One Can Go Off People

[poliphilo]

I thought it would be fun to re-read some of the Father Brown stories (in conjunction with watching the TV show) and so it is- because they're colourful and clever- but also I'm gritting my teeth. Chesterton was a polemicist- which is a fancy name for pub bore- and is always banging on about his blasted opinions. He once accused H.G. Wells of having sold his birth right as a story teller for a pot of message- and if there was ever a case of the pot calling the kettle black...

Yes, everything modern is wrong and it would be so much better if we reverted to being medieval Catholics- now get on with it and solve the murder, please?

Hardest to take is the anti-semitism. One expects the odd unthinking flicker of prejudice from writers of this vintage and one steels oneself in advance- but with Chesterton it's persistent. He's always dragging Jews into his stories for no better reason than to make snide remarks about them.

It's unusual for me to fall out of love with a favourite author, but I think I just did.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Never could stand him.

I suppose I'm just too much of a Socialist.

Being from a working class background I always found Chestertonian raptures over the slums and the nobility of being poor just far too much to take.

[poliphilo]

He was a passion of my youth. It's always hard to give those up.

[sovay]

but with Chesterton it's persistent. He's always dragging Jews into his stories for no better reason than to make snide remarks about them.

It's funny that I remember it less in his fiction than his nonfiction, but Chesterton in his nonfiction is really anti-Semitic. He managed to be fervently anti-Nazi while really hating Jews: he supported Zionism because he wanted the Jews out of Europe where he felt they were unassimilable, eternal foreigners; he decried eugenics, but took all the anti-Semitic stereotypes as racial fact; he believed in blood libel, although he hedged it round with #notallJews. I ran into a bunch of it a few years back and it really upset me.

It's unusual for me to fall out of love with a favourite author, but I think I just did.

I am sorry for your sake that he didn't hold up. I haven't tried to re-read either of the books of his that I discovered him with and loved, The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill. I've been a little worried to try.

[poliphilo]

It's everywhere in his work. I just happen to be reading the detective fiction. It's as if he couldn't help himself. In the story I've just read- The Actor and The Alibi- he introduces a Jewish character of no importance to the plot just to have a dig at him for having tried to assimilate.

There may be less of it in the earlier, happier books- like the The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill- but I won't be re-reading them to find out.

[oakmouse]

Sympathy. I read and enjoyed some Chesterton when I was a teenager, but then didn't read anything by him again for nearly 40 years. Then I reread some of his stories last year, and couldn't abide them.

[poliphilo]

I think he appeals to young people who are looking for a guru.