by Ian Ker
The irony of the scene was apparently not lost on Chesterton, for six years later in his play The Judgement of Dr Johnson a couple arrives on a wild coast after a sea voyage, and, while the wife busies herself lighting a fire, the husband merely holds forth, observing: ‘Wherever we find the manual work forced upon the weaker sex, while the man merely amuses himself in his own fashion, there we have the rude original savage state of man, before the dawn of reason.’19
When the Chestertons arrived at their hotel, ‘another frenzied mob of newspapermen attacked us and even penetrated to our room and took photographs there’.20 As he answered the reporters’ questions, Chesterton wondered if he was not violating some amendment to the American constitution by smoking. Asked about the amendment enforcing Prohibition, he replied that he did not approve of it, hastily adding that it had not affected him when a reporter wondered if he had been suffering since landing. ‘No country on earth’, he declared, ‘could ever force me to touch a drop of cocoa, but if any country forbad its citizens to drink cocoa…I should immediately want to drink it…’ As the ship approached New York harbour, he had been ‘tempted to take all the liquor on board and pour it out to the Statue [of Liberty] in a final libation’. (Later, he was to note how it had ‘a soothing effect on earnest Prohibitionists on the boat to urge, as a point of dignity and delicacy, that it ought to be given back to the French, a vicious race abandoned to the culture of the vine’.21) He offered his condolences to the reporters on the fact that their country had ‘started out with the Declaration of Independence and ended up with prohibition’. (On another occasion during the lecture tour, he was to refuse to discuss Prohibition on the ground that he had promised on his visa application not to upset the American government!22) Asked why he had come to America, he replied: ‘It would be absurd for a man to go to his grave without seeing America. I’m all for the Statue of Liberty.’ Inevitably, the Irish question came up, and Chesterton did not hesitate to deplore the fact that Catholic Ireland had opposed the Allied cause, with which it sympathized ‘at heart’, while recognizing all the wrongs it had suffered at the hands of the British. Asked if he would be going to the West Coast, he responded that he did not expect to go further west than Chicago: ‘having seen both Jerusalem and Chicago, I think I shall have touched on the extremes of civilization.’ He refused to give his impressions of America on his first day there: ‘I am only human.’23
Anyway, Chesterton did not feel that he was the sightseer, as he explained to the readers of the New Witness in one of the articles he wrote from America that would become the book What I Saw in America. On the contrary, it was his lecture audiences that were the sightseers, even if they were ‘seeing a rather melancholy sight’. It was said that people came ‘to see the lecturer and not to hear him—in which case it seemed ‘rather a pity that he should disturb and distress their minds with a lecture’: ‘He might merely exhibit himself on a stand or platform for a stipulated sum; or be exhibited like a monster in a menagerie.’24
But, if the American public stared at Chesterton, the famous man himself stared with amazement at what he saw in the New York hotel, the Biltmore, which the Chestertons were to make their base for the lecture tour. He was to discover that the inns of Europe did not exist in America. The Prohibitionists had closed the saloons, but no one could accuse them of the ‘desecration’ of ‘chucking Chaucer out of the Tabard and Shakespeare out of the Mermaid’. However, hotels existed such as Chesterton had never before seen—or rather ‘only one hotel’ existed, to be found in all parts of America. For every hotel was built on the same ‘rational pattern’ with every floor exactly the same. There were no ‘lifts’ but only ‘elevators’, an example Chesterton thought of the American tendency ‘to linger upon long words’, which was ‘rather strange’ considering their fondness for ‘hustle and hurry’. More used to stairs than to lifts, Chesterton at first wondered whether Americans ‘possessed and practised a new and secret religion, which was the cult of the elevator’. Certainly, it was noticeable that gentlemen always took off their hats to ladies in this ‘tiny temple’, as though they were in church, but not in the lobby of the hotel, which ‘is thrown open to the public streets and treated as a public square’: ‘My first impression was that I was in some sort of high street or market-place during a carnival or revolution.’25
The day after arriving in New York, the Chestertons took the 10 a.m. train to Boston. ‘The heat of the trains and hotels is indescribable—but no windows are allowed to be opened,’ Frances lamented. What she saw from the window of the train was no less dismal: ‘Nothing had prepared me for the utterly neglected look of these unending collections of wooden houses. There are no gardens to any of them…’. They arrived in Boston at 4 o’clock in the afternoon to the same reception as in New York: ‘Again assaulted by a wailing crowd of journalists…’. Next day, after the usual interviews and photographs, Frances recorded in her diary her distinctly unfavourable feelings about America: ‘So far my feelings towards this country are entirely hostile—but it would be unfair to judge too soon.’ The contrast between the temperature outside and inside continued to dismay her: ‘Bitterly cold outside and the heat unbearable inside’. Still, at least the audiences were ‘most appreciative’ and enjoyed Chesterton’s humour. He lectured in Boston on ‘The Ignorance of the Educated’. His mannerisms as a lecturer inevitably attracted the attention of journalists. It was noted that he spoke ‘clearly’ but ‘in a rather high-pitched voice’, accompanying ‘his remarks with many nervous little gestures’: ‘His hands, at times, stray into his pockets. He leans over the reading desk as if he would like to get down into the audience and make it a sort of heart-to-heart talk.’ One reporter was fascinated by the movement of his right hand as it ‘spent a restless and rather disturbing evening’:
It would start from the reading desk at which he stood and fall to the points of that vast waistcoat which inspired the description of him as ‘a fellow of infinite vest’. It would wander aimlessly a moment about his—stomach is a word that is taboo among the polite English—equator, and then shift swiftly to the rear until the thumb found the hip pocket. There the hand would rest a moment, to return again to the reading desk and to describe once more the quarter circle. Once in a while it would twist a ring upon the left hand, once in a while it would be clasped behind the broad back, but only for a moment. To the hip pocket and back again was its sentry-go, and it was a faithful soldier.26
Chesterton had begun his lecture by observing that he was the only person in the auditorium who could not lecture, since, no lecturer himself, he found himself in the land of lecturers. The mark of being truly educated, he declared, was that one did not believe what the newspapers say.27
The press was interested in Frances as well as her famous husband: ‘I was interviewed to my amusement but insisted on seeing a proof so that nothing too outrageous should be printed.’28 On 15 January, Frances, who was constantly feeling tired and ill, saw a doctor, who told her she must rest for four hours a day, refuse all invitations, and absent herself from her husband’s lectures. The doctor advised a few days in a nursing home but instead agreed to give her ‘a strong tonic and sleeping draught’.29
Back in New York, they had lunch with their old friends from Overstrand Mansions, Battersea, Rann and Edith Kennedy—‘a very great joy after 10 years’. The Rann Kennedys, who were now living near Poughkeepsie in New York state, had become American citizens in 1917. In spite of the doctor’s orders, Frances was ‘interviewed and photographed all the after-noon’.30 Chesterton lectured on the same subject as in Boston, this time asserting that to be truly educated was to refrain from either reading or writing for the newspapers! He began the lecture by admitting, ‘Mine is the voice of the original mouse that came out of the mountain,’ and apologizing to those who could not hear him—and even more to those who could hear him!31 He had been introduced as a man whose ‘voice was heard on four continents. “But you will have reason, I fear,” said the lecturer
, “to gather that it is not heard in all theatres.”’32
On 18 January the Chestertons left New York for Northampton, Massachusetts, where Chesterton lectured at Smith College. Their hosts welcomed them in English style—‘a wood fire to welcome us—tea…’. After the lecture the entertainment was more American: they ‘sat round the fire and made pop-corn and toasted mallows’. Next day Frances felt much better: ‘Got a good night sleep at last…’. It seems the reporters were almost as interested in her—‘I saw many interviewers’—as in her husband, the ‘leading American bestseller’.33
Back in New York, the Chestertons had lunch again on 22 January with the Kennedys at the Women’s University Club, where Chesterton ‘only said a few words’. The American fascination with celebrities amazed Frances: ‘Why several hundred women should come together in a hot and crowded room to see us, when there was not even a speech to be made is beyond my understanding but they like to do it it seems.’ That evening, only a week after seeing the doctor who had advised her not to attend her husband’s lectures, Frances was present at the Brooklyn Institute to hear him speak: ‘We went by subway—a new experience, like our tube but not so good.’ She thought New York was ‘a wonderful sight at night especially the view from Brooklyn Bridge (1 mile long)’.34 Her husband had ‘looked, not without joy’, at Broadway’s ‘long kaleidescope of coloured lights arranged in large letters and sprawling trade-marks, advertising everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency of the two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of God: colour and fire’, remarking in his ‘simplicity’ to his American friends (it ‘seemed for some reason to amuse them’): ‘What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to read.’35 Next day Frances had another bad headache, but went for a short walk in Central Park—‘a poor substitute for a park as we mean it’; but still it was ‘a relief from the streets’.36
Four days later they left for New Haven, Connecticut, where Chesterton lectured to ‘a very enthusiastic audience—hundreds of Yale boys stormed the platform afterwards for hand shakes and autographs’. Next day they left for a lecture at Bridgeport, Conn. Two days later they arrived in Philadelphia, where they were met as usual by reporters and photographers. ‘What I’ve seen of Philadelphia’, Frances recorded in her diary, ‘I really like’.37 Chesterton told the press that, because of his extensive knowledge of detective stories, he imagined he would ‘be right at home with any thieves in Philadelphia, if she has any’.38 They returned to New York next day, but were back again three days later on 2 February, when they ‘lunched at a cafeteria, quite an amusing experience—you take a tray and place on it all you want to eat and then get a ticket punched’.39 After one of the lectures in Philadelphia, a woman asked Chesterton what made women talk so much, to which he replied, briefly, ‘God, Madam’.40 On this second visit a reporter asked him whether he liked lecturing, to which he responded: ‘I always feel like a quack doctor. As to nervousness, I am obsessed, before I go upon the stage, by the feeling that I shall make a fool of myself; and I always have a warm, glowing feeling, when I leave the stage, that I actually have made a fool of myself.’41
Two days later they were in Baltimore for a lecture. During the questions at the end, Chesterton was asked if Shaw was to some extent himself the Superman and replied: ‘I do not think it is as bad as that.’ Would he himself prefer to be the Superman or the Missing Link? The latter, replied Chesterton without hesitation. Interviewed by the press, Frances insisted: ‘The real truth is that I care more for my dog, donkey and garden in the little English village where we live than for all the publicity in the world.’ ‘Thank Heaven’, she continued, ‘my husband is thoroughly normal and unaffected; he doesn’t care for popularity any more than I do, and we are both just terribly homesick for our home in England.’ Her worst duty as the wife of a famous man, she confessed, was having to ‘read stupid letters from feminine admirers’.42 The state of Maryland, Chesterton was to remind his readers in the New Witness, ‘was the first experiment in religious freedom in human history’, but the fact that ‘the first religious toleration ever granted in the world was granted by Roman Catholics’ was ‘one of those little informing details with which our Victorian histories did not exactly teem’. Chesterton visited the first monument raised to Washington after the American Revolution, where he fell into conversation with two children ‘who were clambering about the bases of the monument’: ‘I felt a profound and radiant peace in the thought that they at any rate were not going to my lecture. It made me happy that in that talk neither they nor I had any names. I was full of that indescribable waking vision of the strangeness of life, and especially of the strangeness of locality…’. Baltimore was also memorable as providing ‘the only sample of the substance called “tea” ever found on the American continent’.43 The spirit of freedom that characterized Baltimore for Chesterton reminded him of the Irish struggle for freedom. ‘When you hear of an organization in England fighting for liberty,’ he told an Irish American he met, ‘you must find whether or not that organization contains much Irish blood.’ A strike in Glasgow, for instance, meant an ‘exciting’ strike: ‘The reason is that a mass of the Irish poor is found in that city, and the Irish will not submit meekly when any person or any group tries to trample upon them.’ True, there were ‘plenty of old radicals in England, who, as individuals, are sincere defenders of liberty, but they are isolated’. But the Irish ‘love for liberty seems to have been created by the Catholic Church—their only corporate defender of liberty today—is the Catholic Church. Liberty means much to her—something to be protected.’44
Returning to New York, Chesterton gave a lecture on 6 February, which the New York Times reported next day. When the time for questions arrived, he was asked about the ‘psychological significance’ of his use of paradoxes, which elicited the grave reply: ‘I never use paradox. The statements I make are wearisome and obvious common sense. I have even been driven to the tedium of reading through my own books, and have been unable to find any paradox. In fact, the thing is quite tragic, and some day I shall hope to write an epic called “Paradox Lost”.’45 Asked by the New York Herald about his famous love of paradox, Chesterton declared: ‘I should not know a paradox if it met me on the street.’46 The Chestertons then travelled on to Pittsburgh, where there was a collective gasp from the audience when they saw the huge expanse of the lecturer, who hastened to reassure them in his opening words at the microphone: ‘At the outset I want to reassure you I am not of this size, really; dear no, I’m being amplified by the thing.’47 After a lecture in Washington, the Chestertons left New York on Saturday 12 February for Montreal on the night train, arriving at 7.45 a.m. on Sunday morning. In the afternoon Frances went for a sleigh ride to the top of Mount Royal. Interviewed by the Montreal Daily Star, Chesterton said that being in New York was ‘very much like being in hell—pleasantly, of course. I had a wild and whirling experience.’ By contrast, a city like Baltimore gave ‘a very definite impression of that fine old republican spirit, which English people have never really understood’.48
Apparently, Chesterton had stipulated before leaving England that he must have three days free of lectures so that he could spend some time with his relations in Ottawa. But when the time for his visit approached, there was a smallpox scare, which caused Chesterton’s lecture agent, Lee Keedick, to send a telegram to say that, if there was going to be any difficulty about leaving the city, he would not be able to come. But the reply was that so long as he was vaccinated there would be no problem.49
Accordingly, at 5 p.m. the Chestertons left Montreal for Ottawa, arriving there at eight, where Chesterton’s uncle Walter Chesterton, an architect who designed many of the public buildings in Ottawa, met the train and took them to his house at 300 Waverley Street. Unfortunately, when the Chestertons went upstairs to their bedroom, they discovered that Chesterton had the wrong suitcase. Lilian, the daughter of the house, heard ‘a scream of laughter from upstairs, a d
oor opened and both Gilbert and Frances called out, “Lil, come here.”’ Running upstairs, Lilian found them standing over the strange suitcase. ‘What amused them most was thinking of the plight of the owner if he tried to wear Gilbert’s clothes!’50
‘Such a lovely day of snow and sunshine,’ Frances wrote in her diary the next day. In the afternoon there was another sleigh drive followed by sightseeing, which ‘included a glimpse’ of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, ‘who had just opened Parliament’, in their ‘state sleigh with outriders in scarlet against the dazzling snow’.51 Asked by a reporter if England would ever introduce Prohibition, Chesterton replied with a chuckle that, if the governing class could be assured of its indispensable glass of champagne, then it was not impossible. They were leaving America in April, on April Fool’s Day, he hoped, after failing as a lecturer.52 On Wednesday the 16th they left Ottawa at midday, arriving back in Montreal at four o’clock. After Chesterton had given a lecture in the evening, they ‘hurried off to catch the night train to Toronto’, where they arrived next day at 7.30 in the morning. Frances found the King Edward Hotel ‘noisy and crowded’.53 There were the usual interviews and photographs. Chesterton gave a lecture in the evening on ‘The Ignorance of the Educated’. The professor of English who was in the chair ‘thought there must have been an error in the title as printed, and announced that Mr Chesterton would speak on The Ignorance of the Un educated’.54 That night the Chestertons’ sleep was disturbed by ‘a jazz band which went on till 2 a.m.’.55
On Friday 18 February the Chestertons left Toronto to cross back into the United States, arriving in Albany at seven o’clock in the evening, where they found a pile of letters awaiting them. The next evening Chesterton gave a lecture. Frances informed the press when she was interviewed: ‘I didn’t know I was the wife of a great man till I came to America. It had never bothered me before.’ While in America she had failed to encounter a single draught or Prohibitionist. On Sunday they woke up to find it had snowed heavily during the night. Unable to get a taxi, they had to borrow a car to drive to Buffalo, where they arrived at 7.30 in the evening of Sunday 20 February. Next day they were driven to see the Niagara Falls, which ‘were a disappointment’. After a lecture in the evening—‘a tremendous success’—they left Buffalo at midnight for Chicago, where they arrived at one o’clock next day ‘very tired’. Frances went to bed and stayed there till it was time for dinner with the Rann Kennedys. It was raining heavily and what Frances saw of Chicago looked ‘dreadful’, although Lake Michigan looked ‘rather wonderful’.56