Did G.K. Chesterton keep his mistress in our prime street?
PAUL JOHNSON
Athe end of our quiet little street in Bayswater stands a charming cottagey house with hollyhocks and other old-fashioned flowers in its front garden. It has been put on the market at £1.6 million. The street, of 18 semi-detached villas, was built in 1840 by the Ladbroke Estate to house what were termed 'senior servants', that is cooks, butlers, agents, coachmen and housekeepers, who worked in the enormous 20-bedroom houses then going up in the district. Apart from two, knocked down in the 1930s by Denys Lasdun to build the first London house in the International Modern Style, these villas have survived virtually intact, though they have been added to in a charmingly incongruous manner. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to read that the villas were once inhabited by fallen women kept as mistresses by the Victorian and Edwardian rich. And I was positively flabbergasted to learn that among the keepers was G.K. Chesterton, who used the house up for sale as 'a home for his mistress'.
Poor old G.K. Chesterton, dragged in as a selling-point in a house-agent's patter? For I have no doubt that he was picked as the keeper because most people know he wrote a book called The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and houses associated with the Hill are hot properties. He was, in fact, totally devoted to and childishly dependent on his wife, and sex, I suspect, played only a small part in his life, though love pervaded it. There may, of course, be a further confusion. Though our street was never a purlieu of kept women, not so far away is St John's Wood, which undoubtedly was (and, even nearer, Little Venice, where Lillie Langtry had a magnificent villa, serving Tum-Tum meals of ortolans stuffed with foie gras). GKC made jokes about St John's Wood. He complained that he was not allowed to believe any more in Jack and the Beanstalk.
GKC wanted to believe in fairies. The desire for mystery, myth and magic, not in storybooks alone but in everyday life, led him slowly and stealthily into the Roman Catholic Church, where the supernatural is quotidian, normal. The sense of wonder illuminated his entire life, permeated all his writings and made him a happy man. I have a strong hunch that in the 21st century GKC is going to be recognised as one of the greatest writers of the 20th. There are already signs, such as the global growth of the Chesterton Society, run from Seton Hall University in New Jersey, which publishes an outstanding quarterly, the Chesterton Review. Its special issue on Manning is already a collector's piece, and its current one, on Tolkien, is likely to become another.
Chesterton's output was prodigious, since he wrote almost like breathing, and his most hurried efforts, scrawled in station waitingrooms or pubs, almost invariably contain new ideas. I reckon that at least half of it has never been collected. He wrote half a dozen of the best short stories in our language, all of which I once knew by heart, and The Ballad of the White Horse (1911) is a modern epic. The Father Brown stories are in the league of Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe for their strangeness. No one has ever written better on Dickens and Browning. His book on Aquinas conveys the essence of that formidable but impenetrable theologian more surely than all the learned commentaries. And this is only scratching the surface of his vast oeuvre. Moreover, poet, novelist, critic and biographer though he might be, most of his time was spent in journalism. In one sense this is curious. Journalists deal with facts, or at least factual lies or half-truths. GKC avoided facts. There are fewer facts in his books, including his history of England, than anyone else's. Yet his journalism survives just as fairy stories survive, because neither is attached to facts, which grow out of date and uninteresting. GKC was a highly unprofessional journalist but he believed strongly in the ethics of journalism. He also pointed out that fairy stories were based on a system of ethics, that folklore was merely a German expression for common sense. Like Kipling, he saw law everywhere from the jungle to Camelot. In 'The Ethics of Elfland' (a key guide to his philosophy), he writes:
The toiling serfs of Fleet Street, when they catch a glimpse of the fairies, think the fairies are utterly free. But fairies are like journalists in this and many other respects. Fairies and journalists have an apparent gaiety and a delusive beauty.
Anyone who could write thus of journalists in the age of the muck-rakers and the early tabloids had childlike faith in human nature, one of GKC's most durable gifts. Yet he had no illusions about newspapers, as is shown by his sad and powerful poem 'When I came back to Fleet Street'. Journalists, he argued, were casualties, made slaves by their appetites, 'the prisoners of the Fleet':
Chained to the rich by ruin, Cheerful in chains, as then When old unbroken Pickwick walked Among the broken men.
GKC was never broken because he had fields of activity and resources outside the presses. It is a curious fact that some of his best journalism takes poetic form. For instance, 'Antichrist. or the Reunion of Christendom: an Ode'. No one has ever rebuked more effectively the humbug of politicians when they drag in sacramental defences for their crude party tactics. F.E. Smith, 'the cleverest man in the kingdom', claimed that the Welsh Disestablishment Bill had 'shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe'. GKC's brilliant teasing, down to its punchline, 'Chuck it, Smith', was one of the greatest journalistic put-downs of the century, and is still relevant today when politicians make pious references to the environment, the underclass and the Third World to clothe their naked ambition. There are, indeed, dozens of his poems which, while treating of Edwardian or Georgian events, have thundering modern resonances. Indeed, his great poem 'Lepanto', a geopolitical survey of danger, albeit set in the 16th century, has suddenly sprung to vivid relevance as civilisation again confronts Islamic aggression.
But it is, above all, the links with fairyland which make GKC so important and fresh today. He saw fairies as precursors of saints and angels, and their laws as prototypes of Christianity. So did Tolkien. I knew him at Oxford and he told me of the inspiration GKC had given him in his work on The Lord of the Rings. He thought The Ballad of the White Horse should be 'studied', though he criticised Chesterton for his 'ignorance' of the sagas and their language, Like GKC, however, he got the central point that fairy tales, minute or epic, are the means whereby children acquire their moral sense long before religion teaches it systematically. Of course Tolkien was a devout, orthodox and most meticulously observant Catholic, as GKC became. C.S. Lewis, by contrast, was an Ulsterman, a fervent Protestant, with Low Church written into his genes. He told me, as we went the round of Addison's Walk at our college, that Chesterton was a 'problem' for him. GKC would not have minded baffling a clever don. He was a problem to himself, and to his wife. He would have been a problem to his mistress if he'd had one.
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