The Life and Words of GK Chesterton (3 page)

G. K. Chesterton made a name for himself writing for the Speaker, very much thanks to the Second Boer War (1899–1902). The United Kingdom was, as a whole, very much for the war, whereas Chesterton was not. As one American writer noted: “Chesterton was the one British writer, utterly unknown before, who built up a great reputation, and it was gained, not through nationalistic support, but through determined and persistent opposition to British policy.”

By the end of 1900 Gilbert was already becoming significantly better known, and his articles in the Speaker were attracting quite a bit of attention. He had also managed to publish his first book: Greybeards at Play: Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen, Rhymes and Sketches. It was quite the curiosity: a book made up of three satirical poems, illustrated by the poet’s own drawings.

By 1901 Gilbert’s work was being sought after by other liberal publications, and he was writing regular book reviews for the Daily News. It was the year that Queen Victoria died on January 22. Gilbert did not go out into the throngs of people to participate in the processions, but he was still deeply affected by the monarch’s death, staying in simply to avoid weeping in public.

Gilbert and Frances’s long engagement also finally came to an end in 1901, after five years of waiting. They were wed on June 28 at the Kensington Parish Church. Gilbert’s cousin, Annie, remarked that the wedding reception was the one time in their lives that Gilbert and his brother Cecil did not argue. The newlyweds missed their honeymoon train because Gilbert demanded to stop on the way. He wanted to have a glass of milk in a shop where his mother used to take him and to buy a revolver. As a newlywed he needed a weapon, he said, to defend his new bride against all dangers. In reality, though, he loved weapons and always carried both a revolver and a sword-stick. They spent their honeymoon on the Norfolk Broads. Gilbert’s first letter written on their honeymoon begins: “I have a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a knife: what more can any man want on a honeymoon?”

Upon their return to the city, the newlyweds moved into Edward’s Square, but they lived there for only a few months before moving to Overstrand Mansions, where the rest of their London life was spent. Later in the year The Defendant, Gilbert’s first book of journalistic essays, was published.

Gilbert’s second book of essays, Twelve Types, appeared in 1902. It was a book of literary articles that had previously appeared in the Speaker, the Daily News, and the Literary Gazette. It was also the year that the Daily News changed owner- and editorship after falling into financial ruin on behalf of its anti-imperialist stance. The new editor gave the paper a new format and new features, which included expanding the literary section for which Gilbert was writing.

In 1903 Gilbert was promoted by the Daily News and given a regular column on the leader page every other Saturday, which in 1904 became a weekly column. Chesterton was becoming much better known as a writer and as a person. It did not necessarily result in wealth. Although his biography, Robert Browning, published in 1903, created a sensation and established Chesterton as a top notch biographer; when he set out to write the novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill, he was broke. He left his worried wife at home and set out to a restaurant, where he spent their last 10 shillings on a big lunch and wine. He then walked over to the publishing house and laid out his idea for the book. He needed a 20 pound advance in order to write it, he said. The publisher wanted the book, so they offered to have the money sent over on Monday, but, having no money to tide him over until then, Gilbert said: “If you want the book, you will have to give it to me today, as I am disappearing to write it." Luckily for him, it could be arranged.

The book was published in 1904. It was a busy year. Not only did Chesterton publish one more book that year, but he had also started lecturing. In a combined lecture tour and holiday, Gilbert and Frances spent some time in Yorkshire, where they lodged with the Steinthal family. It was through the Steinthal family that they made the acquaintance of Father John O’Connor, a parish priest and later the Privy Chamberlain to Pope Pius XI. Gilbert and Father O’Connor were outwardly very different and had different personalities, but when it came to religion and sensibility, they were like peas in a pod. They immediately became very close and learned much from each other. In some ways, Father O’Connor became someone Gilbert could turn to with his half-formed ideas and test them, to dismiss or challenge them. He was also the inspiration to Gilbert’s fictional priestly detective, Father Brown.

A trend had started. Every year revealed an increasing flood of engagements for Gilbert. He attended numerous lectures and debates, but there was rarely any rhyme or reason to his choice of engagements; Gilbert was simply too good natured to say “no” when invited.

With 1905 came The Club of Queer Trades, a collection of short stories that were classified as a “fantasia.” It was not terribly well received, and even fans of Chesterton’s work were starting to wonder if he was stretching himself thin by trying too many new things. It was also the year that his very important work, Heretics, was published. In these 20 essays, he laid out his understanding of the words orthodoxy and heresy. It was his first overtly religious work since becoming a famous man.

The no doubt most important religious work by G. K. Chesterton is his Orthodoxy. It was published in 1908 and followed on the theme of Heretics three years earlier. Chesterton had a tendency to attack the Utopias imagined by other writers, such as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and John Street. They had all responded that Chesterton had to play nice and put forth his own Utopia for critique. Orthodoxy was that response. In the preface, Chesterton wrote that the book’s purpose was to “attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian faith can be believed, but of how [he] personally has come to believe it.” 

Chesterton’s thesis was that contemporary thinkers were restructuring the way in which people thought, and what they thought, in a way that challenged the reality of sinfulness. In an eerie prediction of the polarization that occurred in Europe during the 1930s, Chesterton urged for a return to what he considered the only safe means to keep a moderate course in a universe full of extremism: Orthodox Christianity. But Chesterton was not speaking about Eastern Orthodoxy. Rather, he meant the orthodoxy inherent in following the Apostles’ Creed.

For Chesterton, finding Christianity was unlike any other discovery. It was the process of coming home, of seeing fully for the first time. He likened his discovery to a man setting off on an adventure by taking a boat from England’s southern coast, spending many days at sea, only to arrive  at the same port that he had left from. In this instance, the man does not recognize his home port; having traveled for so long, he thinks that he has discovered someplace new, only that this new place had clearly already been discovered by many men before him. That makes his discovery no less wondrous, however, and even when he finally recognizes his home, he sees it in a new, more appreciative way.

Something very cathartic, or perhaps revelatory, must have happened during the writing of Orthodoxy, for the period that immediately followed its publication was the most contented and profound time that Gilbert had ever known. Unfortunately, Frances was anything but content. She was tired of the city and the hectic lives that they led there. She was no doubt also tired of all things relating to Fleet Street, where Gilbert had a tendency to stay out late and drink copiously, leading his wife into a worried existence. Frances wanted to leave London, and after many months of subtle pressure on Gilbert, he finally agreed to move with her to the quiet town of Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire.

The move threw a wrench in Chesterton’s contentment. He was shocked by the provincial attitudes of his neighbors and how limited life was in the country. It threw him into depression, although he eventually came to peace with his new life through the aid of routine.

He also made some new friends: all of the children in town! Having always been rather childlike himself, he conceived wondrous new games for them that were refreshing to the children but sometimes worried their conservative parents. In one such game, an adult passerby was asked to adopt a strange position, and the children were to explain through a story how these poses had come about. The children adored him and must have seen him as a slightly larger version of themselves. When games of cowboys and Indians were arranged, Gilbert would be as enthusiastic as the wildest of the children, playing his part with tremendous gusto. His friendships with the neighborhood children only grew as he came to understand that it was unlikely that he should ever have children of his own. It probably did not help that the countryside left the extremely outgoing man very lonely. He filled that loneliness with children’s games and pets. Friends came to stay, which Gilbert enjoyed, but they rarely stayed for long, detecting a certain coldness in Frances, who had not signed up for constantly entertaining guests.

Eventually, Gilbert decided to focus the excess energy that had partly been spent on his loneliness on his work. Never being a man of half-measures, he threw himself into it head first. He employed a secretary. Her workload was enormous, simply taking dictation. While dictating to his secretary, Gilbert was also writing books in his own hand and taking notes for further books. When he wasn't writing for commission, he was writing for his own enjoyment. His output was staggering.

In 1910 the first Father Brown story appeared in the Storyteller magazine. In 1911 the first Father Brown book was published: The Innocence of Father Brown. It was a surprising success. Although Gilbert himself never saw his character as all that special or these particular stories as his best writing, the general public greeted Father Brown as the new Sherlock Holmes—a Sherlock Holmes with an exotic, mystic, and, in England, unfamiliar Catholic way of life.

Ever experimenting, Gilbert premiered his first theatrical play in 1913. It was a comedy on the theme that love and knowledge of God are prerequisites for contentment and understanding and that the supernatural is part of our lives. It was called Magic, and although it was a critical success, it only ran for three weeks.

Rather than slow down, Gilbert started writing like never before. He was frantically busy. In addition to writing several new books at the same time; writing reviews, essays, and plays; and contributing poetry to journals, Gilbert started writing for a new magazine that his brother Cecil had bought: The New Witness.

Although Frances was happy that they had moved and that Gilbert had found an outlet in writing once more, she was unhappy with how much of his time was spent on journalistic articles. In her experience, journalism meant going out drinking on Fleet Street and staying out late. Gilbert’s friends were split amongst his oldest friends, who urged him to stay at home in the country and write seriously, and newer friends, who urged him to leave the country and come back to London. Since Gilbert had never much enjoyed the life that he had in the country and had felt the most at peace in London right before moving, he was obviously torn. His workload had by this time become truly enormous, and it caused him much stress, even without the constant arguments with his wife and brother as soon as his career was mentioned. It was beginning to take a serious toll on his health. His weight was getting the best of him. Although Gilbert had always been a large man, he now weighed 320 lbs, and it was starting to become difficult to carry the obesity. Photos of him from this time show a much more uncomfortable and unhappy man, and his usual jokes about his own size fell out of his repertoire.

The new Father Brown books were an enormous success, and the Chestertons became rather wealthy as a result. Gilbert toasted himself on his success alone in his Beaconsfield house. He had become an isolated and melancholy drinker. Frances may have hoped that in keeping him in Beaconsfield, away from Fleet Street, she would stop her husband’s excessive drinking, but instead he drank excessively alone. Combined with his always excessive eating, Gilbert’s health continued to suffer. He started to have recurring pains in his throat.

In 1916 Cecil left for the war, and Gilbert was left in charge of The New Witness. Cecil was wounded while fighting in France but stayed on his post until the armistice and died in December of 1918 from complications as a result of those wounds. Gilbert was heartbroken and consoled himself by taking his mind off his grief. He traveled to Ireland to lecture and drum up interest for his late brother’s magazine. The result was his Irish Impressions, in which he clearly sympathized with the Catholic south over the Protestant north. In order to keep Gilbert occupied, his best friend, Bentley, stepped in and got the Daily Telegraph to commission a series of articles from Chesterton. He and Frances were to travel to the Holy Land, once again under British control, and write about what they saw there.

Travel only served to deepen Gilbert’s religious convictions. This was not only the case of his journey to the Holy Land. His travels to America were certainly also a part of it. “They make the best audience to lecture to in the world,” he said of the people of the United States. Canada, too, was a triumphant tour. Upon returning to Britain, Gilbert was committed to converting to Catholicism. Never one for letters if he could avoid it, he nonetheless started to correspond more with his Anglo-Catholic friends for guidance. His letters reveal not only Gilbert’s commitment to converting to the Catholic faith but his deep fears that such an act would hurt his friends and Frances. He worried that his new church would be too “alien” to those he loved the most. His Catholic friends, however, assured him that the Catholic Church was as foreign, and indeed as English, as he wished to make it, despite British prejudice that Catholicism was a continental and un-English religion.

Gilbert discussed the matter with Frances, trying his best to be sensitive to her feelings, but they both knew that her consent did not truly matter, and the discussions were as much to satisfy his own feelings as hers.

Before a conversion could take place, Gilbert’s father passed away. Gilbert was heartbroken but was forced to carry on, coping through the necessity of taking care of his father’s outstanding business.

It was Gilbert’s good friend Father O’Connor who guided him in planning his conversion. He also took Gilbert’s first confession. The actual baptism, however, was presided over by Dom Ignatus Rice. Gilbert’s Anglican and nonreligious friends were less than supportive of the change, but after the news became public, strangers started showering Chesterton in supportive letters, which must have been quite a comfort for him.

Of his conversion, Chesterton said:

When people ask me, or indeed anybody else, “Why did you join the Church of Rome?” the first essential answer, if it is partly an elliptical answer, is “To get rid of my sins.” For there is no other religious system that does really profess to get rid of people’s sins. It is confirmed by the logic, which to many seems startling, by which the church deduces that sin confessed and adequately repented is actually abolished; and that the sinner does really begin again as if he had never sinned.

Friends detected a new energy in Gilbert’s step after his conversion, and he approached his work with more pleasure. Meanwhile, The New Witness, which he was still managing after his brother’s death, was going very badly. Frances must have breathed a sigh of relief feeling that the journalistic days were almost behind him, but Gilbert could not let his brother’s life’s work fail. He took the advice of others and changed its name to G.K.C. Weekly, cashing in on his own famous name. Gilbert took out a third of the salary that his friends thought that he should and made use of his network of writer friends to fill the pages. Eventually, subscriptions rose to 8,000. The real number of readers must in reality have been significantly higher, as people in those days read magazines in places like cafés and not necessarily merely in the home. The increase in readership was probably in part related to interest in Distributionism, an economic theory based on Catholic social teachings, which was being organized into a more coherent political ideology at the time and for which Chesterton was one of the more influential writers.

In 1926 Frances, too, joined the Roman Catholic fold. “"I am feeling my way into the Catholic fold,” she told Father O’Connor, ‘but it is a difficult road for me and I ask for your prayers.’ ‘I don’t want my instruction to be here. I don’t want to be the talk of Beaconsfield and for people to say I’ve followed Gilbert.” Soon after her conversion, Frances fell into a physical decline. It was not the first time that she had been ill, and Gilbert, fearful of illness, did not know at all how to handle it. Frances’s illness postponed her first communion and confirmation but did not stop them.