When G. K. Chesterton died in 1936, the obituary in the Manchester Guardian
dismissed the description of him as a philosopher as “very ill-chosen”. He
had, rather, “a profusion of fresh and original ideas, but they owed more to
the spontaneous inspirations of an enormously zestful temperament than to
continuous or connected thought”. To this anonymous obituary, his friend
Hilaire Belloc replied six days later in the Observer, with the view that
“The intellectual side of him has been masked for many and for some hidden
by his delight in the exercise of words and especially in the comedy of
words”. The most sustained defence of “the intellectual side” of GKC remains
Hugh Kenner’s classic short exposition, Paradox in Chesterton (1948). Since
then, there has been a steady stream of books, usually by Roman Catholics,
more or less ploddingly demonstrating Chesterton’s orthodoxy – which is a
different exercise from winkling out the peculiar charms of his playful
mind.
Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy painstakingly follows the development
of GK’s ideas from the schoolboy poet and debater of the 1880s to the author
of Orthodoxy in 1908. William Oddie’s book demonstrates, sometimes with a
little too much bluster, that although Chesterton did not actually become a
Roman Catholic until 1922, his “position” as a robust defender of Catholic
Orthodoxy was well in place fifteen years earlier. It is also Oddie’s
intention to demonstrate that Chesterton absorbed many of his Catholic ideas
not, as might previously have been supposed, from his friend Belloc, nor
from Fr O’Connor, the model for Father Brown, but from his Anglo-Catholic
wife Frances Blogg, and from some of her high-church heroes, most notably
Charles Gore, Conrad Noel and Percy Dearmer. Oddie has produced an abundance
of new material to substantiate his picture, notably Chesterton’s
contributions to the Debater magazine (written when he was a pupil at St
Paul’s School), and from the journalism. He has used newspaper articles
which have hitherto been unnoticed, or only quoted in part. And he has also
been attentive to the G. K. Chesterton manuscripts in the British Library,
which contain unfinished poems, sayings and theological musings from
Chesterton’s unformed youth. It is now possible to follow Chesterton’s
development from schoolboy Communist to a sort of Unitarian under the spell
of Stopford Brooke, to full-blown Anglo-Catholic husband of the
clergy-loving Frances Blogg.
One new item unearthed by Oddie is a letter written in 1892–3, in which GK the
Communist says, “I should like to have a tea-party of about six individuals.
I mean real individuals. Christ, Walt Whitman, St Francis, Robert Burns, and
Mr Tom Mann, round our table would be very funny”. The Mann in question is
not the author of Buddenbrooks, but Keir Hardie’s campaign manager. The
other item that will be new to many is the full version of a story called
“The Diabolist”, which Oddie has unearthed from the Daily News of November
9, 1907. It is an encounter with a languid Nietzschean “devil worshipper”
who denies traditional ethics. “Only what you call evil I call good”. It
isn’t a very good story, but it does throw a lurid light on Chesterton’s
obsessive hatred of nineteenth-century Decadence. Oddie writes, “The
parallels with the story of Dorian Gray are strikingly close; and we surely
have here all the explanation we need of Chesterton’s loathing for the
Wildean fin de siècle which came to such an abrupt end with Wilde’s own ruin
halfway through the decade”. The use of the adverb “surely” is
characteristic of Oddie’s style. For my part, the story is a good
demonstration of Chesterton’s loathing for “The Nineties”. But it does not
explain the obsession; still less does it provide “surely all the
explanation we need”.
G. K. Chesterton was soaked in the poetry of Swinburne and the ethos of the
Aesthetic Movement. The aspect of the Decadence which filled Chesterton with
shuddering abhorrence was its sexual licence. In Orthodoxy he priggishly –
and with uncharacteristic near-malice – observed, “Oscar Wilde said that
sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar
Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being
Oscar Wilde”. And in his Autobiography, he told a significant story about Fr
John O’Connor. GK had mentioned “a certain proposal, it matters not what, in
connection with some rather sordid questions of vice and crime”. The
priest’s breezy response revealed that Chesterton was “in error, or in
ignorance; as indeed I was. And merely as a necessary duty and to prevent me
falling into a mare’s nest, he told me certain facts he knew about perverted
practices which I certainly shall not set down or discuss here”. The
priest’s knowingness gave Chesterton the idea of Father Brown – the
seemingly innocent cleric whose experience in the confessional makes him
aware of the darkest secrets of the human heart. But the revelations of Fr
O’Connor had left GK “shivering with the appalling practical facts of which
the priest had warned me”.
What can the priest possibly have said that produced such a strong reaction?
And why does GK want to portray himself as someone of such exaggerated,
childish innocence? William Oddie’s new appraisal of GK’s religious
development devotes a chapter to what he calls “the Nightmare at the Slade”.
It did not leave me any the wiser about the cause of GK’s near-breakdown
during his year as an art student – though whatever it was that caused
Chesterton to have the horrors is reflected in the opaque story called “The
Diabolist”. When I was writing my Life of Belloc, Malcolm Muggeridge told me
that GK’s schoolfriend E. C. Bentley (he of the clerihew) suspected
Chesterton of being a repressed homosexual. Bentley had once complained to
Muggeridge, a colleague on the Daily Telegraph, of GK’s capacity for
hero-worship (embarrassingly evident in his friendship with Belloc) and of
his tendency to be a clinging companion. I did not make much of the
observation in my book – though it now seems to me persuasive. Not so to
Oddie, who says “how seriously we need take this is indicated by Wilson’s
source, which is given as Malcolm Muggeridge, who had no direct knowledge of
either Bentley or Chesterton”. This claim is mistaken. Muggeridge heard it
from Bentley himself, who had known GK since the 1880s.
More central than the question of why Chesterton felt so sensitive about
Decadence is whether he is the sort of writer who can bear an analysis of
his thought. I think he can. But with so playful a writer as Chesterton, one
needs to tread carefully. Literary games, such as his delightful novel The
Man Who was Thursday, clearly reflect a jumble of religious preoccupations,
but they do not necessarily lend themselves to the ponderous analysis which
might be apt in the case of, say, John Henry Newman’s A Grammar of Assent.
Readers of The Man Who Was Thursday will remember that a group of anarchists
who take their names from the days of the week discover that they are in
fact none of them anarchists. The last left to be exposed, Sunday, far from
being a villain, turns out to be . . . well, what?
On the very eve of his death, June 13, 1936, GK wrote in the Illustrated
London News that his novel had been “a very melodramatic sort of moonshine”.
The discovery that Sunday was
the master both of the anarchy and of the order . . . led many to infer that
this equivocal being was meant for a serious description of the Deity; and
my work even enjoyed a temporary respect among those who like the Deity to
be so described . . . . But this error was entirely due to the fact that
they had read the book but had not read the title page. In my case, it is
true, it was a question of a sub-title rather than a title. The book was
called The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. It was not intended to
describe the real world as it is.
Yet in Oddie we find the assertion that “The identification of Sunday as God –
and in a very particular way as God incarnate – is confirmed in the text of
the novel”.
Chesterton’s fiction and journalism were dashed off at speed. This is not to
say that they were not on some levels deeply considered. It could be said,
truthfully as well as Chestertonianly, that he was never deeper than when he
was being superficial. Many of his wisest remarks are the throwaways, but
you do not necessarily preserve the truth of a throwaway remark by patching
it together with other throwaway remarks to construct a Summa. Chesterton’s
observation about angels – that they can fly because they carry so little
weight – applies to his own writings.
We know that fourteen years before he died – when most of his best writing had
been complete – Chesterton joined the Catholic Church. It led inevitably to
the perception of him as someone whose intellectual pilgrimage was
comparable with a figure such as Cardinal Newman. Oddie himself makes the
comparison. Under the eye of eternity this might make some sort of sense. If
the recording angel – or even the Devil’s Advocate in Rome (for there is
bizarre talk of GK’s canonization) – were surveying the material, they might
need to sift it in this monist manner. But with the greatest reverence one
would wish to add that this would not make the recording angel or the
Devil’s Advocate very astute literary critics.
W. B. Yeats, in his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, recalled
how the 1890s came to an end – “Then in 1900, everybody got down off his
stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went
mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church”. Oddie’s
comment – “He was wrong about the Catholic Church of course” suggests that
he has not quite caught Yeats’s tone. But maybe the joke tells us more than
many more serious sentences about Chesterton. Having abstained from the
absinthe and, as in one of his funnier Ballades, decided not to hang
himself, GK was perhaps never more “Nineties” than when he followed in the
footsteps of Lionel Johnson, John Gray and Oscar Wilde himself, into the
arms of Rome.
William Oddie
CHESTERTON AND THE ROMANCE OF ORTHODOXY
The making of GKC 1874–1908
416pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $50).
978 0 19 955165 1
A. N. Wilson’s most recent book, Our Times: The age of Elizabeth II,
was published in 2008.
