God's Fool

By Stefan Kanfer

THE OUTLINE OF SANITY by Alzina Stone Dale Eerdmans; 354 pages; $18.95

Decades ago, a controversial novel stirred England and America. Its action took place in 1984, and its theme was the encroachments of a future authoritarian state. The book was The Napoleon of Notting Hill, written in 1904, when George Orwell was an infant. The author was Gilbert Keith Chesterton, a man perpetually in advance of, and behind, his time.

As Chicago Biographer Alzina Stone Dale indicates in her spirited biography, Chesterton doted on paradox. The lover of tradition was a radical populist; the Falstaffian clown was a deeply committed intellectual; the friend of such freethinkers as George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells converted to Roman Catholicism at 48, and thereafter engaged in eloquent public debates with his colleagues.

From the start he seemed to be writing with five pens in hand: verse, stories, novels, biographies, essays issued forth as from a publishing house. The son of a London real estate agent was famous at 30, striding through the town like a caricature, a voluminous caped figure, swinging a sword cane and spouting epigrams: "Silence is the unbearable repartee"; "All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it"; "The world will never starve for wonders; but only for want of wonder."

But prolificacy exacts a price; in Chesterton's case it was an excess of surface and a lack of consistency. At his death in 1936 he was called a master without a masterpiece, and his value rapidly diminished. If the writer's celebrity was disproportionate, so has been his recent neglect. The Outline of Sanity seeks to correct the imbalance.

Chesterton was happiest in an arena he never really left: the nursery. The happy child turned into a neurotic adolescent haunted by unspecified guilts. He could only assuage them with religion. "Dogma," he was to conclude, "does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought." The childless man endlessly tried to recapture a youthful sense of wonder; almost all his works blink out at the world as if they were seeing it for the first time. Yet when he could tear himself away from toy theaters and critiques about "The Ethics of Elfland," he could toss off mature, insightful analyses of Browning and Dickens, marred primarily by their inaccurate quotes (he was too lazy to look up the original passages).

To support himself and his wife, and to pay off the debts of his brother Cecil, who died young, Chesterton contracted for more newspaper and magazine assignments than he could decently fulfill. But even a breakdown at age 40 could not slow him. In self-defense he lauded the ephemeral: "The daily paper is more important [than books] because citizenship must be more important than art, Dale praises this attitude; after all, "Wells, Shaw, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy--all saw themselves involved with and influencing events." But those men attempted, with whatever ludicrous results, to reach far into the future. Chesterton's ideas were rooted in the past. He espoused "Distributism," a warm-hearted and thoroughly impractical program that recalled the days of yeomanry, when every man had three acres and a cow. "To say we must have Socialism or Capitalism," he protested, "is like saying we must choose between all men going into monasteries and a few men having harems."

It was not until the appearance of the Father Brown mysteries in the early '20s that readers discerned, in his vast output, a sense of the author's bedrock beliefs. The tales followed a bumbling, intuitive priest who understood evil more profoundly than any policeman. Chesterton said he based the character on the qualities he found in a real priest, Father John O'Connor, but Brown was, in fact, an idealized projection of his creator.

Chesterton came to regard life as a moral melodrama. In it he appropriated the role of God's Fool. Sometimes his undertone was jovial: "And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine/ 'I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine.' " When he spoke disdainfully about preferring "the Jew who is revolutionary to the Jew who is a plutocrat," the result was not so felicitous. Dale never averts her eye from these occasions, but she manages to find a rationale for every lapse, from deliberate naivete to the production of potboilers. Alas, there is something to be said for Ezra Pound's annoyance with Chesterton for "never taking a hedge straight . . . dodging behind clumsy fun."

Yet not all the fun was clumsy. Examining Chesterton's fiction, Jorge Luis Borges praised "one of the finest writers of our time," possessed with "fortunate invention . . . visual imagination and rhetorical virtues." Lionel Trilling maintained that Chesterton was "a far greater critic than his present reputation might suggest." And W.H. Auden could not think of "a single comic poem that is not a triumphant success."

According to Dale, Chesterton published 78 books. Not all are fine or triumphant, and far more than half are forgotten. But that is no reason for regret. As Father Andrew Greeley, the sociologist and pop novelist, comments, "In Books in Print I found nine volumes of H.G. Wells and eleven volumes of G.B. Shaw ... for Chesterton the list goes up to more than thirty. With thirty volumes listed, who needs a 'revival'?" If one ever becomes necessary, The Outline of Sanity is the place to begin.

--By Stefan Kanfer This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.