The Man who was Chesterton ...

What are we to do about G K Chesterton? The most famous Old Pauline novelist, he is renowned for his Father Brown detective stories, dramatisations of which have just reached their sixth series on BBC One. For Chesterton these were primarily a money-spinner; what really interested him was argument, whether political, theological or literary, a passion which was born during his time at St Paul’s, where the library’s fascinating archive shows him to have been an enthusiastic speaker at formal dinners and a keen debater, even editing a journal under that title.

Pictures of him abound on English-classroom walls: six-foot-four, so obese that his coffin had to be lowered out of his bedroom window, and dressed in cape, pince-nez and broad-brimmed hat with a trusty sword-stick by his side – the epitome of the Edwardian intellectual with larger-than-life persona.

And yet as a school we rarely mention him. Even our ‘Chesterton Union’ quietly disappeared in recent years. What lies behind this? That he is remembered as the dogmatic Catholic writer he became in his final years? Or the accusations of anti-semitism? Defenders of Chesterton are keen to point out that he described himself as so ‘appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities’ which ‘have absolutely no reason or logic behind them’ that ‘I will die defending the last Jew in Europe.’ However, the fact remains that Chesterton insisted there was a ‘Jewish problem’. One can sympathise with his anti-imperialism (he was a leading voice in opposition to the Boer War), his distaste for the homogenisation caused by mass production (he would have loved craft beer) and his scorn for the materialist progressivism espoused by the likes of H G Wells, but he leaves us with a vision of a Brexit Britain where Jews would be protected but might usefully wear identifying attire, at which point his ‘fancy for having things on a smaller and smaller scale’ enters disturbing territory.

Fortunately the reader of Chesterton’s best work will be oblivious to this or the leanings towards the right which he shared with so many other writers in the twenties. The Man who was Thursday sees Chesterton near the start of his career as a novelist and writing at his brilliant best. A hundred-and-ten years after publication the novel remains in print in multiple editions and is regularly adapted for stage, screen and radio. Subtitled ‘a nightmare’, the novel is situated at the point where the bonkers surrealism of Lewis Carroll begins to mutate into the more sinister worlds of Kafka, an existential anxiety hovering behind the bravado of the characters. As Chesterton sees it, ‘The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange’ and in this novel he certainly presents a world in which the bizarre and frightening do not intrude on the everyday but arise from it – a world that is recognisably ours yet disquietingly different.

But for most readers the biggest attraction of the novel is that it is extremely silly. Chesterton’s genius lies in his ability to resurrect the imagination of his twelve-year-old self (he was a keen fencer at St Paul’s, and it is no surprise to find a duel foregrounded in the novel) to devise a wacky plot through which he might explore profound questions about human existence with some satire of contemporary politics thrown into the bargain. It is as if Chesterton is putting into practice his aphorism ‘A key has no logic to its shape. Its logic is: it turns the lock’. For every moment where a Chiswick pub table plunges down into a secret subterranean base (shamelessly ripped off in Live and Let Die) or a villain escapes through the streets of London on elephant-back, there is an astute observation on the hypocrisy of the anarchists behind the spate of terrorist attacks which had erupted around the world at the turn of the century and which are chillingly resonant to the modern reader.

Chesterton’s skill lies in his ability to tell his story at breakneck speed at the same time as packing his novel with Wildean hyperbole (elsewhere he defines a saint as ‘one who exaggerates what the world neglects’) and paradoxes which are amusing yet through their anarchic use of language come to question conventional thinking, to expose hypocrisy and to explode artificial dichotomies. There is charm, fun and intelligence in both narrative and narration, which makes the novel irresistible, even if its ultimate world view may differ from one’s own.

The optimistic ending of The Man who was Thursday marked a significant stage in Chesterton’s journey out of a period of serious depression which, he claimed, arose from existential despair. For Chesterton it became increasingly clear that the Church was the only solution to moral anarchism, and he became such a staunch supporter of Catholicism that the current Pope has set him on the road to canonisation. In parallel to his conversion came Chesterton’s theories of distributism. Opposed to capitalism (‘that economic condition in which there is a class of capitalists … in whose possession so much of the capital is concentrated as to necessitate a very large majority of the citizens serving those capitalists for a wage’), Chesterton sounds like a textbook Marxist when he writes:

Capitalism is contradictory as soon as it is complete; because it is dealing with the mass of men in opposite ways at once. When most men are wage earners, it is more and more difficult for most men to be customers. For the capitalist is always trying to cut down what his servant demands, and in doing so is cutting down what his customer can spend. As soon as his business is in any difficulties, as at present in the coal business, he tries to reduce what he has to spend on wages, and in doing so reduces what others have to spend on coal. He is wanting the same man to be rich and poor at the same time.

However, he found no comfort in socialism, recalling that ‘the two great movements during my youth and early manhood were Imperialism and Socialism. Both believed in unification and centralisation on a large scale. Neither could have seen any meaning in my own’. Instead Chesterton advocated distributism which supported private ownership of property and was opposed to excessive state intervention, seeking to distribute wealth more evenly through an emphasis on owner-operated small businesses and worker-controlled cooperatives. Never has Chesterton’s utopia seemed more distant than in our global economy dominated by gigantic corporations in which the political leadership of one super-power may be determined by the interference of another, a world where Chesterton’s insistence on optimism seems at odds with rising rates of depression.

So, what are we to do about Chesterton? We need a paradox to tell us that the answer lies somewhere between sainthood and sending him to oblivion. In creating a stage adaptation of The Man who was Thursday we might have found that we could not agree with his solutions to the problems of the world. However, we have taken what we loved from his novel to explore a twenty-first century which would have appalled him. As a champion of individuality, imagination and irreverence, Chesterton would, we hope, be entertained by what a new generation of Paulines has produced … or if nothing else find it marginally less annoying than what the Soviets did to it in their 1923 adaptation.

Chesterton Aphorisms 

Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest.

Our Lord commanded us to forgive our enemies, but not to have none.

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums. 

AJB