Gilbert: The Man Who was G. K. Chesterton Read online

  Frances’s mother was no less an obstacle. She was not particularly fond of Gilbert — he was “a self-opinionated scarecrow” — and was jealously loving towards her daughters. Gilbert did not provoke a feeling of security in other people; his dress was becoming increasingly disorganised, his mannerisms more and more ridiculous. As a publishing assistant he was not a highly paid man, earning just over one pound a week. As Frances would have to sacrifice her job, as was demanded by custom, the couple would be forced to live solely on his income; it seemed impossible. Nor were Gilbert’s chances of promotion very great, he was quite content to remain in his position, and as long as he adopted that attitude his employers would be in no hurry to pay him more money or raise his position in the company. It was not an enthusiastic Mrs Blogg who heard and consented to the news of her daughter’s engagement, but she was determined to make the best of it. Attempting to restore a note of balance to the evening after she had heard the startling news, Mrs Blogg looked round her drawing-room for a conversation piece to alter the subject. “How do you like my new wallpaper, Gilbert?” she asked. He bounded over to the new, expensive paper, stared at it in deep thought for a few moments, and then after searching and finding a piece of chalk in his pocket drew a portrait of Frances over the wall. We have no description of Mrs Blogg’s expression after this! She did insist that the couple maintain a silence on the subject of their engagement, and inform as few people as possible for the time being.

  Taciturnity was not Gilbert’s forte. He ached to tell people the good news, as any recently betrothed man would. The matter took his mind from his work, kept him awake at night and even managed to distract him from his food and drink. Each day of quiet on this subject so very dear to his whole self was a day of bland indifference. The smoke-screen of silence surrounding the good news was becoming thicker; how long would it be before Frances started to doubt the existence of their engagement? Mrs Blogg was now insisting that because of financial difficulties there would be no marriage for a long time. Rumours were spreading however. Gilbert wrote to Frances, thanking her for a gift of some pressed flowers, but he could only contain himself until the second paragraph

  Yourself and your Mother are the only guardians of reticence you have any need to appease or satisfy. For my part, it is no exaggeration but the simple fact if any fine morning you feel inclined to send the news on a postcard to Queen Victoria, I should merely be pleased at the incident. I want everybody to know: I want even the Siberian standing beside his dog-sledge to have something to rejoice his soul: I hunger for the congratulations of the Tasmanian black. Always tell anyone you feel inclined to and the instant you feel inclined to. For the sake of your Mother’s anxieties I cheerfully put off the time when I can appear in my regalia, but it is rather rough to be timidly appealed to as if I were the mystery-mongering blackguard adventurer of the secret engagement, “despised even by the Editress of Home Chat …”

  They were not the only engaged couple in their circle, both at work and amongst friends. As far as they knew, of course, they were the only couple who were not proclaiming their news to all around. “Why, in Heaven’s name, dear love,” he wrote, “do you talk as if I were endeavouring to hide you like stolen property in a cupboard?” Gradually the news began to spread. Miss Mason, a working companion of Frances’s, was told the secret — she probably already had a strong idea, as she would frequently observe the letters, poetry and messages on the blotting-pad left for Frances by Gilbert most mornings. Frances’s cousin, Margaret Heaton, pleased the Chesterton family and made Gilbert feel more welcomed and encouraged when she sent her congratulations to him, speaking as one of the Blogg family. “I wish you both the most perfect union and God’s blessing. I have known you pretty intimately for some time now, and I have never heard you say an unkind word of anyone and have often observed how you championed the cause of the weak, this makes me feel more confident than anything of my dear cousin’s happiness with you …” Gertrude Blogg also wrote to him: “Please don’t be afraid of me any more,” and “Of course you are quite unworthy of Frances but the sooner you forget it the better.” The Bloggs always fascinated Gilbert, and terrified him. Gertrude’s forthright ways were indicative of how strident, at times rude, the family could be. They were caring and compassionate, also mildly eccentric and deeply Victorian English. Gilbert wrote to Frances

  … It is a mystic and refreshing thought that I shall never understand Bloggs. That is the truth of it … that this remarkable family atmosphere … this temperament with its changing moods and its everlasting will, its divine trust in one’s soul and its tremulous speculations as to one’s “future,” its sensitiveness like a tempered sword, vibrating but never broken: its patience that can wait for Eternity and its impatience that cannot wait for tea: its power of bearing huge calamities, and its queer little moods that even those calamities can never overshadow or wipe out: its brusqueness that always pleases and its over-tactfulness that sometimes wounds: its terrific intensity of feeling, that sometimes paralyses the outsider with conversational responsibility: its untranslatable humour of courage and poverty and its unfathomed epics of past tragedy and triumph — all this glorious confusion of family traits, which, in no exaggerative sense, makes the Gentiles come to your light and the folk of the nations to the brightness of your house — is a thing so utterly outside my own temperament that I was formed by nature to admire and not understand it. God made me very simply — as He made a tree or a pig or an oyster: to perform certain functions. The best thing He gave me was a perfect and unshakable trust in those I love …

  His undoubted love for Frances brought some irritating truths home to Gilbert. Happy though he was at his work, it would not suffice in the future. His financial demands, as his mother-in-law had pointed out, were easily met at present, but married life would alter all that. He paid no rent while living at home in Warwick Gardens, his travel expenses came to only four or five shillings a week, and it would take more than his prodigious eating and drinking habits to get through the remaining money. He was to be a rich man no longer. Work in publishing was notoriously under-paid, with nobody at Fisher Unwin earning more than a meagre salary in the closing years of the nineteenth and opening decade of the twentieth century. If he enjoyed working at the publisher’s, and if circumstances demanded extra income, he would have to supplement his wages with some extra labours. As so many writers have done since, he worked at his articles during the few free moments he had at work. It was difficult and at times overwhelming but Frances and her world made it all worthwhile. The I.D.K. was still meeting, still full of verve and passions. Gilbert was never happier than at the centre of it. He designed a menu for one of the Society’s Ladies’ Nights, and came to dominate the discussions with his piercing ability to be able to get straight to the heart of a problem which seemed to possess none. He also bathed in the attention of those kindly souls who were attempting to change his appearance. Frances’s mother was constantly, through others and by herself, encouraging him to smarten himself up; from her point of view a wealthy and successful man necessitated a tidy man. He was teased, and sometimes cajoled. Mostly it was good-natured, and Gilbert interpreted it so — he was always the best of victims. The poking of fun was part of the camaraderie of the Bedford Park set, and its latest recruit played his full part when he wrote of his appearance in the July of 1899

  … I am clean. I am wearing a frockcoat, which from a superficial survey seems to have no end of buttons. It must be admitted that I am wearing a bow-tie: but on careful research I find that these were constantly worn by Vikings. A distinct allusion to them is made in that fine fragment, the Tryggvhessa Saga, where the poet says, in the short alliterative lines of Early Norse poetry:

  Frockcoat Folding then

  Hakon Hardrada

  Bow-tie Buckled

  Waited for war

  (Brit. Mus. MSS. CCCLXIX, lines 99981-99985)

  I resume. My appearance, as I have suggested, is singularly exemplary. M
y boots are placed, after the fastidious London fashion, on the feet: the laces are done up, the watch is going, the hair is brushed, the sleeve-links are inserted, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. As for my straw hat, I put it on eighteen times consecutively, taking a run and a jump to each try, till at last I hit the right angle. I have not taken it off for three days and nights lest I should disturb that exquisite pose. Ladies, princes, queens, ecclesiastical processions go by in vain: I do not remove it. That angel of the hat is something to mount guard over. As Swinburne says — “Not twice on earth do the gods do this.”

  The Blogg family did not maintain its happy state. Gertrude, clever and articulate, full of argument and sense, was knocked from her bicycle by a bus and horribly injured. She lived for a few days, but was never expected to pull through. Frances was Gertrude’s closest friend; they were intimate companions and shared most secrets of their love journeys together. Gertrude probably gave Frances her last talk of advice and reassurance before Gilbert proposed. There had been so much sharing, and now it all seemed so pointless. Frances had long been of a weak physical disposition and this blow hit her harder than anything else before. Her mental condition was also subject to swings — she would suffer from depression throughout her life — and the death of such a near soul almost destroyed her. She went to Italy soon after the funeral in an attempt to escape the pain and recapture the balance in her life which had seemed so easy a few months earlier. Gilbert was concerned not just for the loss of a future sister-in-law and present friend, but because of the change it had produced in Frances. He was made aware for the first time of the tragic dimension to his fiancée’s character. It shocked him. Here was no mere mourning for a sister, more a breakdown of spirit and faith. His own inexperience with death and his father’s antipathy to illness and dying made it all the more difficult for a confused young man, quite out of his depth.

  The funeral was viciously sad. Gilbert attempted to break the circle of suffering by sending a wreath of scarlet and orange flowers, with the attached inscription: “He that maketh His angels spirits and His ministers a flame of fire.” They stood out beautifully amongst the universally white blooms, but to little avail. He began to write to Frances, unsure of how much humour he should include. He was worried and frightened, often shaken, when he considered the doubt now cast over his future, but adamant that he would not give up his love without a struggle.

  … I am black but comely at this moment: because the cyclostyle has blacked me. Fear not. I shall wash myself. But I think it my duty to render an accurate account of my physical appearance every time I write: and shall be glad of any advice and assistance …

  I have been reading Lewis Carroll’s remains, mostly Logic, and have much pleasure in enlivening you with the following hilarious query: “Can a Hypothetical, whose protasis is false, be legitimate? Are two Hypothetical of the forms, If A, then B, and If A then not B compatible?” I should think a Hypothetical could be, if it tried hard …

  To return to the Cyclostyle. I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people … When we call a man “manly” or a woman “womanly” we touch the deepest philosophy.

  I will not ask you to forgive this rambling levity. I, for one, have sworn, I do not hesitate to say it, by the sword of God that has struck us, and before the beautiful face of the dead, that the first joke that occurred to me I would make, the first nonsense poem I thought of I would write, that I would begin again at once with a heavy heart at times, as to other duties, to the duty of being perfectly silly, perfectly extravagant, perfectly trivial, and as far as possible, amusing.

  He concluded

  I have sworn that Gertrude should not feel, wherever she is, that the comedy has gone out of our theatre. This, I am well aware, will be misunderstood. But I have long grasped that whatever we do we are misunderstood — small blame to other people; for, we know ourselves, our best motives are things we could neither explain nor defend. And I would rather hurt those who can shout than her who is silent. You might tell me what you feel about this: but I am myself absolutely convinced that gaiety that is the bubble of love, does not annoy me: the old round of stories, laughter, family ceremonies, seems to me far less really inappropriate than a single amount of forced silence or unmanly shame …

  His letter had only the smallest of impacts. Frances could see only blackness ahead of her, she was in the midst of a serious depression. Gilbert discussed the agony of his fiancée with his family — he received precious little advice from that quarter — and Frances’s mother. Should he leave her to live out her grief, or rush to her aid? The first option was not even to be considered, not when the sufferer was his greatest love. It was difficult enough being apart from Frances at all; practically impossible to know that she was in shock, was at times hopeless, and may not be able to face a future with a person so loved that if he died she would once again find her life smashed. He wrote again on 11th July

  I have made a discovery: or I should say seen a vision. I saw it between two cups of black coffee in a Gallic restaurant in Soho: but I could not express it if I tried.

  But this was one thing that it said — that all good things are one thing. There is no conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and a comic-opera tune played by Mildred Wain. But there is everlasting conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and the obscene pomposity of the hired mute: and there is everlasting conflict between the comic-opera tune and any mean or vulgar words to which it may be set. These, which man hath joined together, God shall most surely sunder. That is what I am feeling … now every hour of the day. All good things are one thing. Sunsets, schools of philosophy, babies, constellations, cathedrals, operas, mountains, horses, poems — all these are merely disguises. One thing is always walking among us in fancy-dress, in the grey cloak of the church or the green cloak of the meadow. He is always behind, His form makes the folds fall so superbly. And that is what the savage old Hebrews, alone among the nations, guessed, and why their rude tribal god has been erected on the ruins of all polytheistic civilisations. For the Greeks and Norsemen and Romans saw the superficial wars of nature and made the sun one god, the sea another, the wind a third. They were not thrilled, as some rude Israelite was, one night in the wastes, alone, by the sudden blazing idea of all being the same God: an idea worthy of a detective story.

  More than anything else the death of Gertrude tested Frances’s faith. Gertrude had been happy, engaged to be married, God-fearing, loving. Frances saw her as a much better person than herself, so why should such a fate befall her? She was not in a state of doubt, more one of despair. This may be the supreme plan, with that she could come to terms; but if it was, did she feel encouraged and strengthened by that plan? It was rather like C.S. Lewis felt when his wife Joy died of cancer. He did not question the existence of God, there could be no dispute there. Rather, he wondered what God’s purpose was: could it be God the vivisectionist, looking down on a planet of feeble creatures and experimenting with their lives and emotions? Lewis lived through his grief, as Frances was to do.

  She began to search for deeper justification in the Scriptures, and was comforted by the aspect of supplication which is so common in the lives of the disciples, as well as that of Christ. If Gertrude’s death was God’s will, that must be accepted; God is all good or he isn’t the real God at all. She told Gilbert that she was feeling the warmth of comfort, and that she now realised that “It is good for us to be here.” He was delighted at her breakthrough, and proud of her resolute stance. He replied to her

  … I am so glad to hear you say … that, in your own words “it is good for us to be here” — where you are at present. The same remark, if I remember right, was made on the mountain of the Transfiguration. It has always been one of
my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the long Vision we call life — other things superficially, but this always in our depths. “It is good for us to be here — it is good for us to be here,” repeating itself eternally. And if, after many joys and festivals and frivolities, it should be our fate to have to look on while one of us, in a most awful sense of the words, is “transfigured before our eyes”: shining with the whiteness of death — at least, I think, we cannot easily fancy ourselves wishing not to be at our post. Not I, certainly. It was good for me to be there.

  Gradually she recovered her will, and focused on her future happiness with Gilbert. What hadn’t destroyed her had made her stronger. Their relationship blossomed after Frances’s recovery, and the trauma spurred Gilbert into a more industrious frame of mind. If his future wife could be liable to such fits of depression — as she was to be — the least he could do was to make her feel financially secure.

  He had had little of his work published during the past year, with only a few poems appearing in print; they usually paid hardly anything at all, sometimes exactly nothing at all. Possibilities for selling work appeared to be brighter when the Speaker, which Gilbert had made contact with in the past, was put into the hands of some young, sophisticated men recently down from Oxford who were both friends of Oldershaw and eager for new talent and writing. The new vibrant owners of the journal took the Speaker on a hard turn to the Left, leaving a proportion of its readership behind as it established itself as being solidly anti-imperialist and a mouthpiece for the radical wing of the Liberal Party. As the Second Boer War was in its bloody and disastrous early stages the angry young men of the Speaker had plenty to write about. And so did Gilbert.