In September 1986, I was completing my biography of the great British author Gilbert Keith Chesterton. He had died 50 years earlier and various supporters and devotees of his work had organized a conference around the man at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. I was fortunate enough to be invited over from my home in England to deliver a paper.
In the audience was a woman of extraordinary beauty who, under normal circumstances, would surely not have looked twice at me. But I was discussing Chesterton and Gilbert’s magic was obviously still at work. I met that wonderful lady, Bernadette, and we were married the following year. I came to live in Canada and we have four children. The first has Gilbert as a middle name, in gratitude and tribute to the genius who made it all possible.
So I am not objective. Then again, why would I be? Objectivity is redundant when speaking of one of the finest minds and most pristine thinkers of modern times.
Born in 1874 in London, England, Chesterton and his brother Cecil grew up in a financially secure and emotionally happy home. They received the best of British education, but Chesterton – the gangly, awkward yet gifted schoolboy – chose art school rather than university. He didn’t plan a career in journalism as much as drifted into the craft, mingling an emerging Christianity with a delightful refusal to be bound by conventional party labels or accepted political wisdom.
On nationalism, for example, “My country, right or wrong, is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, my mother, drunk or sober.” On literature, “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” On being controversial, “I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.”
Books came early. Greybeards at Play in 1900, Twelve Types in 1902, a biography of Robert Browning the following year. Then, in 1904, a novel and one of his finest works, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. This splendid book concerned the residents of a London district who declare independence from Great Britain. “If you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe,” he wrote. If you look at it the 1,000th time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.”
The book established Chesterton as one of the leading authors of his day, along with the likes of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw.
Outside of literature and letters, there were two compelling factors in his life. He married Frances Blogg in 1901 and they had an intensely happy, though childless, life together. She was an essential steadying influence on his notorious untidiness and lack of organization. “Am at Market Harborough,” he once wrote to her. “Where ought I to be?” Her reply? “Home.”
The other central aspect to Chesterton was faith, and the inevitable and invincible pull of Roman Catholicism. He would join the church in 1922 and said at the time, “The fight for the family and the free citizen and everything decent must now be waged by the one fighting form of Christianity.”
He would now become the champion, the grand knight, of the church, the family and the genuine nature of community. He and others formed and promoted the idea of distributism and the concept of family autonomy and small-scale production leading to authentic democracy. He edited a magazine based around this ideal that would eventually be known as GK’s Weekly.
Always there was the art of the paradox, the thrusting ability to hold up a mirror to the addled society around him and show its absurd reflection. “Journalism largely consists of saying, ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.” And, “The Bible tells us to love our neighbours and also to love our enemies, probably because they are generally the same people.”
Brilliance seemed to be at his very fingertips. “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
There were biographies of St. Francis, St. Thomas Aquinas, Charles Dickens and others, compilations of columns and journalism and analyses of history and culture and truth such as Orthodoxy, Heretics and The Everlasting Man. There was poetry too, including The Ballad of The White Horse and Lepanto.
His Father Brown stories were delicious detective tales involving a seemingly naÔve priest who in fact knew the criminal mind better than the most hardened of police officers. He also wrote a volume of autobiography and more novels and short stories.
He has been accused of anti-Semitism and the charge has too often stuck. That is a shame, because whilst Chesterton certainly made a handful of ill-conceived comments about Jewish people – usually in rash jest or in the pain of reaction – he was a genuine friend when friendship was at its most scarce and most necessary. Chesterton spoke out against Nazism long before it was politically acceptable, or correct, to do so. He called for the rescue of European Jews as early as 1934. So vociferous was he that Rabbi Stephen Wise, one of the leaders of the American Jewish community, would later speak of him as a great and true friend of the Jewish people.
He died in 1936 and his like will not be seen again. There are few greater compliments that could be given to a writer than to say they have something of Chesterton about them. Something, perhaps, but never everything. That would be asking too much.
Michael Coren is a broadcaster and columnist.