G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  Apart from the voyage home, their travels were now ended, and Frances had time to rest, as well as to see friends, including the Rann Kennedys, although it fell to her, of course, to make the practical arrangements for their departure. Before they could leave America they had to pay 8 per cent tax on the proceeds of the lecture tour. There was also a pile of correspondence waiting to be attended to. On 3 April Chesterton lectured at the Apollo Theatre on ‘Ireland and the Parallel of the Confederacy’. On the evening of 5 April they left the hotel for an apartment at 56 85th East Street that belonged to some friends. During the day they saw a friend from Bedford Park days, ‘old Mr Yeats who is the same as ever—talked delightfully’. On the 9th the Chestertons went to a lunch given in their honour at the National Arts Club by the Dickens Fellowship; they were greeted with great enthusiasm, Chesterton ‘made an excellent speech’, and even Frances was called upon to say a few words. They ‘rushed away’ to catch the 3.30 train for Poughkeepsie, where they stayed the night at Millbrook with the Kennedys, who were joint heads of the drama department at Bennett School for Girls. In the evening they went to watch at the Greek theatre—which the Kennedys had had built82—a ‘part performance’ of Euripides’ Electra. Frances thought the chorus was ‘quite wonderful, and Edith splendid’. Afterwards a lot of the girls came round to the Kennedys’ home—‘such a happy party’, Frances wrote in her diary. Next day the Chestertons visited the school, where Rann and Edith Kennedy ‘gave a reading’ of his one-act 1912 play The Terrible Meek, before returning to New York in the afternoon. On 11 April Chesterton lectured for the last time.83

  One thing that had delighted him about lecturing in America was the American sense of time: people arrived at his lectures (he would ‘heartily recommend the habit of coming too late’) frequently ‘three-quarters of an hour or even an hour after time…it gave me a sort of dizzy exaltation to find I was not the most unpunctual person…’. Any fears that his disapproval of Prohibition might displease his hosts were soon dispelled: ‘I went to America with some notion of not discussing Prohibition. But I soon found that well-to-do Americans were only too delighted to discuss it over the nuts and wine. They were even willing, if necessary, to dispense with the nuts.’ It was ‘to some extent enforced among the poor; at any rate it was intended to be enforced among the poor’, but it was ‘certainly not enforced among the rich; and I doubt whether it was intended to be’.84 Frances had felt tired or ill for much of the trip, as well as homesick. One newspaper reported that she noticeably cheered up on hearing from the current secretary back at Overroads, Kathleen Chesshire, that the crocuses were in bloom. Frances again told a reporter that she cared more for her dog, donkey, and garden back home than for ‘all the publicity in the world’. Far from being an adorer of her husband, while she admired intelligence, she thought life was ‘too short to put one’s husband on a pedestal’, apart from being ‘unutterably boring’. Anyway, her husband was ‘thoroughly normal and unaffected’ and did not ‘care for popularity’ any more than she did. She claimed that, while her husband lectured, she was ‘organizing a campaign for the emancipation of the wives of famous men’.85

  On Tuesday 12 April they said goodbye to America. Asked by reporters what had most impressed him in America, Chesterton replied: ‘The number of people who came to my lectures. Such an outpouring of people could hardly be possible in England!’86 The ship sailed at 12.30. On the instructions of the Cunard shipping line they were given a better cabin than they had booked, a state room with a bathroom attached. On the 14th Frances recorded that Chesterton had had ‘a long and interesting talk’ with Sir Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer, who gave a ‘delightful’ lecture with slides the following evening. The next day Chesterton presided at a concert in aid of the Liverpool Seamen’s Orphanage, in which the film star Pearl White, the so-called Stunt Queen of the silent films, participated. It was ‘quite a magnificent affair’, and over £100 was collected. On Sunday 17 April both Chestertons attended a religious service that the Captain held in the lounge. Next day they reached Cherbourg. And on the 19th they arrived at Southampton at daybreak, where they caught the 10.15 train to Waterloo. On arrival they found Kathleen Chesshire, together with Chesterton’s mother and ‘Keith’, awaiting them. After lunch at Waterloo and a visit to Warwick Gardens, they caught the 5.38 train from Marylebone Station to Beaconsfield—‘and so HOME once more, and as I am feeling now,’ wrote Frances, ‘never again’.87

  3

  On 15 February 1921 Chesterton had published an article in the Manchester Guardian condemning British atrocities in Ireland, albeit themselves a response to outrages committed by the Irish Republican Army or IRA. He expressed more briefly the same sentiments in ‘What are Reprisals?’, a pamphlet published by the Peace with Ireland Council either at the end of 1920 or in early 1921.88 Like the British press in general, Chesterton expected the British government forces to behave in an altogether different way from the IRA, which was regarded as a terrorist organization of which the worst could be expected. In December 1918, following the execution of many of the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 and the threat of compulsory military service, the nationalist party Sinn Féin won a majority of the Irish seats in the Westminster parliament. Refusing to sit as members of the House of Commons in January 1919, they assembled in Dublin, set up a separate parliament, and declared an independent Irish republic. War then broke out between the British and the IRA. Michael Collins, the IRA leader, who led the Sinn Fein delegation at the peace talks that led eventually to the treaty of 6 December 1921 establishing the Irish Free State, was influenced in the formation of his nationalism by The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which he described as his favourite book. Hearing of this, Lloyd George gave copies of the book to his Cabinet before the negotiations began for insights into the mind of the Irish nationalist leader.89 Joseph Plunkett, one of those executed after the Easter 1916 rising, was also a passionate admirer of Chesterton.90

  Chesterton’s article, which was subsequently published as a pamphlet by the Peace with Ireland Council in London under the title ‘The Danger to England’, began: ‘The whole world thinks that England has gone mad.’ The British entertained the ‘most curious idea that what is done in Ireland is done in a corner and concerns only themselves. We treat Ireland not only as if it were our own farmyard, but our own backyard. The Government and the gangs of murderers between them are rapidly turning it into something rather resembling a churchyard.’ Writing from North America, Chesterton maintained that people abroad knew more about what was being done in Ireland, as the details were often suppressed in British newspapers, as had been the case in the Marconi scandal. The British had effectively ceased to govern in Ireland, but instead were conducting what could only be called a ‘Prussian war’. That is to say, they were carrying out a war of reprisals against the southern Catholic Irish, the principle of which was ‘the very opposite of law and order’. Instead of ruling, the British were raiding the country; although the British government said they would never recognize Ireland as a separate nation, they were in fact ‘paying the plainest possible compliment to its independence’—they were ‘invading it’ exactly as the Germans had invaded Belgium in the war. And, because the British seemed to be ‘snatching at something as though it were slipping’ from them, it gave the impression abroad that the British Empire was breaking up. Anti-British sentiment was growing worldwide, just as it had against the Germans. But the peoples Germany had invaded were not ‘scattered everywhere among all the new democracies of the earth’, and Britain could afford even less than Germany to make enemies everywhere, ‘for we gather our food everywhere’. What people abroad saw when they saw ‘the “black-and-tan” uniform in Ireland’ was ‘what we saw when we saw the black and yellow flag flying over Belgium’. Patriots like Chesterton who predicted the result of British reprisals would never desert their country but would be with it to the last—‘to take our share in the hatred of humanity and our portion in the wrath of God’. I
n another article at the time, also published by the Peace with Ireland Council under the same title as that of the earlier pamphlet, ‘What are Reprisals?’, Chesterton again drew the analogy with the German invasion of Belgium that had brought Britain into war with Germany. Reprisals were intended to be ‘indiscriminate’: ‘When men in our uniform shoot a woman with a baby in her arms, or kill a little girl of eight, it is a confusion of thought to profess that it was an accident, or even to discuss whether it was an accident. The whole system is designed to produce such accidents, even if you call them accidents.’ The whole point of ‘terror’ was that innocent people should suffer. But the policy was clearly a failure: ‘The very outburst of new demands for repression proves that it does not repress.’ The British had copied what the Germans had done in Belgium—‘down to the very last detail of all—that they were defeated’. The truth was that the British government was ‘fighting against something that may express itself in wild and wicked ways but is not in itself wicked or even wild; and which therefore draws perpetually on infinite sources of strength…’. Wise statesmen would seek ‘to avoid the necessity of stemming any such main stream of the nature of mankind; fighting against the love of home or the desire of freedom or the respect for the dead’. A government that had succeeded in stirring up ‘all that mass of sympathies and half-sympathies’ against it had ceased to govern. The common view in Ireland was that the British were ‘not only wickeder but wilder’ than the republican guerrillas.

  The very first of the articles that would be collected together in What I Saw in America, published on 18 February 1921 in the New Witness, pointed out that Britain in its dispute with Ireland was dealing not just with the native Irish but with the huge Irish diaspora in English-speaking countries, which included a particularly numerous and powerful community in the United States.

  4

  In September 1922 Chesterton published What I Saw in America, rather less than a third of which consists of the articles he had already published while in America in the New Witness. He had already broken the promise he had made before leaving England, according to the New York Times,91 that ‘he would not write a book of American impressions on his return, as so many other’ English writers had done, with the articles he had written for the New Witness while still in America. The book begins with the paradoxical assertion that ‘travel narrows the mind’, as the traveller tends to look at ‘the outside’ rather than ‘the inside’ of what he sees. In particular, the traveller is apt to be too ‘much amused…to be instructed’. There was nothing wrong in ‘thinking a thing funny because it is foreign’, only in ‘thinking it wrong because it is funny’. That was the mistake of Dickens when he visited America, thinking that Americans were ‘foolish because they were funny’. The traveller was ‘perfectly entitled to laugh at anything’ so long as he understood that he himself was ‘laughable’. Chesterton himself had never lost the sense of his own ‘laughable position’ while he was in America. Moreover, the traveller must realize that his sense of humour was not necessarily the same as that of the foreigner. Indeed, the American and English senses of humour ‘are in one way directly contrary’:

  The most American sort of fun involves a soaring imagination, piling one house on another in a tower like that of the sky-scraper. The most English humour consists of a sort of bathos, of a man returning to the earth his mother in a homely fashion; as when he sits down suddenly on a butter-slide. English farce describes a man as being in a hole. American fantasy, in its more aspiring spirit, describes a man as being up a tree.

  American humour made ‘life more wild and impossible than it is’, and English humour made ‘it more flat and farcical than it is’. The ‘road to international friendship’, Chesterton thought, was through understanding the other nations’ ‘jokes’.92

  What made America superior to England in his view was that the British constitution lacked ‘the theory of equality’ that is ‘the chief mark of the Declaration of Independence’: ‘Citizenship is the American ideal; and it has never been the English ideal.’ On the other hand, if England could boast of ‘less equality and fraternity’, it had ‘certainly more liberty’. And American equality did ‘tend too much to uniformity’, but then that uniformity reflected the idea of the ‘dignity’ of every citizen rather than the ‘social superiority’ of England. The ‘danger’ of a real democracy like America was ‘convention’, ‘a general impression of unity verging on uniformity’. For democracy was ‘no respecter of persons’. The American cult of individualism was, paradoxically, ‘the death of individuality’, since ‘individualism is the reverse of individuality’: ‘Where men are trying to compete with each other they are trying to copy each other.’ Again, the ‘worship of personality’ made Americans ‘almost impersonal’. Unlike ‘English eccentricity’, there was not enough ‘unconsciousness’ in America ‘to produce real individuality’. American women particularly tended ‘too much to this cult of impersonal personality’.93

  The uniformity of American life, Chesterton thought, undermined its democracy. It explained why, where there was ‘so genuine a sense of human dignity, there should be so much of an impossible petty tyranny’. This was a country where not only was the ‘sin of drink’ punished but also ‘the equally shameless sin of smoking a cigarette in the open air’, not to mention people ‘kissing each other’. How was it possible to reconcile such tyranny with ‘the genuine democratic spirit’ of the masses? What made ‘this great democracy so unlike all other democracies, and in this so manifestly hostile to the whole democratic idea’? The ‘first historical cause’ was what Chesterton called ‘Progressive Puritanism’—that is, ‘unlimited limitation’, in which ‘prohibitions are bound to progress…more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away’:

  Progressives are prophets…anybody who chooses to prophesy and prohibit can tyrannise over the people…people are afraid to contradict him for the fear they should be contradicting their own great-grandchild. For their superstition is an inversion of the ancestor-worship of China; and instead of vainly appealing to something that is dead, they appeal to something that may never be born.

  Another cause of ‘this strange servile disease in American democracy’ was American feminism. For, though ‘the aggressive feminists are a minority, they are in this atmosphere…in which there is a sort of sanctity about the minority’. A ‘feminine fad’ was surrounded by ‘a curious halo of hopeful solemnity’, so that, when the ‘earnest lady-reformer…utters a warning against the social evil of beer’, for example, she was ‘seen to be walking clothed in light, like a prophetess’. Chesterton wondered why, if drinking and smoking were prohibited, talking, which tends to lead to these two evil practices, should not also be ‘put a stop to’. Indeed, ‘nine-tenths of the harm in the world’ was ‘done simply by talking’. So perhaps the government should issue lists of subjects suitable for talking about, perhaps ‘a formal application in writing’ should be compulsory for making jokes, perhaps all should have to ‘wear gags’ except between one and three, when English pubs were allowed to open. But Chesterton knew that, if ever ‘the statutory silence of the populace’ became law, an exception for the rich would be made: ‘It will only be the populace that is silent. The politicians will go on talking.’94

  The worst example of ‘petty tyranny’ in America was Prohibition, which simply meant that the wealthy sipped their cocktails while ‘discussing how much harder labourers can be made to work if only they can be kept from festivity’. That was the argument for it: ‘that employees work harder, and therefore employers get richer’. Prohibition had originally been introduced in many states to prevent blacks, whose ‘enslavement and importation…had been the crime and catastrophe of American history’, from drinking; but, once ‘tried successfully on black labour’, it ‘could be extended to all labour’. Chesterton takes the opportunity to point out that, regarding slavery, ‘the eighteenth century was more liberal than the nineteenth century’ with its dogma of in
evitable progress. But then ‘the utter separation and subordination of the black like a beast was a progress; it was a growth of nineteenth-century enlightenment and experiment; a triumph of science over superstition’. The ‘dawn’ of Darwinian evolution heralded ‘the break-up of our brotherhood’, with its ‘growing evolutionary suspicion that savages were not a part of the human race’. Another ‘movement of the progressive sort’ that meant a ‘more brazen and brutal’ slavery was that of industrialization, which encouraged a ‘commercial and competitive’ slavery.95