William Oddie's Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy is a new biography of G.K.Chesterton covering the first thirty-four years of his life (he died in 1936). Oddie chooses 1908 as his end date because it saw the appearance of two of GKC's major works, Orthodoxy and The Man who Was Thursday. For Oddie, the former in particular was also a key moment in Chesterton's intellectual and spiritual formation: ‘The publication of Orthodoxy was the end of a journey. It was both the conclusion of a process of self-discovery and the key document … in which he assessed not only where he now stood but how it was that his journey had followed the course that it did.’
Indeed, the idea that Chesterton's ‘intellectual discovery comes to a fairly clear terminus ad quem in 1908 with Orthodoxy’ is the central theme of this book. This is a new and important claim in Chesterton studies; others might disagree. Chesterton himself stated that the major turning point in his life was the Marconi Scandal of 1913, which ended his faith in the Liberal Party and which nearly destroyed his brother Cecil. Another key date was of course his reception into the Catholic Church in 1922, which inspired a sonnet that is one of his greatest poems. Indeed, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy is more a monograph on its author's key subject rather than a traditional biography as is explained in the introduction: ‘My study is inevitably organised and written in biographical form, but there are differences to be noted from the biographies which have so far appeared. A general biography must inevitably be a kind of catch-all, organising chronologically any material which comes to hand … its cornucopian assembly inevitably brings, to a greater of lesser extent, a certain loss of focus on the one part of a writer which is of lasting importance: his writings.’
Oddie's reductionist methodology leads him to ignore much of Chesterton's output, the fiction, the poetry, most of the essays, and to concentrate on a relatively small number of works that he sees as key to his thesis. He also has little time for others who have surveyed Chesterton's life before him: ‘with one exception, I have found existing biographies of little help in my own study’. As Oddie states, ‘the one exception’ is in fact the two books by Maisie Ward written relatively soon after GKC's death, which have been subsequently used as the primary source by all successive biographers. She had the huge advantage of not only knowing the Chestertons personally, but also of being able to write to their friends and helpers on matters which were not clear, while she also had access to material that seems to have been destroyed during the War.
However, Oddie seems more dismissive of other biographers than he needs to be. For example, he rightly stresses the great importance of the poem at the beginning of The Man who Was Thursday dedicated to GKC's old friend and former schoolmate E.C Bentley. In the poem Chesterton looks back to his own troubled youth (1892–1895) when his mind had almost given way under the weight of evil he saw underlying the decadence of Oscar Wilde, but goes on to mark his path to sanity by the rejection of the Green Carnation (Wilde's symbol). In 1926 he wrote a foreword to a dramatic version of the book: “I was not then considering whether anything is really evil, but whether everything is really evil”. Curiously Oddie then adds: ‘though most of his biographers ignore it’. Looking at the Chesterton biographies on my shelves I cannot see the justification for this remark as at least part of the poem is quoted in all of them: Barker (1973); Dale (1982); Ffinch (1986); Coren (1989), and Pearce (1996). Tellingly, it is absent from Ward.
Where Oddie scores well is in the work he has done on the Chesterton manuscripts, which were not properly catalogued until as late as 2001 by a scholar at the British Library. This has enabled him to uncover some interesting material on Chesterton's early life that has not been published before. As befits a former clergyman in the Church of England, he also shows a clear understanding of the Anglo-Catholic world in which GKC moved under the influence of his future wife from the late 1890s onwards.
However, I must say that I am sceptical about Oddie's central thesis. If GKC's mind was made up by 1908, why did it take him another fourteen years to join the Roman Catholic Church? His nightmarish adolescence left Chesterton constantly wrestling with the interlocking questions of sanity and evil for the rest of his adult life. It also enabled him to write visions of despair with great power, such as those found in the Father Brown books, and which were admired as such by Kafka and Borges.
This hypersensitivity to evil also left him obsessed with the Book of Job, references to which crop up in all sorts of unexpected places in Chesterton's work, and it is surprising that Oddie does not discuss GKC's major 1907 essay on the subject. It would have been useful if he had studied Father Ian Boyd's book on Chesterton's novels, which describes The Man who Was Thursday as ‘an extended commentary on the Book of Job’. Likewise, in a period when employees can be sacked for wearing a cross, it is also strange that Oddie does not mention the parable of the insane atheist obsessed with destroying crosses which begins The Ball and the Cross (1910), a piece which was greatly admired by Albino Luciani (Pope John Paul I).
To sum up: Dr Oddie has given us an interesting study concentrating on Chesterton's intellectual and spiritual development up to the year 1908, although not all lovers of Chesterton will agree with its key thesis. In any case, it should be seen as a monograph rather than a major new biography which replaces Maisie Ward.
