I've waited for a week or so for the New Yorker to post Adam Gopnik's excellent essay about G.K. Chesterton to its site, but the piece is still unavailable. Alas. It really is a fine piece of writing. Gopnik is a fan of Chesterton, but not an uncritical admirer (and not, it should be said, a Christian; he's left cold by Chesterton's apologetic work). I should say here that I'm the sort of person who admires Chesterton more than I read him. I find his style puffed-up and off-putting. I think the only Chesterton book I've ever read cover to cover is "The Man Who Was Thursday," which is 100 years old this year, and occasions Gopnik's literary appreciation of its author. I was in college when I read it, and didn't understand it. I think now I have to re-read it.
Anyway, I'm the sort of person who likes people who like Chesterton, though I just can't tuck into his writing with enthusiasm. (I feel the same way about Walker Percy's fiction, and the people who love it). But in reading Gopnik's essay, I can see why I have such an affinity for things called "Chestertonian," despite my inability to adore Chesterton's writing.
Take this lovely, insightful passage from Gopnik:
The other epiphany concerned limits, localism. "All my life I have loved edges; and the boundary line that brings one thing sharply against another," he writes. "All my life I have loved frames and limits; and I will maintain that the largest wilderness looks larger seen through a window. To the grief of all grave dramatic critics, I will still assert that the perfect drama must strive to rise to the higher ecstasy of the peepshow." The two central insights of his work are here. First, the quarrel between storytelling, fiction, and reality is misdrawn as a series of illusions that we outgrow, or myths that we deny, when it is a sequence of stories that we inhabit The second is not that small is beautiful but that the beautiful is always small, that we cannot have a clear picture in white light of abstractions, but only of a row of houses at a certain time of day, and that we go wrong when we extend our loyalties to things much larger than a puppet theatre. (And this, in turn, is fine, because the puppet theatre contains the world.)
And there's this:
Chesterton liked to pair himself, congenially, with [George Bernard] Shaw, as his opposite, and he was right to do so, for they were the two most perceptive critics of capitalism in their decade. The chief bourgeois vices are hypocrisy and homogenization. Mercantile capitalist societies profess values that their own appetites destroy; calls for public morality come from the same people who use prostitutes. Meanwhile, the workings of capitalism turn the local artisan into a maker of mass-produced objects and every high street into an identical strip mall. Shaw is the great critic of the hypocrisy of bourgeois society -- its inconsistencies and absurdities, the way it robs the poor and then demands that they be "deserving." Chesterton is the great critic of its homogenization, the levelling of difference in the pursuit of cash. He is the grandfather of Slow Food, of local eating, of real ale, the first strong mind that saw something evil in the levelling of little pleasures.
Gopnik discusses the genius of the insight in "The Man Who Was Thursday" that the flip side of the desire for absolute order is a desire for romantic violence. (This would go a long way toward explaining the longing for Armageddon, sacred or secular, in this increasingly chaotic culture). Here's Gopnik:
Given that longing [for absolute meaning], it was as obvious that Chesterton was headed to Rome as it was that Wilde was headed to Reading jail. If you want a solution at once authoritarian and poetic, to the threat of moral anarchism, the Catholicism, which built Chartres and inspired Dante, looks a lot better than Scotland Yard. If you want stability allied to imagination, Catholicism has everything else beat.
In that single paragraph by Adam Gopnik, I had a flash of insight: there should have been no doubt from the time of my early teenage years that I was headed to Rome. This is why I had such a deep psychological and emotional attraction to Catholicism.
In taking stock of Chesterton's Catholic apologetics, though, Gopnik finds the great man to have been not much more than a hack. Again, Gopnik:
In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis's intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas's pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts of Catholicism are relived not to have to defend Henry VIII's divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts time-servers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you're new to mail.
Boy, does this feel familiar to me, and I can see now (from my own experience) why converts tend to wear on cradle believers (and vice versa: little exasperates a convert more than a cradle believer's apparent inability to get excited about the Amazing Wonderful Church). Again, I can't discern the justice of Gopnik's judgment re: Chesterton's writing, because I've never read enough of his apologetics to know. But this feels right to me. It also gives me insight into why I don't have and never had that convert's glow about Orthodoxy. I didn't believe when I left it that Catholicism was a jury-rigged makeshift system, nor did I believe that Orthodoxy was a uniquely fabulous thing. I'm glad not to have those illusions about either faith, but it does take some of the romance out of the thing.
I won't quote any more of the Gopnik essay, which really is superb, and should make you go out and buy the issue. I will note two things, though. Gopnik spends some time discussing Chesterton's anti-Semitism. I was not at all aware that GKC was an anti-Semite, but it does seem undeniable from the evidence Gopnik presents (and Gopnik discusses it in an even, somewhat sorrowful tone). Gopnik also discusses briefly why GKC's style of writing became instantly antique and mannered. It was after World War I, under Irish, American and French influence -- Modernism, basically. Gopnik:
Writers like Shaw and Chesterton depended on a kind of comic and complicit hyperbole: every statement is an overstatement, and understood as such by readers. The new style prized understatement, to be filled in by the reader. What had seemed charming and obviously theatrical twenty years before now could sound like puff and noise. Human nature didn't change in 1910, but English writing did. (For Virginia Woolf, they were the same thing).
I would quote Gopnik's lovely conclusion paying magnificent tribute to Chesterton's vision, but really, you should buy the magazine.
I'm curious to know what you Chesterton readers make of the things I've put down here from Gopnik's essay. Are his judgments accurate? If not, why not?
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Alicia,
You're welcome. Glad to be or service.
Alicia and everyone else,
Another problem with the Gopnik essay that I forgot to mention in my previous post is that it assumes some sort of false polarity between Chesterton's prose style and the prose styles we associate with literary modernism in the generation of writers just after his own. There are as many differences as similarities between Chesterton's sense of style and 18th and 19th century style. And there are as many similarities as differences between Chesterton's project as a writer and the modernists' project.
It's worth noting that the first book by Hugh Kenner, the most well-respected scholar of literary modernism in the English language, was not on Yeats or Joyce or Eliot or Pound or Beckett or any of the modernist figures that Kenner went on to write about in authoritative terms. No, the first book by Kenner was on Chesterton. Believe me when I say that if a man once described as "The Pope of Modernism" can like both Chesterton's prose and modernist prose, then anyone can.
Kenner's book on Chesterton -- *Paradox in Chesterton* -- looks at how the Chestertonian style was a necessary means of expressing Chesterton's ideas, not some verbal eccentricity or deliberate playing of games with words, as many have alleged. Kenner does an excellent job explaining how Chesterton's paradoxical style derives from his efforts to articulate Thomist philosophy in popular terms, an effort which made those ideas come alive for his peers and for many readers since.
The book can probably only be found in university libraries, but it's worth looking for -- a brief, lucid, enjoyable, and illuminating read.
Augustus: Finally, given the focus of the blog, I find it amazing that Rod is unfamiliar with much of Chesterton's work -- though that fact does explain the equally amazing lack of Chestertonian reference on this blog.
I agree, it is amazing, and unfortunate. I enjoy reading *about* Chesterton and his ideas, but not reading Chesterton. Believe me, I've tried to get into Chesterton. I simply can't penetrate those dazzling sentences. I mean, I know what they're trying to convey, but they draw such attention to themselves that I find them distracting.
In his day, there were a number of writers who liked Chesterton's fiction and poetry but, for ideological reasons of their own, were infuriated by his politics or religion. One talked of wanting to split Chesterton in two, to which Chesterton replied that a lot of people who saw him traveling on buses thought the same. Gopnik seems to be one of that number and, like many of the rest, it seems to lead him into irrationalities.
Those who'd like to explore Chesterton's relationship with the Jews might want to read a book I recently edited, Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II. Someone has noted that the book is the ultimate refutation of those who, like Gopnik, claim Chesterton was anti-Semitic. They're right.
To understand why, you need to step back a bit over a century to an era when almost everyone who was well-educated believed what the major universities were teaching almost without exception, that humanity was divided into superior and inferior races, with the former building civilizations and the latter tearing them down. That's simply how history was taught at places such as Harvard, Yale and Oxford in the late 1800s and for decades thereafter. Margaret Sanger's 1922 The Pivot of Civilization is an example of the thesis applied to birth control. We need birth control, she said, to keep the inferiors (mostly Irish, Italians and Polish Jewish immigrants) from outbreeding us. Chesterton's Eugenics and Other Evils was his attack on that idea as a domestic issue. Chesterton never collected under one cover his good articles on the same concept as an international issue, so I did it for him in Chesterton on War and Peace.
From his youth, Chesterton would have none of that racist nonsense. He poured scorn on the idea that there were racial distinctions that mattered among the various groups of Europeans (including Jews). He made it quite clear that ideas such as Teutons and Semities were totally nonsense, having absolutely no meaning at all. Chesterton was incapable of being anti-Semitic because he thought all ideas that Semities existed were bosh. He says that repeated. He says that clearly. He says that bluntly. And he says that in defiance of the conventional wisdom of his day.
As his pair of books, Heretics and Orthodoxy, indicate, he believed that what a nation, a people or a group believed mattered and determined how they lived not by who their ancestors were or trivial distinctions in how they looked. And in the realm of loathed beliefs, those of the Prussians, particularly Prussian professors and bureaucrats, ranked the highest. Call him anti-Prussian, and he would ;smile in delight. His loathing for all things Prussian (except their music) is why he was one of the first and definitely one of the loudest critics of the trends in Germany that became Nazism (hence my book's title). And he defined the distinction between civilization and barbarism in such a way as to include virtually all of academic Germany among the barbarians. Barbarians, he noted, see men driven by forces outside themselves. It matters not whether those forces are demons in the woods or historical nonsense like Teutonism.
I highly recommend the book. In it Chesterton was warning during WWI that there was something terrible wrong with Germany that, if not corrected, would lead to another and still more horrible war within a generation. In 1932 he went still further and warned that the next war would break out over a border dispute between Germany and Poland, precisely what happened in 1939.
--Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace.
Rod, I share your sympathy with but inability to enjoyably read Chesterton, with his baroque style. But I can't believe you don't enjoy Percy's fiction. His style is the opposite, so pristine, direct, clean and pure, so accurate in recording human thought and speech and the rythyms of life, so modern in the best sense.
Adam Gopnik is scandalized by G. K. Chesterton’s increasingly fervent embrace of Catholic Christianity. His offense causes him, while making many fine points about GKC, to get the main point exactly backward—namely, that the great man’s Catholicism saved him from a lamentable narrowness and provincialism. Chesterton’s reception into the single institution without boundaries of race or class or ethnicity enlarged and deepened his sacramental discernment of divinity as it is embodied in the local and particular. It also enabled him to confess the sins of the church and to perceive the evils of the world. Gopnik fails to notice that, unlike other enlightened people of his time, Chesterton prophesied against both eugenics and euthanasia. There are plenty of enlightened people, alas, who would still like to inflict these evils—not only on Jews and gypsies, but also on the infirm elderly, the mentally deficient, the allegedly unfit and the hopelessly incurable. To have missed this most salient point makes Gopnik lamentably provincial and narrow-minded as an interpreter of Chesterton.
Ralph C. Wood
University Professor of Theology and Literature
Baylor University
Waco, Texas
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