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John Watson, Croquet - Gordon Bowker, GK Chesterton

Chesterton’s Spell

Whenever I’m asked who my favourite schoolteacher was, I don’t hesitate. His name was Bill Drysdale and he taught me English when I was barely into my teens. He was tall and charismatic, with a dark beard and a beautiful bass voice. The thing we most loved about Bill, however, was that from time to time, instead of teaching us grammar, he would read us a story instead. I remember him reading Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Aldous Huxley’s The Gioconda Smile. But best of all, he introduced us to G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown Stories.

We never quite understood the instant spell Chesterton cast over us, though I now believe it had to do not only with his beguiling use of language but also with his odd way of looking at the world and his love of paradox. Bill Drysdale had won me over to Chesterton completely. I hurried off to my favourite bookshop and quickly found the newly reissued Father Brown Stories.

I also came across a collection of his newspaper sketches called Tremendous Trifles. The beautiful English, the eccentric point of view and the love of paradox are all there to be relished. He also had the knack of taking his readers on flights of fancy, transforming trivialities into matters of moment, and so turning them into parables. ‘If anyone says that I am making mountains out of molehills,’ he writes, ‘I confess with pride that it is so. I can imagine no more successful and productive form of manufacture than that of making mountains out of molehills.’

My favourite Chesterton essay, which perfectly captures this spirit, was and still is ‘A Piece of Chalk’, in which GK sets out one day with brown wrapping paper and a number of coloured chalks to spend a day drawing on the Sussex Downs. He has to explain to his landlady that he doesn’t want the brown paper for wrapping but takes the opportunity to outline to her the aesthetic

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Whenever I’m asked who my favourite schoolteacher was, I don’t hesitate. His name was Bill Drysdale and he taught me English when I was barely into my teens. He was tall and charismatic, with a dark beard and a beautiful bass voice. The thing we most loved about Bill, however, was that from time to time, instead of teaching us grammar, he would read us a story instead. I remember him reading Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Aldous Huxley’s The Gioconda Smile. But best of all, he introduced us to G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown Stories.

We never quite understood the instant spell Chesterton cast over us, though I now believe it had to do not only with his beguiling use of language but also with his odd way of looking at the world and his love of paradox. Bill Drysdale had won me over to Chesterton completely. I hurried off to my favourite bookshop and quickly found the newly reissued Father Brown Stories. I also came across a collection of his newspaper sketches called Tremendous Trifles. The beautiful English, the eccentric point of view and the love of paradox are all there to be relished. He also had the knack of taking his readers on flights of fancy, transforming trivialities into matters of moment, and so turning them into parables. ‘If anyone says that I am making mountains out of molehills,’ he writes, ‘I confess with pride that it is so. I can imagine no more successful and productive form of manufacture than that of making mountains out of molehills.’ My favourite Chesterton essay, which perfectly captures this spirit, was and still is ‘A Piece of Chalk’, in which GK sets out one day with brown wrapping paper and a number of coloured chalks to spend a day drawing on the Sussex Downs. He has to explain to his landlady that he doesn’t want the brown paper for wrapping but takes the opportunity to outline to her the aesthetic qualities of that often despised colour:

I not only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness in paper, just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer, or in the peat-streams of the North. Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness.

Out on the Downs the landscape sends him into yet more poetic ecstasies:

I crawled across those colossal contours that best express the quality of England, because they are at the same time soft and strong. The smoothness of them has the same meaning as the smoothness of great cart-horses, or the smoothness of the beech-tree; it declares in the teeth of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty are merciful.

One can see the teenage George Orwell – a keen Chestertonian as a schoolboy – basking in that passage and hear him decide that that was the way he, too, would one day write about England, though later discovering that the dictatorial mighty are less likely to be merciful than cruel. When a cow wanders into sight, Chesterton decides that he can’t possibly draw it, so he resolves to draw the soul of the cow instead, seeing it as all purple and silver. Suddenly he realizes that, although among his crayons he has all the colours of the rainbow, one colour is missing, and that is a white one. Then, just as suddenly, he stands up ‘in a trance of pleasure’ as the truth dawns on him. ‘Imagine’, he writes, ‘a man in the Sahara, regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass, imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt water with him for his chemical experiments.’ For he is in fact standing on ‘a great warehouse of chalk’: ‘Southern England is not only a grand peninsula . . . a tradition and a civilization; it is something even more admirable. It is a piece of chalk.’ It’s the obvious presented as a revelation. There is always some delicious surprise awaiting the reader of a Chesterton essay. If, like me, you regret the demise of amateur cricket and amateur rugby and amateur athletics, and the rise of professional sport with its muscle-bound money culture, then Chesterton’s essay on ‘The Perfect Game’ will be music to your ears. One blazing sunny afternoon he finds himself for some inexplicable reason playing a game of croquet. He is a poor player up against a very good one, but he takes this as a pretext to expound a philosophy in celebration of the loser. ‘It is only we who play badly who love the Game itself,’ he tells his opponent, a man called Parkinson. ‘You love glory; you love applause; you love the earthquake voice of victory; you do not love croquet . . . You do not love croquet until you love being beaten at croquet. It is we the bunglers who adore the occupation in the abstract. It is we to whom it is art for art’s sake.’ Parkinson argues back, but Chesterton has expressed a view of sport that mirrors my own: love of the game is what matters and not the corrupting love of money, which is difficult to admire – for some of us at least. There are more pleasures to come. In ‘The Extraordinary Cabman’, an altercation over a cab fare leads to a disquisition on the nature of reality. ‘Lying in Bed’ opens with the thought that this would be ‘an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling’. Elsewhere he is left to muse on the topsyturvyness of our world when the hansom cab in which he is travelling overturns; on the singularity of having just one leg when a sprained ankle leaves him hopping; and the sense of exile and homesickness he feels while visiting the remote French frontier town of Besançon. Serving on a jury, meeting an elderly Dickensian and Peggotty enthusiast on the seashore at Yarmouth, and a mysterious encounter with a spectre at an all-night pageant – all serve as grist to the mill of Chesterton’s inventive mind. Tremendous Trifles contains thirty-nine of these lovely essays. Each has its charm, its humour, its curiosity and its moral to be drawn. Reading them, with their blend of elegant writing and gentle irony, always gives me a sense of satisfaction. The man is always there in front of you, sharing his thoughts, chatting and chuckling along with you. It’s like being in the company of a highly intelligent and congenial person one might run into in a pub. Chesterton is one of our most brilliant and accomplished essayists, a man whose delightfully quirky take on this world is a pleasure to share.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 52 © Gordon Bowker 2016

 

About the contributor

Gordon Bowker has written four literary biographies, the latest being of James Joyce (2012). He lives in Kensington, near where Chesterton was born, and frequently encounters the author’s friendly ghost when he ventures down Campden Hill Road.

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