Chesterton as War Propagandist: Or, Against the Ignorant, Mendacious, Calumniating Anti-Chestertonians

Chesterton as War Propagandist: Or, Against the Ignorant, Mendacious, Calumniating Anti-Chestertonians

As people who know me in real life can attest, I have for the past fifteen years or so regularly joked that--despite being (by this point) nominally an academic expert with a PhD and a book from Oxford University Press on 4th century political theology--the area which I am actually most qualified to write on is Star Trek. However, in the dry, sober, unhumorous light of day, the single topic I am probably actually most fully qualified to write on is the life and thought of G.K. Chesterton.

Regular readers of this """weblog""" will note that pretty much every essay I have written for The Adventures of Captain Peabody since its inception has included at least a few credited or uncredited paraphrases of Chesterton. These citations, though, drastically underrate the degree to which I have stolen from Chesterton over the years. 

The truth is, there is more or less no thought I have had on any topic since the age of twelve that has not derived to at least some degree from a thought by Chesterton. This is not an exaggeration. Since the age of twelve, I have self-consciously and deliberately done everything in my power to adopt and assimilate Chesterton's approach to the world as my own. The basic structures of my reasoning on history, art, literature, poetry, psychology, anthropology, humor, enjoyment, and theology all derive to greater or lesser degrees from his own: as does by extension every thought or creative product deriving from those structures. In the scale of my various identities, "Chestertonian" comes just behind "Catholic Christian" and very far ahead of "American."

Grotesque, Egotistical Presentation of Credentials

Beyond that, though, I have in fact read a shockingly large proportion of Chesterton's shockingly large corpus: and what is more (believe it or not!) remembered most of it. That, though, gives a perhaps unhelpful impression of my engagement with Chesterton, which has not been academic and systematic but constant and totalizing. Put simply, "reading Chesterton" is something I do every day, multiple times a day, on top of and alongside anything else I happen to be reading or doing. The vast majority of the works by Chesterton I have read I have read not once, but somewhere between a dozen and a hundred times.

Or, as Chesterton's close personal friend Hilaire Belloc put it:

I like to read myself to sleep in Bed,
A thing that every honest man has done
At one time or another, it is said,
But not as something in the usual run;
Now *I* from ten years old to forty one
Have never missed a night: and what I need
To buck me up is Gilbert Chesterton,
(The only man I regularly read).

The Illustrated London News is wed
To letter press as stodgy as a bun,
The Daily News might just as well be dead,
The 'Idler' has a tawdry kind of fun,
The 'Speaker' is a sort of Sally Lunn,
The 'World' is like a small unpleasant weed;
*I take them all because of Chesterton*,
(The only man I regularly read).

The memories of the Duke of Beachy Head,
The memoirs of Lord Hildebrand (his son)
Are things I could have written on my head,
So are the memories of the Comte de Mun,}
And as for novels written by the ton,
I'd burn the bloody lot! I know the Breed!
And get me back to be with Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

ENVOI

Prince, have you read a book called 'Thoughts upon
The Ethos of the Athanasian Creed'?
No matter--it is not by Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

I have naturally read many times all of his so-called "major works" of Christian apologetics and philosophy: namely, Heretics, Orthodoxy, and The Everlasting Man. I have also, however, read and re-read his less well-known works on Christian topics, namely The Thing, The Catholic Church and Conversion, The Well and the Shallows, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Thomas Aquinas. I have read and reread many times all of Chesterton's six novels (The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Ball and the Cross, Manalive, The Flying Inn, and The Return of Don Quixote), as well as more or less all of his short stories (including not only all 53 Father Brown mysteries, but also the one-off collections The Club of Queer Trades, Four Faultless Felons, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Tales of the Long Bow, The Poet and the Lunatics, The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, and the early unpublished writings collected in The Coloured Lands and elsewhere). I have read nearly all of his poems that have been collected (some thousands), and memorized more than a dozen of them, including his famous epic poems Lepanto, The Ballad of St. Barbara, and the book-length Ballad of the White Horse. I have read all those books covering his frequent travels and impressions taken from them: What I Saw in America, Irish Impressions, The New Jerusalem, Sidelights on New York and Newer London, Christendom in Dublin, and The Resurrection of Rome. I have not read all, but at least a reasonable proportion of his works of literary criticism, including his Twelve Types, The Victorian Age in Literature, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, George Bernard Shaw, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and his Chaucer. I have read most of his works of political and economic theory and polemic, including Utopia of Usurers, Eugenics and Other Evils, William Cobbett, What's Wrong with the World, and The Outline of Sanity. I have read his one and only Short History of England. I have read all three plays he wrote in his lifetime, namely, Magic, The Judgement of Dr. Johnson, and The Surprise, as well as the mummer's play The Turkey and the Turk. I have also, relevantly to this essay, read most of his works of anti-German war propaganda, including The Barbarism of Berlin, Lord Kitchener, The Crimes of England, and the posthumous collection of his anti-Nazi columns and essays The End of the Armistice. 

(I left out a few books here because I missed them in the Wikipedia list of Chesterton works I found and/or wasn't 100% sure I had read them even though I likely did.)

While I have not read all his collections of essays, I have read at least a reasonable proportion of the weekly or more than weekly columns he wrote for most of his life and from which these essay collections were drawn. In particular, I have read and reread all of the weekly columns, reviews, and letters he wrote for the Daily News from 1901 to 1913. It is literally true that I do not know how many of the weekly columns he wrote for the Illustrated London News from 1905 to 1936 I have read--as I used to simply read through volumes of them ad libitum without taking any particular notice of what the year was or which I had read before--but I believe upon sober reflection that I have read certainly the majority of them (including definitely all between 1914 and 1919 and all from 1930-1936, of which I made particular note), and consider it likely that I have in fact read something approaching all of them. I have also read everything he wrote (including both weekly columns and occasional anonymous leaders, easily distinguishable by his distinctive voice) for his brother's newspaper The New Witness from 1919 to 1922 (the only years, alas, currently available online); and am at the present slowly reading through everything he wrote for his own newspaper G.K.'s Weekly in the available online archives: so far, I have only made it from Sept. 1925 to February 1926, but am making steady progress. This remains, for me, the true "frontier" of Chesterton reading, which will hopefully last me until death.

Oh yes, and I have also naturally read a decent amount of scholarship and writing on Chesterton: including most notably Chesterton's own Autobiography, and Ian Kerr's voluminous and magisterial G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, my copy of which is in tatters from reading it in the shower too much. I have also read many times the initial biography written by Maisie Ward, a personal friend of Chesterton: as well as owning and frequently rereading the rare and hard-to-find supplement Return to Chesterton, a delightful and profound book consisting of dozens of largely unedited accounts and anecdotes of Chesterton by personal friends and people he took under his wing as children and adolescents.

All this might well make me seem like a rather crazed monomaniac, the proverbial "man of one book" spoken of by Aquinas. I can assure my readers that this is not the case: as, for instance, the many books on diverse topics reviewed in this space might indicate. Besides getting a PhD in Classics and writing a book on 4th century political theology, I flatter myself in thinking that I read rather widely. In the past few months, for instance, I have read an academic book on Ottoman political theory, another on modern Islamic movements to revive the Caliphate, another on Medieval European social organization, and another on the internal economy of the contemporary Pakistani military, in addition to a few works of fiction. Still, all the while, I have been also and on the side reading and rereading G.K. Chesterton.

It is, in fact, Chesterton who led me to become such a generalist, and my general reading that leads me back to Chesterton. He himself read and wrote rather widely on very different topics all throughout his life: and a close personal friend compared him to a house with large windows opening in every direction. I have, to a much smaller extent, aspired to be the same.

For the purposes of this essay, however, I should point out that my knowledge of Chesterton extends not merely to his text, but to his context. I would venture to say that I have a fairly decent working knowledge of all of the major authors and politicians, intellectual and religious and political movements, major world events, and journalistic fads of Chesterton's lifetime. A decent amount of that knowledge, it is true, comes via absorbing and researching the references to these events and fads and figures found in Chesterton's voluminous writings--while some more comes from reading a decent proportion of the non-Chesterton writings and reviews and columns and leaders of the weekly popular newspapers Chesterton wrote for. But I have also directly read a decent number of other contemporary authors and/or scholarly works on the period. 

Hence, while I would never profess to be a scholarly expert on the Victorian Era or the early 20th century or WW1 or the '20s or the '30s, I can speak with reasonable facility on and around, for instance, the Eugenics movement in Germany, England, and America, the Celtic Revival, the Decadents, the WW1 German military, the lead-up and results of the Russian Revolution, the introduction of Russian literature into England, the birth and early development of the English Air Force, the rise of Imperialist Jingoism and Mafficking in England, the Darwinian debates over evolution, Teutonist racialism in England and Germany, the Victorian debates over Birth Control, the Great Strikes of the 1900s, Orientalism as a cultural movement, the French syndicalist movement and its American and British offshoots, the place of Jews in England and France in the 19th and 20th centuries, Anarchist dynamite attacks and assassinations, the economic downturn in England, France, and Germany after WW1, the birth of modern policing, the origins of science fiction, the rise of Fascism in the 1920s and '30s, detective fiction in Britain and America, the Conservative Revolution in Germany, and so on and so forth. More than this, I am intimately familiar with the language and cast of mind of people in these times and places and could give, I fancy, a pretty decent approximation of how different groups wrote and thought. I have also read or read about a great number of the authors and topics from earlier history written about by Chesterton, including such diverse figures as William Cobbett, William Shakespeare, Homer, and Euripides.

Short Story: La Cafe

[There has been a lot of discussion about the JFK assassination in the last year or so. Because of that, I felt it important to finally reveal to everyone the truth about who killed JFK and why. Please note that because of its setting and content, the below story unavoidably contains offensive language and content, and that I endorse absolutely none of the sentiments expressed therein.]

Nothing about the man stood out to me. He was entirely unusual in every respect–but that was what made him blend in.

La Cafe was, as its name indicated, a coffee shop at the outskirts of a college town. It was exactly one street over from the main road where undergraduate women clustered in Starbucks and Caribou Coffee, and had been around, or so locals told me, since at least the early 1970s, though there was some debate over whether the name might have changed in the mid-’80s. It served bitter black coffee, Great Value tea bags in lukewarm water, and obviously store-bought croissants. You had to add the sugar yourself from a porcelain bowl on the counter: whipped cream was not an option.

On the plus side, the purportedly Albanian family that owned La Cafe had not visited or exercised any oversight over the place for roughly forty years, and the manager, a 60-something woman named Beth who wore knitted winter hats all year round, spent her days in her “office” (the main storage room), gambling on her phone: she was rumored to be an alcoholic, but no one had caught her at it yet. As a result, anyone and everyone was welcome to spend eight to twelve hours a day in the minimally-heated interior of the place, or sit at any of the ten to twelve tables scattered around the grassy, uncovered patio outside, or use either of the two filthy bathrooms hastily relabeled as gender-neutral in the mid-2010s, without ever ordering anything at all. Most importantly, there was free, unsecured wi-fi.

Taken as a whole, then, La Cafe was shunned by anyone with taste, friends, social status, or an orientation towards modern coffee-shop-culture and/or personal safety, but embraced by poverty-stricken graduate students, homeless people, failed academics, intellectual poseurs, con men, the clinically insane, and various lonely cast-offs desperate for any kind of proximity to what they perversely persisted in regarding as the Life of the Mind.

Did I belong to any of those categories? That’s a good question. I didn’t think so at the time: but looking back I have my doubts.

Roughly two years prior to my meeting with the strange man, I had finally finished my PhD after nine and a half years of increasingly strained meetings with my advisor ended with a shouted ultimatum and a rushed, desultory defense over Zoom. For the next few years, I worked as an adjunct, failed to pay my rent, and sent off two applications a week for tenure-track positions and prestigious post-docs with names like “the Young Talent Enrichment Program.” I have never been able to work out whether this was the worst or something approaching the best time of my life.

Then, abruptly, on an icy March day where half of my Persian poetry class had again failed to turn in their final projects, I received an email from Messrs. Snodgrass and Beit cordially informing me that I had inherited from an estranged uncle more money than I had ever imagined.

Up to that point, I had assumed, like most people, that inheriting unimaginable sums from estranged uncles was something that only happened in stories. Since then, I have on innumerable occasions pointed out the folly of this all-too-common misconception: pointing out that most people in America still have siblings and therefore their children will have uncles, that some number of these uncles are statistically certain to become wealthy, that wealthy is said in many ways, that given the growing income gap what used to be considered merely upper middle class is now as good as rich anyway, that earning lots of money often clashes with the time and affections necessary for a happy family life and so leads to estrangement with family members, that even wealthy uncles must inevitably die, that they too must feel the basic cultural and indeed biological imperative to hand on something of themselves to the next generation, that an estrangement with one’s siblings need not necessarily apply to nieces and nephews, that a lack of personal contacts with those inheriting logically must mean less where estates are large and estate-planning largely carried out by lawyers, and that consequently there is in itself nothing more logical and indeed commonplace in human history than inheriting an unimaginable sum of money from an estranged uncle. 

Whenever the matter has come up socially since then, I have endeavored–more, I admit, for the sake of my own pride than anything else--to give the impression that the inheritance did not come as a surprise to me, that I had in fact expected it and planned on it for many years, and of course this was why I had pursued a graduate degree in such a poorly-renumerated field as Medieval Persian poetry, failed to complete my PhD in less than nine years, and then worked for two years as an adjunct.

As a matter of fact, this impression is false. I had not even the smallest inkling that my uncle–whom I had seen only twice in my entire life–would choose to leave any money to me, let alone what amounted to his entire fortune. To tell the truth, I had largely forgotten that I had an uncle, and had in fact told several women I dated in graduate school that my father was an only child–using this as a key psychological factor to explain why he had failed to understand my uniquely sensitive disposition and consequently left me unable to feel and receive normal human affection and so in desperate need of remedial attention from women. When I did occasionally remember my uncle, I certainly remembered that he was a fabulously successful and wealthy engineer–but given that my uncle’s first two marriages had between them produced two children, given that he had never actually directly spoken to me that I could remember, and given that the only time I had seen him interact with my father had ended in a shouting match, it had simply never occurred to me that he might choose to leave me anything.

I am still not really sure why he chose to do so. My leading theory has always been spite towards his own children: though I cannot entirely rule out spite towards his ex-wives, my father, his business associates, himself, and/or me. Life is unfortunately filled with mysteries, and I had no interest in unravelling any of them.

In any case, my sudden inheritance left me in a very sticky situation. On the one hand, I had for years been telling everyone I knew how much I hated my job, my students, and my field. On the other hand, my failed academic career had for more than ten years given me my only meaning in life, my entire sense of self, my only topic of conversation, and my only reason whatsoever for ever leaving my bed. Still, in the end I could think of no excuse that would hold water with my colleagues, my students, or my increasingly rare dates: I resigned.

During my time as an adjunct, I had frequently complained that I lacked the time to work on both my academic monograph on Rumi and a science-fiction novel in which my original viewpoint on life would be explored via a painstakingly detailed description of the poetry, literature, politics, society, and sex lives of alien grubs. Having quit my job, I no longer had an excuse not to work on these projects. Unfortunately, I quickly found that I loathed both of them as well.

Theoretically, I could have simply moved away to somewhere warm and inviting, or gone on vacation to the Bahamas and never come back. Every time I considered these options, though, my head would spin, a cold sweat would break out on the back of my neck, and I found myself unable to sleep for the next several days. Like it or not, this town had become my home–and the last thing I needed in the throes of such an emotionally disturbing transition (as I reminded myself constantly during this time, many lottery winners kill themselves) was a drastic change in milieu.

No longer having any colleagues, students, or advisors to ask about what I was doing, I briefly considered simply giving up any active efforts whatsoever, watching television all day, and ordering take-out for all my meals. A devastating encounter with a former student at Walgreen’s, however, confirmed me in my ultimately illusory, but nonetheless deeply felt need to at least fake some kind of productivity.

Hence, within about two months of my inheritance, I found myself spending ten hours a day, six days a week sitting behind my laptop at a corner table at La Cafe, scrolling through Twitter, watching Shakira music videos and DnD streams, and occasionally adding and then deleting a paragraph or two of text to my two project documents.

Intimate Portraits of Madness: American Psycho, Uncut Gems, Remains of the Day

Intimate Portraits of Madness: American Psycho, Uncut Gems, Remains of the Day

[In this column, I will again return to the mini-art-criticism format by discussing three works of art which I have read/watched over the last several months, which I believe are extremely connected to each other. Obviously there are lots of spoilers.]

American Psycho (2000)

"I can't believe Bryce prefers Van Patten's card to mine..."

My story parallels those of many other men of my generation. I finally watched American Psycho recently after years of seeing business card memes on the Internet. 

American Psycho is what is known as a "cult classic."

Like many other critics to write about American Psycho, I am haunted by the fear that I may sound as nonsensically bullshitting as its protagonist, stereo aficionado Patrick Bateman, does in the key scene in which he energetically monologues meaningless critical jargon about Huey Lewis and the News while dancing around with an ax. 

This cult-classic critical indie darling...*axe noises*