CHAPTER FOUR

SOME FRIENDS

“There’s nothing worth the wear of living Save laughter and the love of friends.”

No one believed more in these words of his friend Hilaire Belloc than Chesterton himself. He delighted in thousands of steadfast friends and acquaintances, and they rejoiced in his inimitable wisdom and good fellowship.

The novelist, Isabel C. Clark, first met him in 1929 when he and his wife lunched with her at Piazza Grazioli: “I cannot remember that he said anything at all amusing or arresting, resembling in this the late Lytton Strachey and Kenneth Graham so that I imagine few authors are as loquacious as myself. But then I am not a man of genius!

“When I saw him he was fifty-five years of age but looked at least ten years more, probably on account of his enormous bulk about which he was fond of joking; indeed I believe he was proud of resembling Dr. Johnson in this respect.

“I heard him lecture on Henry VIII here at the Convent of the Holy Child when he said that Henry had no intention of Protestantizing the Church in England but thought he could have a Catholic Church with himself at the head of it, and that he was astonished to discover how rapidly it disintegrated into many sects. I remember his saying on this occasion: ‘Many people are prejudiced against Henry VIII because he was a Large Fat Man,’ and then going off into a chuckle of laughter, swelling himself out to an enormous size as he spoke. His wife told me he always rather spoilt his own jokes by laughing at them before he uttered them.”

Ralph Adams Cram met him first in London a good many years ago: “Father Wagget asked my wife and myself once when we were staying in London, whom we would like best to meet--‘anyone from the King downward.’ We chose Chesterton who was a very particular friend of Father Wagget. At that time we put on a dinner at the Buckingham Palace Hotel (in those days the haunt of all the County families) and in defiance of fate, had this dinner in the public dining room. We had as guests Father Wagget, G. K. C. and Mrs. Chesterton. The entrance into the dining room of the short processional created something of a sensation amongst the aforesaid County families there assembled. Father Wagget, thin, crop-headed monk in cassock and rope; G. K. C., vast and practically globular; little Mrs. Chesterton, very South Kensington in moss green velvet; my wife, and myself.

“The dinner was a riot. I have the clearest recollection of G. K. C. seated ponderously at the table, drinking champagne by magnums, continually feeding his face with food which, as he was constantly employed in the most dazzling and epigrammatic conversation, was apt to fall from his fork and rebound from his corporosity, until the fragments disappeared under the table.

“He and Father Wagget egged each other on to the most preposterous amusements. Each would write a triolet for the other to illustrate. They were both as clever with the pencil as with the pen, and they covered the backs of menus with most astonishing literary and artistic productions. I particularly remember G. K. C. suddenly looking out of the dining room window towards Buckingham Palace and announcing that he was now prepared ‘to write a disloyal triolet.’ This was during the reign of King Edward VII, and the result was convincing. I have somewhere the whole collection of these literary productions with their illustrations, but where they are, I do not know.”

“Ten or fifteen years ago,” recollects Stephen Gwynn, whom we have already quoted, “Barrie had taken a big house for August, and there was a large party, including several schoolboys and the Chestertons. It was decided to play the game of clues, and in the evening a dozen or more of us were each given bits of paper containing some mystification in verse. At the end all the clues led us to a most amusing charcoal portrait of Lord Beaverbrook. Everybody went to bed, and I was settling down to a quiet chat with G. K. C. over whiskey and soda when three schoolboys filed past. ‘Thank you very much,’ they said to him, ‘for giving us an amusing evening.’

“Next morning I said to the spokesman’s mother, ‘Your youngster said his piece very well.’ But she knew nothing about it. It had been the schoolboy’s own idea. Admittedly the Chestertons were the best guests in that gathering of a long and very mixed list.

“I remember how Lord David Cecil when still a boy, sitting up there one night and expounding to us two elders the point of view of the younger generation. Not only the easiest man in the world to talk with, but also a very good listener.”

Lucille Borden, the novelist, found G. K.’s personality was even more impressive than the things he put to paper: “I remember once on meeting him I asked him what he thought of a certain small English boy (who calls us Aunt-Uncle though we are no relation) who used to plot out London in sections, selecting the men of prominence in those sections, then call on them. This between the ages of nine and thirteen. He was very small and fragile, and by reason of this, all flunkies and secretaries let him pass. So he not only gained access to the great man but used to go and sit with him, looking for all the world like Tiny Tim.

“‘Indeed I remember that boy--he was an extraordinary chap. He will go far but he needs a guiding hand.’ ... This after the boy had grown. The thing that was so remarkable was, that Terence had only his inquisitive personality to recommend him. He has gone far but without the guiding hand, and drifted into the set pseudo-literati, sponsored by the Sitwells. However, at the age of eighteen or nineteen he married--a very clever young woman over whom the London newspapers fought and whom the “Daily Mail” finally acquired--as one of their top-notch women. This gives Terry leisure to write terrible but correct poetry--and to carry on a most extraordinary and original literary career.

“Back to ‘nos moutons’--we’ve seen Gilbert Chesterton start a broadcast-speech to a club on whose Board I am--for which he was allowed forty minutes: He rose from the speakers’ table--put his watch in front of him--began one of the most stirring prose poems to which we all ever listened--made his introduction--points in phrases as colorful as a rainbow--approached his conclusion--made his logical deductions and finished on the fortieth minute. It was such a tour de force as was rarely done in the earliest days of radio.”

“When I was introduced to Chesterton,” writes Adolphe de Castro, “I was a bit abashed. He was so formidable and such a mighty eater. But his conversation and his wit were delightful. I have my doubts if any one ever had the temerity to ask Mr. Chesterton why he had embraced Catholicism. I asked him. Americans in those days were forgiven much, and a friend of the late Ambrose Bierce was a particularly privileged character. Chesterton twirled the end of his scraggly moustache for some time, then he said: ‘Because of its primitivity.’

“‘Then you ought to have become a Jew,’ I said. ‘Judaism has greater primitivity.’

“To which he rejoined: ‘It has too much primitivity and is not sufficiently elastic for adaptability.’

“‘You hold with Heine that Judaism is not a religion but a misfortune?’ I asked.

“‘Heine was a great poet,’ returned Chesterton. ‘And do you recall what John Locke said, ‘A merchant lies for gain; a poet lies for pleasure.’ Do you happen to write poetry?’

“I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out a sheaf of papers, extracted one and gave it to him. He read it. ‘I like this,’ he said.

“It was a quasi sonnet entitled ‘The Jewish Poet.’”

“At one time I doubted the existence of G. K. C.,” declares Holbrook Jackson. “I listened to the stories of him as one listens to the yarns of men who have been in the ends of the earth. And even now, after I have looked upon him with my own eyes, I have to nudge myself to realize his probability. He has the reality of one of those dragons or fairies in which he has such invincible faith. I first beheld him on a Yorkshire moor far from his natural element, which is in London. He was in the locality on a holiday, and I had gone over to verify his existence just as one might go to the Arctic regions to verify the existence of the North Pole or the Northwest Passage.

“He was staying at the house of a Bradford merchant adjoining the moor, and I was to meet him there. It was April and raining. I trudged through the damp furze and heather up to the house only to find that the object of my pilgrimage had disappeared without leaving a trace behind him. No alarm was felt, as that was one of his habits. Sometimes he would go down to the railway station, and taking a ticket to any place that had a name which appealed to him, vanish into the unknown, making his way home on foot or wheel as fancy or circumstances directed. On this occasion, however, nothing so serious had happened. Therefore I adjourned with the lady of the house and Mrs. Chesterton to an upper hall, where a noble latticed window commanded a wide vista of the moor. I peered into the wild, half hoping that I should first behold the great form of Gilbert Chesterton looming over the bare brow of the wold, silhouetted against the grey sky like the symbol of a large new faith.

“His coming was not melodramatic; it was, on the contrary, quite simple, quite idyllic, and quite characteristic. In fact, he did not come at all, rather was it that our eyes, and later our herald, went to him. For quite close to the house we espied him, hatless and negligently clad in a Norfolk suit of homespun, leaning in the rain against a budding tree, absorbed in the pages of a little red book.

“This was a most fitting vision. It suited admirably his unaffected, careless, and altogether childlike genius. He came into the house shortly afterwards and consumed tea and cake like any mortal and talked the talk of Olympus with the abandonment and irresistibility of a child. I found his largeness wonderfully proportionate, even, as is so rarely the case with massive men, to his head. This is amply in keeping with the rest of his person. He wears a tangled mass of light brown hair prematurely streaked with grey, and a slight moustache. His grey-blue eyes laugh happily as his full lips unload themselves of a constant flow of self-amused and piquant words. Like Dr. Johnson whom he resembles so much in form, he is a great talker. But while I looked at him I was not reminded of the lexicographer, but of Balzac. And as his monologue rolled on and we laughed and wondered, I found myself carried away to a studio in France, where the head of Chesterton became one with the head of Rodin’s conception of France’s greatest literary genius.

“Since my first meeting I have seen G. K. C. many times. I have seen him standing upon platforms defending the people’s pleasures against the inroads of Puritanism. I have seen him addressing men from a pulpit, and on one memorable occasion at Clifford’s Inn Hall I saw him defending the probability of the liquefication of the blood of St. Januarius in the teeth of a pyrotechnic heckling from Bernard Shaw. Again I have seen his vast person dominating the staring throng in Fleet Street like a superman; and I have seen the traffic of Ludgate Circus held up for him, as he strolled by in cloak and sombrero like a brigand of Adelphi drama or a Spanish hidalgo by Velasquez, oblivious alike of critical bus-driver and wonder-struck multitude.

“But best it is to see him in his favorite habitat of Bohemian Soho. There in certain obscure yet excellent French restaurants with Hilaire Belloc and other writers and talkers, he may be seen, sitting behind a tall tankard of lager or a flagon of Chianti, eternally unravelling the mysterious tangle of living ideas; now rising mountainously on his feet to overshadow the company with weighty argument, anon brandishing a wine bottle as he insists upon defending some controversial point until ‘we break the furniture’; and always chuckling at his own wit and the sallies of others, as he fights the battle of ideas with indefatigable and unconquerable good-humour.”