G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  Back in the United States, Chesterton began lecturing again on 6 January. After lectures on the usual subjects in New York and in New Jersey at the College of St Elizabeth, Chesterton introduced a new subject, St Francis of Assisi, in a second lecture in New York. On the 11 th there was another debate with Cosmo Hamilton in Boston on the subject ‘Is Divorce a Social Asset?’ The hall was only half-full because of the rain, which, Dorothy Collins noted, ‘thoroughly disorganises things’, being a comparatively rare event compared with England.113 Two days later in Washington Chesterton first lectured on ‘The Curse of Psychology’ and then debated again with Cosmo Hamilton on ‘Is Psychology a Curse?’ From there Frances again wrote home to report that Chesterton was keeping wonderfully well’ and that the ‘drier climate’ suited him better than the damp and fogs of home’. As always, she—if not Chesterton—rejoiced in the wonderful sunshine’. She could, however, assure the family at home that they would not be returning to America, as after California they would ‘have seen all there is to be seen’.114

  On 16 January and again on the 18th Chesterton debated the motion ‘Will the World return to Religion?’ first in New Haven and then in New York with the famous American lawyer Clarence Darrow, who had defended the Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes, prosecuted for breaking state law by teaching evolution, in the notorious 1925 ‘Monkey Trial’. Chesterton was to recall that, when he had ‘tried to talk about Greek cults or Asiatic asceticism’, Darrow had ‘appeared to be unable to think of anything except Jonah and the Whale’.115 During his speech in New Haven, the loudspeakers had crackled and rumbled, causing Chesterton to remark that ‘it seemed as if the devil was rehearsing applause for Mr Darrow’.116 In the Mecca Temple, New York, Chesterton teased Darrow by saying that he felt he was arguing with a fundamentalist aunt; and when something again went wrong with the sound system, he jumped up and cried, Science you see is not infallible.’ The audience voted that Chesterton had won the debate.117 In retrospect, Chesterton thought that it was ‘the curse’ of the ‘comic career of lecturing’ that it seemed to bring on the lighted stage nothing except comedies’.118

  The English visitors left the East Coast on 20 January bound for California after lectures in the South. The following day they arrived at night at Chattanooga, Tennessee. Frances was already running a temperature, which next day was over 103. A doctor was called, who diagnosed ‘an attack of grip” which the doctors here’, Dorothy Collins told her mother, ‘call a disease which is like ‘flu but much quicker’.119 Meanwhile Chesterton was persuaded to carry out his lecturing engagements in St Louis and Nashville, equipped with ‘pages of instructions’ provided by Dorothy.120 In St Louis he told reporters that, while he had been at Notre Dame he had soon given up pronouncing the name in the French way.121 On 25 January Dorothy was able to report to her mother that Frances was better but frightfully depressed and lugubrious’.122 On the 28th she wrote that Frances had got over the ‘flu but was now ill with ‘gastritis or its equivalent’. A nurse had had to be hired to help Dorothy with the nursing. On the same day Chesterton returned ‘looking like nothing on earth: ‘His hair had not been brushed for a week—he has slept in the train in his day clothes and his nails were filthy (as usual) and he needed a shave—He can’t go about alone and I am at my wits’ end what to decide.’123 It was imperative financially that Chesterton should continue the lecture tour, but, if so, she, Dorothy, would have to accompany him. In any case, Chesterton absolutely refused to go by himself. On the other hand, Frances would be devastated if she were left alone in Chattanooga. Next day she wrote again to say that Frances had been taken to hospital in an ambulance. The doctor thought Chesterton should cancel the remaining lectures.124 By the following day Frances was ‘dangerously ill’: ‘in fact I have never seen anyone so ill.’ She was in a private room and now had two nurses in attendance, as well as two doctors, and the night before a specialist had been called in. She hardly recognized her husband and Dorothy. She was constantly vomiting and had to be artificially fed. Dorothy and Chesterton took turns to sit with her. Chesterton was ‘very anxious’: ‘He is marvellous though and kindness and consideration itself to me.’125

  By 31 January Frances was ‘off the danger list’. Dorothy told her mother that the papers in St Louis had made much of Chesterton’s untidy appearance’. She herself had to take him back to his bedroom when he appeared at breakfast to dress him properly, comb his hair, and do up his shoe-laces.126 Now that Frances was so much better, the lecture tour could continue, and Chesterton, accompanied by Dorothy, very reluctantly left Chattanooga on 7 February on the evening train bound for Los Angeles via New Orleans. The cancellation of five lectures in the South had cost over £700, and the medical bills were coming to £40 a week, while the hotel accommodation was costing another £6 or so. The day after leaving Dorothy reported to her mother: ‘I drag G.K. round like a good-tempered sack of potatoes. I pay everything and give him his pocket money. He seems to get rid of about £1 a day on detective stories and magazines and getting shaved and that is all he pays. I can’t think what he does with it.’127

  On 8 February en route to Los Angeles, Dorothy Collins wrote to Father O’Donnell enclosing a poem Chesterton had written especially for the University, which he had composed a long time ago’, but, as he had still not written an accompanying letter and as there would be no spare time in the immediate future for him’ to do so, she was sending it herself. She told O’Donnell that Frances had had ‘a very bad time with influenza’ and that they had been held up for over a fortnight in Chattanooga’ and that they had had to cancel all the Southern lectures’. They hoped that Frances, accompanied by a nurse, would be able to join them in California this day next week’.128

  After travelling by train for three days and nights, Chesterton and his secretary reached Los Angeles on 10 February, where he gave a lecture on the 11th. Back in Chattanooga, Frances received a telegram from her husband to say that the lecture had been a tremendous success’.129 On 12 February Chesterton lectured at Santa Barbara, where his uncle Cyril Chesterton, an accountant, lived, who had invited him to make his headquarters’ at his home and ‘allow’ him to drive him round to his various engagements in California.130 There followed lectures at San Diego, Long Beach, and Pasadena on 13, 14, and 16 February.

  Meanwhile Dorothy Collins found and booked ‘a delightful little place which had only three bedrooms’ in the hills outside Los Angeles at Palos Verdes, now a suburb of the city, called La Venta.131 She described the inn to her mother as being ‘on the top of a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean’. It seemed quite European and quite unlike the ostentatious American hotels they were used to. Frances, accompanied by a nurse, arrived in Los Angeles on 17 February. She was ‘dreadfully upset’ by the long journey to Los Angeles.132 They all moved to the La Venta Inn on the 18th, where Frances and the nurse would remain till 22 March. Their third day at La Venta was the first day Frances was without a temperature. There was now a respite from lectures until the 27th, when Chesterton had to lecture in Los Angeles, during which they—that is, Frances and Dorothy if not Chesterton—could bask in the Californian sunshine and Dorothy could bathe in the warm sea. Dorothy, however, was also able to do some business for her employer. Invited to spend a night in Hollywood with a friend of hers who worked there and his family, she was shown over the Fox Film Studio. During the visit she ‘did some good business for G.K.’, she proudly informed her mother, ‘which he would never have done for himself. I got into touch with an honest Hollywood agent and he is negotiating for the sale of film rights in Magic and some of the Father Brown stories.’ Chesterton could earn as much as £4,000 for the Magic film rights as opposed to a mere £100 for a single lecture. She herself had been offered ‘tempting’ secretarial jobs but felt she could not abandon the Chestertons.133 Three weeks later she mentions to her mother a ‘good job’ she was offered in Hollywood, which might be worth it later on’.134

  While they were at Palos Verdes, Chesterton wro
te to Clare Nicholl, using again a variety of coloured crayons: If you only knew how we long to be home in England you would not accuse us of wandering wilfully.’ He reported that Frances had fallen ill suddenly and was taking time to recover. As an exile, he, Chesterton, was learning ‘to hate time’ and to ‘see a new and savage sense in the figure of killing Time’: ‘I handle the large knife in my pocket.’ He was certainly able to kill time by dramatizing for the benefit of Clare ‘a real scene, farce, comedy or miracle play’. It had ‘occurred in Chattanooga in the State of Tennessee (which is Puritan and very Dry). Near Dayton of the Monkey Trial. Frances in bed. To her enter a perfectly gigantic Popish Priest, swarthy as a Spaniard but bearing the reassuring name of Dillon.’

  Priest (after a boisterous greeting) I was told ye were ill: but I didn’t know how ill. I’ve brought the Holy Oils.

  Frances (somewhat tartly) Then you can take ‘em away again. I don’t want them just yet. But I wish you’d give me your blessing, Father.

  Priest I’ll give ye some whiskey first. (Produces an enormous bottle of Bootleg Whisky and flourishes it like a club). Don’t ye believe all that yer told about the stuff we get—you’ve only got to know your Bootlegger. This is perfectly sound mellow Canadian stuff and the nurse says ye need a little stimulant. (Administers a little stimulant with a convivial air.) You drink that down and ye’ll be all the better.

  Frances (rather faintly) … and the Blessing?

  Priest (straightens himself and gabbles in a strong guttural voice) Benedicat te Omnipotens Deus, etc. etc., or whatever is the form for sickbeds.

  Chesterton then told Clare that he would ‘like to have that actual dialogue printed as a little Catholic leaflet’:

  It would tell people more about the Soul of the Church than ten thousand chippy chats between A (Anglican Enquirer) and C (Catholic Instructor)—about its fearlessness of the facts of life and the Fact of Death, its ease and healthy conscience, its contempt for fads and false laws, its buoyancy that comes from balance: its naturalness with the natural body as with the supernatural soul: its freedom from sniffing and snuffling embarrassment: its presence of the Priest: its utter absence of the Parson. Clare dear, Never let go of the Faith. At unlucky moments, in unworthy people, it may sometimes turn on us a face that is harsh or features that are irritant: but in moments like that, when Reality is only too close you suddenly see it quite plain: the face of your best friend: and in the sick-room that wind from beyond the world is only something fresher than fresh air.

  But the note on which he ended the letter was one of gratitude to Clare and her sisters: ‘You and your little sisters … came into my life about the time one fancies one’s purely personal circle is closing or closed: and showed me a vista.’135 The actual scene that Chesterton recreates for Clare’s amusement is a perfect example of Chesterton’s conception of the seriousness of humour and of how he saw comedy as just as serious a medium as tragedy.

  Chesterton also wrote a ‘hurried line’ in ‘chalk pencil’ to his mother to say that Frances was ‘ever so much better, as this Land of Sun agrees with her: and we shall soon resume the march home.’ Apart from Frances’s illness, the lecture tour had been ‘very successful’.136

  On 3 March Chesterton gave a lecture in San Francisco. While he was in the city, Chesterton was taken by a journalist to a ‘bootleg joint’, where he asked for ‘some speciality of the house’ and was offered a ‘Mule’. ‘Six of these babies will put you on your ear,’ the barman remarked. What had he said about his ear? Chesterton enquired. After he had knocked back three of the special cocktails, the barman commented, ‘He can take it,’ a slang expression apparently unfamiliar to Chesterton. It seems that Chesterton was either just being polite or somewhat inconsistent, given his disapproval of cocktails as the product of Prohibition—’perhaps the only practical product of Prohibition’:

  The reason why the American millionaire does not drink wine or beer with his meals, like all poorer and better Christians, is simple if not dignified…. He prefers to be a Prohibitionist on public occasions; especially those highly important public occasions when he meets his wife. Hence arose, originally, the habit of the males of the party consuming hurried, secret and very potent drinks before they assembled at table. It was necessary that the sort of drink should be one that could be gulped down quickly; it was necessary that it should be very strong for its size …

  This was what ‘determined the novelty and nature of this remarkable sort of refreshment. It was, quite simply, a tippling husband hiding from a nagging wife.’ But in any case, whatever its origins, Chesterton considered that cocktails were a deplorable form of drink quite simply because ‘it was a worse way of drinking’, it being ‘rudimentary human nature’ to be ‘more natural to sit still and talk, and even drink, after dinner, than to stand up and gulp before dinner’. But, in defence of his drinking the despised cocktails, perhaps Chesterton was being more than merely polite: enjoying as he did the company of ordinary people, as he informed his host in San Francisco, on this occasion the pleasure would necessarily have entailed the drinking of the house speciality, the creation of which by a ‘creative’ craftsman would have seemed to Chesterton to deserve ‘legitimate praise’.137

  His stated wish to meet ordinary people emboldened a request to him to give a talk at a Catholic girls’ school that could not possibly pay his normal fee. When he had given the talk and signed autographs, a large chauffeur-driven car arrived at the school. Informed that he had missed an important engagement, Chesterton replied, ‘I have filled an important engagement, lecturing to the daughters of the poor.’138

  On the same day that Chesterton was lecturing in San Francisco, Father O’Donnell wrote to Dorothy to say that he had returned home only the previous day to find her letter of 8 February enclosing Chesterton’s poem. The poem would ‘shortly appear in the University publications’, while they planned to have Chesterton’s manuscript framed and hung in the University library. Considering the amount of travelling and the various engagements, he was surprised that all three had not fallen sick. It seemed their plans had changed, as he had understood that after the Christmas holiday in Ottawa they were going directly to the West Coast ‘to take it easy there for the rest of the winter’. He hoped that they would be able to stay a few days at Notre Dame on their way back to the East Coast. In her reply Dorothy Collins explained that it did seem that there had been more lectures than originally envisaged, but at least ‘it has made it possible to stay out here for the winter, so we do not grumble. It has been a glorious experience to spend the winter months in such lovely surroundings.’ Unfortunately, because of a lecture in Toledo and engagements in New York they would be unable to accept his kind invitation to stop off at Notre Dame, but they hoped he could join them for lunch or dinner on 26 March in Chicago before they left for Toledo. Father O’Donnell also wrote by the same post to Chesterton, thanking him for ‘an immortal poem’: ‘We do feel that you have somehow divined the spirit of the school which moves in and around the amplitude of Our Lady’s blessings.’ He hoped that Frances was now fully recovered, although it was his ‘private opinion that a few more days at Notre Dame [would] be needed to make her completely forget the rigors of American life’. He ended the letter with his ‘affectionate regards’ to them both.139

  Working his way up the West Coast with Dorothy Collins in attendance, Chesterton lectured on 5 March at Oakland, California, where he told reporters that he hardly thought that George Bernard Shaw would visit America, because he would be afraid to witness the Prohibition that he so vigorously advocated in action. He also thought that Shaw prided himself on being that rare English author who had never done a lecture tour there.140 On 8 March he gave a lecture on a new subject, ‘Shall we Abolish the Inevitable?’, in Portland, Oregon. Outside their hotel there was a holdup and killing, a common enough crime in those days of Prohibition, which, Dorothy Collins remembered, ‘much to the distress of our taxi-driver, we just missed by minutes’.141 Cr
ossing into Canada, Chesterton lectured on 10 March in Vancouver, where he stayed with Annie Firmin, the angelic ‘girl with ropes of golden hair’142 of his childhood, now Mrs Robert Kidd. Next day he gave a lecture at neighbouring Victoria.

  Meanwhile Frances wrote home from ‘lovely’ Palos Verdes to say that the doctor had forbidden her to ‘go north into the cold after such a bad attack’, so she had remained behind, although she ‘hated the separation’. The Holywood studios were ‘not far off’ and ‘some of the managers there are anxious to get hold of some Father Brown stories for filming’. She thought that Chesterton would ‘try and arrange something… It would be splendid financially… and a great help, as naturally my illness has been a bit expensive. Every thing out here is about 4 times as much as in England.’143

  On the 13th Dorothy Collins and Chesterton were back in the United States for a lecture in Seattle, where they stayed with some of Frances’s relations. They all left Palos Verdes on the 22nd on their way back to New York. They arrived at the Grand Canyon at 8 a.m. the next day, where they spent the night. The following morning they left for Chicago, which they reached on the morning of 26 March, when Chesterton spoke in favour of the motion that ‘Psychology is a Curse’ in another debate with Dr Bridges. On the way they dropped off Frances’s nurse at Kansas City. ‘She was a dear’, recalled Dorothy Collins, ‘and said it was the happiest two months of her nursing career’.144 On the 24th Father O’Donnell wrote to Dorothy Collins at the hotel in Chicago where they were to stay, suggesting that, unless they had engagements in Chicago on the night of the 26th, they could spend the 26th and most of the 27th at Notre Dame before leaving for the lecture in Toledo on the 28th. He was ‘moved to these desperate calculations because at this moment it looks impossible for me to come to Chicago’. On the 25th he wrote again to Dorothy to confirm that he was unable to meet them in Chicago, but suggested again that, provided they had no engagements on the evening of the 26th they should leave Chicago in the afternoon, buying train ‘tickets through to Toledo, arranging at the ticket window for stop-over privilege at South Bend’, which they would have to pass through anyway. If this was impossible, he would like to know what train they would be leaving Chicago by on the morning of the 27th as he could ‘board the train in South Bend and ride with you as far as the next station East’. When the English visitors’ train stopped at South Bend, they found the platform was ‘crowded with our friends from the University and the town, including the Bixlers and the two children’. One assumes that Father O’Donnell was there, but whether he accompanied them on the train as far as Chicago is not recorded.145