by Ian Ker
On one occasion I saw him emerge from Shoe Lane, hurry into the middle of Fleet Street, and abruptly come to a standstill in the centre of the traffic. He stood there for some time, wrapped in thought, while ‘buses, taxis and lorries eddied about him in a whirlpool and while drivers exercised to the full their gentle art of expostulation. Having come to the end of his meditations, he held up his hand, turned round, cleared a passage through the horses and vehicles and returned to Shoe Lane. It was just as though he had deliberately chosen the middle of Fleet Street as the most fruitful place for thought. Nobody else in London could have done it with his air of absolute unconsciousness, of absent-mindedness. And not even the most stalwart policeman, vested with full authority, could have dammed up London’s stream of traffic more effectively.
The same astonished observer on another occasion saw him arrive at a newspaper office in a cab, the driver of which was told to wait outside. Talking to himself, Chesterton noted that he had half-an-hour to write an article. He asked for a file of back numbers of the paper and looked at some of his own articles.
Presently, he smiled. Then he laughed. Then he leaned back in his chair and roared. ‘Good—oh, damned good!’ exclaimed he. He turned to another article and frowned a little, but a third pleased him better. After a while, he pushed the papers from him and sat awhile in thought. And … he wrote his article, rapidly, calmly, drowsily. Save that his hand moved, he might have been asleep. Nothing disturbed him—neither the noise of the office nor the faint throb of his taxi-cab rapidly ticking off twopences in the street below … He finished his article and rolled dreamily away.
On another occasion when he had a lunch date in a restaurant at one o’clock, his host was handed a message from a cab-driver at three o’clock asking, ‘Would the gentleman please pay him off now as he wanted to eat too?’43
The story was told of him that he would take a cab from his home in Battersea to a Fleet Street newspaper office to claim money owed to him for an article, and then spend so much time talking to journalist friends that by the time he arrived back (in the same cab) at Battersea the fare practically came to the fee for the article that he had gone to collect.44 Lucy Masterman remembered that his ‘practice was to drive in a hansom’ to the office of the Daily News, where her husband Charles, the Liberal politician, was the literary editor at the time. ‘Having acquired his book for review he would climb back into the hansom and signal it to drive on until he had finished his article which he wrote on his knee. The plan had its amenities; but when he had drawn his fee and paid off the hansom there was not much left to take back to Frances and the Battersea tradesmen.’ As a result, it was arranged that payment for his articles was in future to go directly to Frances—although it meant that sometimes he had to borrow the money for the fare home.45 A waiting cab in Fleet Street as likely as not indicated the presence of Chesterton: ‘He quite forgot it was there, and would chuckle delightedly when he realised it had been stationary for hours. He would pull out a handful of money and invite the cabby to take his fare and a tip …’. That was also his method of settling for drinks in pubs—and if his pockets were empty, ‘it would not matter, every pub within the radius of Fleet Street knew the big figure, recognised the chuckling laugh and would have given credit for so long as it was wanted’.46 Restaurants and pubs, in fact, not newspaper offices, were much more likely places to find Chesterton writing his articles. Charles Masterman remembered one such Fleet Street restaurant where Chesterton used to write articles,
mixing a terrible conjunction of drinks, while many waiters hovered about him, partly in awe, and partly in case he should leave the restaurant without paying for what he had had. One day … the headwaiter approached [Masterman]. ‘Your friend,’ he whispered, admiringly, ‘he very clever man. He sit and laugh. And then he write. And then he laugh at what he write.’47
Lucy Masterman recalled that his ‘favourite spot was a corner table … where he would turn back the cloth and lay his manuscript on the baize underneath’.48 The restaurant was probably El Vino, one of his ‘favourite haunts, with the George and the Bodega’. ‘Under the shelter of a vast cask of sherry, on the corner of an old mahogany table’, he ‘would reel off hundreds of words and talk in a glowing flow of epigram and paradox. It became a custom to look in round about six in the hope of finding him.’49 One American visitor to London met Chesterton face-to-face in Fleet Street: ‘Wrapped in a cloak and standing in the doorway of a pie-shop, he was composing a poem, reciting it aloud as he wrote. The most striking thing about the incident was that no one took the slightest notice.’50
Chesterton was becoming a great London character like Dr Johnson. Unlike many eccentrics, he was well aware of his public image, but that does not necessarily mean that it was ‘put on’—although he no doubt enjoyed playing up to it to a certain extent. It is true that there was at least one contemporary who knew him well, Mildred Wain, who had her doubts.51 She used to meet Chesterton regularly in a cafe in Fleet Street before she got married when they were both students. Meeting another student there once, she observed Chesterton enter arguing with another man.
They sat down at a table a short distance away and Gilbert ordered two poached eggs on toast and some coffee. They were brought to him in due course and he, apparently not noticing their arrival, continued to talk and argue, and, lifting his hand to emphasize some point, brought it down with great force on the edge of the plate and tipped the eggs right into his lap. He still continued talking and when the waitress came to him all he said was: ‘Will you please bring me two more poached eggs—I seem to have lost the others.’
At the party celebrating her engagement to Waldo d’Avigdor, she discovered Chesterton in a distant corner of the house talking rapidly and walking up and down. She went up to him to say good night and found her sister sound asleep behind him. She had got bored with arguing and fallen asleep, but Chesterton continued perfectly happily, answering all his own questions. ‘You had to be careful not to give him an opening if you didn’t want him to talk. A chance remark would set him off for half an hour.’52 Neither of these two stories necessarily suggests anything like cultivated eccentricity. What they do show is the sheer absent-mindedness of a mind totally detached from immediate practicalities and constantly engaged in thought—what Chesterton himself called ‘presence of mind on other things’53—that bore fruit in a phenomenal amount of writing. Nor was there anything new about Chesterton’s extraordinary absent-mindedness: he had been noted for it even while still a schoolboy at St Paul’s, when he could scarcely have been accused of cultivating an image for publicity purposes. His insouciance about taxis was only an aspect of his absent-mindedness. As for his dress, Frances had merely chosen a simple costume that was likely to cause the least problems, as well as to accommodate his enormous size.54 The only deliberate eccentricity was the sword-stick that symbolized adventure and romance. But it was there for its wearer’s own boyish satisfaction, not to create a particular image. The charge made by Robert Blatchford, soon to be one of his most significant opponents in controversy, that Chesterton was ‘an actor’ who ‘played a part, and dressed for a part’ has been supported by one of his later biographers, who even alleges that his absent-mindedness and appearance were ‘a publicity device’, adopted ‘at the instigation of Frances’ so far as his dress was concerned.55 But such a deliberate self-seeking strategy would have been completely repugnant to the devoutly Anglican Frances and totally inconsistent with her dislike of publicity.56
No one can claim that Chesterton’s drinking habits were a cultivated eccentricity. Heavy drinking in the bars of Fleet Street went with the job. ‘Keith’ Jones herself, though a woman, joined in the drinking of her fellow male journalists. Chesterton would sit for hours in a wine bar opposite the Daily News with a bottle of burgundy.57 His brother Cecil described how he would ‘pour out conversation to anybody who happens be about. He talks, especially in argument, with powerful voice and gesture. He laughs at his own jokes loud
ly and with quite unaffected enjoyment.’ The brother noticed too how he would ‘take a cab halfway up a street, keep it waiting for an hour or so, and then drive halfway down the street again’. On one occasion, Cecil related, his brother met a friend in a bookshop opposite the Law Courts at one end of Fleet Street. A waiting cab then took them to a pub a few doors down, where they ordered a bottle of wine and talked for three-quarters of an hour while the cab waited. Finally, the cab took Chesterton to his destination, an office a few yards in the other direction, when the driver was probably given at least twice the proper fare.58
Not surprisingly, Chesterton’s absent-mindedness included forgetting engagements. One evening in El Vino, ‘Keith’ Jones remembered him suddenly musing, ‘I oughtn’t to be here, I’m supposed to be speaking to the Literary Society at Bletchley—I should be speaking now!’ Even then there was time to order another glass of port. ‘Keith’ and Cecil hurried with him in a cab to Conrad Noel’s, the clergyman who had married him and Frances, where he was staying. On emerging from the bedroom he was sharing with Noel, he appeared wearing an evening dress coat far too small but without the trousers; he was still wearing the brown tweed plus fours in which he had entered the bedroom. Clearly, Chesterton explained, ‘some strange magic had been at work’: ‘Perhaps the Mesopotamian deacon staying at the flat had put a spell on him.’ Certainly, he had donned or attempted to don the required evening dress laid out on the bed he was sleeping on. Refusing to change again, he left in his cab for Bletchley. The return of Conrad Noel, who also needed to change into evening dress, revealed all: the wrong evening dress had been laid on the wrong bed.59 In his Autobiography Chesterton had a less bizarre version of the story: that he had merely made the excusable error of mistaking Noel’s black clerical trousers for his own evening trousers.60 Constantly writing not only in pubs with a bottle of Burgundy (his favourite drink) beside him, but also in cabs, buses, trains, and in the street, he was constantly preoccupied—‘He was always working out something in his mind’61—with the inevitable result that appointments were not kept—‘and he frequently wrote to explain why he had failed to turn up’. He was certainly capable of eccentric behaviour that was without doubt beyond the imagination and invention of man—or of his own acting capabilities: ‘Once he called on a publisher at the exact hour agreed upon, but he spoilt the effect by handing the man a letter explaining elaborately why he could not keep the appointment.’62 Indeed, his readiness to risk his life does not immediately suggest contrived eccentricity: ‘I have seen the traffic of Ludgate Circus held up for him, as he strolled by in cloak and sombrero like a brigand of Adelphi drama or a Spanish hidalgo by Velasquez, oblivious alike of critical bus-driver and wonder-struck multitude.’63 And yet, in spite of his being ‘apparently oblivious of everything that passed before him’, his future secretary Dorothy Collins noticed, ‘really he was a much closer observer than most, and remembered what he had seen and what he had read’. But his memory was certainly not visual: ‘He always remembered what he had seen and those with whom he had talked, not so much by their faces as by their minds—for that is how he saw people.’64
4
In September 1902 Chesterton became involved in a controversy in the letters column of the Daily News. The Balfour government’s educational bill, which abolished independent school boards and replaced them with municipal local-education authorities, was before parliament. Nonconformists opposed the bill, as the new educational system would include Church of England and Roman Catholic elementary schools, which would now be subsidized by local taxes. The opposition was led by a Dr Clifford, a Baptist minister of extreme Protestant views. Liberals like Chesterton opposed the bill because it violated ‘an elementary liberal principle in not equalising contribution and control’—that is to say, he did not think it fair that the ordinary tax-payer should be required to pay for exclusively church schools. Nevertheless, Chesterton vehemently opposed any opposition on religious grounds. Attacking the ‘No Popery Cry’ of Clifford, he urged his party to attack the bill as Liberals, ‘without binding the living body of Liberalism to the slimy corpse of the Protestant Truth Society’. He wrote to Clifford to remind him how they had stood together against popular jingoism at the time of the Boer War, and now Clifford should not be exploiting the ‘No Popery’ cry: in this they should show their superiority to the Conservatives by not resorting to ‘an old, an effectual, an infallible, and a filthy weapon’. However, he also saw that the Liberal ‘compromise’ of compulsory Bible teaching in all state schools was in fact ‘in favour of the Protestant view of the Bible’, as it implied that Christian belief is derived from the Bible rather than the Church.65
Chesterton’s second book of selected journalism was published in October 1902. Twelve Types consisted of articles from the Speaker, the Daily News, and one from the Literary Gazette, with some revisions and additions. The majority of the pieces were literary, not surprisingly, since, although the pieces collected in The Defendant were articles of a general nature rather than book reviews, such articles counted for considerably less than half of his contributions to the Speaker, and when he began writing for the Daily News he wrote almost entirely for the books page.66 As in the articles collected in The Defendant, so too in the pieces that comprise Twelve Types we find already in Chesterton’s early journalism many of his central ideas to which he would return time and time again in his writings. The twelve essays are about one woman and eleven men, mostly writers, who make up the ‘types’ referred to in the title of the book. A third of them, all writers, are Victorians, a foretaste of Chesterton’s writings about Victorian literature, which ought to have won him a place among the great literary critics.
The opening essay on Charlotte Bronte states a paradox pertinent to Chesterton’s gospel of wonder. The Bronte novel, we are told, stands for ‘a certain most important truth about the enduring spirit of youth, the truth of the near kinship between terror and joy’. As ‘the epic of the exhilaration of the shy man’, it shows how fear is ‘one of the eternal ingredients of joy’. For joy to be reverent, the presence of fear is necessary. The Brontë heroine ‘approaches the universe … with real fear and delight’, for she is ‘shy before the multitude of the stars’, so that her joyful wonder at the universe is not ‘as black and barren as routine’. The Charlotte Brontë heroine was only a ‘shabby and inconspicuous governess’; she was not a ‘dark wild’ heroine of the ‘dark wild Yorkshire’ of the Brontës. For her emotions were ‘universal emotions, emotions of the morning of existence, the springtide joy and the springtide terror’. They were emotions, Chesterton insists, that can be felt even in the suburbs. Yes, he agrees with the intellectuals, ‘the branches of the great city’ are so ‘endless’ that there are ‘times when we are almost stricken crazy … by the multiplicity of those appalling perspectives, the frantic arithmetic of that unthinkable population’. But to dismiss all these countless people as simply ‘the masses’ is ‘nothing but a fancy’. The truth is that there is no such thing as ‘the masses’, Chesterton passionately insists, contrary to the dogmatic assumption of virtually every contemporary writer: ‘There are no chains of houses; there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses is an illusion … Each of these men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of these houses stands in the centre of the world.’67
The ‘elaborate and deliberate ugliness’ of the Victorians is another regular Chestertonian theme. How was it possible ‘to account for the clinging curse of ugliness which blights everything brought forth by the most prosperous of centuries’? How could a cultivated and educated man wish ‘by a farcical bathos’ to ‘be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat’? Could ‘all created nature’ show ‘anything so completely ugly as a pillar-box’? And there was ‘no reason whatever why such hideousness should possess an object full of civic dignity, the treasure-house of a thousand secrets, the fortress of a thousand souls’. Against all this ugliness stood William
Morris, who in reaction held up ‘for practical imitation the costumes and handicrafts of the Middle Ages’. But literal imitation was as far as Morris went. He failed to see that the costumes and handicrafts of medieval people ‘sprang honestly and naturally out of the life they led and preferred to lead’. And yet Morris should have seen the point. For—and this another perennial theme in Chesterton—‘Of all the various works he performed, none, perhaps, was so splendidly and solidly valuable as his great protest for the fables and superstitions of mankind. He has the supreme credit of showing that the fairy-tales contain the deepest truth of the earth, the real record of men’s feelings for things.’ And no fairy tale contained ‘so vital a moral truth’ as the story of Beauty and the Beast, which teaches ‘the eternal and essential truth that until we love a thing in all its ugliness we cannot make it beautiful’. That was where Morris failed: ‘he sought to reform modern life’, but ‘he hated modern life instead of loving it’. The trouble was that Morris was too close to the nineteenth century to appreciate its ‘fascination’; modern London was indeed ‘a beast, big enough and black enough to be the beast in Apocalypse, blazing with a million eyes, and roaring with a million voices’—but unless one loved ‘this fabulous monster’, one could not ‘change the beast into the fairy princess’. Morris could create beautiful things, but he was incapable of making ‘modern things … beautiful’, for ‘he had not the supreme courage to face the ugliness of things’.68