G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  There was no question of Chesterton underestimating the arduous nature of playing with children. It was, he explained in his column in the Daily News, totally absorbing of one’s energies, as serious a business as playing with toys such as toy theatres. Playing with children was in Chesterton’s view a glorious thing’—but hardly a soothing or idyllic one’. It was not like ‘watering little budding flowers’ but like ‘wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils’. One was confronted constantly by moral problems ‘of the most monstrous complexity’. For instance, one might have

  to decide before the awful eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother’s bricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on the sister’s picture-book, and whether such conduct does not justify the sister in blowing out the brother’s unlawfully lit match.

  But just as he was solving this problem upon principles of the highest morality’, he would suddenly remember that he had not yet written his Saturday column for the Daily News, which was due in an hour’s time. Barricading himself in another room with the children drumming on the door, he manages to produce ‘fifteen hundred unimportant words’, before turning his attention to the enigma of whether a brother should commandeer a sister’s necklace because the sister pinched him…’.45

  Chesterton had the same sort of effect on adults as on children. When you talked with him, you did not feel ‘how brilliant he was but how brilliant you were’. And he thought nothing of his own writings: ‘He seemed to regard what he wrote as ephemeral, as ephemeral as speech. It was an accident that what he said, when transferred to the typewriter and delivered to the publisher, constituted a livelihood.’ His attitude was that everybody had to make a living somehow and his ‘trade’ unfortunately happened to be ‘words’. His nephew Peter Oldershaw remembered how amazed Chesterton was that his poem ‘The Donkey’ was constantly being reprinted, ‘as if some idle jest were now being bandied about ad nauseam’. When he heard that someone was being given a copy of his collected poems as a wedding present, he ‘cried “Good Lord! What has the poor girl done to deserve that?” in whole-hearted wonder.’46 The Chestertons’ closest Beaconsfield friends in the early days were the rector and his wife and the doctor and his wife. The doctor found him a difficult patient because of his ‘detachment from his own physical circumstances. If there was anything wrong with him he usually did not notice it. “He was the most uncomplaining person. You had to hunt him all over” to find out if anything was wrong.’ The doctor’s wife remembered how he would come back from a dinner with Beaconsfield tradesmen, fascinated by what he had heard and anxious to share the news.47 Chesterton’s neglect of his health is well exemplified by the tiny pince-nez he wore (two pairs survive), both of which are virtually just plain glass; he would naturally have preferred to patronize a local high-street optician in Beaconsfield to going to the trouble of consulting a specialist in London.48

  It was not only educated people who were made to feel on the same intellectual level as Chesterton. One of the barbers in Beaconsfield who shaved him—he was never able to shave himself—remembered how he could always bring himself down to their level and was always ready to argue with anyone. He was too shy to talk when other people were in the barber’s shop, but if there was no one else there and he was asked a question, ‘it was like rich cream pouring out’. The head barber’s wife was an invalid, and Chesterton never came to the shop without asking after her. Abstracted as he was in thought, he would always stand and raise his hat if a woman came in. He would sit patiently in the queue waiting his turn in the shop, until, that is, Dorothy Collins had the bright idea of getting the barber to come to the house. One day when the assistant barber was cutting Chesterton’s hair at the house, Frances, who took a keen interest in its cutting, was suggesting ‘a bit off here and a bit off there’, when the barber ‘caught hold of her hand and patted it and said: “Make up your mind, old girl.”’ As Beaconsfield expanded, another barber’s shop was established in what came to be known as New (as opposed to Old) Beaconsfield. Barbers and hairdressers are famous for their conversational resources, and Chesterton later thought of writing ‘a massive and exhaustive sociological work, in several volumes, which was to be called “The Two Barbers of Beaconsfield” and based entirely upon the talk of the two excellent citizens to whom I went to get shaved. For these two shops do indeed belong to two different civilisations.’ The hairdresser in the new town belonged to ‘the new world’ and had ‘the spotlessness of the specialist’, while the one in the old town had ‘what may be called the ambidexterity of the peasant, shaving… with one hand while he stuffs squirrels or sells tobacco with the other’. ‘The latter tells me from his own recollection what happened in Old Beaconsfield; the former, or his assistants, tell me from the Daily Mail what has not happened in a wider world.’ Chesterton also had a taxi-driver, whose first arduous task was to try and get his massive frame into the car, no easy feat. The return journey from London would pose an immediate hazard, because Chesterton could never remember where the car was waiting for him. Interestingly, his driver later said that he knew that Chesterton would become a Roman Catholic one day, because he would always tell him to stop if he saw a Catholic church: ‘He liked to look at RC churches and go in and stroll about. Not for services… but just at any time. There was one church where we often stopped between Waterloo and Charing Cross.’49

  Father O’Connor, who was a frequent visitor to the house, was struck like others by the abstracted way Chesterton moved and spoke, but it was the opposite of ‘mooning’: ‘He was always working out something in his mind, and when he drifted from his study to the garden and was seen making deadly passes with his sword-stick at the dahlias, we knew that he had got to a dead end in his composition and was getting his thoughts into order.’ This abstraction could get in the way of the exquisite courtesy that ‘was with him both a passion and a principle’, if he was ‘late in tumbling to the situation’. But it was always ‘a new thrill’ for O’Connor to watch ‘the vast mass of G.K.C. nimbly mobilising itself to make room or place a chair or get out of the way’. Apart from his sword-stick he liked to play with a very large knife that he had had for years, even taking it to bed with him! When they were staying at a hotel this habit required Frances to remove the offending knife from under the pillow ‘for fear of complications’. He was observed once sharpening a pencil with it at a lecture to the amused astonishment of the audience. O’Connor immediately knew when a book had been read by Chesterton because it ‘had gone through every indignity’ a book could endure: ‘He turned it inside out, dog-eared it, pencilled it, sat on it, took it to bed and rolled on it, and got up again and spilled tea on it—if he were sufficiently interested.’ He remembered the sad case of a pamphlet on ‘the Roman Menace by a Dr Horton—it ‘had a refuted look when I saw it’. Like Frances, O’Connor wanted Chesterton to give up the journalist treadmill for purely literary work. This made sense if, like O’Connor and other contemporary and later admirers, you thought Chesterton’s greatness lay in his poetry and novels; but it did not make so much sense if Chesterton’s real greatness lies in his non-fiction prose works, into which the journalism fed, not just in the books of collected articles but also in terms of working out the ideas that would go into the books. Anyway Frances knew it was hopeless: ‘You will not change Gilbert, you will only fidget him. He is bent on being a jolly journalist, to paint the town red, and he does not need style to do that. All he wants is buckets and buckets of red paint.’ According to O’Connor, Chesterton did his ‘best work’ between ten and midnight, when he would ‘sip a glass of wine’ and ‘stroll between sips in and out of his study, brooding and jotting, and then the dictation was ready for the morning’.50

  There was one thing that could ruffle Chesterton’s geniality. His jokes about his size were at least in part defensive, for he was sensitive about it, as O’Connor discovered one eve
ning. The ‘little triangular house’ that was Overroads, as Maisie Ward recalled it, did not provide enough room for ‘the sort of fun the Chestertons enjoyed’; so in November 1911 they bought the field across the road and had a brick-and-timber studio built on it. The night the studio was opened, there was ‘a large party at which charades were acted’. Returning to the house, O’Connor offered his arm to Chesterton, who ‘refused it with a finality foreign to our friendship’. Ten yards behind O’Connor, Chesterton fell over a tree-pot and broke his arm, a few minutes before midnight; the result was six weeks in bed. Another friend remembered ‘the only time when he saw Chesterton annoyed was when he offered him an arm going upstairs’.51

  Friends visited from London, as did Belloc from Sussex. But more often meetings would take place in London. There was a regular train service from Beaconsfield to Marylebone Station, where Chesterton became a familiar figure, with his black bag containing a bottle of wine. Train times were, unsurprisingly, beyond him, but when Frances expressed her surprise at his ignorance of the timetable, he responded, ‘My dear, I couldn’t earn our daily bread if I had to study timetables.’ Then there were the lecture engagements, at one of which in December 1909 a lady remarked, ‘You seem to know everything.’ On the contrary, Chesterton retorted, ‘I know nothing, Madam, I am a journalist.’52 And there is the even more famous reply that he gave to an elderly lady after a debate at which various racial characteristics were discussed, who asked ‘with something of a simper, “Mr Chesterton, I wonder if you could tell what race I belong to?” With a characteristic adjustment of his glasses he replied at once, “I should certainly say, Madam, one of the conquering races.”’53

  There were also the visits to the parental home in Kensington, where his mother laid on her usual lavish meals. According to ‘Keith’ Jones, these visits undermined Frances’s efforts to get her husband to lose weight. Knowing better than the Edwardians the dire effects of obesity on health, a modern reader will view these efforts rather differently from ‘Keith’, who scornfully presents them as stemming solely from Frances’s Puritanism: ‘She did not like food, except cakes, chocolate and similar flim-flams, and her appreciation of liquor stopped short at tea. She was not in sympathy with Gilbert’s masculine taste for succulent dishes and drink—especially drink—and would have liked it better had he consumed appreciably less of both.’ She contrasted the Beaconsfield regime where Chesterton ‘ate Spartan fare—or tried to eat it—washing it down with restricted claret, quite unconscious and uncritical’, with the maternal table at Warwick Gardens, which ‘groaned with salmon, veal cutlet, cream meringues, all the things of which Gilbert was most fond, with lashings of Burgundy and crême de menthe’. While his mother heaped up his plate, his wife, not surprisingly perhaps, ‘looked on, concerned and really unhappy’. Interestingly, ‘Keith’ admitted that the battle to cut down on her husband’s enormous consumption continued ‘silent and unceasing’ only until Frances herself became a Roman Catholic: ‘Then, by some miraculous intervention, she accepted food—for others if not for herself—as desirable, and though the cooking at Beacons-field, to my mind, was execrable, salt beef appeared less frequently, and was of a milder flavour. Moreover, the supply of claret expanded.’54 Perhaps, however, there was a less supernatural reason why the food improved: the retirement of their cook, aged 75, whom Chesterton and Frances had decided to keep on even when she reached her seventies for as long as she wanted to stay. How ‘dull’ the meals were, one guest remembered, ‘roast and boiled, boiled and roast, with potatoes day in and day out, and usually rice pudding’.55

  Frances may not have been able to win the dietary battle with Mrs Chesterton senior, but one battle she did win with great ease, according to ‘Keith’, was over the question of money. Frances naturally needed to be sure that there was money in the bank to pay for the housekeeping, and, given her husband’s total lack of any money sense, she proposed that

  she should take over the business of paying his cheques in and drawing them out, and be wholly responsible for the settlement of bills. Gilbert agreed like a bird, blithely signing the necessary documents for the bank and discovered that he had made over his rights to every penny of his earning and was a pensioner on his own bounty.

  In fact, this is an exaggeration of what was true—namely, that Frances did take over the practical administration of cash and the paying of bills. It was agreed between them that he should handle only small sums of money, in effect pocket money. As Belloc put it, ‘he spent money like water’—not least on beggars, whom he was incapable of refusing. Any expenses he had that could not be covered by his pocket money could be settled on account at places where he was likely to want to spend money. But so far as was possible Frances herself bought whatever he was likely to want, anticipating as best she could all his needs, with ‘loving care’ in the words of Father O’Connor.56 But nevertheless Chesterton remained the sole signatory on his bank account, and when later he paid money into the accounts of the New Witness and G.K.’s Weekly he certainly required neither Frances’s signature on the cheques nor her approval in the form of a counter-signature.57 If ‘Keith’ was right that Chesterton was freed of certain practical financial responsibilities and was given the equivalent of an agreed allowance (from the money, of course, that he drew from the bank by means of cheques signed by him), then there was no doubt a drawback: what if the allowance did not cover unexpected expenses? ‘Keith’ remembered one particular occasion at a lunch at Chesterton’s parents. Chesterton was to meet a publisher later at his club, the National Liberal, but he did not have enough money to entertain his guest. The standard allowance was apparently half-a-crown; but that was not enough, nor was the extra shilling that Frances produced. Thereupon the parents withdrew from this domestic scene, accompanied by ‘Keith’. It was, she said, the only time that she remembered Mr Ed ever expressing any criticism of Frances, ‘for whom he had a great affection and esteem’, considering her to be ‘a most desirable check on Gilbert’s irresponsibility’. “‘Frances should not argue about money before us,” he said gravely. “After all, it is Gilbert’s money, and he has a right to what is just. I wish they would come to some sort of satisfactory arrangement.”’ ‘Keith’ thought the half-a-crown restriction was most acutely felt by Chesterton on return visits to Fleet Street when it was his turn to buy the round—when, ‘with an expansive gesture of his beautiful hand, he would look round—one could feel the words of invitation hovering on his lips—until remembering that he had no money, his hand fell, almost wounded’. But, according to ‘Keith’, he never complained and remained totally loyal to his wife.58 However, the truth is that he must surely have agreed with Frances the amount of his ‘allowance’.

  5

  In January 1910 a general election was called after the House of Lords had rejected the Liberal government’s budget. Speaking on behalf of the Liberal candidate for Beaconsfield, Chesterton argued that Conservatism was self-contradictory: if you wanted to keep things as they were, the only way to do that was to change them, as, for example, in the case of wanting a white shirt it was necessary to wash or even replace the shirt from time to time. Belloc retained his seat, but Chesterton’s friend Charles Masterman, who had been a Cabinet minister, lost his, partly because of the bitter attacks on his integrity by Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, who accused him of betraying his liberal principles to become a member of the government—much to the distress of Cecil’s brother, who knew that Masterman had gone into politics from ‘noble bitterness on behalf of the poor’.59

  In February another novel, The Ball and the Cross, was published—although the first eight chapters had in fact been published already serially between March 1905 and November 1906 in the Commonwealth.60 As in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, there are two protagonists, both Scotsmen, the emotional Catholic Highlander Evan MacIan and the cerebral atheist Lowlander James Turnbull. Diametrically opposed in politics, too, MacIan being a monarchist and Turnbull a Socialist, they nevertheless are bo
th democrats, believers in the individual’s rights and without any of the contemporary intellectuals’ contempt for the masses. They are also, more importantly, at one in taking religion seriously. Their attempt to fight a duel over an article displayed in the window of the editorial office of ‘The Atheist’, edited by Turnbull, which MacIan denounces as a blasphemy against the Virgin Mary, is constantly frustrated by a society that, unlike MacIan and Turnbull, is indifferent to whether religion is true or not, and that eventually confines them to a lunatic asylum. ‘Religion is—a—too personal a matter to be mentioned in such a place,’ the magistrate angrily informs MacIan when he is brought to court for smashing Turnbull’s window. One ‘peacemaker’ the two protagonists encounter, who urges, ‘we won’t quarrel about a word,’ is informed by MacIan: ‘The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only things worth fighting about.’ The ‘peacemaker’, who is a pacifist disciple of Tolstoy, urges the Christian ‘principle of love’ against the prospect of a duel, to which MacIan’s harsh response is: