G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  The contract Chesterton had signed was ‘monstrous’: ‘I tell you these things calmly: but my feelings would prompt me to write them in blood across the heavens.’41 There is an undated letter urging Chesterton to support the Society of Authors (‘your trade union’), on one of whose ‘two big committees’ Shaw was

  one of the unhappy slaves who … drudge at the heart-breaking work of defending our miserable profession against being devoured, body and soul, by the publishers—themselves a pitiful gang of literature-struck impostors who are crumpled up by the booksellers, who, though small folk, are at least in contact with reality in the shape of the book buyer.

  ‘It is a ghastly and infuriating business, because the authors will go to lunch with their publishers and sell them anything for £20 over the cigarettes, but it has to be done; and I, with half a dozen others, have to do it.’ Shaw, who had missed the last committee meeting, had now heard from ‘the harassed secretary’ that it had been ‘decided to take proceedings in the case of a book of yours which you (oh Esau, Esau!) sold to John Lane (John is a—well!—no matter: when you take your turn on the committee you will find him out)’. But apparently everything was ‘hung up’ because Chesterton had failed to reply to letters sent to him by the Society’s barrister, Herbert Thring. Shaw reminded Chesterton of his ‘obligations to us wretched committee men’ that were ‘simply incalculable’: ‘We get nothing but abuse and denigration: authors weep with indignation when we put our foot on some blood-sucking, widow-cheating, orphan starving [sic] scoundrel and ruthlessly force him to keep to his mite of obligation under an agreement which would have revolted Shylock… We get nothing and spend our time like water for you.’ Shaw ended his plea to Chesterton:

  All we ask you to do is to answer Thring and let us get along with your work.

  Look here: will you write to Thring

  Please write to Thring

  I say: have you written to Thring yet?42

  There is also an undated letter from Chesterton, which would have infuriated Shaw, to Chesterton’s agents, A. P. Watt & Son, written from the Battersea flat, in which he wonders at the ‘prices’ the agents had obtained for his books, ‘compared with what I used weakly to demand’, which ‘seem to me to come out of fairyland’:

  It seems to me there is a genuine business problem which creates a permanent need for a literary agent. It consists in this—that our work, even when it has become entirely a duty and a worry, still remains in some vague way a pleasure. And how can we put a fair price on what is at once a worry and a pleasure?43

  On the evening of 7 January 1914, Chesterton presided at the King’s Hall, King Street, Covent Garden, as judge at the mock trial of John Jasper for the murder of Edwin Drood, after whom Dickens’s unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, is named. The trial had attracted ‘so much interest’ that it had had to be moved to ‘a more capacious place for its enactment’, the Dickensian, the Dickens Fellowship’s magazine, announced. The counsel for the defence was Cecil Chesterton and the jury included W. W. Jacobs and Hilaire Belloc, with Shaw as foreman. The unsolved mystery apparently fascinated Cecil, who believed that the hero had not really been murdered at all and who knew great chunks of the novel off by heart. The mock trial was a charity event in aid of some of the grandchildren of the great novelist who were living in poverty, organized by the Dickens Fellowship, of which both Chesterton brothers were members. The trial was given extensive publicity by the press and tickets were soon sold out. ‘Keith’ Jones, who played Princess Puffer, thought that Evelyn Waugh’s father, who played Canon Crisparkle, was the most impressive member of the cast. There was standing room only in the King’s Hall, which was filled to more than capacity, beyond what was permitted by law. But the performance ended with an anti-climax: according to ‘Keith’, remembering the event many years later, after the judge’s witty and penetrating summing-up, as the jury was about to retire to consider their verdict, Shaw, as foreman of the jury, rose to object that nobody knew what Dickens’s intention had been and that it would be presumptuous to try and second-guess him. But, according to the contemporary report in the Dickensian, which was disgusted with the ‘outrage’, Shaw, who ‘was the one man in the building who was not in serious mood’, with his usual ‘impishness’, ‘spoiled’ everything by jumping up before the jury could consider its verdict and announcing that the jury had decided during their lunch break and that it was one of manslaughter. However, Shaw did not have the last word, for the judge then committed everyone but himself to prison for contempt of court. It was now midnight.44

  On 22 January 1914 Chesterton’s next novel, The Flying Inn, was published. Humphrey Pump, the dispossessed landlord of The Old Ship, succeeds in evading Lord Ivywood’s Islamic prohibition regulations by simply moving the inn’s sign round the country and serving his customers wherever he parks the sign. Chesterton could hardly have predicted the mass Muslim immigration into Europe, and not least England, of the late twentieth century which makes the novel uncannily prophetic in its satire of multiculturalism and political correctness. For example, Lord Ivywood wants Muslims in Britain to be able to vote differently from the rest of the population:

  If we are to give Moslem Britain representative government, we… must not ask them to make a cross on their ballot papers; for though it seems a small thing, it may offend them. So I brought in a little bill to make it optional between the old-fashioned cross and an upward curved mark that might stand for a crescent—and as it’s rather easier to make, I believe it will be generally adopted.

  However, Ivywood is more than just a multiculturist, for he sees in Islam a valuable if improbable ally in the contemporary prohibition campaign, invoking the religious pluralism that was already becoming fashionable in the early part of the twentieth century:

  Ours is an age when men come more and more to see that the creeds hold treasures for each other, that each religion has a secret for its neighbour, that faith unto faith uttereth speech and church unto church showeth knowledge.… we of the West have brought some light to Islam in the matter of preciousness of peace and of civil order, may we not say that Islam, in answer, shall give us peace in a thousand homes, and encourage us to cut down the curse that has done so much to thwart and madden the virtues of Western Christendom?… Already the legislature takes more and more sweeping action to deliver the populace from the bondage of the all-destroying drug.

  Ivywood claims that prohibition is intended ‘to protect the savings of the more humble and necessitous classes’. But of course it does not apply to the rich, who can continue to enjoy drinking champagne in their homes, while the public houses of the poor are closed. Like the intellectuals of the day, Ivywood believes in the inevitability of progress, and here too Islam is seen as an ally, for ‘the principle of the Crescent’ seems to him ‘the principle of perpetual growth towards an implied and infinite perfection’. Indeed, he believes that ‘Islam has in it the potentialities of being the most progressive of all religions’. As an admirer, too, of Nietzsche, Ivywood admires the oriental ‘love of fate’. As for the Muslim view of women, that he pronounces is somehow ‘too simple and solid for our paradoxical Christendom to understand’, with its belief in the individual woman rather than simply ‘Womanhood’. Like the typical intellectual of the time, Ivywood cares not for human beings but for Humanity, just as he cares not for dogs but ‘the Cause of Dogs, of course’. And naturally, Ivywood embraces ‘eastern Vegetarianism’. But Ivywood is most fundamentally oriental in believing that ‘everything lives by turning into something else’ as no ‘limit is set upon living things’, as opposed to the Western idea that the ‘prime fact of identity is the limit set on all living things’.45

  The most memorable part of The Flying Inn for most readers will be the verses reprinted from the New Witness, which had appeared there under the heading ‘Songs of the Simple Life’, together with three new songs. They include not only the ‘Song of Strange Drinks’, but also well-known poems like ‘The Rolli
ng English Road’ with its famous line ‘The rolling English Drunkard made the rolling English Road’—which had originally been entitled ‘A Song of Temperance Reform’. In August 1915 the ‘songs’ were again reprinted, but with the addition of one poem that had also been originally published in the New Witness but not included in The Flying Inn, under the title of Wine, Water and Song.

  On 28 January 1914 Chesterton and Frances travelled down to Sussex to see Elodie Belloc, who was seriously ill and died a couple of weeks later. ‘Keith’ Jones thought Elodie was the most attractive woman she had ever known; Cecil Chesterton adored her. According to ‘Keith’, after Chesterton had been exiled to Beaconsfield by Frances, Cecil was rarely able to arrange a meeting with his brother there. Telephoning was of little avail, as Chesterton hated the instrument, and the maid who answered would invariably say that ‘the great man could not be disturbed, and would they ring again when he might be less busy’. Only Belloc, according to her, was able to run ‘the blockade’; he would insist on speaking directly to Frances, whom he would inform at what time he proposed to call, at the same time demanding: ‘Have you any beer? If not, I’ll bring some with me.’ Once Cecil told Elodie that he had not seen his brother for over a month:

  Elodie sighed. ‘Poor Gilbert!’ She leaned forward with an expressive gesture of her little hands. ‘I’m very sorry for Frances. It would distress her terribly if she knew how this—this ban hurt him.’..’. ‘Why on earth does Gilbert stand it?’ asked Cecil in an unusual burst of irritability. ‘He loves her,’ said Elodie with eloquent simplicity.… ‘But really he should beat her. Hilary would beat me if I behaved like that.’

  Yes, Elodie repeated. ‘Frances would be much better if Gilbert could beat her.’ But sadly to ‘Keith’, ‘the thought of Gilbert laying about Frances with a stick, though impiously joyful, was incredible’.46 Perhaps Chesterton was less unhappy in his exile than his brother and friends supposed—who after all had not chosen to marry Frances. There was, however, one respect in which Elodie, ‘a very charming Californian’, resembled Frances, and that was in their mutual dislike of the cold weather that so appealed to their husbands, as Chesterton recalled in his Autobiography. He remembered one wintry day when Belloc dragged the four of them through Sussex to find the source of the river Arun. They found the half-frozen pool set among ‘a small grove of slender trees, silver with the frost’: ‘But I think the ladies, though both of them sensitive to scenery, looked on that cold paradise with something of a cold eye.’ Nor did Belloc’s ‘remedy of hot rum, in large tumblers at an adjoining inn’ appeal to them: ‘we were puzzled by the fact that the remedy was regarded with almost as much distaste as the disease.’47

  On the night of 2 July 1914 Chesterton attended ‘a cinematograph supper in two acts’ at the Savoy Theatre. The invitation came from J. M. Barrie and Harley Granville Barker. The other guests were prominent members of society and included the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and the former Sir Rufus Isaacs, now Lord Reading, the Lord Chief Justice, as well as Edward Elgar and Yeats. Guests began arriving at 11.30 p.m. As they entered the theatre foyer, they were filmed on camera, and also while they sat for supper at small tables on the stage. After supper, the guests moved to the auditorium and the second act began. This consisted of a series of short revue sketches played by well-known actors and actresses, who were interrupted by members of the audience with obviously pre-arranged gags. The last of these came from Shaw, who rose from his seat, with the film camera pointed at him, and proceeded to deliver a series of witty remarks, while the camera filmed him and the audience. He then explained the point of the theatre supper: ‘You understand, a Scotsman doesn’t give you a supper for nothing.’ They were, he informed them, all ‘supers’ in a revue that Barrie was writing for Granville Barker: ‘You’ll have the pleasure of seeing yourselves—and me—on the film, for I’m working tonight for a greater dramatist than myself.’ Then, according to the New York Times report, ‘Seizing a property sword, Shaw brandished it, crying, “Who’ll follow me?” Chesterton and Barker cried, “I will follow!” and charged the stage. Then the curtain fell and the cinematograph machine stopped. The guests filed out, laughing at the realization that they had been “caught”.’48 The Prime Minister may have been less amused: at any rate, a stern letter was sent from 10 Downing Street forbidding his appearance on film.

  Chesterton’s involvement in the film experiments of Barrie, who was fascinated by the new art form, began with a visit from Shaw, who proposed ‘in the heartiest spirits’ that they ‘should appear together, disguised as Cowboys, in a film of some sort projected by Sir James Barrie’. What the purpose of this film was nobody ever discovered—and ‘even Barrie had rather the appearance of concealing his secret from himself’. All that Chesterton could discover was that ‘two other well-known persons, Lord Howard de Walden and Mr William Archer, the grave Scottish critic and translator of Ibsen, had also consented to be Cowboys’. “‘Well”, I said, after a somewhat blank pause of reflection, “God forbid that anyone should say I did not see a joke, if William Archer could see it.” Then after a pause I asked, “But what is the joke?” Shaw replied with hilarious vagueness that nobody knew what the joke was. That was the joke.’ Invited to a supper at the Savoy Theatre in order to ‘talk things over’ with Barrie and Granville Barker, Chesterton was expecting only a small party there, but instead he found the stage crowded with ‘nearly everybody in London, as the Society papers say when they mean everybody in Society’. Barrie made himself ‘almost completely invisible’. Towards the end of the supper, Elgar ‘casually remarked’ to Frances, ‘I suppose you know you’re being filmed all the time.’ But, while some of the company were ‘throwing bread about and showing marked relaxation from the cares of State’, it was ‘unlikely that she was brandishing a champagne-bottle or otherwise attracting social attention’. Meanwhile, ‘the Original Four, whom destiny had selected for a wild western life’, were privately given their instructions. When the company had left the stage for the auditorium, Shaw ‘harangued them in a furious speech, with savage gesticulations denouncing Barker and Barrie and finally drawing an enormous sword. The other three of us rose at this signal, also brandishing swords, and stormed the stage, going out through the back scenery.’ Then ‘the Original Four’ disappeared ‘for ever from the record and reasonable understanding of mankind; for never from that day to this has the faintest light been thrown on the reasons of our remarkable behaviour’. Immediately after this memorable theatre supper Chesterton says he received ‘a friendly and apologetic note’ from Barrie, ‘saying that the whole scheme was going to be dropped’.49 Chesterton’s account, written a couple of decades after the event, which omits in particular Shaw’s joke about the parsimony of Scotsmen, differs a little from that of the contemporary report in the New York Times, which was presumably more accurate.

  The note from Barrie to which Chesterton refers cannot have been sent immediately after the supper, since ‘the whole scheme’ was in two parts, of which the Savoy Theatre farce was only the first part. For ‘the Original Four’ had an appointment to make yet another appearance, ‘in a sort of abandoned brickfield somewhere in the wilds of Essex; in which spot, it was alleged, our cowpunching costumes were already concealed’. On the second of these two ‘melodramatic assignments’ their ‘Wild West equipment’ was duly found in ‘the waste land in Essex’; but much indignation was felt against Archer, ‘who, with true Scottish foresight, arrived there first and put on the best pair of trousers’: ‘They were indeed a magnificent pair of fur trousers; while the other three riders of the prairie had to be content with canvas trousers.’ This ‘piece of individualism’ on the part of Archer aroused much comment throughout the afternoon proceedings—‘while we were being rolled in barrels, roped over faked precipices and eventually turned loose in a field to lasso wild ponies, which were so tame that they ran after us instead of our running after them, and nosed in our pockets for pieces of sugar’. Again, it was also a fact�
��‘whatever may be the strain on credulity’—that they all got onto the same motor-bicycle, ‘the wheels of which were spun round under us to produce the illusion of hurtling like a thunderbolt down the mountain-pass’.

  When the rest finally vanished over the cliffs clinging to the rope, they left me behind as a necessary weight to secure it; and Granville Barker kept on calling out to me to Register Self-sacrifice and Register Resignation, which I did with such wild and sweeping gestures as occurred to me; not, I am proud to say, without general applause. And all this time Barrie, with his little figure behind his large pipe, was standing about in an impenetrable manner; and nothing could extract from him the faintest indication of why we were being put through these ordeals.… It was as if the smoke that rose from that pipe was a vapour not only of magic, but of black magic.50

  Nor was even that the end of ‘the whole scheme’, as Barrie had promised. Two years later, on 9 June 1916, a silent film was shown as part of a matinée at the London Coliseum in aid of the War Hospital, with the title ‘How Men Love’, featuring the very adventures of ‘the Original Four’ that Chesterton was to describe twenty years later more or less accurately—except that in the film Chesterton was seen to drop the rope, which not even his weight could secure.51 Shaw saw the film and wrote to William Archer on 30 December 1916: ‘It wasnt [sic] in the least funny. Chesterton has possibilities as a comic film actor—or had before his illness spoilt his figure—but the rest of us were dismal failures as amateur Charlie Chaplins. The Savoy supper was the most interesting.’52