by Ian Ker
I have only once before gone through a ceremony of this kind and that was at the highly Protestant University of Edinburgh, where I found that part of the ceremony consisted of being lightly touched on the head with the cap of John Knox. I was very much relieved to find that it was not part of the ceremony on the present occasion that I should, let us say, wear the hat of Senator Heflin!
(Heflin was a notoriously anti-Catholic senator from Alabama.) On his first visit to America, his first sensation had been one of terror; this second time he had felt quite differently: ‘If you want to know why I felt different, the reason is in the name of your University.’85
Towards the end of his time at Notre Dame, a party was held in Chesterton’s honour after his lecture. A keg of beer was obtained without too great a trouble. The twenty or so people present were mostly from the teaching staff. Chesterton held forth for three hours from 9.30 p.m. to 12.30 a.m., his mug never empty. The party broke up only after the amused but somewhat indignant Chesterton was firmly told that his wife had been promised that he would be returned home by midnight.86 Three or four days before the last lecture, Chesterton invited students to bring books to the Bixlers’ house to be autographed. Altogether he ended up autographing 600 or 700 books.87 On 15 November the Chestertons and Dorothy Collins left South Bend. As they parted from the Bixler children, both Chestertons had tears in their eyes,88 while the whole Bixler family’ was ‘in floods of tears’.89
The Chestertons’ first stop after leaving South Bend was Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Chesterton lectured on ‘The Age of Unreason’ at the university there. Two days later, on Monday 17 November, they were in Cincinnati. From there Frances again wrote home. They were ‘very sad’ at leaving Notre Dame, where everyone had been ‘so nice and the lectures so successful’ and Chesterton ‘so beloved by the students’, who, ‘poor boys’, were now being examined on the lectures. On arriving at their hotel, they had found a large Union Jack on the walls of the hotel entrance, with “Welcome to G. K. Chesterton” in electric lights at the top’. That evening the hotel management had presented them with ‘a huge cake, something like this—’. Below Frances drew a picture of the cake, on the white icing of which was written in gold letters the name of Chesterton’s latest book, The Resurrection of Rome, of which the cake was ‘an exact replica’. Fortunately, there was a local Chesterton Club and they had invited some of its members to tea that afternoon, who would help them to eat it.90 Chesterton’s lecture to the Club was on ‘The Curse of Psychology’. The Club presented Chesterton with ‘a large etching’, which only added to their luggage; the English visitors already required two taxis to get anywhere. Having got it as far as New York, Chesterton sat on it in a taxi in New York, smashing the glass.91
From their hotel in Cincinnati Frances wrote to the President of Notre Dame on 17 November to say that she felt ‘somehow’ that they had never thanked him properly for all his ‘goodness’ to them while they had been at Notre Dame: ‘It must have been a bit of a nuisance to you to think for a man’s wife and his secretary—but you will have realised how impossible it would have been for him without us.’ She continued, perhaps with a certain resignation: ‘No man was ever so dependent on his belongings—no man was ever more compelled to carry his home with him—wherever he might go.’ But they had all had ‘a very happy time and for us there are nothing but loving memories—of Notre Dame and all she stands for’. Her husband wanted her to thank Notre Dame ‘very warmly’ for its generosity in the matter of payment for his lectures’. The money was ‘badly needed’ if he was ‘to keep the flag flying’ at G.K.’s Weekly. It was difficult to keep a paper going that lacked both capital and subsidy. For over twenty years her husband had tried to preach sanity ever since he could run a paper at all’, without making a penny’s profit and with heavy debts, which he had always paid. On 19 November O’Donnell replied to Frances’s ‘thank you’ letter. He said they had all felt ‘very lonesome’ after the English visitors’ departure. And, far from deserving any thanks, he felt he had ‘grossly neglected’ them; it was unfortunate that they had had to come in the autumn, the busiest time of the year. However, he was counting on them returning for a visit on their way back East from the West Coast. Notre Dame was the logical’ and the psychological place to break that long journey’. The University would ‘take care’ of them ‘very nicely for as many days as you will have the kindness and courage to grant us’. He understood about the paper and was glad to have been able to contribute ‘even a little to keep the flag flying’.92
Next stop was Pittsburg, where Chesterton lectured on The Inhumanity of Humanism’ on 18 November. The following day he was at Canisius College, Buffalo, New York, lecturing on ‘Culture and the Coming Peril’. Back in his hotel in New York, he gave an interview to the New York Sun, in which he admitted that he did not understand why Sinclair Lewis had received the Nobel Prize for Literature for satirizing America’s Main Street. ‘I don’t know when I have enjoyed an experience more,’ he declared in reference to his stay with the Bixlers. ‘They are my kind of people … fine and sincere; kindly and considerate … most Americans habitually are courteous and considerate, especially of their inferiors.’ But he also struck a more critical note: It has long been recognized that America was an asylum, but it is only since prohibition that it has resembled a lunatic asylum.’93
There followed lectures in New York City on The Inhumanity of Humanity’ on 21 November, and on ‘The Age of Unreason’ at Trinity College, Washington, on 22 November. On Sunday 23 November Chesterton opposed the motion ‘Divorce as a Social Asset’ at a debate in New York City with the English playwright and novelist Cosmo Hamilton, who wrote a number of Broadway shows. This was followed by another debate with him two days later, when Chesterton again opposed the motion That Immorality in Modern Books is Justified’. On 26 November they stayed for a day and a half with the Rann Kennedys in Millbrook, near Pough-keepsie, as they had done on their previous visit. A special performance was put on in Chesterton’s honour at the Greek theatre the Kennedys had had built and that had become well known all over America among teachers of classical Greek. Thursday 27 November was Thanksgiving Day. The students carried in the turkey high in the air, and a prize was offered for the best song—to be written on the spot and handed in anonymously.’ Unsurprisingly, Chesterton won the prize—‘but he certainly seemed surprised and was quite obviously delighted’. When he was asked to make a speech, he suggested that he should stay on at the school and play in their next performance. The play he suggested was The Tempest: ‘Rann Kennedy would play Prospero and he himself would be a “natural” for Caliban.’ In this same speech he delighted some of his audience and infuriated others by explaining that England too should have a Thanksgiving Day ‘to celebrate the departure of those dour Puritans, the Pilgrim Fathers’.94
While he was staying with the Kennedys, Chesterton met Regina Cody, who taught English at the school and was a Catholic from Vermont. She remembered talking to Chesterton about the Church, and particularly about confession. He made no bones about how difficult he found confession; but, while he knew ‘it shouldn’t be easy… it was harder for him than for many. For one reason even his being a little oversize—naturally there was no confessional box big enough to house him.’ Wedged’ in the confessional, ‘all thought ceased, all that was left was a sense of something that had to be got through with. Devotion departed, even if he’s had it before.’ Unable to remember what he was intending to say, ‘He thanked God for the formula, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” with which Confession opens.’ He never felt so grateful for ritual—about which the truest thing was said by Yeats … that ceremony goes with innocence’—without which in this case ‘he would often have left. If he did leave he would probably take the confessional with him.’ Coming downstairs on a Saturday morning, Frances ‘wouldn’t say a word but the look in her eyes said: we are both going to Confession.’ And go they did. While Frances would use her prayer book to make a s
crupulous examination of conscience, Chesterton would get carried away with speculations about sins … His own two chief sins, he felt, were ‘laziness … and certain kinds of anger’. The act of contrition—Oh my God, I am so sorry… ‘—after confessing his sins seemed to him to go perfectly with the prayer before Communion—‘Lord, I am not worthy…’. The two prayers expressed his inadequacy for both sacraments. As he left the confessional he would see ‘people turning to look at him as he came out’, as he had said the words of contrition ‘much louder than he realized’. He felt he followed the Latin Mass poorly compared with Frances, and the prayer before Communion gave him the necessary courage to receive. He spoke of his great happiness after receiving Communion—and yet the next time it’s just the same again: the same dread…’.95
Although 27 November was Thanksgiving Day, nevertheless Chesterton had to give a lecture in the evening at the Hotel Commodore in New York. From there Frances wrote home to report that Chesterton was really enjoying himself’. The weather continued to be ‘lovely’—such glorious sunshine’.96 Then there was a respite of a few days from lecturing, in the course of which, however, Chesterton gave an interview that was published in the 30 November issue of the New York Times Magazine. The interviewer was struck not only by his charm and humour but also by his ‘kindliness and sweetness’ and his ‘perpetual wonder at the universe that is almost childlike in its earnestness’. True, any reader of his books would know that he could be ‘caustic’, but it was ‘a causticity that does not leave a scar, a causticity that burns with its wit rather than with its scorn’. The interviewer wanted to know what Chesterton, after six weeks in South Bend, thought of Main Street America. A couple of weeks before he had met and talked with Sinclair Lewis, whose famous book by the same name had made Main Street a name that stands for commonplace drabness and dulness’. Chesterton replied with a chuckle that, since he knew very little about Main Street, he supposed that he was a good person to discuss it! He had found Main Street to be ‘most charming and entertaining’. There were certainly things that struck an English visitor as ‘rather peculiar’, not that he found fault with them. He was pleasantly surprised by a ‘friendliness’ that one would not find in an English small town. He was also struck by the classlessness: he was astonished, for example, by the familiarity with which a grocer would greet a professor from the university. On the other hand, he missed the ‘privacy’ that was valued in England. The almost universal hospitality’ seemed to him to make the American’s home not a cast lebut a hotel. But he would not want to change the simplicity’ of the people. He had read Sinclair Lewis’s book before going to South Bend, and, while he could recognize some of the characteristics’ described in the book, there were others that had been completely ignored. Any street had two sides to it, a sunny side and a shadowy side, and both had to be taken into account. Small town America, unlike small town England, was ‘the outgrowth of Puritanism’. American pioneers had travelled westwards in ‘covered wagons with closed minds’. Puritans believed in the simplicity of human nature’ and failed to realize its complexity’. Thus, on deciding that drink is the cause of much misery, the Puritan ‘promptly adopts prohibition as a panacea for all ills’. The Puritanic American was by nature a professional reformer… constantly looking for ways to improve the world’. Sinclair Lewis himself, Chesterton remarked with a chuckle, was just such a reformer, as he ‘tried to delve behind the scenes on Main Street’, finding only ‘ulcers on potatoes’. ‘The real motives, the simple but full lives of these people’ had escaped him’, or at any rate he had tried to improve and reform them’. But Chesterton did not think that the people he knew in South Bend, whatever their ‘peculiarities’, could be ‘changed to advantage’. The room by now was getting ‘quite warm’ and Chesterton tried with difficulty to open the ‘new-fangled’ window, a product, he remarked, of the ‘machine age and the reformer’. As he mopped his brow with a huge handkerchief, he announced that he had changed his mind about Prohibition: ‘You know I am not so sure prohibition is not a good thing for this country. The rooms are kept so warm here that the desire to drink is constant.’ As the interviewer left him, he was standing in front of the opened window, ‘and all that he was gulping down were great draughts of air’.
On 30 November the Chestertons and Dorothy Collins left New York, where they had stayed at the St Moritz Hotel in West 59th Street.97 On 1 December the famous lecturer was back in the Mid West lecturing on What I Saw at Rome’ in Cleveland, Ohio. Back in New York State he lectured on 3 December in the capital Albany on ‘The Age of Unreason’. Chesterton warned his audience against the American religion of activity for its own sake, a passion that he supposed came from the pioneering spirit and the energy of Puritanism, which had turned from religion to business. However, the worship of activity was no worse than the English worship of idleness among the rich.98 Back again at the St Moritz Hotel in New York City on 7 December, Chesterton was again visited by the Irish American who had visited him in his hotel in Baltimore on his previous visit in 1921, when Chesterton had praised the Irish love of freedom and attributed it to the influence of the Catholic Church.99 Then he had not been a Catholic, now he was. But even before he believed in Christ, he explained to his visitor that he had believed in Christmas. Indeed, he had ‘believed in the spirit of Christmas’, even when he was a boy and thought he was an atheist. Not only that, but he had actually written a poem in honour of the Blessed Virgin:
From my earliest years I had an affection for the Blessed Virgin and for the Holy Family. The story of Bethlehem and the story of Nazareth appealed to me deeply when I was a boy. Long before I joined the Catholic Church the Immaculate Conception had my allegiance … the thought that there was in all the ages one creature, and that creature a woman, who was preserved from the slightest taint of sin, won my heart.100
Between 4 and 16 December Chesterton lectured at Syracuse, Philadelphia, Boston, Providence, Worcester, Newark, and Hartford, on the usual subjects: ‘The Curse of Psychology’, ‘The New Enslavement of Women’, Culture and the Coming Peril’. In Boston Chesterton informed reporters that he had discovered that you cannot get murdered in gangster-famous Chicago unless you belong to ‘an exclusive circle’.101 The Worcester, Massachusetts, lecture was at the invitation of Holy Cross College, where the English visitors were greeted by ‘students dressed up as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare’. Chesterton commented that the pageant had made him think that ‘they were the culture and he was the Peril’.102 Dorothy Collins was less kind: she could not imagine English students behaving like that; it was a ‘pantomime of a day’.103 After a reception, a message from Paul Claudel, the dramatist and poet, who was then French ambassador to the United States, was read out. Claudel said Chesterton’s books over the past twenty years had never failed to bring him ‘joy and refreshment’.104 The visit was filmed, and Dorothy Collins urged her mother to try and see it: ‘They told us it will go all over the world.’105 On 16 December Chesterton lectured on a new subject, Puritanism and Paganism’, in Baltimore. On 7 December Frances wrote home to say that they had decided to stay on in America, so that Chesterton could give ‘a second course of lectures’, which he was very keen to do’, even though this meant being away from home at Christmas and they were both feeling ‘pretty homesick’: ‘But it seemed too good a chance to be missed.’ She was very anxious for Chesterton to be a bit relieved of the financial anxiety of the paper—the debt on it is always so heavy, and he would hate to give it up’. They were off to Canada next week for ‘a little holiday’.106 Before leaving New York Chesterton gave another interview to the New York Sun, in which he praised Prohibition for encouraging people to make their own home-brew, thus reviving ‘the old pride of the craftsman’.107 On a later occasion he told reporters that he had found Americans invariably eager’ to discuss Prohibition, especially over the nuts and the wine’—although they were often ‘willing to dispense with the nuts’.108
On 18 December the Ches
tertons left for Canada to spend Christmas and the New Year with Uncle Walter and Lilian in Ottawa. Dorothy Collins remained in New York, very happy to have time on her own, dealing with correspondence. Frances, she told her mother, departed for the arctic Canadian winter very reluctantly’, adding that Chesterton was ‘a selfish creature like all men when it comes to big things and she gives him his own way in everything. It makes me furious.’ In the same letter, she offers an insight into the Chestertons’ marriage: ‘I tell her she makes him more helpless than he need be. Like so many women I think she likes to feel that he is dependent on her.’ In an earlier letter, Dorothy had complained about her employer’s vagueness’, which was ‘simply appalling’. But, she added, nothing is worse than when he thinks he ought to be businesslike—the fussing that then ensues cannot be described. Luckily it only happens once a week for a short time!! Mrs. C. does not encourage it.’ As an example of Chesterton’s vagueness’, Dorothy mentions in passing that he was far too absent-minded even to notice the huge helpings in restaurants—an aspect of American life that visitors still comment on—to which she and Frances objected, who, when ‘feeling very brave’, would order one portion between them, to the contempt of the waiters. Chesterton, on the other hand, did not ‘mind’ whether he had ‘a little or a lot’ on his plate: ‘he is quite oblivious either way and just munches through it.’109 But, all things being equal, Chesterton was naturally, she recorded, a small eater’.110
Predictably, Frances developed such a bad cold in Ottawa, which she blamed on the ‘hot’ North American rooms, that Lilian had to send for a doctor. This upset Lilian’s Christmas preparations, which ‘vexed’ Frances, since the ‘poor girl’ had a very hard time as her health is very undermined and Uncle Walter is a very difficult patient’. Chesterton himself was enjoying a real “do nothing whatever” time here’, Frances informed the family at home. ‘He just wanders to the bookcases and takes out books and puts them back and then has a smoke—and then a meal—and then a look at some new toy or detective story.’111 Meanwhile Dorothy Collins, who had remained behind in New York, was invited to Christmas dinner by the Rann Kennedys. New Year’s Eve in New York was ‘like hell let loose’, she recalled, with ships’ sirens blowing and taxi horns blaring. At the English Speaking Union Club she listened nostalgically to ‘a relay of Big Ben striking midnight’.112