G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  sat waiting in total darkness, enthroned on a dais, ceremonially robed in a scarlet-and-black Mandarin coat, and wearing a tiny pillbox hat… The doors were flung open and the members entered in a procession, the first carrying [a] skull on a black cushion, flanked by torch bearers; then came the other wardens with the implements of their trade—daggers, guns, vials of poison, and blunt instruments. The Ruler (Chesterton) called out in a great voice, ‘What mean these lights, these ceremonies, and this reminder of our mortality?’

  The new member had to promise that his or her detectives would well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God’. ‘Do you solemnly swear’, the candidate was asked, ‘never to conceal a vital clue from the reader?’ ‘Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics; and utterly and for ever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science?’ And finally: ‘Do you, as you hope to increase your Sales, swear to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are a member of the Club?’ If the new member fails to keep their promises, then, the Ruler pronounces: May other writers anticipate your plots, may your publishers do you down in your contracts, may strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints and may your sales continually diminish. Amen!’20 One could easily see the hand of Chesterton in these oaths or promises of initiation, but according to Evelyn Waugh they were adapted from a code of rules set out in Ronald Knox’s introduction to The Best Detective Stories of the Year, published in 1928, a year before the founding of the Club.21 If so, it was Dorothy Sayers who was responsible for the adaptation, since it was she who drew up, in the words of Anthony Berkeley, the ‘most ceremonious ritual’ used for admitting new members.22

  According to Chesterton, perhaps ‘the most characteristic thing that the Detection Club ever did was to publish a detective story, which was quite a good detective story, but the best things in which could not possibly be understood by anybody except the gang of criminals that had produced it’. The Floating Admiral: A Detective Novel of all the Talents by ‘Certain Members of the Detection Club’ was published in 1931 by Hodder and Stoughton, with an introduction by Dorothy Sayers and a prologue by Chesterton, and with contributions from among others Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ronald Knox, and Freeman Wills Crofts.23 It was

  written somewhat uproariously in the manner of one of those paper games’ in which each writer in turn continues a story of which he knows neither head nor tail. It turned out remarkably readable, but the joke of it will never be discovered by the ordinary reader; for the truth is that almost every chapter thus contributed by an amateur detective is a satire on the personal peculiarities of the last amateur detective.

  The book sold reasonably well, and out of the proceeds ‘a sort of garret’ (in Gerrard Street in Soho), according to Knox, was rented to serve as ‘Club Rooms; and on the night after we all received our keys the premises were burglariously entered; why or by whom it is still a mystery, but it was a good joke that it should happen to the Detective Club’.24 Dorothy Sayers wrote to tell Chesterton how ‘delighted’ she was to learn from his remarks about the book in his column in the Illustrated London News that he did not think ‘too badly’ of the book: it was ‘especially gratifying to find that you—alone of our critics—had appreciated our little digs at one another’.25

  On 27 July 1930 one of ‘the most amusing events’ in Chesterton’s life took place when he took the chair at a dinner to celebrate Belloc’s sixtieth birthday. There were about forty guests, ‘nearly all of them were what is called important in the public sense, and the rest were even more important in the private sense, as being his nearest intimates and connections’. It seemed to Chesterton ‘something between the Day of Judgment and a dream, in which men of many groups known to me at many times, all appeared together as a sort of resurrection’. It was ‘specially impressed’ on Chesterton that there were to be no speeches; that only he, as the chairman, ‘was to be permitted to say a few words in presenting Belloc with a golden goblet modelled on certain phrases in his heroic poem in praise of wine, which ends by asking that such a golden cup should be the stirrup-cup of his farewell to friends’. Accordingly, Chesterton ‘merely said a few words to the effect that such a ceremony might have been as fitting thousands of years ago, at the festival of a great Greek poet’, and that he was ‘confident that Belloc’s sonnets and strong verse would remain like the cups and the carved epics of the Greeks’.

  He acknowledged it briefly, with a sad good humour, saying he found that, by the age of sixty, he did not care very much whether his verse remained or not. But I am told,’ he added with suddenly reviving emphasis, ‘I am told that you begin to care again frightfully when you are seventy. In which case, I hope I shall die at sixty-nine.’ And then we settled down to the feast of old friends, which was to be so happy because there were no speeches.26

  Towards the end of the dinner somebody whispered to Chesterton that ‘it would perhaps be better if a word were said in acknowledgement of the efforts of somebody else’ whose name Chesterton had forgotten, ‘who was supposed to have arranged the affair’. Chesterton therefore ‘briefly thanked’ the supposed benefactor, who in his turn denied that he had been responsible because ‘the real author of the scheme’ was his right-hand neighbour, who ‘rose solemnly to acknowledge the abruptly transferred applause; glanced to his own right, and warmly thanked whoever happened to be sitting there … for having inspired him with this grand conception of a banquet for Belloc’. His neighbour on the right in his turn explained that the gentleman on his own right … had been the true and deep and ultimate inspiration of this great idea; and that it was only fitting that the secret of his initiative should be now revealed’. By now ‘the logic of the jest was in full gallop and could not be restrained’, even if Chesterton had ‘wished to restrain it’. When it was E. C. Bentley’s turn, he ‘gave one glance to his own right, and rose with exactly that supercilious gravity’ that Chesterton remembered so vividly from the days of the Junior Debating Club, responding with his bland solemnity’ and in his precise enunciation’ that

  he had himself followed through life one simple and sufficient rule. In all problems that arose, he had been content to consult exclusively the opinion of Professor Eccles. In every detail of daily life, in his choice of a wife, of a profession, of a house, of a dinner, he had done no more than carry out whatever Professor Eccles might direct. On the present occasion any appearance he might have had of arranging the Belloc dinner was in fact a mask for Professor Eccles’ influence.

  In the end, every single guest ended up making an after-dinner speech at a dinner ‘at which there were to be no speeches’.27 The most lasting effect of the dinner was Sir James Gunn’s Conversation Piece, the idea of which came to the painter during the dinner, and which was to be exhibited in the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition of 1932.28

  Douglas Woodruff, the future editor of the Catholic periodical the Tablet and at the time a young journalist on The Times, had been detailed to bring Chesterton safely to the dinner and on time. He therefore accompanied Chesterton in ‘the high old-fashioned car’ the Chestertons used to hire in Beaconsfield. On arriving in London, they went first to The Times, where Woodruff had to correct some proofs. Chesterton was seized with the idea that it would be very good fun for him to enter Printing House Square and have it announced that it was Mr Chesterton come to write the leaders, having brought the thunder [The Times was known as The Thunderer] with him under his cloak’. Early in the drive to London Chesterton had been ‘speculating about who would be at the party, and when he had suggested various figures who were certainly not going to be there he said with a mixture of regret and acceptance, “There is always such a sundering
quality about Belloc’s quarrels.”’ However, when it came to propose the toast, ‘he said at once that if he or anybody else in the room was remembered at all in the future it would be because they had been associated with the guest of the evening. He meant that.’29

  Woodruff knew of no one who ‘more naturally distinguished between a man and his views, or found easier the theological injunction to hate the sin but love the sinner’. One of the few occasions he remembered Chesterton as being ‘hurt’ himself was when he met Stanley Baldwin, three times Conservative prime minister, ‘and had not been welcomed as a fellow Englishman sharing immense things like the love of the English country or English letters, but with a cold correctitude from a politician who seemed chiefly conscious he was meeting in G.K. a man who week by week sought to bring political life into hatred, ridicule and contempt’. In fact, Woodruff did not think that the polemical journalism of Belloc and Cecil came naturally to Chesterton, and it was only his ‘loyal affection for them’ that made him follow in their steps. Woodruff remembered him as happiest of all when he was prosecuting in one of the mock trials that were held every summer during the last ten years of his life at the London School of Economics in aid of the King Edward VII Hospital. He loved these ‘trials’ of well-known personalities because they gave him the opportunity to indulge in two of his favourite pastimes, debating and amateur theatricals. Other celebrities who agreed to take part in these charitable events and who ‘rarely unbent like that in public … were wholly facetious and trivial’. Chesterton, on the contrary, saw nothing incongruous in both acting for the fun of it and seriously debating. Once when he had been prosecuting leading headmasters of public schools, Woodruff found they were volubly nettled at the drastic and serious case he had made inside the stage setting of burlesque, and seemed to think he had not been playing the game when he wrapped up so much meaning in his speech and examinations’. But, of course, Chesterton never made any such rigid distinction between the serious and the comic: ‘It had come perfectly naturally to make wholly real and material points even in a mock trial and with a wealth of fun.’ Like Chesterton’s neighbour at Overstrand Mansions, Rann Kennedy, Woodruff was fascinated by the way in which he would stand reading a book

  here and there, not a process which could be called dipping, but a kind of sucking out of the printed contents, as though he were a vacuum cleaner and you could see the lines of type leaving the page and being absorbed. When he put it down it was to discuss … the book as a man fully possessed of its whole standpoint.

  Woodruff noted his extensive knowledge of Newman’s writings—‘“You cannot catch me out about Newman,” he said, with a joy of battle’ to some Oxford dons when he was addressing a Catholic dining society. In general, though, Woodruff was struck by how ‘he was curiously content to read what happened to come his way and to rely upon his friends for references and facts, remembering what they might tell him, but not ordering the books which would have greatly strengthened him in the sort of newspaper arguments in which he was so often employed’. His library at Top Meadow ‘gave the impression’ that the books had assembled themselves’. He was not, Woodruff recalled, the only well-known journalist living in Beaconsfield, since J. L. Garvin, the famous editor of the Observer, was a neighbour—not that Chesterton saw him ‘very much’ but he, Chesterton, liked ‘to think that that great factory’ was steaming night and day’.30

  In August 1930 Chesterton published Four Faultless Felons, a collection of stories that had first appeared in Cassell’s Magazine and the Storyteller. The four alleged felons, who belong to the Club of Men Misunderstood and tell their stories to an American journalist, are in fact heroes. But as would-be felons, they face a judicial system, which, in Chesterton’s view, would be more effective if it had a sense of humour:

  I think the world is much too solemn and severe about punishments; it would be far better if it were ruled like a nursery. People don’t want penal servitude and execution and all the rest. What most people want is to have their ears boxed or be sent to bed. What fun it would be to take an unscrupulous millionaire and make him stand in the corner! Such an appropriate penalty.

  Not only criminal offences need to be punished with humour, but also moral defects like the pomposity of a politician: ‘What is needed in such a case?… A few healthful weeks standing on one leg and meditating on that fine shade of distinction between oneself and God Almighty, which is so easily overlooked.’ But in a so-called civilized country like England, it is the poor man who is treated as a criminal, ‘actually punished for being in want’, ‘called a criminal for asking for sympathy’. Fortunately, there are good as well as bad paradoxes, and Chesterton uses one in ‘The Honest Quack’ to illustrate his principle of limitation: ‘But I say to you, always have in your garden a Forbidden Tree. Always have in your life something that you may not touch. That is the secret of being young and happy for ever. There was never a story as true as that story you call a fable.’ Limitation is also essential for religious people who believe such fables and who ‘have … wild visions…who want to expiate and to pray for this wicked world’, for they ‘can’t really do it anyhow and all over the place. They have to live by rule. They have to go into monasteries…’.31

  3

  In September 1930 Chesterton left for a second lecture tour of America. It was an invitation from the President of the Catholic University of Notre Dame in Indiana that occasioned this second trip. On 5 April 1929 Father Charles L. O’Donnell had written a memorandum for Robert Sencourt, an English writer of biography, criticism, and history, who was apparently on a visit to Notre Dame (no doubt lecturing) and whom the President had asked if he would make an approach to Chesterton with a view to his lecturing at Notre Dame. The idea was that Chesterton should give a six-week course of lectures, which would be ‘part of the regular curriculum for which students … would receive credit toward their degree’. The President wanted the lectures to be given during either ‘the spring term or the fall term’, which would mean during either the last two weeks of April and the whole month of May or during October and the first two weeks of November. But the University would ‘much prefer’ that the lectures should be given during the spring term. There would be one lecture a day during ‘the six class days of the week’. The ‘lecture period’ would be fifty minutes long. But if Chesterton preferred that ‘certain days should be entirely free from lectures it could be arranged that two lectures a day would be given’. The subject of the lectures would be left to Chesterton, but Father O’Donnell suggested that there should be two courses on English literature and English history, with three lectures in each course given each week. The President could offer ‘a flat fee of $5,000.00, plus expenses from England direct to Notre Dame and return’. If Chesterton could come in the spring term, then the University would like to confer on him an honorary degree at the Commencement exercises’. On 23 May Sencourt wrote from France to say that he had heard that day that Chesterton was ready to accept the invitation provided his wife’s health permitted. Chesterton’s secretary had asked Sencourt to make it plain that Chesterton would not go to Notre Dame without his wife and so his acceptance was conditional on her being ‘really strong enough to take the journey’. Sencourt thought there was plenty of time for Frances to recuperate from an operation for appendicitis that she had recently undergone. He advised the President now to write directly to Chesterton and tell him what his ‘plans and hopes’ were. He warned him that his wife’s accommodation at Notre Dame would be uppermost in his mind’ and the President should reassure him on that point. He ended by thanking the President for a copy of a book of his poems, which he was pleased to tell him he was arranging to review in the Times Literary Supplement.32

  Accordingly, Father O’Donnell wrote to Chesterton on 7 June to assure him that the University would be ‘most happy to welcome Mrs Chesterton’ and that arrangements would be made in due course for him and his wife to live in the neighborhood of the University’. He was sure that com
fortable quarters’ could be found. He assumed that Chesterton would be coming in the spring term. He asked Chesterton to leave it to the University to announce that he would be coming to Notre Dame when all the arrangements had been made. To ‘refresh’ Chesterton’s memory of the terms of the invitation, he was copying into the letter the memorandum he had given to Sencourt. On the same day O’Donnell wrote to Sencourt to say that it would ‘complicate arrangements a little bit but provide no insuperable obstacle’ if Mrs Chesterton came too. He doubted if accommodation could be found on the University campus, but was sure that ‘delightful quarters at reasonable rates’ could be found in the near neighborhood’. He asked Sencourt to send him a copy of the Times Literary Supplement in which his review would appear. On 21 June Dorothy Collins wrote to confirm that, provided they were both well, the Chestertons planned to come to Notre Dame in April next year. She emphasized that there was no question of Chesterton coming if Frances was unable to accompany him, but she had made ‘a splendid recovery’ from her operation and the doctors saw no reason why she should not be well enough to accompany Chesterton next spring. She assumed that the President knew that the Chestertons enjoyed ‘a very quiet life and would much prefer that there should be as few public functions and publicity during their visit to America as possible’.33

  On 16 January 1930 Father O’Donnell wrote again to Chesterton asking him to confirm that he would be coming in April; on receiving confirmation, he would send an advance payment to cover the travelling expenses. On 23 January Dorothy Collins wrote to confirm that Chesterton would begin lecturing on Monday 14 April and conclude on Saturday 24 May. She now informed the President that she herself would be accompanying the Chestertons. They understood that there should be no difficulty about accommodation as they had heard that there was a quiet and comfortable hotel’ at Notre Dame. She would write again but in the meantime she informed him that they would be probably be in America for a week or two before coming to Notre Dame as Chesterton had been asked to give some public lectures. The Notre Dame publicity director accordingly announced that the famous British journalist and author’ had accepted an invitation to come to the University to give two courses of lectures from April to June, when he would give the commencement address and receive an honorary doctorate. The announcement, somewhat curiously, described Chesterton as being, ‘if not one of the really great men of contemporary literature, certainly… one of the most discussed and caricatured’. He was following in the footsteps of his brother Cecil, ‘who lectured at the University more than twenty years ago’.34