Father Chesterton
BELL, PEARL K.
Winters Writing FATHER CHESTERTON BY PEARL K. BELL Although it is something of a literary oddity, a mild but unquestionable G. K. Chesterton revival is currently going on. Not long ago, W. H....
...To be sure, the Edwardian offered a wholly different answer-religious, Catholic and somehow very English?to the despair of apocalyptic nihilism than any contemporary author would think of accepting...
...Barker, the most self-effacing and matter-of-fact of biographers, does not conjecture at any length about the nature of this sin ?it probably contained a strand of latent homosexuality, and some looming evil which seems to have been a kind of diabolism"-but out of this lacerating dark night of the soul came Chesterton's lifelong opposition to "the artistic and moral decadence of the English society in which he grew up...
...He wrote a great deal in pubs...
...Like many another highly respected British writer before Hitler, he was shamelessly open about his anti-Semitism...
...This motive, along with the more mundane necessity of supporting an invalid wife, unleashed a prodigious outpouring of work...
...He was also an ardent admirer of Mussolini, and considered Franco the true savior of Catholic Spain...
...During his two years at the Slade School of Art, however, he suffered a terrible late-adolescence crisis that "has left, in my mind forever a certitude upon the objective solidity of Sin," as well as an unshakable faith in the truth of Christian myth and doctrine...
...Dudley Barker, to his credit, in no way fudges the distasteful evidence of his subject's bigotry and unthinking piety, yet one is forced to concede, after reading G. K. Chesterton (Stein & Day, 304 pp., $8.95), that Chesterton was an attractive, engaging, frequently brilliant man of letters...
...Plots and counterplots, murder and mayhem-In Chesterton's best fiction, these signify the secret danger that threaten the vulnerable heart of the universe over which God and the Devil wage their incessant battle...
...Yet for someone who claimed to be a jovially contented Christian believer, Chesterton certainly envisaged an oddly frightening, harsh and punishing Deity, not of the New Testament but of the Book of Job...
...Nevertheless, Chesterton knew that despair is the twin of madness, that life is riddled with dragons whose ambiguity only enhances the reality of their menace...
...Abandoning art in favor of writing, he embarked on a witty Christian battle against "the pessimism, the solipsism, the scepticism, the decadence of contemporary art, literature and society...
...his anachronistic medieval political philosophy...
...It is astonishing how much of this "hackery" has actually remained perceptive and amusing-elegantly phrased in a characteristic texture of epigram and aphorism (not to mention paradox, a Chesterton trademark that, admittedly, he often drove into the ground...
...Chesterton's name and a small part of his enormous output have never fallen into the pit of oblivion that consumed many of his equally well-known contemporaries (Oliver Onions, Stephen Hudson, C. E. Montague, and R. H. Mottram, to cite only a few...
...And it is precisely Father Brown's priestly experience, rather than his deceptive air of unworldly innocence, that makes him the formidable foe of evil that he is...
...He composed his articles, his reviews, his essays, wherever he happened to be, in tea shops and restaurants, in cabs, on the open-air tops of omnibuses, or walking down the street...
...As the British critic Martin Seymour-Smith has written, "Terror is the father of [Chesterton's] ingenuity...
...Of Charlotte Bronte he said: "She showed that abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a manufacturer...
...Barker perceptively notes: "Chesterton, with his innate optimism, believed, as Orwell did not, that eventually human beings would throw off the chains of the authoritarian State...
...No "innate optimism," though, is to be descried in the Kafka-like surrealist horror of Chesterton's finest novel, The Man Who Was Thursday-In which six police detectives named for different days of the week, who do not know each other, infiltrate a seven-man Central Anarchist Council...
...Though he became one of the most widely acclaimed journalists, debaters, lecturers, and novelists of his day, Chesterton had originally trained as an artist...
...So great was the redemptive exaltation following his adolescent ordeal that Chesterton wanted to share it with the world...
...even now Chesterton's official bibliographer despairs that his lists will ever be complete...
...Either forgotten or ignored till now were his indefatigable apologies for the Church, which he joined in 1922...
...On the positive side, he was joyously convinced that "even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting...
...Johnson), his deliberately devised public image as familiar a landmark of Fleet Street as its pubs and newspaper offices...
...Bumblingly large and awkward in childhood, he grew into a gargantuan, bibulous, jolly-fat-man of the London literary scene (still another in England's long line of eccentric litterateurs dating back to Dr...
...But it is in his fiction that the strains of Chesterton's complex and contradictory temperament can best be seen-If never wholly understood...
...and his detestation of most aspects of modern life-Including industrialism, Wellsian ideas of progress, esthetic decadence, and Shavian rationalism...
...His first novel, The Napoleon of Nolting Hill, set in an authoritarian future, was undoubtedly familiar to the author of 1984, though Chesterton's message is the opposite of Orwell's...
...Anything was magnificent as compared with nothing...
...With the natural advantage of a gigantic stature, he was unmistakable wherever he went rolling down a street dressed in the heavy cloak and huge-brimmed hat, waving his sword-stick, and probably with the butt of a pistol protruding from his pocket...
...Chesterton was born in 1874 into a middle-class family whose substantial income derived from a real-estate agency...
...But his reputation since his death in 1936 has rested principally on several volumes of tales about the pudding-faced detective-priest, Father Brown, and on that remarkable Conradian nightmare of an anarchist conspiracy, The Man Who Was Thursday...
...Barker gives us a memorable portrait of Chesterton's dogged work habits: "Sometimes, on his way down the street, he would pull from his pocket a penny exercise book and a pencil, and write his essay against the support of the nearest wall...
...It is also what gives G. K. Chesterton-the anti-Semite, the pompous Catholic apologist, the political and esthetic reactionary-his strange contemporaneity...
...Barker fully demonstrates Chesterton's superb critical gift for expressing in a few concise sentences the essential quality of a writer...
...The idea for the clerical detective had come to Chesterton from his friend, Father John O'Connor, a "quiet and celibate priest" who "had plumbed far deeper abysses of iniquity than [Chesterton] himself had dreamed of in the worst days of his adolescent nightmare...
...The tumult of pre- and post-World War I modernism in the arts may have been far less real to him than King Alfred's victory over the Danes in 871 (the subject of his long epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse), yet the fantasy-ridden interplay of equable appearance and sinister reality that lends vitality to his most original work likewise obsesses writers today...
...more recently in England, Kingsley Amis did the same for Chesterton's short stories...
...Similarly, because of a not altogether Catholic fascination with the presence of the Devil within the commonplace, many of the Father Brown stories are more than simple exercises in criminal detection...
...If he somehow never rose above the rank of a second-class writer (he was often called "a master who never wrote a masterpiece"), he nonetheless often perceived and dramatized the frightening goblins that can lurk at the heart of the most seemingly commonplace serenity...
...Not long ago, W. H. Auden put together a selection of the Catholic convert's nonfiction prose with an appreciative introduction...
...And now Dudley Barker, who has chronicled the lives of such other Edwardian novelists as Galsworthy and Bennett, has written the first full-scale biography by a non-Catholic...
...Behind the benign visage lurks a mailed fist of terror...
...Sunday, the seventh Council member, is the chief of police and, presumably, the author's symbol of God...
...Not only did a steady torrent of articles, reviews, essays, and poems flow from Chesterton's tireless hand (for 31 years he turned out a weekly 1,500-word piece for the Illustrated London News) but, remarkably, he also found the time to write literary biographies (the finest are those on Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson), novels, political and religious tracts, travel books and, of course, dozens of those ingenious Father Brown detective stories...
Vol. 56 • October 1973 • No. 19
