G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  Next morning Chesterton visited a bookshop in the Marshall Field building, where he encountered the English writer John Drinkwater and the American novelist Sinclair Lewis, the author of the best-selling satire on small town America, Main Street, which had been published the previous year. The visitors were invited into the proprietor’s office. Lewis told the others that he had ‘received floods of letters from people in the small towns throughout the middle west taking him to task’ for implying that Main Street was a typical American town. An onlooker of this literary gathering suggested that the three writers should collaborate in a play, a suggestion that was ‘received with delight’. The proprietor invited them to stay for lunch, which he would have sent up from the tea rooms on the floor below: ‘Upon his saying that he had something rare in his safe besides books, Chesterton decided to stay.’ The rest of the company immediately followed suit. Lewis’s proposal that the play should be named Marry the Queen of Scotch was met with approval by the others, now ‘in a haze of alcohol’, and it was agreed that Chesterton should write the first act, which, Chesterton announced, would feature a murder mystery: ‘There is nothing like a nice murder.’ The hero was to be the son of a rich English whisky distiller and the heroine the daughter of an American ex-distiller from Peoria, Illinois. An American Prohibitionist of ‘international fame’ would be found dead in his Paris hotel room, the weapon, a broken bottle, lying beside the body. The rooms on either side would be occupied by the hero and heroine, upon whom suspicion would naturally fasten.57

  Meanwhile, Frances, after ‘a wonderful lunch’ with some ‘very nice women’, was taken to see ‘the famous Marshal Field Store’, where Self-ridge, the owner of the famous London shop named after him, used to work. Chesterton gave ‘a fine lecture’ in the evening in Orchestra Hall to an audience of 3,000, but ‘did not seem done up after it’.58 Interviewed in his hotel by a reporter, he insisted first of all on lighting a cigar, saying: ‘Some men write with a pencil, others with a typewriter, I write with my cigar.’ Asked which of his works he considered the greatest, he replied: ‘I don’t consider any of my works in the least great.’ Slang, he told the reporter, was ‘too sacred and precious to be used promiscuously. Its use should be led up to reverently for it expresses what the King’s English could not.’59

  They left Chicago on Thursday morning, arriving in Columbus, Ohio, at 8.20 in the evening. The couple they stayed with were ‘very delightful people—so affectionate and warm hearted’. On Friday morning they were taken by car ‘to see something of the very dull country of the Middle West’. The lecture in the evening was ‘a real scrum but quite good fun’. On Saturday 26 February they left Columbus in the morning for Detroit, where they arrived over six hours later at 4.30 in the afternoon. The evening lecture next day in Orchestra Hall ‘went well’.60 Chesterton acknowledged that he spoke with an ‘English axn’t’—‘and regretted deeply that he might never apprehend what it was like’.61 A Detroit newspaper reported that actually seeing and hearing the man provided ‘a meal for the imagination’ such as no books by or about Chesterton could give. The subject of his lecture, as in Toronto, was the ignorance of the educated: the trouble with educated people was that they substituted theories for things, whereas the uneducated simply stated the facts as they saw them: they would say, for example, that they saw that a German was drinking beer, not that a Teuton was consuming alcohol. Another Detroit newspaper quoted from the lecture: ‘There is a deeper side to such fallacies. The whole catastrophe of the Great War may be traced to the racial theory. If people had looked at peoples as nations in place of races the intolerable ambition of Prussia might have been stopped before it attained the captaincy of the South German States.’62 In a newspaper interview next morning, Frances confessed: ‘I was never interviewed in my life until I came to America.’ What had most touched her was ‘the genuine affection’ with which her husband was greeted everywhere. When the reporter congratulated her husband on his lecture the evening before, Chesterton responded: ‘You can gather what I think of my lectures from the fact that I always precipitately leave town the next day!’63

  The Chestertons left Detroit on Monday 28 February at midday ‘on a miserable day of mist and rain’, arriving in the evening in Cleveland. As usual, Frances found the heat of the train unbearable, and she went to bed with a headache, lying in late next morning. Both Chestertons were interviewed before lunch. Chesterton assured the Cleveland Press that he was losing his impressions about America. He thought politics should be kept ‘as local as possible’: ‘Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It’s terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hung today.’ He claimed he was not troubled by his weight: ‘I’ve never taken the trouble to weigh myself.’ Anyway, his weight gave him ‘something with which to start after-dinner speeches’.64 After dinner they were invited to meet Helen Keller, the author and political activist, who was staying in the same hotel. In her diary Frances describes her as ‘the blind girl who [was] also deaf and dumb’. In fact, Helen Keller was only deaf and blind as a result of an illness when she was a baby. Frances thought she was ‘quite wonderful or rather…the lady [was] who taught her’ sign language and became her companion. Rather ‘pretty and very lively’, Helen ‘amused herself by making up paradoxes and retailing them’ to Chesterton—‘very good they were too’. The writer of paradoxes would have been less amused by the progressive views of Helen Keller, who had founded the American Civil Liberties Union the previous year, and who was a Socialist, a suffragette, and an advocate of contraception. Wednesday 2 March was a ‘very fine day, quite a feeling of spring’. Chesterton gave an evening lecture in the hotel ball room.

  Next day they left Cleveland on the 8.30 train back to Toronto, where they arrived in the evening, whereupon Frances went to bed in the same hotel she had so disliked on their previous visit. Utterly exhausted, Frances stayed in bed till four o’clock the next afternoon and did not attend Chesterton’s lecture in the evening. On Saturday 5 March she had ‘to submit to an interview for the Toronto “Daily Star”’, before leaving after midday for Detroit, where they arrived at 10.20 in the evening, ‘very done for by that time’. The 2.30 train next day took them to Dayton, Ohio, where they arrived at 11.30 at night. The next morning was another morning in bed for Frances, but in the afternoon she was taken for ‘a lovely ride round Dayton which is really very pretty’.65 It was here in Dayton, Chesterton later recalled, that he was interviewed on the roof of the hotel where they were staying:

  after answering the usual questions about Labour, the League of Nations, the length of ladies’ dresses, and other great matters, I took refuge in a rhapsody of warm and well-deserved praise of American bathrooms. The editor, I understand, running a gloomy eye down the column of his contributor’s ‘story’, and seeing nothing but metaphysical terms such as justice, freedom…and the like, paused at last upon the ablutionary allusion, and his eye brightened. ‘That’s the only copy in the whole thing,’ he said, ‘A Bath-tub in Every Home’. So these words appeared in enormous letters above my portrait in the paper. It will be noted that, like many things that practical men make a great point of, they miss the point. What I had commended as new and national was a bathroom in every bedroom. Even feudal and moss-grown England is not entirely ignorant of the occasional bath-tub in the home. But what gave me great joy was what followed. I discovered with delight that many people, glancing rapidly at my portrait with its prodigious legend, imagined that it was a commercial advertisement, and that I was a very self-advertising commercial traveller.

  This ‘charming error’ Chesterton was only able regretfully to trace ‘with certainty’ to ‘two individuals’, who naturally supposed that, because there was ‘a Laundry Convention going on in the same hotel’, he had come to Dayton to attend the said Laundry Convention, ‘and had made an eloquent speech to that senate, no doubt exhibiting my tubs’.66 After Chesterton had g
iven a lecture at Victory Hall, there was ‘a rush’ to get to the station to catch the night train for Chicago.67

  They arrived back in Chicago at the hotel at 7.30 a.m. after ‘a horrible night journey’, ‘the worst I’ve experienced’, wrote Frances miserably in her diary after a sleepless night. After lunch Chesterton went off to lecture, but Frances stayed in the hotel ‘too tired to move’. On Wednesday 9 March they left Chicago for Madison, a four-and-a-half-hour journey. Frances was cheered up by the ‘really pretty journey through Wisconsin’. The farmhouses they saw through the train window had ‘that settled and ordered look that belongs to older countries’. The hotel where they stayed was also satisfactorily ‘small and countrified (comparatively)’. Chesterton lectured for an hour and a half to ‘a crowded and amused audience’ at the university, where the ‘college yell greeted him’.68 During questions, he asserted that, in spite of being accused of an excessive love of paradox, he could not find any paradoxes in his books, only dull monotonous good sense!69 The next day was free until they took the 9.30 p.m. train for Duluth in Minnesota, where they arrived next morning at 8.30. Frances went immediately to bed, ‘very done up’. Chesterton gave a lecture in the evening, while Frances stayed in bed. On Saturday 12 March they left Duluth in the afternoon and arrived in Minneapolis in the late evening.

  They had a day off here to break the journey before taking the night train to Omaha, where they arrived at 7.45 a.m. on the Monday morning after a sleepless night on a ‘very shaky train’. Frances was glad that there were only four more lectures to give before returning to New York. At Omaha they were entertained to lunch by the ladies of the Fine Arts Club, who had arranged the lecture Chesterton gave in the afternoon in the hotel ball room.70 This was the only lecture of the entire tour that met with a decidedly negative response: the lecturer told his audience at the beginning of the lecture that he was ‘one of those famous Englishmen who cannot lecture—and do’. The Omaha Daily Bee reported that by the end of the hour ‘the majority of his audience agreed with him’. However, one lady confessed that, while like the rest of the audience she did not get much from the lecture, ‘I think the reason we didn’t is because our own education is so superficial; he’s beyond us’. The Omaha Daily Bee subsequently explained that the anger felt by the citizens of Omaha arose from their fear that they had ‘missed the fine points’ of the lecture and that it was above their heads.71 Chesterton, for his part, told reporters that he had ‘left a trail of wailing rabbis all across the continent’, one of whom in Omaha he believed had warned ‘every lover of his fellow man’ to stay away from his lecture. This did not worry him in the slightest, as he liked a small audience: ‘Just picture to yourself a few misanthropes, sitting several chairs apart, scowling into space, and all the humanitarians staying at home.’ As for his book The New Jerusalem, if the rabbis had ‘read all the chapters on the Jews’ and considered they constituted ‘fanaticism, then all the fanaticism is on their side’.72 He was ‘not a little hurt and puzzled about their unreasonable attitude because in that work I have honestly tried to be objective, fair, and understanding, but they won’t see that’.73 He thought Americans took his ‘work absolutely too seriously, though they make the best audience to lecture to in the world. In England a lecture is a most dry affair. It is not a national sport.’ What most impressed him about America were the en suite hotel rooms.74

  Next day, Tuesday 15 March, they left for Kansas City at 1.30 p.m., where they arrived at 8.30 in the evening. They then took the night train to Oklahoma City, a town that had been ‘created out of the…prairie in less than thirty years’ owing to the discovery of oil, where they arrived shortly after midday on the 16th. ‘The journey was so lovely,’ wrote Frances, ‘through little spring woods with wild cherry—almond—peach and all in flower’.75 There was no lecture that day, but Chesterton faced the usual interviews that afternoon. He found it, he said, ‘interesting and agreeable to find people who were proud of having lived in a community for only three minutes’. As for himself, he lamented that he felt ‘like a race horse being hauled about in a box car, if I may be permitted to compare myself with so useful and elegant an animal’.76 The following day they were taken for ‘a lovely ride…about this startlingly new but interesting place’. After calling on the state governor, Chesterton lectured in the evening at the Presbyterian church.77

  While they were in Oklahoma City an accident occurred that ‘could not have happened in any other country’ that Chesterton had ‘ever clapped eyes on’. If he could understand it, he seriously believed he would understand America. Oklahoma was what foreigners imagined wrongly was true of all American cities: it was ‘proud of having no history. [It was] glowing with the sense of having a great future—and nothing else.’ While strolling down the main street, Chesterton was accosted by a stranger who demanded to know what he was doing in the city. The ‘most singular thing about him was that the front of his coat was covered with a multitude of shining metallic emblems made in the shape of stars and crescents’. To this singular stranger’s question, Chesterton replied ‘with restraint’ that he was lecturing. To this the stranger replied ‘without restraint, but with an expansive and radiant pride, “I also am lecturing. I am lecturing on astronomy.”’

  Expanding his starry bosom and standing astraddle, with the air of one who owned the street, the strange being continued, ‘Yes, I am lecturing on astronomy, anthropology, archaeology, palaeontology, embryology, eschatology,’ and so on in a thunderous roll of theoretical sciences apparently beyond the scope of any single university, let alone any single professor. Having thus introduced himself, however, he got to business. He apologised with true American courtesy for having questioned me at all, and excused it on the ground of his own exacting responsibilities. I imagined him to mean the responsibility of simultaneously occupying the chairs of all the faculties already mentioned. But these apparently were trifles to him, and something far more serious was clouding his brow. ‘I feel it to be my duty’ he said, ‘to acquaint myself with any stranger visiting this city; and it is an additional pleasure to welcome here a member of the Upper Ten.’ I assured him earnestly that I knew nothing about the Upper Ten, except that I did not belong to them…He waved my abnegation aside and continued, ‘I have a great responsibility in watching over this city. My friend the mayor and I have a great responsibility.’ And then an extraordinary thing happened. Suddenly diving his hand into his beast-pocket, he flashed something before my eyes like a hand-mirror; something which disappeared again almost as soon as it appeared. In that flash I could only see that it was some sort of a polished metal plate, with some letters engraved on it like a monogram. But the reward of a studious and virtuous life, which has been spent chiefly in the reading of American detective stories, shone forth for me in that hour of trial; I received at last the prize of a profound scholarship in the matter of imaginary murders in tenth-rate magazines. I remembered who it was who in the Yankee detective yarn flashes before the eyes of Slim Jim or the Lone Hand Crook a badge of metal sometimes called a shield. Assuming all the desperate composure of Slim Jim himself, I replied, ‘You mean you are connected with the police authorities here, don’t you? Well, if I commit a murder here, I’ll let you know.’ Whereupon that astonishing man waved a hand in deprecation, bowed in farewell with the grace of a dancing master; and said, ‘Oh, these are not the things we expect from the Upper Ten.’ Then that moving constellation moved away, disappearing in the dark tides of humanity…

  ‘Who and what was that man?’ Chesterton wondered. ‘Was he an astronomer? Was he a detective? Was he a wandering lunatic?’ Two things Chesterton did know. First, he knew that ‘he had something else in his pocket besides a badge’ and that ‘under certain circumstances he would have…shot me dead’. Second, he knew that, confronted with ‘this mysterious figure’, he was ‘confronted with the fullness and depth of the mystery of America. Because I understand nothing, I recognise the thing that we call a nation; and I salute the flag.’78<
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  On Friday 18 March the Chestertons left Oklahoma City for St Louis, which they reached at about 8.15 next morning after travelling all night with little sleep. Still, they had ‘a comfortable drawing room car’ and the countryside was ‘looking lovely and the weather…like a perfect English June’. Frances found her hotel room ‘decorated with lovely roses a gift from the management’, and a pile of letters from England awaiting her: ‘I was so glad of them.’ Next day was Palm Sunday: ‘Oh for Jerusalem,’ sighed Frances. That afternoon they received an ‘urgent invitation’ to call at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, where Frances was presented with ‘the loveliest bouquet of roses’. ‘We like St Louis—though the town itself is not much to boast of but it is older and mellower than the middle west towns such as Omaha and Oklahoma City,’ Frances recorded in her diary. Chesterton’s lecture took place in the hall of the Ethical Society: ‘very successful and many questions were asked and delightfully answered.’ On Monday they left St Louis at 8.15 in the morning and travelled all day through ‘pretty country’ to Nashville. Next day Frances was suffering from one of her headaches and stayed in bed till after lunch. It was pouring with rain. The lecture in the evening was ‘tremendously appreciated’.79 They stayed at the Hotel Hermitage, which had been President Andrew Jackson’s home. Frances was again interviewed and again declared, ‘I was never interviewed in my life until I came to America.’ At the end of the interview her husband appeared and again told the press, ‘You can gather what I think of my lectures from the fact that I always precipitately leave town the next day.’80 They duly left Nashville next day, Wednesday the 23rd, on the 7.25 train and travelled all day to Indianapolis, where they arrived at 6.30 in the evening, after changing trains at Louisville. Next day in the Masonic Hall there was ‘a very enthusiastic though small audience’ at Chesterton’s lecture—‘this is the last lecture on tour—thank heaven,’ recorded Frances with relief. After going to church next day, which was Good Friday, they left for New York at three o’clock in the afternoon, arriving there at about two in the afternoon next day, when they were met by Chesterton’s agent Lee Keedick. On Easter Sunday, which fell that year on 27 March, they ‘got to early celebration at the Church of St Mary the Virgin near this hotel’. That evening Frances attended her husband’s ‘very good’ lecture ‘The Revolt against Reason’.81