Park, which lies along the river. From one side of their flat they had a view of Battersea Park, while the other side looked out on the roofs of Battersea. Because it was the ‘wrong’ (south) side of the river but close to central London, it was both affordable and convenient for a journalist of modest means. When they could afford to have the work done, they had the wall between the drawing-room and the dining-room knocked down—thus anticipating a fashion that was to become popular more than half a century later. At one end of the little study, lined with brown paper to allow for his drawings, in which Chesterton worked, hung a board, inscribed lest we forget’, on which were noted projected articles and pending literary and other engagements’. Hilaire Belloc added a witty little poem:
Frances and Gilbert have a little flat
At eighty pounds a year and cheap at that
Where Frances who is Gilbert’s only wife
Leads an unhappy and complaining life:
While Gilbert who is Frances’ only man
Puts up with it as gamely as he can.15
Two of their immediate neighbours became close friends. One couple, Charles Rann (always known simply as Rann) Kennedy, an actor, and his actress wife Edith Wynne-Matthison, Ellen Terry’s successor as Henry Irving’s leading lady, who would emigrate to the United States where Rann wrote several plays about moral problems, lived in the flat below. Chesterton used to meet Rann Kennedy on the stairs (there was no lift), as he walked up ‘very slowly, writing an article on his cuff’. One day Chesterton remarked ‘Isn’t it jolly out in the park there?’ Kennedy replied, ‘Yes, it is lovely, have you just been there?’ Next day he pointed out to Chesterton, ‘Did you notice when we saluted yesterday we both greeted each other in choriambs and a hypermetric?’ Kennedy had a large library and was happy to lend books to Chesterton. He was struck by Chesterton’s capacity for extracting the essence of a book even without reading right through it: ‘In three hours lolling against a bookcase he would have left aside all unnecessary, absorbed all vital elements.’ He also enjoyed arguing, a trait that naturally endeared him to Chesterton. One or other of them would often bang on the floor or ceiling of their flat to attract the other’s attention in the hope of an argument. Another neighbour, Saxon Mills, a Liberal imperialist who was introduced to Chesterton by Cecil, was also good for an argument. His wife remembered one argument that continued till five in the morning; next day the room was found littered ‘with cigar butts, empty glasses and siphons scattered everywhere and the smell of stale smoke hanging over it like a pall’. On occasions when money was short, the Chestertons and Millses would loan each other money or even give each other food. Mrs. Mills was struck by how placidly Frances reacted to her husband’s eccentricities, one of which was his habit of letting out a bloodcurdling cry in the morning for his wife to come and tie his tie. The Chestertons’ maid (even an impoverished journalist could afford a servant in those days) told Mrs Mills how Chesterton would flood the bathroom floor, which required immediate mopping up; on one occasion, while waiting for him to come out, she heard a loud splash and then a groan: ‘Dammit, I’ve been in here already.’16 There was another much more important neighbour, not actually in the block but just across the river in more fashionable Chelsea: Hilaire Belloc, who lived at 104 Chelsea Walk. One of the Belloc children remembered Chesterton giving them ‘absorbing displays of phantasy through puppets with plaster heads and appropriate gowns … They came to life by the gowns and heads being slipped on to those gifted hands … as Uncle Gilbert sat perilously on the edge of a nursery chair and rumbled off into the story of action!’17
2
In December 1901 Chesterton published his first book of prose, The Defendant. It was much more widely reviewed than the two books of verse, but not all the reviewers were pleased by his generous use of paradox, a criticism that would continue to be made about his writings. In a letter to The Speaker defending himself against one critic, Chesterton justified his use of paradox, not as a literary device but as a necessary tool for understanding the world. Because ‘there really is a strand of contradiction running through the universe’, it is impossible to avoid the use of paradox. And, he concluded, this was the reason why ‘so many religions’ were led to ‘boast not that they had an explanation of the Universe, but that they had a pure, defiant paradox, like the Athanasian Creed’.18 The book consisted of the ‘in defence of’ articles he had published in the Speaker. In the introduction he returned to the fin de siècle pessimism he had grappled with at the Slade: ‘The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility’ of ‘tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves’. The true revolutionaries were not the pessimists but the optimists who ‘have been indignant not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realising its goodness’. Thus Jesus Christ was crucified ‘on a charge of saying that a man could in three days pull down and rebuild the Temple’. This central theme of Chesterton’s writings is touched on in more than one of the articles. Optimism depends on our ability to wonder at the world—a ‘simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions’. But this leads to the kind of paradoxical assertion that so irritated some of his critics: ‘This simple sense of wonder … is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense.’ Chesterton recognizes but insists on the paradox: ‘Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook.’ This insistence on the strict limitations of logic, combined with no less an emphasis on the importance of imagination, reminds one of Newman; but the function of the imagination for Chesterton is not to make the notional and theoretical concrete and real as for Newman, but to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders’. In other words, the imagination is essential for that wonder at existence that underpins optimism.19
This is one important reason for the defence of the common man that runs through Chesterton’s writings and that distinguished him so sharply from the majority of other contemporary writers. What Chesterton calls the
merely educated can scarcely ever be brought to believe that this world is itself an interesting place. When they look at a work of art, good or bad, they expect to be interested, but when they look at a newspaper advertisement or a group in the street, they do not, properly and literally speaking, expect to be interested. But to common and simple people this world is a work of art, though it is, like many great works of art, anonymous.
Their popular literature, unlike the morbidities of modern literature, contains ‘a plainer and better gospel’. To them ‘this planet is like a new house into which we have just moved our baggage’. The common and simple are humble and therefore are privileged to have a colossal vision’ of things as they really are’. The loss of respect for the virtue of humility had led to the revival of ‘the bitterness of Greek pessimism’. The merely educated’ have also ‘lost altogether that primitive and typical taste of man—the taste for news’. And Chesterton then makes a familiar and hackneyed expression come alive in all its original sense: When Christian
ity was named the good news, it spread rapidly, not only because it was good, but also because it was news.’ The dignity of the poor was always close to Chesterton’s heart, a dignity he thought was more threatened in modern society than even in ages in which the most arrogant and elaborate ideals of power and civilisation held … undisputed sway’, when ‘the ideal of the perfect and healthy peasant did undoubtedly represent in some shape or form the conception that there was a dignity in simplicity and a dignity in labour’. Sadly, no such ideal exists in the case of the vast number of honourable trades and crafts on which the existence of a modern city depends’. The romance, however, of modern urban life was to be a persistent theme of Chesterton’s writings, again in marked contrast to contemporary writers. And he considered that there was one art form, a popular art form, that did do justice to it, the detective story: ‘it is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life.’ After all, it was not until the romantic movement of the nineteenth century that mountains, for example, came to seem poetic. The detective story was not idealizing the city, because ‘properly speaking’ the city is more poetic even than a countryside, for while nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones’. Thus, while a particular flower may or may not have a symbolic significance, ‘there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol—a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post card’. ‘A rude, popular literature of the romantic possibilities of the modern city was bound’, therefore, ‘to arise. It has arisen in the popular detective stories, as rough and refreshing as the ballads of Robin Hood,’ which celebrate the ‘romance of the police force’.20