Postscript on G. K.

RETURN TO CHESTERTON (336 pp.)--Masie Ward--Sheed & Ward ($4.50).

Biographer Maisie Ward was entitled to a contented sigh when she finished Gilbert Keith Chesterton nine years ago. It was (and is) the most thorough account ever written of that man-mountain of modern English letters. But Author Ward's book was hardly off the presses before she began to find fascinating new bits and pieces of Chestertoniana. Return to Chesterton is her 336-page postscript.

Nothing in her discoveries "changed the picture of the man I knew, but fresh aspects came to light." They came from Chesterton's taxi drivers, barbers, secretaries, neighbors, and companions of childhood. Loosely strung together as they are, these reminiscences do not, of course, add up to a portrait of the artist. Indeed, most of them give so fantastic an impression of G.K. that, from this book alone, he would seem to have been hardly more than a remarkably likable lunatic.

Swordsticks & Umbrellas. He was a slim, tall youth, who quickly developed such a belly that, when asked by a lady in World War I why he was not "out at the front," he was able to retort: "Go round to the side, Madam, and you'll see that I am." When, enveloped in a vast cloak and toying with a swordstick, he sat his 300 pounds down to dream on a wayside bench, passers-by "either take me for the village idiot or for one of Harrod's delivery vans." He liked to believe that his life was "centric," though it struck most people as eccentric beyond belief. He would take a bath, step out, and then step in again, shouting angrily: "Dammit, I've been in here already!" He would drop a garter on the floor, plunge after it, find a book there, and lie on the floor, reading.

He could be seen walking in brilliant sunshine with a raised umbrella over his head; his wife had put it up for him during the last rain, and he had since seen no reason to put it down. A waitress who brought him two poached eggs saw them fly into his lap when he struck the table to drive home a point; they remained there, unnoticed and unfelt, even when he paused in his argument to cry: "Waitress, will you please bring me two more poached eggs? I seem to have lost the others."

Visits to "grand houses," where a valet would unpack his luggage, made Chesterton uneasy. Neither he nor the valet could ever be sure what would turn up in his bags and pockets--a green glass bottle stopper and a horse pistol on one occasion; on another, "several stubs of pencil, a paperbacked murder story, some colored chalks, and a small cigar or two." Nor did anyone know what he would bring to a lecture: a Dutch audience that flocked to hear him talk on Dickens went away much enlightened on the subject of Browning.

Up for Mass. On those occasions when he noticed his own whims, he liked to embellish them with wit. A man who saw him chasing his hat through a stream of traffic joined in, caught the hat and returned it to G.K.--who promptly assured him that it should never have been rescued at all. "Then why on earth did you run after it?" "It's an old friend," G.K. explained. "I am fond of it, and I wanted to be with it at the end."

Chesterton's friend Nicolas Bentley believed that if G.K. had become "a decorative draughtsman" instead of a writer, "he would have had very few equals." Many of his numerous drawings have perished; but the sharpness of his talent may be glimpsed in a cartoon entitled "WHEN THE REVOLUTION HAPPENS: Bernard Shaw Refuses to Drink the Blood of Aristocrats on Vegetarian Principles and out of Kindness to the Lower Animals." This work is not only a splendid parody of Daumier, it is also an example of Chesterton's genius for translating his gravest opinions into wit. It was, for instance, agony for him to tear himself "out of bed for Mass. He was not speaking lightly when he groaned: "Only religion could have brought us to such a pass."

The Vials of Gloom? Some of his acquaintances could not believe that his idiosyncrasies were genuine: "I always felt Chesterton was an actor," one of them told Maisie Ward. "He played a part and dressed a part." And when O.K. became a Catholic, even G.B.S. was shaken into protesting: "This is going too far." On the other hand, his more extravagant admirers regarded him as a pure & simple saint--a man "taught by the Holy Ghost."

Biographer Ward's own opinion is that Chesterton's "ready acceptance of life's normal pleasures" rules him out of saintly ranks. But it does not put him among those who, precisely because they "fail to reach sanctity . . . pour out upon us the vials of their gloom." Chesterton ranks, she believes, among the "spiritual geniuses" of the human race--"to which," as G.K. once observed, "so many of my readers belong."

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