FROM THE TELEGRAPH
By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
GK Chesterton was one of the giants of early 20th-century literature. If that description makes him sound less like a human being than a fairy-tale creature, then it accurately captures a character who often gave the impression of having wandered into real life by mistake.
GK Chesterton, c. 1930 Everything about Chesterton was larger than life: his height, his bulk, and a list of publications long enough to stock a small library. In a career spanning four decades, he produced some 80 books, 200 short stories, 4,000 essays and countless newspaper columns that he dictated while chuckling at his own jokes and jabbing at the air with a knife. A “man of colossal genius”, according to G B Shaw, he sometimes seemed to have several other writers nested inside him like Russian dolls.
Though physically awkward, intellectually Chesterton was as nimble as a hummingbird. His writing became famous for its use of paradox: little controlled explosions that ranged from everyday clichés (“travel narrows the mind”) to the perils of the suffragette movement: “Ten thousand women marched through the streets of London saying: ‘We will not be dictated to’, and then went off to become stenographers.”
And whereas Wilde’s slick one-liners were usually polished up in advance, Chesterton’s came as naturally as breathing. Like every true genius, he assumed that everyone thought as he did, and simply needed to be reminded of the fact from time to time.
The greatest paradox was reserved for his own life, because he was simultaneously one of the most knowledgeable men of his time and as innocent as a baby. His first memory was of a scene in his father’s toy theatre, which he later recalled as “a glimpse of some incredible paradise”, and in many ways he spent his adult life trying to recapture that lost vision.
It was a task that was reflected in everything from his Christianity to his propaganda work during the First World War, patriotism being just another example of “the necessity of boundaries” he first became aware of when looking through that illuminated cardboard arch.
It was therefore not altogether surprising that Chesterton stopped off en route to his marriage in 1901 to buy a revolver “with a general notion of protecting [his wife] from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads”. He was behaving like a Peter Pan who had grown older and fatter but stubbornly refused to grow up.
In the years of happy domesticity that followed, stories about him as a “great big boy” multiplied like flies around a sticky bun. Some of these could be put down to simple absent-mindedness, as when he turned up for a dinner at the House of Commons wearing one shoe and one slipper.
Other stories suggested that he had not so much married the long-suffering Frances as been adopted by her. She gave him pocket money, tied his shoelaces and on one occasion was overheard telling the cook to heat some water for his bath, at which ‘“Oh, need I?” came in tones of deepest depression from the study.
His writing turned this innocence into a style. A true democrat, he was interested in everything and brought the same infectious enthusiasm to lampposts or the colour grey that he did to more obviously ambitious essays such as “The Plan for a New Universe”.
His most famous fictional creation took this principle even further, because the skill of his detective Father Brown lies in noticing what everyone else had missed, but everything Chesterton wrote was based on the same “ecstasy of the ordinary”. He described the world with all the wonder of Adam naming the creatures in Eden.
In one way this new biography by Ian Ker perfectly matches its subject. It is very large. It is also thoroughly researched and so generous in the number and length of its quotations that it sometimes seems on the verge of turning into an anthology.
Sadly, in every other way this is a book that punches below its weight. Viewing Chesterton as “the obvious successor to Newman” as a Catholic convert and apologist, Ker devotes many pages to the events that led Pope Pius XI to praise him as a “gifted Defender of the Catholic Faith”. Unfortunately this leaves very little room for the rest of Chesterton.
Passages of sketchy literary history (“Thus arose the movement called Modernism”) and ungenerous social commentary (“The later employment of the euphemisms euthanasia and gay for suicide and homosexual would not have surprised Chesterton in the least”) are bad enough. But by the time page 700 is reached, with its summary of the Chestertons’ final trip abroad (“They met on the quay in Calais. They arrived in Amiens on the evening of the 10th. Next day they left for Rouen…”) it becomes clear that this book has done what should have been impossible: it makes Chesterton sound boring.
G K Chesterton: a Biography
by Ian Ker
By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
GK Chesterton was one of the giants of early 20th-century literature. If that description makes him sound less like a human being than a fairy-tale creature, then it accurately captures a character who often gave the impression of having wandered into real life by mistake.
GK Chesterton, c. 1930 Everything about Chesterton was larger than life: his height, his bulk, and a list of publications long enough to stock a small library. In a career spanning four decades, he produced some 80 books, 200 short stories, 4,000 essays and countless newspaper columns that he dictated while chuckling at his own jokes and jabbing at the air with a knife. A “man of colossal genius”, according to G B Shaw, he sometimes seemed to have several other writers nested inside him like Russian dolls.
Though physically awkward, intellectually Chesterton was as nimble as a hummingbird. His writing became famous for its use of paradox: little controlled explosions that ranged from everyday clichés (“travel narrows the mind”) to the perils of the suffragette movement: “Ten thousand women marched through the streets of London saying: ‘We will not be dictated to’, and then went off to become stenographers.”
And whereas Wilde’s slick one-liners were usually polished up in advance, Chesterton’s came as naturally as breathing. Like every true genius, he assumed that everyone thought as he did, and simply needed to be reminded of the fact from time to time.
The greatest paradox was reserved for his own life, because he was simultaneously one of the most knowledgeable men of his time and as innocent as a baby. His first memory was of a scene in his father’s toy theatre, which he later recalled as “a glimpse of some incredible paradise”, and in many ways he spent his adult life trying to recapture that lost vision.
It was a task that was reflected in everything from his Christianity to his propaganda work during the First World War, patriotism being just another example of “the necessity of boundaries” he first became aware of when looking through that illuminated cardboard arch.
It was therefore not altogether surprising that Chesterton stopped off en route to his marriage in 1901 to buy a revolver “with a general notion of protecting [his wife] from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads”. He was behaving like a Peter Pan who had grown older and fatter but stubbornly refused to grow up.
In the years of happy domesticity that followed, stories about him as a “great big boy” multiplied like flies around a sticky bun. Some of these could be put down to simple absent-mindedness, as when he turned up for a dinner at the House of Commons wearing one shoe and one slipper.
Other stories suggested that he had not so much married the long-suffering Frances as been adopted by her. She gave him pocket money, tied his shoelaces and on one occasion was overheard telling the cook to heat some water for his bath, at which ‘“Oh, need I?” came in tones of deepest depression from the study.
His writing turned this innocence into a style. A true democrat, he was interested in everything and brought the same infectious enthusiasm to lampposts or the colour grey that he did to more obviously ambitious essays such as “The Plan for a New Universe”.
His most famous fictional creation took this principle even further, because the skill of his detective Father Brown lies in noticing what everyone else had missed, but everything Chesterton wrote was based on the same “ecstasy of the ordinary”. He described the world with all the wonder of Adam naming the creatures in Eden.
In one way this new biography by Ian Ker perfectly matches its subject. It is very large. It is also thoroughly researched and so generous in the number and length of its quotations that it sometimes seems on the verge of turning into an anthology.
Sadly, in every other way this is a book that punches below its weight. Viewing Chesterton as “the obvious successor to Newman” as a Catholic convert and apologist, Ker devotes many pages to the events that led Pope Pius XI to praise him as a “gifted Defender of the Catholic Faith”. Unfortunately this leaves very little room for the rest of Chesterton.
Passages of sketchy literary history (“Thus arose the movement called Modernism”) and ungenerous social commentary (“The later employment of the euphemisms euthanasia and gay for suicide and homosexual would not have surprised Chesterton in the least”) are bad enough. But by the time page 700 is reached, with its summary of the Chestertons’ final trip abroad (“They met on the quay in Calais. They arrived in Amiens on the evening of the 10th. Next day they left for Rouen…”) it becomes clear that this book has done what should have been impossible: it makes Chesterton sound boring.
G K Chesterton: a Biography
by Ian Ker
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