by Ian Ker
Apparently some time after their return home, Chesterton wrote in an undated letter to Maurice Baring that he had ‘not forgotten the things we talked of last year; though they have had further complications’, about which he would ‘soon probably have more to tell’ him. But what preoccupied him in this letter was Frances:
For deeper reasons than I could ever explain, my mind has to turn especially on the thought of my wife, whose life has been in many ways a very heroic tragedy; and to whom I am so much in debt of honour that I cannot bear to leave her, even psychologically, if it be possible by fact and sympathy to take her with me. We have had a very difficult time lately; but the other day she rather abruptly faced the thing herself in a new way, and spoke as if she knew where we would both end. But she asked for a little time; as a great friend of hers is also (with the approval of the priest whom she consulted) delaying for the moment till she is more certain. She and Frances want to meet and have it out, I think, and I cannot imagine any way in which Frances is more likely to be moved in that direction than by an Anglican or ex-Anglican friend of exactly that type. Fond as we are of each other, I am just a little too Bellocian already, if you understand me, to effect the precise thing I mean. I only write this to tell you the thing may look rather stationary, and yet it moves.3
In a later undated letter he wrote to say that he intended to call on Baring in the next few days:
I would have called on you long ago, let alone written, but for this load of belated work which really seems to bury me day after day. I never realised before that business can really block out much bigger things. As you may possibly guess, I want to consider my position about the biggest thing of all, whether I am to be inside it or outside it. I used to think one could be an Anglo-Catholic and really inside it; but if that was (to use an excellent phrase of your own) only a Porch, I do not think I want a Porch, and certainly not a Porch standing some way from the building. A Porch looks so silly, standing all by itself in a field. Since then, unfortunately, there have sprung up round it real ties and complications and difficulties; difficulties that seemed almost duties…. Sometimes one suspects the real obstacles have been the weaknesses one knows to be wrong, and not the doubts that might be relatively right, or at least rational. I suppose all this is a common story; and I hope so; for wanting to be uncommon is really not one of my weaknesses…4
As he had written during the war in a notebook, using a different metaphor: ‘Catholicism necessarily feels for Protestantism not the superiority a man feels over sticks and straws, but that he feels over clippings of his hair and nails. She feels Protestantism not merely as something insufficient, but something that would never have been even THAT, but for herself.’5 He wrote again to Baring, most probably in July not long after the event took place, to say that he had ‘had the other day a trying experience, and I think a hard case of casuistry; I am not sure that I was right; but also not by any means sure I was wrong’.
Long ago, before my present crisis, I had promised somebody to take part in what I took to be a small debate on labour. Too late, by my own carelessness, I found to my horror it had swelled into a huge Anglo-Catholic Congress at the Albert Hall. I tried to get out of it, but I was held to my promise. Then I reflected that I could only write (as I was already writing) to my Anglo-Catholic friends on the basis that I was one of them now in doubt about continuing such; and that their conference in some sense served the same purpose as their letters. What affected me most, however, was that by my own fault I had put them into a hole. Otherwise, I would not just now speak from or for their platform, just as I could not (as yet at any rate) speak from or for yours. So I spoke very briefly, saying something of what I think about social ethics. Whether or not my decision was right, my experience was curious and suggestive, though tragic; for I felt it like a farewell. There was no doubt about the enthusiasm of those thousands of Anglo-Catholics. But there was also no doubt, unless I am much mistaken, that many of them besides myself would be Roman Catholics rather than accept things they are quite likely to be asked to accept—for instance, by the Lambeth Conference. For though my own distress, as in most cases I suppose, has much deeper grounds than clerical decisions, yet if I cannot stay where I am, it will be a sort of useful symbol that the English Church has done something decisively Protestant or Pagan. I mean that to those to whom I cannot give my spiritual biography, I can say that the insecurity I felt in Anglicanism was typified in the Lambeth Conference…. A young Anglo-Catholic curate has just told me that the crowd there cheered all references to the Pope, and laughed at every mention of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s a queer state of things. I am concerned most, however, about somebody I value more than the Archbishop of Canterbury; Frances, to whom I owe much of my own faith, and to whom therefore (as far as I can see my way) I also owe every decent chance for the conventional defence of her faith. If her side can convince me, they have a right to do so; if not, I shall go hot and strong to convince her. I put it clumsily, but there is a point in my mind.
‘Logically’, therefore, he ‘must await answers’ to his questions from Father Waggett and Bishop Charles Gore, as well as from Father Ronald Knox, who had been a leading Anglo-Catholic priest before converting to Roman Catholicism in 1917, and Father Vincent McNabb, the well-known Dominican preacher.6 This Anglo-Catholic Congress, where Chesterton was ‘received with enormous enthusiasm’,7 was the first of a number that took place between the two world wars when Anglo-Catholics seemed poised to take control of the Church of England, and took place at the Albert Hall from 29 June to 1 July 1920. Along with Bishop Gore, Chesterton spoke on the Church and social and industrial problems.
At the end of the year, just before leaving for America, he wrote again to Baring ‘the shortest, hastiest and worst written letter in the world’ to say that he had to leave for America: ‘I am glad for I shall see something of Frances, without walls of work between us.’ The brief note concluded: ‘I have pretty well made up my mind about the thing we talked about. Fortunately, the thing we talked about can be found all over the world.’8 Just before leaving, Chesterton had also written one of his ‘rare’ letters to Father O’Connor on Christmas Eve 1920. He asked O’Connor for his prayers, telling him that they were off to America ‘for a month or two’. Chesterton was ‘glad of it, because I shall be at least free from the load of periodical work that has prevented me from talking properly to anybody, even to [Frances]; and I want to talk very much’. When he returned to England, he would ‘probably want to talk’ with O’Connor ‘about very important things—the most important things there are’.
Frances has not been well, and though I think she is better, I have to do things in a considerate way, if you understand me; I feel it is only right to consult also with my Anglo-Catholic friends; but I have at present a feeling that it will be something like a farewell. Things have shaken me up a good deal lately—especially the persecution of Ireland. But of course there are even bigger things than that.9
O’Connor felt that Chesterton was ‘longing to have it out with Frances about his conversion, but his work and her delicate health were his excuses for not satisfying that longing. But it was also, as she had already guessed, his congenital aversion from starting a crisis.’10
2
Two months before the Chestertons were due to leave for America on a lecture tour, tests showed that Frances’s arthritis of the spine had seriously deteriorated. It seemed the trip would have to be cancelled. But Father O’Connor asked for prayers at a crippled children’s home in Vienna, which the couple had helped support financially when Austria was starving after the Treaty of Versailles. After a fortnight Frances’s condition improved, and the tour could go ahead.11
Before leaving for America Chesterton had to go to the American consulate in London to obtain a visa. His experience there told him a great deal about the country he was about to visit for the first time. He was given a form to fill in, a form that was ‘very different from any form I had ever filled u
p in my life’. It was a kind of examination paper. It enquired of the applicant, for example,’ “Are you an anarchist?” to which a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, “What the devil has that to do with you? Are you an anarchist?”…’. Another question was: ‘Are you in favour of subverting the government of the United States by force?’ To this Chesterton was inclined to respond: ‘I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the beginning.’ His ‘inquisitor’ had then enquired, ‘in his more than morbid curiosity’: ‘Are you a polygamist?’ The obvious answer to this was ‘No such luck’—or else ‘Not such a fool’—depending on one’s ‘experience of the other sex’. Among the ‘many things that amused’ Chesterton ‘almost to the point of treating the form’ with disrespect was ‘the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it respectfully’.12
Now it was easy to laugh at such a strange form, and there was no harm in a foreigner doing so, provided he went on to consider ‘the deeper causes that make people so different from him’. The contrast with Chesterton’s experience of travelling in the Middle East was certainly striking. There his papers had been examined by officials of ‘governments which many worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with corsairs and assassins’; but these ‘slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content, in the old liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did not inquire into my thoughts. They held their power as limited to the limitation of practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory.’ What, then, Chesterton remembered asking himself as he stood in the consulate with the examination paper in his hand, is it ‘which makes America peculiar, or which is peculiar to America’? The answer, he realized, was the key to understanding the ‘ultimate idea of what America is—namely, that ‘America is the only country in the world that is founded on a creed’—for the ‘American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed’. Now a creed like the Christian creed was ‘at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the world’, for it brought together the most disparate peoples, while at the same time insisting that they conform to certain beliefs: it was a ‘net’ that drew in all kinds of people but it was ‘a net of a certain pattern, the pattern of Peter the Fisherman’. In a not dissimilar way ‘the great American experiment’ was ‘the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting-pot’. But that melting pot was ‘of a certain shape and a certain substance’: ‘The melting-pot must not melt.’ America invited everyone to become its citizen, but this implied ‘the dogma that that there is such a thing as citizenship’. Before mass immigration into Europe much later in the twentieth century, America did seem to a European ‘incongruous or comic’ in its ‘racial admixtures’, and that was why ‘the American international examination paper’ did seem funny to an Englishman like Chesterton. But that was because England was English and took ‘certain national traditions for granted’. There was no ‘inquisition’ for visitors to its shores because there was no ‘creed’. Where there was a ‘type’, there was no need for a ‘test’. And where there were ‘national types’, the types could be ‘allowed to hold any theories’. But there was no such American type, and so America had to be ‘not only democratic but dogmatic’, both ‘inquisitive’ and ‘intolerant’. For America wanted to make its ‘new citizens patriotic Americans’. This was ‘Americanisation’, ‘the amazing ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu’. As he stood there in the American consulate with the examination paper in his hand, Chesterton realized what it was that made America so different from Europe: ‘We are not trying to Anglicise thousands of French cooks or Italian organ grinders. France is not trying to Gallicize thousands of English trippers or German prisoners of war.’ The American visa application form was indeed ‘abnormal’, but then America was abnormal in its ‘experiment of a home for the homeless’. It was indeed an ‘asylum’—but, added Chesterton, writing down what he had felt that day in the consulate, it was ‘only since Prohibition that it has looked a little like a lunatic asylum’. Before leaving for America, Chesterton at least understood, unlike his fellow countrymen, that America was far from being ‘a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony, knowing that it was more and more thronged with crowds of very different colonists’. In that sense, it was closer to Europe than England, and during the war Chesterton had tried to persuade his countrymen ‘not to appeal to the American as if he were a rather dowdy Englishman, who had been rusticating in the provinces and had not heard the latest news about the town’.13
On New Year’s Day 1921 the Chestertons left London’s Euston Station at 8.30 in the morning for Liverpool, where they arrived at 1.45 p.m. On boarding their ship, Chesterton was interviewed by two journalists. Frances was delighted at how empty the ship was, writing in the diary she kept during their trip to North America: ‘all the pleasanter’.14 The purser gave them a better cabin than the one they had booked: ‘Beautiful cabin’, Frances noted, ‘with a sort of sitting room attached and really quite spacious’. On Sunday 2 January they had breakfast on deck. The weather was ‘wonderful outside but the indoor rooms are very overheated’, a complaint that Frances was to make about American hotel rooms. They had discovered ‘a lending library with plenty of the new books’. They sat at the Captain’s table, where they made ‘a nice little party’. That night the weather became ‘rough’ with wind and rain; and because they had left the porthole open, ‘everything on the dressing table got soaked’. Next day Frances felt ‘pretty sea-sick’, but Chesterton was unaffected: ‘G. perfectly well’. The Captain told Frances that the ship was ‘making the long course 100 miles to the South for fear of icebergs’. On Tuesday 4 January Frances noted in her diary that the ship was not as empty as she had implied in her first entry:
We have over 1000 immigrants on board of every nationality. The poor souls look so wretched though often they are merry enough. There are only two classes of passengers on this boat 1st. and 3rd. It seems a shame that 100 first class passengers should occupy nearly the whole of the ship with a winter garden, library, smoke-room, drawing room, dining room and endless cabins and staterooms and these poor folk be confined in a very small space on the lower deck, but I hear they are very well fed most often better than ever in their lives before.
Four days later on Sunday 8 January Chesterton presided at an evening concert and ‘made an excellent speech on behalf of the Merchant Service orphanage’; according to the ship’s officers, there was a record collection.15
On Monday 10 January, nine days after leaving Liverpool, the Chestertons arrived in New York. After lunch, ‘the fun (or the horrors) began. Interviewers, photographers, film men—all seized on us and we spent our last hour on the boat in a mob of what I can only term lunatics,’ recorded the dismayed Frances, while noting at the same time how good-humoured her husband remained throughout.16 In the lengthy report in the New York Times next day, which noted that he spoke in ‘essays’ and that it was ‘difficult…to get a direct reply to any leading question’, Chesterton was quoted as saying that he had come to America ‘to lose his impressions of the United States’. For he had plenty of ideas about America, but he supposed that they were ‘all quite wrong’. He had come ‘to give inadequate after-dinner speeches known as lectures’. He did not know what he would say till the time came: ‘I am a journalist and so am vastly ignorant of many things, but because I am a journalist I write and talk about them all.’ He then ‘shook hands with some half dozen Customs officials who welcomed him to the city’.
The impression given by Mr Chesterton as he moved majestically along the pier or on the ship was one of huge bulk. To the ordinary sized people on the pier he seemed to blot out the liner and the river. Mrs Chesterton was busy with the luggage.
‘My wife understands these things,’ he said with a sweep of his stick, ‘I don’t.’
He did not think that anything that George Bernard Shaw said about England or the English could do any harm, as he
had been out of touch with events for the last ten years.17
In order to get the two figures into the same picture, the photographers requested Mr Chesterton to sit in a big armchair while his wife stood beside him. When they were settled in the required pose, he exclaimed: ‘I say, I don’t like this; people will think that I am a German.’ While Frances, who ‘looked very small’ beside her husband, ‘attended to the luggage examination, opening trunks and bags’, he ‘delivered a short essay on the equality of men and women in England since the war’.18