Imperfect Giant, Merry Cavalier: An Appreciation of GKC
Written: Jul 13 '00 (Updated Jul 13 '00)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: The Apostle of Joy and Merry Doctor
Cons: Forever marred by his repellent prejudices
|
|
|
| mshawpyle's Full Review: Chesterton, Gilbert Keith |
I don't know that significant life events of the birthday / anniversary / reunion sort cause morbid introspection in most people, but they seem to for writers. Facing some of these myself, I determined to call in the aid of friends.
This week's Thursday Write-Off, then, is a special presentation. I am joined tonight by andy, Arazim, buffoonery, caconti, caravan70, conradd, cornelia, CurtisEdmonds, emlin, endora60, ErgoPropterHoc, erik_kosberg, expono, forkids, Grouch, halfsweet, happy2000usa, jasonkirk, jrk, JMB623, kcfoxy, kchowell, kimmiko, Lambira, Leah, kurt_messick, mgreber, stonehousellc, stract, sweeper, sweetpaulie, and tomgray, all of whom are gathered here to render homage to those authors who have been the most influential, the most meaningful, the favorite and best-loved, of each of them. Please use the Books page, their member pages, or the X-Off calendar page at http://www.geocities.com/jpn5/x-off/ to access their reviews.
The Point of the Exercise
Having myself propounded as our text 'Who is your favorite author, or the one who has most profoundly influenced you, as a person and as a writer and reviewer, and why,' I now find myself in a quandary, because frankly it is devastatingly hard to choose.
The Competition
To begin with, I'm an historian, and a military historian at that. Obviously, much of what I am and do has been shaped by the example and genius of Herodotus*, Xenophon, Thucydides, Churchill*, Parkman, Jackson Turner, Foote*, Dowdey*, Ziegler*, Freeman*, McCullough*, Liddell Hart, Tuchmann*, Massie*, Schom, Weintraub*, Keegan*, and Ambrose*. I am also a mystery writer, standing in the long shadow cast by Sayers*, Marsh*, Allingham*, Innes*, Crispin*, and Conan Doyle*.
More to the point, I suppose, is that I am a writer, period. The natural food of writers is their reading. And I am deeply dyed and tinctured by the great predecessors in the art: Homer and Vergil, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Plutarch, Aquinas, Locke, Burke, and Jefferson; Chaucer and Malory, Dunbar, Spenser, Milton, and Donne; Willy the Shake*. By Cranmer and the translators of the Authorised Version, by Honest Izaak Walton*, by Herbert, Lovelace, Crashaw, and Herrick; by Ken and Taylor and Lancelot Andrewes. Erasmus and Thomas More have been my companions, and Plano Carpini and Marco Polo. Boethius, Dante, Villon, Rabelais, Turgenev, Dostoevski: these too have I known.
I am a writer, a reader, and a Southerner: Twain and Sir Walter Scott, Cabell, John Graves*, Dobie*-Webb*-and-Bedichek, Tate and Crowe and the Twelve Southerners*, Faulkner, Welty, and O'Connor, and Bailey White*, these are in my blood. So too though are E. B. White, James Thurber, Robert Benchley*, and S. J. Perelman; as much as are Adrian Bell and John Buchan.
Kipling* has been a major influence upon me, as a man and as a writer, as have Dr Sam Johnson* and Joseph Conrad. My mind, its shape and tenor, and what I have of faith and ethics — such as they are in my case — as well as of the critical faculty and literary competence, are owed very largely to Barfield and Williams, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.*
And yet none of these can I call sensei in the sense I can and do the flawed giant, a verray parfait gentil knight whose character is forever marred by a grave and deathly stain, yet who withal remains primus inter pares among those who have shaped me: Gilbert Keith Chesterton*.
GKC: The Man
Born to a suburban London, middle class, conventionally Anglican family, GK Chesterton became the most famous Roman convert since John Henry Cardinal Newman, a brilliant journalist, beloved essayist, noted ethicist, biographer, philosopher, lay theologian, poet, and creator of the immortal priestly sleuth, Father Brown. He could write about anything, even more so than could Kipling or Bob Benchley — could, and did.
He was trained as an artist, and his caricatures and illustrations remain at the head of their class, as when, for example, he illustrated his friend Belloc's side-splitting book of mock children's rhymes, grim and Grimm morality tales the memorable lines from which are still popular ('Always hold on tight to Nurse / For fear of meeting something worse').
In his late teens and early adulthood — he suffered, for medical reasons, a delayed adolescence — he went through a profound mental and spiritual crisis that was in many ways the refiner's fire for him. He also discovered that writing, in the fast-paced but literate style that derived ultimately from the days of Addison and Johnson and which still characterized Fleet Street journalism in the Edwardian Age, was his vocation, a term I do not use lightly.
The Dark Side
It is necessary here to say at once that for all his many and heroic virtues, GKC, as he became universally known, suffered an appalling, nauseating flaw. He was, rather more mildly than most Late Victorians and Edwardians, a bigot and a racist; and he was, rather more adamantly and extremely than his peers, widespread though the disease then was, a ghastly Anti-Semite.
Little if anything can be offered in mitigation. It was a widespread attitude; but Chesterton, of all people, ought to have known, and did know, better. Not only, in the caustic old phrase, were 'some of his best friends Jewish' — Waldo D'Avigdor, to whom the first set of Fr Brown stories were dedicated, being a case in point — but when he saw the inhuman and unmasked face of Anti-Semitism he opposed it with all his formidable bulk and weapons: until his early death, he, with his sometimes friend, sometimes foe Winston Churchill, was one of the handful of public men in Britain unremittingly opposed to the rise of Hitler.
Yet the mote in his own eye he never saw, admitted, or confessed. It is terrible to contemplate.
GKC As a Public Man
Always excepting his indefensible sin of Anti-Semitism and general bigotry (and a sin it remains regardless of how much his contemporaries shared it), GKC was in all other regards one of the shining lights of his England. After he married his beloved Frances, eventually following her over to the Roman communion, he became a Johnsonian figure, Falstaffian yet saintly, a scourge of wickedness and corruption in high places, especially in finance and government.
Politically, he was the founder of Distributism, which despite superficial affinities with some Leftist nostrums, was precisely conservative: he was an English Jefferson, with a touch of Burke, opposed to wage-slavery and Hamiltonian capitalism; and he was a considerable influence on the Agrarians and Fugitives of my own Southland.
As an intellectual, he towered over his peers. Standing always for the underdog, for Free Will, and for the traditional virtues, ethics, and logic (yes, and faith) of Western Christendom, he pilloried — with love and in high style — his philosophical opponents. In an age when public entertainment was not yet mindless, his vast, mustachioed bulk caused the boards to creak on many a platform, and in his several series of debates with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, he left those two articulate men in the dust.
GKC As Writer and Guide
All this was merely his play. All his work was done as play: he is the one writer, more even than Kipling, who never lost the perceptivity of childhood. And unlike Kipling — he and Kipling were, for twenty years, the two most-quoted writers in the English language — all his jokes were fair-spirited and mostly at his own expense. Everything he did, he did joyfully.
It is that everything — the throw-away essays, Tremendous Trifles on chalk and cheese, beer and barns, on everything under the sun, which have remained immortal and in print; his unsurpassed sketches and biographies of Chaucer, Dickens, Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, St Francis of Assisi, and St Thomas Aquinas, which are the marvel and despair of professional scholars who cannot hope to attain his heights; his epic poems and brief aubades ('I think I shall not kill myself today') — it is that 'everything' that he did so joyously that matters. Mystery yarns or Thomistic philosophy, whatever he did was informed by what Robert Louis Stevenson called 'the great theorem of the livableness of life.'
And always, always, it was done with an infectious joy. As C. S. Lewis, who like me revered GKC, noted, Chesterton's wit and wordplay almost mask, but in the end merely gild and enhance, his strong ethical and logical talent: Lewis likens it to the glitter of a duelist's sword, which is not glittering merely for show.
From the time he first looked on the scene of English letters and intellectual life, he stood and fought, with verve and infectious joy, for what he — and for millennia, the West — had believed in. And no one ever worsted him in that fight. Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, and What's Wrong With the World, like All Is Grist, The Flying Inn, The Poet and the Lunatics, Tremendous Trifles, and the Father Brown stories, are but facets of a single jewel: his laughing, profoundly ethical and Christian philosophy of life. Not even his painful and abhorrent besetting sin can do more than cast a shadow upon that.
The Legacy
That at least is what I find. GKC has influenced my style as much as my logic and my morals. He has also kept me sane. He looked into the abyss, as his unparalleled Autobiography candidly tells, and survived. He survived through joy — which is something internal, something utterly different than mere transient happiness — through joy, and being the Happy Warrior, and never even at his worst losing a deep wellspring of love and laughter.
That, far more than even the many and wondrous things about the writing craft that I owe to his tutelage, is what makes GKC not only my literary master, but a lifeline and a very present help in trouble.
______________________________________
* See prior reviews.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
mshawpyle
|
 - Top 500 |
|
Member: Markham Shaw Pyle, JD
Location: Houston, Texas
Reviews written: 539
Trusted by: 391 members
About Me:
Historian, baseballing bon vivant, Boll Weevil, W&L man; and the Walter Mitty of field sports
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2010 Shopping.com, Inc.