Gilbert: The Man Who was G. K. Chesterton

by Michael Coren

  It did not take long for Overstrand Mansions to take on some of the character of past lodgings. Father O’Connor, later to be the model for Father Brown, remembered sending a prize Wensleydale cheese to the Chesterton apartment for Christmas; they were “at home to callers,” and it did not last for very long. When he visited Gilbert and Frances he saw “Max Beerbohm’s cartoon of Belloc converting Chesterton from the errors of Calvinism. The conversion was almost complete, the pint pot being nearly empty. A special dedication in Max’s hand I do not remember verbatim, but it was a paragraph in the Chestertonian manner to the effect that scoffing was true worship, and the Yah! of the rude boy in the street is but an act of reverence, being the first syllable of the Unutterable Name!” Father O’Connor also travelled with Gilbert from Battersea to a dinner in the West End, and was amused but not surprised when Frances called her husband back to check whether he was wearing a clean collar. He wasn’t.

  The reminder board inside the flat was invariably dripping with pinned notes to aid Gilbert’s appalling memory; they were usually ignored. The unfortunate object was headed “Lest we forget!” Of the other people in the block, most were of a similar class and background, with artists and civil servants making up the majority of residents, and would-be politicians and authors also contributing their share. Another writer, Rann Kennedy, occupied the flat directly below the Chestertons’; Kennedy was a playwright with a middling reputation, and an ability to match. They met when passing one another on the stairs one day; there were no lifts. “Gilbert would walk up very slowly, writing an article on his cuff,” recalled Mr Kennedy. On one occasion Gilbert slowed down even more and said, “Isn’t it jolly out in the park there?” Kennedy responded, “Yes, it is lovely, have you just been there?” When they met again, on the next day, Kennedy said to Gilbert, “Did you notice when we saluted yesterday we both greeted each other in a choriambus and a hypermetric?” Friendship was instantaneous, and became close.

  Also in the block were the Saxon Mills family, who also became friends. “We were very poor in those days,” said Mrs Saxon Mills. “When we were short, they used to feed us. When they were short, we used to feed them.” Mr Saxon Mills was a political opponent of Gilbert’s, but only in the most civilised of senses. When they shared a taxi it was decided that Saxon Mills would pay for the journey to their destination, Gilbert would pay the return. One day Saxon Mills paid three shillings and sixpence to the driver. Gilbert exclaimed “Well, I won’t be outdone by an old Tariff Reformer,” and promptly gave the driver seven shillings and sixpence. The cabbie, it seemed, was not political. The building was conducive to friendship and sharing, with an atmosphere of a club or school. Gilbert took to it immediately, and Frances enjoyed the company and the friendliness. None of the neighbours worried about groups of slightly drunken men returning to the Chesterton rooms at a late hour, and when they sat down to consume huge quantities of meat and cheese and eggs they kept as quiet as they could. Frances pretended that they were succeeding in their endeavours.

  The Defendant, Gilbert’s third volume, was published just before he moved to Battersea. It was clearly the most successful and most recognised of his books to date. It consisted of sixteen essays, most of them previously published in the Speaker. An introductory piece entitled “In Defence of a New Edition” was added to the second edition in 1903. The subjects defended, for each essay involved a defence of something, ranged from skeletons to baby-worship, planets to china shepherdesses. It failed to impress some critics but to most the wit and penetration on display marked the author out as a notable talent. He began his “A Defence of Nonsense” in a way which was to become familiar to his readers, offering alternatives and laying the ground for the paradox to come

  There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost crushed, not so much with the load of the evil as with the load of the goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the inheritors of a humiliating splendour. But there are other times when everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks blown from a boy’s bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine biblical phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white hawthorn grown in May …

  For all of its praise from press and public the book did not make the amount of money which was expected. It was not a serious problem, because Gilbert’s journalism was cutting a deep groove in the magazine and newspaper world, ensuring him outlets and raising the price of his work. Each time a book was published, no matter how little money it actually gained for its author, editors in London would see Gilbert in a brighter light and be willing to raise his payments. He felt more secure, more able to experiment in his contributions.

  Gilbert would be blessed throughout his working life with having two books published in quick-fire succession. It provoked resentment in some quarters, and created the impression in others that such a rapid author could not be a serious author; for the most part it made Gilbert seem a ubiquitous character, always on somebody’s lips, always in the review pages as a subject or a commentator. Shortly after The Defendant Gilbert’s fourth book, Twelve Types, was issued. It too was a collection of articles from the Speaker and Daily News, but this time was on the theme of biography. He discussed Scott, St Francis, Tolstoy, Savonarola, Charlotte Bronte, William Morris, Pope, Byron, Stevenson, Charles II, Carlyle and Rostand. Most of the studies contained some point which outraged historians, for Gilbert was never one to check his facts or worry about the accuracy of his memory. The joy, the genius, of the essays was in their sharpness, their ability to cut through the centuries and myths and get straight to the point. On Sir Walter Scott: “The whole of the best and finest work of the modern novelist (such as the work of Mr Henry James) is primarily concerned with that delicate and fascinating speech which burrows deeper and deeper like a mole; but we have wholly forgotten that speech which mounts higher and higher like a wave and falls in a crashing peroration.”

  Admirers now said that half of London was reading G.K.C., while the other half was asking “Who is G.K.C?” It was of course an exaggeration. Literary London was intrigued however; not the least Max Beerbohm. Henry Maximillian Beerbohm, later Sir Max, was the leading satirist and caricature artist in Britain, if not the world. Although he constantly denied it, he was almost certainly of Jewish stock, out of Lithuania. He had attended Charterhouse and Merton College, Oxford, finding acceptance and welcome in places where others of his background would have met tangible hostility. In 1898 he had become drama critic of the Saturday Review, following George Bernard Shaw in that position. His reviews were published in book form, as were collections of his essays and drawings. He was very much the elegant man-about-town, an individual to know.

  The fact was that Beerbohm wanted to know Gilbert. He wrote to him from the Savile Club in May 1902

  I have seldom wished to meet anyone in particular; but you I should very much like to meet. I need not explain who I am for the name at the end of this note is one which you have more than once admitted, rather sternly, into your writings. By way of personal and private introduction, I may say that my mother was a friend of your grandmother, Mrs Grosjean, and also of your mother. As I have said, I should like to meet you. On the other hand, it is quite possible that you have no reciprocal anxiety to meet me. In this case, nothing could be easier than for you to say that you are very busy, or unwell, or going out of town, and so are not able — much as you would have liked — to lunch with me here either next Wednesday or Saturday at 1.30.

  I am, whether you come or not, yours admiringly,

  Max Beerbohm

  P.S. I am quite different from my writings (and so, I daresay, are you from yours) so that we should not necessarily fail to hit it off. I, in the flesh, am modest, ful
l of common sense, very genial and rather dull. What you are remains to be seen — or not to be seen by me, according to your decision.

  Nobody could have turned down such an offer, hardly Gilbert. He did indeed know of Beerbohm, and did not like all of what he knew. He shared the opinion of so many others that this gifted man “exhibited the cheek of a guttersnipe in the garb of a dandy.” After the lunch his verdict was different. The reputation for having a larger than life ego, for being impudent and ambitious, disappeared after the first moments of their meeting. “Max was and is a remarkably humble man,” Gilbert wrote. “I have never known him, by a single phrase or intonation, claim to know more or judge better than he does; or indeed half so much or so well as he does. Most men spread themselves a little in conversation, and have their unreal victories and vanities; but he seems to me more moderate and realistic about himself than anything else …” So began a long-term friendship and respect, mutually given, mutually received.

  Gilbert immortalised his opinions of his new friend in verse

  And Max’s queer crystalline sense

  Lit, like a sea beneath a sea,

  Shines through a shameless impudence

  As shameless a humility.

  Or Belloc somewhat rudely roared

  But all above him when he spoke

  The immortal battle trumpets broke

  And Europe was a single sword.

  It was Max Beerbohm who was dining with Gilbert when he received the request from Macmillan the publishers for a biography of Robert Browning. Beerbohm was enthusiastic — he was about most things with which he was vaguely connected — and encouraged the unsure young author to accept the project. The book was to be one of the “English Men of Letters” series, and would be the largest, most important undertaking of Gilbert’s life as a writer. He would be in illustrious company: Anthony Trollope had written the book on Thackeray for the series, J.A. Froude had been responsible for Bunyan and Viscount Morley for Edmund Burke. He was extremely young to be awarded such an honour; he was only twenty-nine when the book appeared, and he was not a natural biographer.

  Most of his research took place in the British Museum Reading Room, a location with which he was very much in love, and involved copious amounts of reading. Reading was not enough; this was pleasure to Gilbert, and more was required of him. His note taking was flimsy and volatile, of a sporadic nature and relied entirely on what particular theme of Browning appealed to him on any particular day. There was no realistic pattern of work, no idea as to how the chapters would connect or combine. With carelessness and a touch of arrogance, he steadfastly refused to check his remembered quotations from Browning, and this resulted in a highly inaccurate manuscript.

  Concentration was not a problem, concentration on one subject was. He became a familiar and eccentric figure in the Reading Room, which is noted for its collection of “characters,” with his strange ways and long hours. A story which may be apocryphal concerns him reading late into the evening at the British Museum. He found that he had no money, and as he was hungry and thirsty he set about remedying the situation. He drew a picture of a little man trembling with hunger, passed it around the desks nearest to him, and when he had received enough funds promptly walked off to the nearest pub. It is difficult to imagine the busy scholar donating money to such an obviously well-fed young man.

  When the Browning manuscript was handed in it caused no end of trouble both to Gilbert and to the publishers. Stephen Gwynn, a junior editor at Macmillan’s, had promoted the idea of Gilbert writing the Browning biography, and had to face the consequences: “Old Mr Craik, the Senior Partner, sent for me and I found him in white fury, with Chesterton’s proofs corrected in pencil; or rather not corrected; there were still thirteen errors uncorrected on one page; mostly in quotations from Browning. A selection from a Scottish ballad had been quoted from memory and three of the four lines were wrong. I wrote to Chesterton saying that the firm thought the book was going to ‘disgrace’ them. His reply was like the trumpeting of a crushed elephant. But the book was a huge success.”

  Gilbert himself was always scrupulously honest in explaining his attitude to biography in general, and Browning in particular. He claimed not to have written “a book of Browning; but … a book on love, liberty, poetry, my own views of God and religion (highly developed), and various theories of my own about optimism and pessimism and the hope of the world; a book in which the name of Browning was introduced from time to time, I might almost say with considerable art, or at any rate with some decent appearance of regularity.”

  His biographies would increase in popularity and importance, and his attitude towards accuracy would remain constant. Sometimes the mistakes caused confusion and chaos, more often than not they delighted readers and were treated as gems of insight which had to be taken with just a little salt. The success of the book carved an indelible place for its author. Reviews were mostly sanguine, with those of outright excitement outnumbering the hardened attacks. It was partly a book by Gilbert on Browning, partly, as he said, a book by Gilbert on Chesterton. Such a division is evident from the first page of the book: “His work has the mystery which belongs to the complex; his life the much greater mystery which belongs to the simple. He was clever enough to understand his own character; consequently we may be excused if that part of him which was hidden from him is partly hidden from us. The subtle man is always immeasurably easier to understand than the natural man; for the subtle man keeps a diary of his moods, he practises the art of self-analysis and self-revelation, and can tell us how he came to feel this or to say that …”

  One of the admirers of Robert Browning was someone who was to become as close a friend as Belloc, perhaps even closer. Maurice Baring was one of the banking family of that name, a tall, bald-headed man with a streak of madness and an unquenchable appetite for story-telling and stories. He was a noted linguist, and used that skill in the service of the British diplomatic service. He specialised in Russia and the Russians, and many of the poems and short stories he wrote were influenced by the Slavonic temperament. He wrote dozens of novels, plays and articles, but hardly any of them have survived as published works to the present day. In his Westminster house Gilbert, Belloc and others of their set would gather and drink and discuss until the hours before dawn. Expense was not a problem, and neither was the necessity to rise early next morning for work. It was a bohemian life-style which attracted Gilbert immediately — the romance of the night, the influence of the good wines and the stimulating and intimate company. He was never formally invited into the Baring — Belloc party scene, but neither man could later remember a time when he wasn’t an integral part of it.

  The food and drink took its toll. It is possible for human beings to consume amounts of food far in excess of their needs and only put on ten or fifteen pounds. Serious obesity comes about when the so-called “take-off” point is reached, and instead of only a fraction of the superfluous food being retained, the bulk of it is. This means that even the smallest meal will put on weight, until the body is disciplined back into its previous state. The “take-off” point for Gilbert occurred around the year 1903, when his fatness was recognised by all who knew him, and taken as truth by those who didn’t. His beer intake was extreme, and his exercise meagre; the occasional walk or a country stroll. Bernard Shaw described him as “a young Man Mountain,” and “a large abounding gigantically cherubic person who is not only large in body … but seems to be growing larger as you look at him.” Gilbert was aware of the increase in his size, Frances was often concerned about it.

  I was as light as a penny to spend,

  I was thin as an arrow to cleave,

  I could stand on a fishing-rod’s end,

  With composure, though on the qui vive,

  But from Time, all a-flying to thieve

  The suns and the moons of the year,

  A different shape I receive;

  The shape is decidedly queer.

  By his thirtieth year
the image of G.K. Chesterton had been fully created, with only the Catholicism of his later years still outstanding. Some of it was his natural self, much of it was not even the stuff of truth. That he accused people in argument of “being sober” is based on a single statement, and was not a regular Chestertonian refrain. That he was absentminded was certainly the case, but not as forgetful as he would have had posterity believe. He would often leave his home with the wrong shoes on or without a tie, sometimes forgetting where he was meant to be going when he did manage to dress correctly.

  His ability to get lost was part accident, part intention. It was a delight of his life, and an aspect of his love for London, to simply wander from his front door and take no notice of his surroundings or the direction in which he was travelling until the streets appeared to be new to him, and adventure was a possibility. “There are two ways of getting home,” he wrote in The Everlasting Man, “and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place …” The latter was his choice. He favoured the night, and his walks could last for hours. The novelty was the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary; battle and glory behind a garden wall, secrets and societies just beyond the front door of a suburban dwelling. Getting lost was a recreation.

  His eating habits were constantly the subject of jokes and tales. On one afternoon he was served two poached eggs in a teashop. As gesticulation was an essential part of his conversation, it did not take long before his wild movements knocked the plate from the table and into his lap. His friend noticed the accident, but Gilbert did not; and proceeded to order another helping, informing the giggling waitress that he had misplaced the first. His diet was heavily based around meat and vegetables, with a particular penchant for desserts and cakes. He was addicted to childhood temptations, devouring sticky buns and chocolate concoctions. He could drink milk by the pint. He was not an ugly eater, but was a rapid one; and it was common for him to spill food and drink, both down his front and on to the floor.