Is Chesterton exposé an act of atonement?
Daniel Johnson ponders a great writer’s failings laid bare with a hint of ambivalence. Colin Shindler considers Palestinian polemics
RICHARD INGRAMS’S The Sins of G.K. Chesterton is a necessary corrective to the cloyingly hagiographical literature on this greatly gifted, highly enjoyable but deeply flawed writer. On the subject of Chesterton’s antisemitism, Ingrams is unsparing. Rightly so, for the Catholic myth of England’s most jovial, Falstaffian and unworldly man of letters does not survive scrutiny.
Gilbert Chesterton did not begin life as an antisemite. Indeed, much of the prose and poetry for which he is justly remembered belongs to the prelapsarian phase before, as Ingrams shows, he was infected with the pestilence by his deranged and dishonest younger brother Cecil, and his toxic friend Hilaire Belloc. It is true that Chesterton affected a kind of innocence, or at least ignorance, about the waves of anti-Jewish prejudice that spread across Europe around 1900. “It was the Dreyfus case that first opened my eyes to the Jewish question,” Belloc said. What this meant was that an “Anglo-Judaic plutocracy” controlled British business, politics and the press. And he recruited his more successful frenemy Gilbert to his cause.
“I do not know what antisemitism is,” Chesterton claimed. He may have been in denial, but he was no idiot savant. When the Marconi scandal took off in 1913, he defended his brother’s role in stirring up the nearest thing England came to its own Dreyfus affair. The allegation levelled by the Eye-Witness, a paper edited successively by Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, was that the Attorney General, Rufus Isaacs, his brother Godfrey and the Postmaster-General Herbert Samuel — all of whom were Jewish— had conspired with other politicians, including Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the
Exchequer, to profit from corrupt
insider trading of shares in Marconi, an Anglo-American corporation. Cecil was prosecuted for criminal libel, but was merely fined £100, which was paid for him by supportive Tory MPs. Not only was no evidence of corruption ever produced, but the proprietor of the Eye-Witness, Charles Granville, admitted to a parliamentary committee that the motive for the entire campaign had been “an attack on Jews as Jews”.
It is a striking fact that Marconi failed to generate the antisemitic hysteria that marred French politics for decades after Dreyfus. But Gilbert Chesterton could not let it go. After the death of Cecil in 1918, he wrote an open letter to Lord Reading (as Rufus Isaacs had become) in the Eye Witness.
It is, as Ingrams says, a “hateful” document, full of vile and baseless insinuations, and it ends with an implied threat to British Jewry that the Chestertons had merely sought to prevent “this disaster for you and yours”.
“I wish you no such ghastly retribution,” Chesterton writes. Retribution for what, exactly?
Later in life, GKC made odious excuses for Mosley and Mussolini, but this letter alone ought to put paid to the zealously pursued cause of Chesterton’s canonisation. It took a man like Ingrams — like Chesterton, a convert to Catholicism — to point out the absurdity of revering as a saint a man who could persuade himself that British Jews were foreigners: “Let a Jew sit on the Woolsack,” he wrote, but “let him sit there dressed as an Arab... he should know where he is, which is in a foreign land.”
What makes the former Private Eye editor Ingrams’s indictment of Chesterton so damning is that he is himself a lifelong antiZionist. A decade ago, he was still suggesting that Jewish defenders of Israel should always identify themselves as such, “otherwise the idea gains ground that Israel has a fifth column of politicians, commentators, businessmen, etc, in this country… all seeking…to excuse or explain away Israeli atrocities.” This outburst prompted Howard Jacobson to comment that perhaps Israel’s critics should likewise declare whether they were antisemites.
Could the author of this book have since suffered a crisis of conscience? Is it even possible that, by arraigning Chesterton for his undeniable (though oft-denied) antisemitism, he is also discreetly atoning for the sins of Richard Ingrams?