Three Wise Englishmen

Laurence Housman’s autobiography, The Unexpected Years (Bobbs-Merrill, $3.00), is an attractive, unpretentious volume. The author of Victoria Regina gives us a long and charming account of his Victorian childhood, its restricted sense of values, its remoteness, its self-sufficiency. The Housmans had a fairly happy time — with one or two eccentrics in the background, with many literary games, dominated by the, even in childhood, awe-inspiring personality of the author’s brother. We are told of Mr. Housman’s interest in the suffrage movement, of his various difficulties with the drama, anil especially with the censor; there are many entertaining anecdotes. The book not only makes agreeable reading, it also gives us an agreeable picture of the author, and an interesting picture of certain aspects of his time.

Frank Swinnerton’sAutobiography (Doubleday, Doran, $2.75) is equally pleasant. He is more objective than Mr. Housman and he has few of Mr. Housman’s prejudices; he is also much less interested in his own writing than Mr. Housman. In fact his lack of interest in, his disparagement of, his own books is, for an author, so unusual as to be almost pathological. He writes of Nocturne: ‘As for me I think nothing of it,’ and of his fiction as a whole: ‘I should prefer to speak of something else.’ Consequently he speaks, with great charm and common sense, of his poverty-stricken but not unhappy childhood, of his years in the publishing business, and particularly of the literary men of his acquaintance. These have been various and many. Among the older generation he knew Bennett and Wells best, and he gives lively and convincing portraits of them. But toward the end of his book Mr. Swinnerton’s stage gets so cluttered by literary men that the reader is jostled by them as if he were in the subway at the rush hour. The crowd is so great that though you may notice a man with a red umbrella to your right, or a woman with a strange perfume behind you, individuality — in this case, particularly Mr. Swinnerton’s individuality — is almost lost. Nevertheless one fact is clear. All these literary men are extremely nice; they are all talented, generous, and attractive; Mr. Swinnerton rarely writes sharply or sarcastically about his acquaintances. One ends by feeling that Mr. Swinnerton must be a very nice man himself. Perhaps his book would make even better reading than it does — such is human nature — if he were a little more unpleasant.

The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton (Sheed and Ward, $3.00) is in a different class from these. It is a much more complete picture of a human being, it is much more concerned with ideas, and it is one of the best and wittiest books that Chesterton ever wrote. Its character may be summed up in a sentence from Mr. Swinnerton: ‘Chesterton always gave us the impression of speaking impromptu, of enjoying debate for its own sake, of loving his fellow creatures, and, amid all his laughter, of preserving a grave and religious concern with the eternal.’ That is true of this book. It is full of wit, of humor, of love, and of wisdom, and its prose style, individual, eloquent, sparkling with the familiar Chestertonian paradoxes, is a style that is unique and occasionally superb.

But Chesterton’s writing, here as elsewhere, suggests a problem. His own picture of reality, apparently so concrete, apparently so clearly defined by the lamp-post and the pillar box, continually shifts or shimmers away into a picture which does n’t see the pillar box or the lamp-post at all. I can think of few writers to whom fact as fact and fact as symbol or generalization are so continually interchanged. ‘The real difficulty of man,’ he says, ‘ is not to enjoy lamp-posts or landscapes, not to enjoy dandelions or chops; but to enjoy enjoyment.’ And he tells us that he never thought of himself as a novelist because ‘I really like to see ideas and notions wrestling naked, as it were, and not dressed up in a masquerade as men and women.’ As a result he was a journalist and an essayist. But even in — especially in — his essays and his journalism, the confusion of fact and symbol, of naked notions and notions fully clothed, is strongly evident. His perception was so active that merely to think of a fact was to see it trembling as a symbol of the absolute — of his particular idea of the absolute. That is why his writing is both exciting and exasperating, and that is why, incidentally, the paradox was his natural form of expression.

But Chesterton’s autobiography is not only interesting as an illustration of Chesterton’s mind, it is also more important than Mr. Housman’s and Mr. Swinnerton’s, attractive as they are, because Chesterton writes from a deeper, a more universal point of view than theirs. We may not agree with that point of view, and we may be irritated by the exaggerated value which those who share it have put on Chesterton as a writer, but the fact remains that the life of the man who called himself merely a journalist is — because of his point of view — more complete and more profound than the lives of the playwright and the novelist, and his autobiography is a greater work of art. In fact, to have enjoyed his life as much as Chesterton did was in itself almost a work of art. That is why we enjoy reading about it. For the pleasure we derive from autobiography consists in a vicarious enrichment of our own lives, in becoming more aware than we could be otherwise of the pathos, the fun, the excitement, and the responsibility which make human experience. But it is perhaps a paradox of which Chesterton himself would not have approved that the point of view which makes his autobiography so fine, so full, is a point of view for which our civilization must find a substitute if it is to progress.

THEODORE SPENCER