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literary lives Chesterton: the man who was thirsty Chesterton was an unworldly man who preached to the world. His wife, Frances, assumed complete control of his affairs. Dismayed by the amount of time and money he spent in pubs, she removed him to Beaconsfield. His friends resented this; there is no evidence that Chesterton did. He was content to have Frances manage his life. Ingrams remarks that Chesterton wrote often about women, but based his understanding of the sex, and generalisations about them, almost entirely on his wife, the only woman he knew well. His subservience to Frances may be seen as evidence of his gentle decency or alternatively as a weakness. Ingrams, I think, inclines to the latter view. But what of the ‘sins’ of the title? Here too it may be a question of weakness. Ingrams has Chesterton led astray, like a medieval king, by evil counsellors. There were two: his adored younger brother, Cecil, and his admired mentor Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton had a better mind and sharper intellect than either of them, as well as a kinder and more generous, if weaker, character. He and Cecil had always loved arguing, but Gilbert argued for the pleasure of disputing, Cecil for victory. Cecil, short and ugly, seemed to Leonard Woolf to have ‘a grudge against the universe’, whereas Gilbert ‘gave one the immediate impression of goodwill, particular and general’. Cecil was a formidable journalist; Belloc was much more than that. Son of a French father and English mother who was a Catholic convert from a Nonconformist background, Belloc was brilliant and magnetic: a poet, essayist and historian, though one careless of research. His mind closed when he was young and no new ideas were ever allowed entry. The chief sin with which Ingrams charges Chesterton was anti-Semitism, which he contracted first from Belloc and then, more virulently, from Cecil. Belloc’s anti-Semitism was of the French variety. He felt that Jewish finance was corrupting Catholic Europe. He was an anti-Dreyfusard, maintaining to the end of his long life that Captain Dreyfus was a German spy: ‘poor darling, he was guilty as sin,’ he would say, long after it had been proved that he was innocent. Four years as a Liberal MP (1906– 10) convinced Belloc that parliamentary democracy was rotten and a sham – perhaps because he failed to make a mark in the Commons. Cecil eagerly swallowed Belloc’s prejudices and gave them virulent expression in New Witness, his weekly magazine. In this he was aided and encouraged by his future wife, a remarkable freelance journalist usually known as ‘Keith’; she later became a communist and would survive both brothers to write a biography of them. These prejudices came to the fore during the Marconi scandal. A British monopoly of the new wireless technology was granted by the attorney general Rufus Isaacs, the son of a Jewish merchant, to the British Marconi Company, whose managing director was his brother Godfrey. Prior to this, several members of the cabinet had bought shares in the American Marconi Company in the expectation that its value would rise in parallel with the British one. It was a piece of shoddy insider trading, but no more than that. Cecil denounced it as a Jewish ramp. Gilbert followed loyally in his wake. For the rest of their lives, he and Belloc vastly exaggerated the importance of the Marconi scandal. Cecil’s accusations petered out humiliatingly in court. When war came in 1914, Gilbert and Belloc were too old to enlist, while Cecil was deemed medically unfit for service. He was eventually – to his credit – accepted and served in France, though never on the front line. He collapsed after a route march and died in hospital of chronic kidney disease. For the rest of his life Gilbert maintained that he had been killed in action – and even held Rufus Isaacs responsible. He took over New Witness, later retitled GK’s Weekly, and devoted himself to the sad business of polishing the memory of the heroic Cecil. I still read Belloc and Chesterton with pleasure. Few others seem to. Ingrams opines that only Chesterton’s Father Brown detective stories remain popular. This is probably true, though The Flying Inn, a fantastic novel about an Islamic takeover of England, has considerable vitality. (It’s not much use, I would add, to modern-day Islamophobes, Chesterton’s Islam being very different from theirs.) His book on Thomas Aquinas has been judged one of the best popular accounts of his philosophy. Chesterton is still admired in American Catholic universities, and a few years ago I was sent a copy of a French intellectual journal devoted entirely to Chesterton. All the same, today’s Catholic Church is very different from the one Belloc and Chesterton defended. Ingrams has written an admirable book. It is lucid, intelligent, sometimes disturbing and generally fair. It won’t please zealots, but as a study of the man and his milieu it could scarcely be bettered. Literary Review | september 2021 8
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literary lives susan elizabeth sweeney Reaching for the Stars The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science By John Tresch (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 448pp $30) The first major biography of Poe since Kenneth Silverman’s Edgar A Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance was published thirty years ago, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night provides a necessary alternative to Silverman’s emphasis on childhood trauma, romantic entanglement and beautiful dead women who won’t stay dead. It has arrived soon after Scott Peeples’s The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City, an engaging but more slender study of Poe as an urban writer – focusing on Boston, Richmond, London, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, the cities where he lived – that came out last autumn. In contrast to these works, John Tresch offers a thorough, beautifully developed, long-overdue exploration of Poe’s lifelong affinity for science and its pervasive influence on his art. If you aren’t a scientist, or if you are among the many Poe fans who have avoided reading Eureka, his brilliant but uneven book-length prose poem about the nature of the universe, don’t worry. Tresch is a splendid storyteller. He begins by describing Poe’s efforts to attract a large paying audience for his lecture on ‘The Universe’ in New York City on 3 February 1848, a year before his death, and then flashes back to Poe’s precocious experiences with astronomy in Richmond at the age of sixteen, peering through an expensive telescope of brass, wood and glass given to him by his wealthy foster father, John Allan – who would disown him ten years later – and writing an epic poem, ‘Al Aaraaf ’, set on a star discovered by Tycho Brahe. Throughout this biography, Tresch deftly illuminates connections between Poe’s interest in science, his awareness of discoveries or inventions, his personal circumstances and his writing. At the same time, the author follows Poe’s life without resorting to sentimentality or sensationalism, allowing its narrative to develop naturally. Tresch’s knack for storytelling extends to other aspects of the book, as when he introduces the story of ‘The Balloon-Hoax’ – an article Poe wrote for The Sun newspaper in New York in 1844, describing a balloonist crossing the Atlantic in only three days – as if the crossing had actually occurred. You may wonder why Tresch chose The Reason for the Darkness of the Night as his title. Near the end of the book, he reveals that it was Poe, in 1848, who solved Olbers’s paradox: if the universe ‘A Edgar Poe’ by Odilon Redon, 1882 contains an infinite number of stars, then why is the night sky dark rather than ablaze with all their light? You will have to read the biography for yourself to discover Poe’s solution to this riddle, which 21st-century science has confirmed. The most impressive aspect of this biography is that Tresch’s exploration of science in Poe’s life and work never feels forced. ‘Science’ was defined in many ways in the 19th century, and Poe himself, while endlessly fascinated by the subject, responded to it in different modes and forms, always admiring its rigour but not wanting it to supplant the imagination. Perhaps that’s why Dupin in ‘The Purloined Letter’ praises Minister D– for being both a poet and a mathematician. (One of Poe’s literary descendants, Vladimir Nabokov, similarly urged his students to cultivate ‘the passion of the scientist and the precision of the artist’.) The Reason for the Darkness of the Night addresses all of Poe’s life and work, while showing how viewing them through the lens of science allows new themes and patterns to become visible. Tresch examines the punctuation of Poe’s early poem ‘Sonnet – To Science’, for example, to emphasise the many implications of its central question: ‘How should [the poet] love thee – or how deem thee wise?’ He demonstrates that the evanescent landscapes in ‘Eleonora’ are modelled on magic lantern shows where one image fades into the next. He notes that many of the stories Poe wrote after arriving in New York City in April 1844, such as ‘The Thousand-and-Sec- ond Tale of Scheherazade’, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ and ‘The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether’, satirise assumptions about scientific progress in America. Poe speculated in Eureka that the universe shifts back and forth between unity and diversity, and his aesthetic theories, use of chiastic structures and embrace of a range of genres betray an interest in opposites and contrasts. Tresch’s provocative readings of Poe’s texts in relation to science suggest that they too contain multiple and even contradictory meanings. Interwoven with the narrative of Poe’s life is the story of 19thcentury science itself. Tresch touches on numerous subjects along the way, including natural history as practised by wealthy men of leisure; the influence of French mathematics and engineering on the education Poe received at West Point; surprising technological advances, such as the invention of the daguerreotype; protracted debates over the nature of the universe in the context of belief in a supernatural being; phrenology, animal magnetism and other pseudoscientific fads; the rise of museums, such as the Smithsonian Institution; and the gradual professionalisation of the scientific field, especially as represented by the establishment of the American Association september 2021 | Literary Review 9

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literary lives

Chesterton: the man who was thirsty

Chesterton was an unworldly man who preached to the world. His wife, Frances, assumed complete control of his affairs. Dismayed by the amount of time and money he spent in pubs, she removed him to Beaconsfield. His friends resented this; there is no evidence that Chesterton did. He was content to have Frances manage his life. Ingrams remarks that Chesterton wrote often about women, but based his understanding of the sex, and generalisations about them, almost entirely on his wife, the only woman he knew well. His subservience to Frances may be seen as evidence of his gentle decency or alternatively as a weakness. Ingrams, I think, inclines to the latter view.

But what of the ‘sins’ of the title? Here too it may be a question of weakness. Ingrams has Chesterton led astray, like a medieval king, by evil counsellors. There were two: his adored younger brother, Cecil, and his admired mentor Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton had a better mind and sharper intellect than either of them, as well as a kinder and more generous, if weaker, character. He and Cecil had always loved arguing, but Gilbert argued for the pleasure of disputing, Cecil for victory. Cecil, short and ugly, seemed to Leonard Woolf to have ‘a grudge against the universe’, whereas Gilbert ‘gave one the immediate impression of goodwill, particular and general’.

Cecil was a formidable journalist; Belloc was much more than that. Son of a French father and English mother who was a Catholic convert from a Nonconformist background, Belloc was brilliant and magnetic: a poet, essayist and historian, though one careless of research. His mind closed when he was young and no new ideas were ever allowed entry.

The chief sin with which Ingrams charges Chesterton was anti-Semitism, which he contracted first from Belloc and then, more virulently, from Cecil. Belloc’s anti-Semitism was of the French variety. He felt that Jewish finance was corrupting Catholic Europe. He was an anti-Dreyfusard, maintaining to the end of his long life that Captain Dreyfus was a German spy: ‘poor darling, he was guilty as sin,’ he would say, long after it had been proved that he was innocent.

Four years as a Liberal MP (1906– 10) convinced Belloc that parliamentary democracy was rotten and a sham – perhaps because he failed to make a mark in the Commons. Cecil eagerly swallowed Belloc’s prejudices and gave them virulent expression in New Witness, his weekly magazine. In this he was aided and encouraged by his future wife, a remarkable freelance journalist usually known as ‘Keith’; she later became a communist and would survive both brothers to write a biography of them.

These prejudices came to the fore during the Marconi scandal. A British monopoly of the new wireless technology was granted by the attorney general Rufus Isaacs, the son of a Jewish merchant, to the British Marconi Company, whose managing director was his brother Godfrey. Prior to this, several members of the cabinet had bought shares in the American Marconi Company in the expectation that its value would rise in parallel with the British one. It was a piece of shoddy insider trading, but no more than that. Cecil denounced it as a Jewish ramp. Gilbert followed loyally in his wake. For the rest of their lives, he and Belloc vastly exaggerated the importance of the Marconi scandal. Cecil’s accusations petered out humiliatingly in court.

When war came in 1914, Gilbert and Belloc were too old to enlist, while Cecil was deemed medically unfit for service. He was eventually – to his credit – accepted and served in France, though never on the front line. He collapsed after a route march and died in hospital of chronic kidney disease. For the rest of his life Gilbert maintained that he had been killed in action – and even held Rufus Isaacs responsible. He took over New Witness, later retitled GK’s Weekly, and devoted himself to the sad business of polishing the memory of the heroic Cecil.

I still read Belloc and Chesterton with pleasure. Few others seem to. Ingrams opines that only Chesterton’s Father Brown detective stories remain popular. This is probably true, though The Flying Inn, a fantastic novel about an Islamic takeover of England, has considerable vitality. (It’s not much use, I would add, to modern-day Islamophobes, Chesterton’s Islam being very different from theirs.) His book on Thomas Aquinas has been judged one of the best popular accounts of his philosophy. Chesterton is still admired in American Catholic universities, and a few years ago I was sent a copy of a French intellectual journal devoted entirely to Chesterton. All the same, today’s Catholic Church is very different from the one Belloc and Chesterton defended.

Ingrams has written an admirable book. It is lucid, intelligent, sometimes disturbing and generally fair. It won’t please zealots, but as a study of the man and his milieu it could scarcely be bettered.

Literary Review | september 2021 8

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