The paradox
Richard Ingrams
The Triumph of Sanity: A Life of G. K. Chesterton Aizina Stone Dale (Paternoster Press £15.30) C ince Maisie Ward's ramshackle two-
volume biography of Chesterton (G. K. Chesterton and Return to Chesterton) a number of biographical studies have been published, many of them by Americans, but they do little more than recapitulate things that have already been written. What is there new to say about his life? Chester- ton the man was always an open book. I doubt whether there is any material lurking which would alter our picture of him. Cer- tainly there is nothing much new in this book by Aizina Stone Dale. It is based very much on Maisie Ward, with one or two ad- ditions, some of which, like the conversa- tion between Shaw and Chesterton mischievously invented by Hesketh Pear- son, are not helpful. The book is also full of elementary mistakes. To take only one ex- ample, it is hard to understand how author and publisher could have allowed the famous Clerihew 'Sir Humphrey Davy/detested gravy' to be printed as 'Sir
Humphrey Davis/Detested gravy'.
By and large it has been left to journalists and amateur enthusiasts to write about Chesterton. Graham Greene, W. H. Auden and John Gross have all written short ap- preciations, but on the whole the profes- sional biographers and critics have steered clear. It is not difficult to see why this should be so. Chesterton has never been a fashionable figure in literary circles. He has been labelled (a) Catholic (b) anti-Semitic and (c) journalist, all three dirty words, especially the last. It is often forgotten that the author of Heretics and Orthodoxy, Chesterton's best and most typical books, was not a Catholic (he was not received into the Church until 1922). As for his anti- Semitism, it was perhaps no more marked than that of many contemporaries, Kipling or John Buchan for instance.
The charge of journalist raises the dif- ficult question of how to categorise him. Although he wrote a mass of books, he was never really a book-man. He was happiest with an essay, or perhaps after some time in Fleet Street he just got into the habit of writing an article, or piece. Even his books on specific biographical subjects, 'Charles Dickens' or 'Robert Browning' are really collections of self-contained essays in which Chesterton starts off with a theme and develops it usually with a great deal of the famous paradox thrown in.
Chesterton was so good at this and at analysing a writer by highlighting an inci- dent from his life or a sentence in one of his
books and then making a point, that any book about him which does not proceed along the same lines is bound to seem all the more disappointing. If only we had a book about Chesterton by Chesterton! Such a book I think would begin with one of the central paradoxes about him. It is always said and is repeated here that the character of his most famous creation, Father Brown, is based on a priest, Father John O'Con- nor, who became a close friend. But the more interesting point is how closely. Father Brown is modelled on his creator, although one is small and insignificant and the other was huge and unmistakeable. The point about Father Brown was that he was able to solve his mysteries, because he was general- ly considered to be a fool, or at least naive and out of touch. His appearance and his religion were both responsible for the generally poor impression he made. Similarly with Chesterton, with his cloak and floppy hat, his elephantine frame and untidy hair — was it surprising that most of his contemporaries regarded him as a joker and a buffoon, an outsize Peter Pan who refused to grow up. Yet this was the man who invariably managed to solve the riddle.
Like Father Brown's, Chesterton's religion was thought of as some kind of dotty romanticism, or even affectation. But in all his writing Chesterton was concerned with demolishing the idea of Christianity as a vague and woolly collection of ideas pro- moted by aimiable head-in-the-air eccen- trics. His starting point was that religious belief was natural to man and that Christi- anity was very specific about what had hap- pened and about what we had to do. He kept saying that it was the free-thinkers and the agnostics, Shaw, Wells, and Co, who were woolly-minded and indistinct. I think if he developed this theme Chesterton might have talked about hitting the nail on the head and the fact that he would have been considered the last person on earth to be en- trusted with such a simple task.
It is this precision that needs stressing. A year or so ago, while making a short pro- gramme for the radio, I listened to one of the BBC's archive recordings of Chesterton broadcasting. What struck me was the meticulous, almost pernickety, manner in which he spoke. His voice was rather high and one realised how comic it must have seemed emanating from such a huge body. But every word was scrupulously chosen and precisely enunciated. The whole perfor- mance emphasised the poetic intensity 0.f. Chesterton which is so much at odds wit.n.
waving character.
the popular image of the wild tankard' waving course for someone who wrote so pro- lifically, he wrote his fair share of bosh. He was led by his brother Cecil and Hilaire Belloc into a number of feuds which, unlike them, he never relished. But Chesterton n
spoke sense on a wide variety of subjects te. a way that no one had done since Samuel Johnson. Johnson. Such a man deserves better con.s sideration than he has been given in book.
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