Raven on Chesterton
Sir: Was Mr G. K. Chesterton really quite so silly in his old age as Mr Simon Raven in your issue of May 11 so greatly wants us to believe? In his distributive writings G. K. expressed a profound distrust of the whole direction and momentum of societies dominated by technology and he was urging, although this is not his language, that we should create a pattern of life based on the careful use of replaceable resources such as wood, vegetable fibres and so on, rather than on resources which are starkly finite such as oil, metals and minerals. the publication of the Club of Rome Report or of Blueprint for Survival (has Mr Raven read either?); the latter of which at least is advocating some decidedly Chestertonian solutions to the doomdaY troubles that are now looming up. Perhaps Mr Raven is so busy writing fiction that he has no eyes for the realities around him. John Papworth PO Box RW549 Lusaka, Republic of Zambia.
Sir: I hope I am not too late to offer a few comments upon Simon Raven's review of John Sullivan's Centenary Appreciation of Chesterton.
I am not altogether without qualifications for doing so. I was invited by G.K.C. to work on and write for G.K.'s Weekly when he started it, and continued to do so for the full length of his editorship of it. Two dozen years ago I published a small assessment of his work and his significance.
There is a good deal in Mr Raven's Review which is interesting and with some of which I would agree. My main criticism of it, however, is that (apart from mentioning Chesterton's conversion to Roman Catholicism), he makes no reference whatever to what 1, at any rate, reagard as his most important role of all that of perhaps the greatest Christian Apologist of his day. One does not have to be a Roman Catholic (I am not one myself) to regard him as such. Nor. did the arrival of the 1920's weaken his achievement in this field. The Everlasting Man could fairly be described as the most powerful book he ever wrote, and that appeared as late as 1927.
As to his "distributism," I think Mr Raven is quite justified in declaring
that "The thing was just not on," at least in the shape in which he and his most faithful followers presented it. But much of the criticism, on which he founded this was very much 'on.'
Chesterton suspected and rejected Socialism (so do 1); he acted even more strongly against the reactivist plutocratic society engendered by what we know as Capitalism (so do I). If our society does not set to work to find a way between these social terraces it does not look as if it can last much longer without catastrophy.
Early in Gilbert's life he wrote to his brother "We have somehow got to find a way to love the world without trusting it." I would add to these words some with which he ended an Introduction to a volume that I edited.
"The Church is dying as usual; but the modern world is dead, and cannot be raised save in the fashion of Lazarus."
Maurice B. Reckitt 47 Fairacres, Roehampton Lane, SW15
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