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Book Review, 08 March 2007 Taste for paradox and wonder
G.K. Chesterton: thinking backward, looking forward Do we need more books on G.K. Chesterton? Aside from the formidable corpus of his own writings (over 90 books, many still in print, and uncounted quantities of journalism) there is no shortage of anthologies, biographies, homages and the like. Can anything more be said? Stephen Clark thinks so. His book is an unashamed combination of three personal enthusiasms: for science fiction, Chesterton and philosophy. Fortunately he rides his hobby horses lightly and with a firm hand. His introduction considers the case for and against science fiction as a serious activity, and rightly emphasises Chesterton's fondness for the popular fiction of his day, the penny dreadfuls. These share with most folk tales, and with good science fiction, a thoroughly wholesome belief in the rightness, and desirability, of the happy ending and of a basic moral order: "the problem of the fairy tale", said Chesterton, "is - what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is - what will a madman do with a dull world?" The "fantastic world" Chesterton believes to be precisely the world we live in, only seen afresh. For this reason, Clark observes, "the stories we tell of futurity must still make moral sense, or we must lose all interest in them". His main text falls into two parts: good, brief accounts of those parts of Chesterton's writing that can even broadly be considered as "science fiction" (The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, the short stories in Tales of the Long Bow, and a few others); and thematic chapters looking at those typically "Chestertonian" ideas or topics that have lent themselves, in his hands or others', to exploration in an imaginative or counterfactual context. These are rather a mixed bag; the chapters on nationalism and the Jews, Darwinism and medievalism are excellent; others, such as that on animals and human beings, meander slightly. Clark is always a fair and agreeable interpreter, however, and has not just read Chesterton attentively and with insight, but also (what is rare, and better) learnt from him the difficult art of making philosophical discussion interesting and free from cant or jargon. He writes clearly and without affectation; his footnotes, too, so often an academic author's excuse to show off the obscurity of his reading, are frequently pithy and entertaining as well as informative. Not that he is unlearned; his reading of science fiction is broad and well digested, and, what is wonderful, patently done for pleasure rather than as a gesture towards transgressing some imagined literary canon. Clark has some sensible things to say about science fiction and philosophy; but he has also written a first-rate account of Chesterton the writer, and why what he had to say is still of interest and importance now. One might accuse him of wandering beyond his subject; but it would be fairer to say that he has written the sort of book about Chesterton that Chesterton might have written himself. Chesterton disclaimed any predilection for paradox for its own sake; but only a very obstinate, and not very perceptive, apologist could deny that his writing is saturated with aphorisms, counterpoint, neatly alliterated unexpectednesses. This is fine over a short stretch (say, a newspaper column); but taken at any length, it makes him, to my taste, almost unreadable. Etienne Gilson thought Orthodoxy one of the century's great works of apologetics, and perhaps it is; as a Frenchman, his ear for English prose was perforce duller than Evelyn Waugh's, who seriously considered asking the Chesterton estate's permission to turn The Everlasting Man into decent English. As it stands, its eddying fusillades of clever phrases are in the long run deafening. A reaction to Chesterton's compulsively brittle style may not be the only, or even a major, reason behind Kevin Morris' deft selection from Chesterton's religious prose, but it is one of its major utilities. Morris explains in a rather tendentious introduction that he sees his task as rescuing Chesterton from neo-orthodox Catholicism and neo-conservative political pundits, by emphasising his radical and romantic sympathies (he shared Belloc's bizarre enthusiasm for the French Revolution, without any of Belloc's excuses, and was decidedly on the pro-Boer, soak-the-rich wing of the Edwardian Liberal Party), his long dallying within Anglicanism and his apparent distaste for some parts of what was then Catholic culture. This is all very well, and reminds us of what a superficial beer-and-Thomism view of Chesterton can overlook; but Chesterton is, by any reasonable estimate, if not a reactionary, then a conservative and a traditionalist. To claim him for "liberal Catholicism" (whatever that may be) is simply implausible. The truth is that Chesterton, unlike Belloc, was not much of a systematic thinker, or (for that matter) an historian; his views on social or political issues are too reactive and contextual to bear the weight of contrast and comparison. What Morris' selection brings out well, though, is the imaginative component to Chesterton's religion. He overcame persistent temptations to philosophical nihilism not by any process of deliberative apologetics, but by an intuitive reflection on the sheer strangeness and wonder of there being anything at all, especially the sorts of things (men, trees, sunrises) we encounter daily. Chesterton excelled at looking at an apparently familiar thought, thing or belief from a wholly unexpected angle and thus, in a way, saw it for the first time. This is too unusual a gift to be dismissed by covering it with a party label; we can none of us be so sure of our own unexamined certainties to forgo looking at them, from time to time, through Chesterton's eyes. To the making of books about Chesterton, then, there may be no end; but he, and they, still have much to say to us.  |
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