“The first time I met him was when he was lunching with dear old Robert Barr at the Savage Club. Barr came over to my table to say ‘Chesterton is my guest and I told him who you were.’ He said ‘Kernahan and I are two of the rather uncommon authors, today, who write of serious and religious subjects. I’d like to meet him.’ ‘So come over to my table, Kernahan, and meet him.’
“I did. At about two o’clock Barr had to leave to keep an editorial engagement, and I said to G. K. C. ‘I am a member. Won’t you stay on as my guest now your host is going?’ He did. He stayed till six o’clock, talking brilliantly all the time (with an interlude for tea—’till then he had enjoyed the club’s excellent wine), and never once repeated himself. Then we met again at the Centenary Celebration of George MacDonald. Ramsay MacDonald was President of the Centenary Memorial, with Chesterton and myself as Vice-Presidents, and G. K. C. was one of the speakers, and very happy and interesting in what he said.
“My last meeting with him was in Hastings. My wife and I were passing the Queen’s Hotel on the front, and I heard myself hailed by name. It was G. K. C. sitting outside in the sun at a table, with a bottle of wine before him, and he invited us to come and share it, and as many more bottles as we felt inclined for. Once again, he talked in that brilliant paradoxical and ‘intriguing’ way of his and for hours on at a time. My wife and I came away with his musical, but rather high voice, still in our ears, and with new and many beautiful, but sometimes perplexing thoughts, born of what that man of genius had said, in our minds.
“That, alas, is all I can tell you of G. K. C. But if you can get sight of my book ‘Celebrities’ which I think Dutton published in America, you will find G. K. C. figuring there as Judge, (Bernard Shaw as Foreman and myself as one of the Jury), at the much discussed Edwin Drood trial held in the June before the war by the Dickens Fellowship of which I was, and still am, a Vice-President. Chesterton, as I say in my book, took the part of Judge seriously and finely, for we wished to come to some discovery about Edwin Drood. But Bernard Shaw ‘guyed’ the show, and turned a serious inquiry into a farce.”
Eric Gill, the well known sculptor, recalls,
“Apart from seeing Chesterton many times at meetings I don’t think I actually met him in a personal way until about 1925 on the occasion of the founding of ‘G. K.’s Weekly,’ when I stayed the night at his house and we discussed the policy of his paper, especially with reference to industrialism and art. After we came to live here (which is only a few miles from Beaconsfield) we saw him more often.”
A party of members of St. George’s Rambling Society, devoted to historical and archaeological research were visiting Beaconsfield on a pleasant afternoon in the September of 1935. They called upon the author at his home, “Top Meadow.” Mrs. Chesterton received them with much courtesy, and while they were talking to her, he came into the Lounge Hall of his house, which was fitted up in the Tudor style, with large fire-place, around which everyone grouped. They rose when he entered, and he soon engaged all in conversation. He was in excellent form. His first question, “What really did you come here to see?” was promptly answered by one of the members, Fred H. Postans, “We came to see Mr. Chesterton.” He then told an amusing anecdote against himself. He had been much annoyed by the noise made by the local film studios quite close to his home, and after sending several ineffectual letters of protest, eventually asked his secretary to call upon the manager of the studios. Upon doing so, that lady made a strong protest saying emphatically, “The position is becoming impossible.... Mr. Chesterton can’t write,” to which the manager replied, “We were well aware of that.” He relished the telling of this story immensely. He went on to give some local details about Beaconsfield. It was asked him whether he ever intended to write a Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and he said he thought that had already been done very well by Boswell. Postans pointed out that there was a little too much Boswell in that, in his opinion. He seemed to agree and said that he greatly admired the Doctor and it was not entirely impossible that he might undertake to write his life.
“My only meeting with Chesterton,” writes Hugh Kingsmill, “was in the autumn of 1912, when I went to Beaconsfield to interview him for ‘Hearth and Home,’ which was being edited by Frank Harris. One of his arms was in a sling, and he found great difficulty in pouring out drink. To my surprise he was not quaffing ale but sipping a liqueur. He insisted however in pouring the drinks for both of us, out of courtesy. He seemed to me very absent-minded and gentle, and I formed an extremely pleasant impression of him. At the same time he did not strike me as at all alive to ordinary existence. His praise of the man in the street and of common life has always seemed to me a defense thrown up against his own temperament. I think he was naturally an artist and poet of the self-absorbed, rather limited kind, and that he was afraid of this tendency, and fled to democracy, Dickens and eventually the Roman Church, in order not to lapse into pure aestheticism. As far as I know, and I have met many of them, his friends were drawn from rather cranky people, not from normal types, and this illustrates the division between his opinions and his temperament. He was not a good judge of individuals, in my opinion. Nothing could be further from the truth than his picture of Dickens as a roistering lover of the poor. On the other hand, his intelligence was very acute in the destructive criticism of the fads and poses against which he was always contending. If he did not understand ordinary life, he certainly understood the aesthetes, faddists and millenarians of the twenty years before the war, and made brilliant game of them in ‘Heretics.’ Since the war, his work seems to me to have fallen off greatly. I have seen him several times, wandering about the streets or in Marylebone station, and was touched by his melancholy look. I think life depressed him. In his youth he praised the poor man’s literature of thrillers and shockers. In his later life he denounced the cinema. What the distinction, at any rate in mind, between printed nonsense and visible nonsense is, he never explained. I attribute this change of fact that as he grew older, he could not summon up enough energy to continue his celebration of the man in the street, and was more concerned with finding reasons for his faith in his last refuge from a perplexing world, the Roman Catholic Church.
“But he did a valuable work in destructive criticism, and he was a lovable figure. I cannot think of any other well-known writer of the day in England whom one would not sooner spare from the scene than G. K. My friend Hesketh Pearson was staying with me when I read of Chesterton’s death. I told him of it through the bathroom door, and he sent up a hollow groan which must have been echoed that morning all over England.”
Philip Guedalla recollects, “I first saw Gilbert Chesterton on the occasion of a visit of his to Oxford when I was an undergraduate ’round about 1909 or 1910. It was a dark vision of the inside of a four-wheeled cab almost entirely filled with Chesterton. From its interior an arm and hand emerged and proceeded to struggle wildly with the outside handle of the vehicle. There was a College debate the same evening of which Chesterton was the opener; and I was offered up to him as the only undergraduate with insufficient impudence to attempt this suicidal controversy. He came back with me to my room in College and performed two acts which would have struck him as sacramentally Chestertonian. First he sat through my only arm chair to its destruction; then he finished all my whisky. On the next morning I piously presented for signature by its author a copy of ‘Orthodoxy’ and was profoundly shocked when he inscribed it ‘BOSH BY G. K. CHESTERTON.’”