18 | THE TABLET | 7 May 2011

BOOKS

hesterton’s hair “had not beenbrushed for a week – he has sleptin the train in his day clothes andhis nails were filthy (as usual) and

he needed a shave”. That is a description ofthe writer in the middle of a lecture tour ofAmerica during the days when his wife,Frances, was ill in bed.

A picture of the Chestertons’ marriage isan important element in this comprehensivestudy of the man and his work. FrancesChesterton liked sunshine and gardens; herhusband preferred rainstorms and theuntameable moon. To disguise the absent-minded shambles of his dress, she came upwith the cloak and sombrero hat for his FleetStreet existence, which she curtailed by findingthem a house in Beaconsfield. This saved hislife, for, with his 6ft 4in frame bulked out withfood and drink, he almost died of heart failureas it was, during a five-month illness at theage of 40.

Chesterton knew how much he owed hiswife, who was given to depression (with abrother who committed suicide) and illness(with arthritis of the spine). For all “theimmense good nature, the humility, thehumour” of Chesterton, writes Ian Ker, hisdependence showed “a curious, unusual kindof self-indulgent selfishness that went backto his childhood and the permissive parentswho had spoiled him and his brother”.

It is far from an overall condemnation: FrKer, the author of the authoritative biographyof Newman, gives no simplistic picture ofChesterton. That is very welcome, since hehas long suffered from the deficiencies of hisadmirers. This was partly remedied in 2008by William Oddie’s book on his early life,which Ker calls the most original and seriouswork of research since the biography by MaisieWard in 1943.

To think of Chesterton as a fat and jollyCatholic, defending Establishment values,could not be more mistaken. The socialistparson Conrad Noel, who flew a red flag fromhis church, conducted his wedding becausethat was Chesterton’s milieu. His parents, if

C

WRESTLER

WITH THE

UNIVERSE

G.K. Chesterton: a biographyIan Ker

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 688PP, £35

� Tablet bookshop price £31.50 Tel 01420 592974

Frances and G.K. Chesterton: ‘To thinkof Chesterton as a fat and jolly Catholic,defending Establishment values, couldnot be more mistaken’

CHRISTOPHER HOWSE

they attended church, went to listen toStopford Brooke, who had become a Unitarianbecause he could not accept the miracle ofthe Incarnation – or the social conservatismof the Church of England. As a young man,Chesterton embraced the socialism of RobertBlatchford, an odd mixture of medievalism,feminism and bicycling.

Politically, Chesterton defined himself byopposition to the Establishment, acceptingin part Hilaire Belloc’s notion of a servile stateruled by a confederacy of the parties. TheDistributism to which Chesterton devoted

his energies through G.K.’s Weekly (circulation8,000) may have been theoretically shipshape,but it never floated. As for accusations of anti-Semitism, which Ker does not duck,Chesterton was a Zionist who saw Jews asstateless strangers. He hated the political cor-ruption of Godfrey and Rufus Isaacs andextrapolated from it, if with none of the con-spiracist animosity of his brother Cecil or ofBelloc. But Chesterton’s politics have beenovertaken by history in a way that his visionof the world has not been.

Ian Ker’s biography confirms him as a great

thinker. He wrestled the universe inside out.“We have only known the back of the world,”says a character in The Man Who WasThursday. The big question, as he put it inOrthodoxy, was: “How can we contrive to beat once astonished at the world and yet athome in it?” It was, he thought, better “to walkpast a church as if it were a pagoda” than tobe inside as “the ill-educated Christian turninggradually into the ill-tempered agnostic”.

Chesterton, born in 1874, became a Catholiconly at the age of 48. Perhaps he took so longbecause he saw the Catholic faith as a com-plicated landscape (indeed, with some fieldsfallow). Like Newman, he reached certaintyby the convergence of probabilities or a jigsawof evidence. At 20 had come his great crisisas an art student at the Slade, when he stoodbeside an abyss. It was an existential crisisand a moral one – not concerned, as somehave presumed, with sexual impulses but witha terrible prospect of nihilism and diabolism,“a nightmare of negations about mind andmatter”, as he put it. Ker shows that he resolvedit not so much by a methodic optimism (a“half-truth” in Chesterton’s judgement) butby rejoicing in existence. He followed notPollyanna but the book of Job.

The awkwardness of the cosmos helpsaccount for the importance of humour forChesterton. He seldom says anything seriousexcept in a joking way. T.S. Eliot is quoted asfinding his paradoxical style “exasperating tothe last point of endurance”, but to me thetrue humour in Chesterton is humour ofrecognition, of seeing something familiar asif for the first time, no matter how angular orabsurd it is.

As a journalist, Chesterton would write14,000 words, week after week. But if he wasa jolly journalist, he was a jolly bad editor ofthe paper he took on when his brother died.His dramas are unstageable and his novelsmere toy theatres of debate, excepting the“nightmare” of The Man Who Was Thursday.Along with this, the great books out of thedozens he published, remain Orthodoxy and,Ker suggests, Charles Dickens, The EverlastingMan and, soon before his death, theAutobiography and St Thomas Aquinas.

In Aquinas he discovered not so muchmetaphysics as “a hunger and thirst forThings”. This matched Chesterton’s sacra-mentalism (although it is striking that hecame to the Eucharist with “dread”). A recur-rent theme in his thought is limitation, whichincludes materiality, form and incarnation.His magnetic memory retained everythinghe tore from the books by a sort of strengthof attraction. Thus he found in Browning a“symbolism of material trifles” or in Stevensonan escape from “the shadow of Schopenhauer”.Reading with him is like mining for gold: IanKer’s tremendous biography is an incitementto read Chesterton afresh.

As a young man, he embraced the socialism ofRobert Blatchford, an odd

mix of medievalism, feminism and bicycling