Chesterton: faithful to the child he used to be
John Saward hails a definitive new biography of the larger-than-life Catholic convert
12 December 2008

G K Chesterton: 'You should not look a gift universe in the mouth'

One of Chesterton's favourite paradoxes is the novelty of the familiar, like the world traveller's excitement when he discovers that strange and mysterious place which is his own native land. I have had such a feeling myself in reading William Oddie's new book on Chesterton, which charts the journey of his life up to the publication, 100 years ago, of his greatest work, Orthodoxy.

Don't misunderstand me: Oddie hasn't written one of those iconoclastic biographies telling us that we don't really know the man we thought we knew, and that we definitely shouldn't love him. No, he has presented us with a far greater surprise: he has shown Chesterton to be even more Chesterton than we thought he was, to be even more worthy of the love and admiration he has received from so many in the last 100 years.

And Dr Oddie's conclusions come not only from a re-reading of GK's published works, but also from painstaking research on the vast treasure store of his unpublished papers collected and organised at the British Library by Dr R A Christophers. For a reviewer to call Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy "original" is, just this once, entirely justified: Dr Oddie has gone to the strictly primary sources in a way that no one has attempted since Maisie Ward, a friend of the Chestertons and the author of the first and, until Oddie, the best biography of GKC.

The first and most important achievement of this biography is its realisation of the potential of its subject's Autobiography. The stories men tell of their lives rarely take us to the truth; apart from when they are preparing to go to Confession, thinking about what they have been and done is, for most of the sons of Adam, an occasion of sin, certainly an opportunity for self-deception.

Only a handful of autobiographies are a reliable guide to their authors' minds: St Augustine's Confessions, Newman's Apologia, and, as Oddie demonstrates, Chesterton's posthumously published Autobiography are the exceptions.

Now, according to Oddie, though in several matters even Chesterton is in error about himself (for example, that in his youth he was only a "reluctant Socialist"), his principal claim in the Autobiography, quoting Maurice Baring quoting Mary Queen of Scots, that his end was to be found in his beginning, that his whole life was an endeavour always to be, or at least to become again, the child he used to be, is the key to understanding his life's development.

What protects him from the diabolical Pessimism of the Nineties and finally leads him from agnosticism to Catholic orthodoxy is the remembrance of his childhood's wonder at the richness of reality, the gratitude for being and beings that, thanks to his parents and especially his beloved father, "Mr Ed", blessed his earliest days.

Dr Oddie's long hours in the British Library have their reward in his proof, from the manuscripts of Chesterton's earliest writings, that his "own version of his childhood is not a semi-fictional reconstruction (as his account of several episodes in his later life can be shown to be), but a sometimes profound meditation on a reality authentically recalled".

Moreover, Oddie sorts out for the first time the chronology and content of Chesterton's studies at University College, London, and the Slade School of Art, for it is in this life-changing period that, in the person of "the diabolist", he encounters the nihilism, the "sick cloud upon the soul", of a world turned away from God, encounters it and, by the remembrance of his childhood's gratitude, overcomes it.

Chesterton makes the point against Pessimism in his habitually unforgettable way in a letter, unearthed by Oddie, written to the closest of his boyhood friends, E C Bentley: "A cosmos one day being reviled by a pessimist, replied: 'How can you, who revile me, consent to speak to me by my machinery? Permit me to reduce you to nothingness, and then we shall discuss the matter.' Moral: You should not look a gift universe in the mouth." A gift universe: the entire Christian doctrine of creation is contained in that phrase of the student Chesterton; the insight will lead him to the orthodoxy of the Church's Creeds. As Oddie says of Orthodoxy, "wonder necessarily leads to a sense that life is a precious gift, for which it is natural to thank the giver".

Oddie is his own man and refuses to follow the well-trodden path. He takes an interest in those remote Edwardian debates which Chesterton thought significant, but which many of his biographers have overlooked. To take one example: from the "landmark year" of 1903 onwards Chesterton "publicly, persistently, and sometimes aggressively confessed his faith", not least in his debate with Robert Blatchford.

Now Dr Oddie has taken the trouble actually to read the articles in which GK defends Christianity against Blatchford's attacks, and from that reading he extracts several important apologetical arguments that prefigure the reasoning to be found in his later works. Moreover, whereas some critics have thought that GK's disagreement with Blatchford's determinism was simply philosophical, Oddie shows that it was "a dispute over the doctrine of original sin, that is, over the very basis of Christianity".

There are a thousand fascinations in this book. For example, we have always known of Chesterton's friendship with Edwardian Anglo-Catholics such as Henry Scott Holland and the Vicar of Thaxted, Conrad Noel, and of such men's influence in bringing him, as he said, "nearer and nearer to the orthodox side"; but now Dr Oddie helps us see more clearly how this "clerical group of canons and curates" shaped GK's grasping of the sacramental principle, and of that scandal of particularity which lies at the centre of the religion of the Incarnation.

Then again, Oddie shows how paradox for Chesterton is a metaphysical necessity, not a mere rhetorical flourish: "His passion for common sense is part of his passion for rational truth; and paradox is an instrument of common sense in a world out of joint, a world in which common sense is habitually denied. Since the world has become a kind of permanent paradox, only paradox can unravel the truth about it."

Chesterton studies will now be dated as pre- and post-Oddie. Here for once is a book that merits the routine words of journalistic praise: it is "magisterial" in its understanding, and, since its thoroughness of research is not likely to be rivalled in our lifetimes, it is most certainly "definitive".

If you want to be enlightened and encouraged in your own battles with the nihilists and pessimists of today, if you want to know why the greatest human adventure of all is the orthodoxy of Catholic faith, and that Modernism is a craven capitulation to a world gone mad, then I urge you to buy and read this book.

Perhaps, even without Chesterton, you know these things; I hope you do. Even so, read Oddie on Chesterton, for, as this great biographer says, "all exploration - geographical or spiritual - is a homeward journey".