G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  They arrived in Toronto on 2 October. After lunching next day with the Catholic Archbishop, Chesterton gave the lecture that he had already given in 1927 at University College, London, on ‘Culture and the Coming Peril’. There were about 2,500 people in the audience at St Michael’s College, a Catholic college in the University of Toronto. During questions, in reply to a woman’s query as to his height and weight, he replied, ‘about six foot two, but my weight has never been successfully calculated’.54 Before the lecture Chesterton admitted to reporters that he did not at all like lecturing—he always felt nervous when he got up in front of an audience—and travelling even less. He felt it was presumptuous imposing his ideas and thought half an hour was quite long enough for a lecture. As for his famous paradoxes, he swore that he would not know one even if he met one ‘socially’.55 On another occasion, when asked how he felt before lecturing, he replied: ‘I always think that this time they’ll find me out.’56 Chesterton explained in his lecture that by the coming peril he did not mean Communism, which had been tried and failed, nor did he mean another great war—which, Chesterton presciently predicted, would break out when Germany violated Polish sovereignty. Rather, he meant by the coming peril the threat to civilization from intellectual and economic ‘overproduction’, which was deadening people, leaving them no time for creativity and thought of their own. During questions Chesterton was asked why Dean Inge was so ‘gloomy’, to which he replied: ‘Because of the advance of the Catholic Church. Next question, please.’ Was George Bernard Shaw a coming peril? He was asked. ‘Heavens, no. He is a disappearing pleasure.’57 Frances could not attend the lecture because she had an attack of lumbago, but heard that it was ‘a great success’.58

  The Chestertons and Dorothy Collins left Toronto at eight on the morning of Saturday 4 October. There was ‘a good deal of fuss at the customs at the American border’ because of ‘a great deal of liquor smuggling’, but their ‘one flask of brandy was undetected’.59 They arrived at South Bend just after six in the evening. They were met at the station by the President, Father O’Donnell. Chesterton told the waiting reporters that he did not know why the University of Notre Dame thought that he was an educator, or even that he was educated, just because he had written a few books.60 After dining with the President, Chesterton stayed the night at the all-male university, while Frances and Dorothy stayed in the University’s infirmary under the care of the nuns who looked after it.

  Writing home, Frances reported that ‘rooms had been taken’ for them at 209 E. Pokagon Street, ‘near the University’.61 This was not quite true. It seems that Father O’Donnell had been true to his word in looking for suitable accommodation for his English visitors but had not taken it upon himself to make the final choice. So after the eleven o’clock Mass the next day, which was a Sunday, Frances and Dorothy Collins set out with a list of possible houses nearby. The first house they went to, about a mile from the University, was a wooden building, rather like a bungalow but with two rooms on top’. It was quite small,’ Dorothy recollected.

  When we arrived there we saw a mother and a little girl of 4 and thought that with the father that was the extent of the family. But when we had fixed everything up and arrived with Mr Chesterton and our luggage, we suddenly saw in a cradle under the piano a baby of six months old; a little later in the day an old grandfather appeared, and later still another lodger. How we all packed in was a mystery.62

  The day after moving in with the Bixlers, Frances wrote home to give her impressions of living with a real typical homely’ American family. It was certainly ‘an amusing experience’. The family were ‘kindness itself’, but they were so utterly unlike people of the same position at home’: Here we have the true democracy at work and we shall all lead the family life.’ As she wrote, Dorothy Collins was already nursing the baby, while Chesterton was ‘conversing with the grandfather about the Civil War and Lincoln’, and she, Frances, must go and help their hostess clear the table. Frances had discovered not only democracy at work, but a democracy in which men were expected to do household chores: father, mother, and grandfather all help with the housework.’ Chesterton’s help, one suspects, would not have been very helpful, and Frances does not record his helping. The rooms, she reported, were ‘small’, but fortunately like all American houses there was ‘a large porch for sitting out’, as Frances feared that they would ‘get a bit congested’. There were in fact only four bedrooms, with a box room that another lodger, a secretary, occupied. As for the University of Notre Dame, it was ‘a perfectly enormous place with over 3000 students’. There was a large and beautiful church’, but ‘the glory of the place, to the students anyhow’, was a football stadium that could hold 53,000 people: The university holds the record for unbeaten football and thousands come from all parts to witness matches.’63

  Dellhard Bixler, a real-estate agent, and his wife Anna,64 who had been a secretary before marrying, were in their thirties; they had been ‘persuaded’ by Father O’Donnell, according to Mrs Bixler, to offer to put the English visitors up at their home. As the son of an estate agent, Chesterton was able ‘to talk about houses and prices’ with his host.65 As for Frances, she was delighted to be in the company of children and would go for walks with little 4-year-old Delphine, who ‘seldom went to bed till midnight and got up in the morning when she felt inclined’.66 Mrs. Bixler recalled many years later how Chesterton would rise usually around 9.30 or 10, occasionally having gone to bed the night before as late as 12.30 or 1, and then dictate to Dorothy between breakfast and lunch and again between lunch and tea, unless they had to go out. In the evening the Chestertons and Dorothy would go to the University from Monday to Friday at 7, returning around 9.30, although occasionally Chesterton would stay on. Every night Mrs Bixler would put a thermos flask of cold water and a plate of crackers by his bed. Originally, the idea was that the English visitors would have meals at the University, but after about two days Frances asked if they could eat at the Bixlers. Breakfast and lunch were eaten in the kitchen with the family and dinner by themselves in the living-room, according to Mrs Bixler.67 But here her memory seems to have been at fault. The actual arrangement for meals was not quite so democratic, but only a little less so: writing to her mother, Dorothy Collins reported that she and the Chestertons ate alone in the dining room—but with the whole family trooping in and out68—while the Bixlers ate in the kitchen.69 Mrs Bixler remembered how Chesterton would relax after his lectures by reading detective stories in a huge rocking-chair. Frances, to whom Chesterton was clearly devoted, would get impatient with her husband occasionally, especially when he left bits of the biscuits in bed or was particularly sloppy at the table or when she asked him to do things and he failed to do them. As always, she had to tie his tie and lace up his shoes. Mrs Bixler noted how the Chestertons liked roast beef and potatoes, but were not interested in salads or vegetables.70 At least in America Chesterton would have been spared the sight of that old-fashioned English pudding the jelly, which he disliked: ‘I don’t like a food that’s afraid of me.’71 Chesterton kept Mr Bixler busy making home-brew in those days of Prohibition. Mrs Bixler was struck by Chesterton’s admiration for the efficiency of Dorothy, of whom he and Frances were obviously as fond as if she were their daughter. Their hostess was delighted when they soon began talking about the house in South Bend as ‘home’. Neither was fond of having to go out to big dinners; they preferred to be at ‘home’, returning with relief from the lectures in the evening. They were constantly buying presents for the 4-year-old, Delphine, of whom they were both extremely fond. But Mrs Bixler was dumbfounded when Frances insisted that the older girl should come and stay with them in England when she was a little older.72

  While he was at Notre Dame, Chesterton gave two lecture courses, thirty-six lectures in all, one on Victorian literature and the other on Victorian history, to audiences averaging five hundred. After just over a fortnight of lectures, Frances told the family at home that Chesterton was enjoying the ‘Univ
ersity work very much’ and that Father O’Donnell informed them that the students ‘particularly’ liked his lectures because they were so original and unacademic’. She lamented that there was little of interest’ in South Bend except the University: ‘It is pure and unadulterated Middle West … ‘. Still, the Bixler family was ‘most amusing’ and provided them with ‘a glimpse of the real middle class American life’. The children were ‘delightful and not spoilt and grown up as American children are’. Mrs Bixler did all the housework, but she was always bright and performs miracles of labour without a murmur. It seems impossible to get servants and hired help here.’73 But Dorothy Collins reported to her mother that the Bixlers had everything in the way of conveniences you can imagine’.74 She observed, perhaps slightly snobbishly, that they knew all the local trades people to whom we are introduced on every possible occasion’.75

  Chesterton gave the first of the lectures on Victorian literature on Monday 6 October. Next day he lunched with Cardinal Hayes, the Archbishop of New York, who had come to bless the new Law School. On Saturday 11 October the Chestertons, without Dorothy Collins, took the afternoon train to Chicago, where Chesterton lectured again on ‘The New Enslavement of Women’ in the Orchestra Hall. Several of his audience in the gallery called out that they could not hear, to which he responded: Good brother, don’t worry, you’re not missing a thing.’76 Contrasting the restricted life of a modern typist with the freedom of an old-fashioned housewife as part of an attack on the modern tendency towards a complete codification of life’, Chesterton coined such epigrams as ‘There are moralists who propose to prevent wife-beating by prohibiting pokers’ and ‘An Englishman is never so fond of his friends as when they are not there’. He gave an interview to several newspapers on the Sunday afternoon. He claimed that the Catholic Church was ‘everywhere winning by the collapse of its opponents’, although more slowly in England, where it was only advancing ‘at a trot’, whereas in America it was advancing ‘more at the charge’. Asked which of his books was his favourite, he replied that ‘he hadn’t read them all’, but that The Flying Inn had been ‘the most fun to write’, while Orthodoxy had been ‘most satisfactory, in the sense that it said what it set out to say’. He thought Notre Dame was more like Oxford and Cambridge than other American universities, since both the former were more like boarding schools, although discipline was more efficient at Notre Dame than Oxford and Cambridge. The students, he said, put up with his lectures with the same fortitude that they displayed on the football field. The Catholic newspaper reporter, however, pointed out to its readers that in fact 650 students had signed up for Chesterton’s courses, and that his classes were the only ones in the University that no student would think of missing. Reminded that on the last occasion he had lectured at Orchestra Hall the lecture had been on ‘Literature as Luggage’, when he discussed what books he would take to a desert island, he was asked what books he might now add to the list. He replied that, much as he liked detective stories, he would not take them to his desert island: they were like ‘returned empties’, which could not be read over and again. (Chesterton was once asked, perhaps on the previous visit, what book he would take to a desert island if he could only take one and replied that he would take a guide to shipbuilding.77) He thought that having children was ‘quite the most amazing thing the human race can do, the most miraculous’. At home women were like artists, whereas in the office they were like machines. By going out to work women had lost much of their influence, and he had noted a decline in chivalry among men. After the reporters from the daily papers had left, the Catholic newspaper reporter asked for a special message for its readers. Chesterton then spoke of his ‘wonderful experience’ at Notre Dame. Remarking how English visitors felt alarmed at the size of America, whose inhabitants seemed as foreign as, say, the French, on this visit he had felt very differently: ‘The name of Notre Dame makes all the difference.’78 In another interview with a newspaper, he confessed that he had ‘spoiled many great ideas under the compulsion to finish a book, I needed money. Publishers pressed me. I rarely was able to give to a book all the time it needed. Books, like children, need a long period of gestation and undisturbed growth.’79

  On Sunday the 19th the Chestertons were again in Chicago, when Chesterton debated the subject ‘Is the New Woman Enslaved?’ with Dr Bridges, the head of the Chicago Ethical Society, with whom he had debated a decade before. Yet again the next Saturday, 25 October, Chesterton was back in Chicago to debate with Dr Bridges in the Orchestra Hall, this time on the motion ‘That Psychology is a Curse’, Chesterton as on the previous occasion moving the motion. Afterwards he had lunch with Dr Bridges and the Episcopalian bishop. He told reporters that, thanks to being at Notre Dame, he now knew more about American football than psychology.80 Four days later he was in Detroit to lecture at a crowded Orchestra Hall on ‘The Curse of Psychology’.

  While he was in Chicago, Chesterton wrote to Clare Nichol in coloured chalks, with the words in capitals chalked in the appropriate colour. He was writing from his hotel, ‘quite near the ground, only fifteen floors up’, from where he could watch cabs crawling like insects’. He reported with amusement that he was ‘constantly greeted as “Lord Chesterton” and “Sir Chesterton”, but often (more strangely still) as “Professor” (the idea being that all English writers possess all English titles and they can be used according to taste and fancy)’. Everybody, he told her, was now complaining that “Prohibition is too wet”, and nobody supports the law against drinking except the bootleggers who sell the drink’. He did not apologize that he had ‘nothing to write with but a box of coloured chalks’, for ‘the wildness of this country…would demand all the colours of the rainbow’.

  A lady was ‘featured’ in a paper here, posing in smiling pride, who had left her husband because he wore orange neck-ties. I read an article of popular psychology about a man who had ‘probably’ dreamed in infancy of murdering his brother, because that alone could explain his dislike of A RED HAT-BAND. Quackery rules this country to a degree beyond belief: and the people are a GREEN PASTURE for every greedy charlatan in the world.

  However, at least Americans were not snobs: ‘They admire a Professor like me more than they do a millionaire: if not so much as another Professor who tells them that violet rays are a substitute for food—or morals. Above all, by the supreme paradox, because they do care for ideas in their own mad way, and because they have kept simplicity of a sort …’.81

  Notre Dame provided Chesterton with a driver, Johnnie Mangan, who found it very hard getting his famous passenger into the car, and even harder getting him out. Once when Chesterton got stuck in the car, he said it reminded him of an old Irishwoman, who, to a suggestion that she should get out sideways, retorted: ‘I have no sideways.’ Frances would entrust Johnnie Mangan with the money if, for instance, he had to take Chesterton to have his hair cut, as otherwise there might not be any change. While driving, Chesterton was very chatty. But above all he enjoyed talking to small children: ‘He liked to ask them things and then if they gave a good answer he could get a good laugh at it.’ One of the professors remembered how he would ‘sit around consuming home-made ale by the quart’, saying that the best brew was made by the head of the philosophy department. When some professors wanted to meet him, they mentioned they had some Canadian beer, to which he replied: ‘The ales have it.’ Once one of the professors met the invariably genial lecturer but only got a grunt in reply to his greeting; when his lack of cheerfulness was commented on, Chesterton responded: ‘One should be given the luxury of a little private grouch once in a while.’ When lecturing, he would climb on to the stage, searching through his pockets for his notes until he found some dirty scrap of paper, which he only occasionally consulted. He was heard once remarking that what he liked about notes was that they could be disregarded once the lecture began. He would quote at length from memory without the slightest hesitation. He stood for the first lecture; afterwards he sat at a table, constantly shifti
ng his huge body and fiddling with his glasses. He began his first lecture by saying that until quite recently he had not been at all certain that he would be able to be there—in which case, ‘you would now be gazing upon a great yawning void instead of myself’.82 After the lectures had been delivered, Macmillans the publisher asked for the text, but unfortunately ‘not a word’ had been recorded, nor were there any notes’.83

  On 5 November Chesterton received an honorary doctorate from the University. In his opening speech the President began by saying that it was a year since it had been agreed that Chesterton should give a series of lectures in the spring and then give the ‘Commencement Address’ to graduating students before receiving ‘the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws’. Unfortunately for the graduating class of 1930, he had fallen ill, and the lectures had had to be postponed. And so ‘it happens that, for the first time in the history of Notre Dame, there is a special convocation of the Faculty, and an honorary degree is conferred outside of a regular Commencement’, an exception’ being made for ‘an altogether exceptional man’. Looking back on Chesterton’s stay at Notre Dame, the President singled out ‘with the greatest possible satisfaction … that note of confident and triumphant Catholicity’ that had ‘rung’ through his lectures. Although he did not expect Chesterton to deliver a ‘Commencement Address’, he did ask him to say whatever he found it in his heart to say to the students of the ‘Senior Class’.84 After receiving the honorary doctorate, Chesterton protested not only that he was unworthy of the honour but that he was in something of a false position, as he was simply a journalist and could claim only that he had tried to show that it was possible to be an honest journalist.