Dale Ahlquist responds

The American Chesterton Society blog is reporting that the Society’s president has drafted a formal reply to Adam Gopnik’s recent and trashy article about our man in the New Yorker. Whether the New Yorker will deign to print it is another matter entirely, but we can take some comfort in the fact that it has been written.

My own response will come later, once I’ve had the time to go over Gopnik’s article again. I certainly don’t plan on submitting it to the New Yorker, of course, but a shorter Outraged Letter might be sent to them anyhow.

UPDATE: The full text of Dale’s response, as posted in the comments on the Commonweal blog’s post about this subject:

To the Editor of the New Yorker:

Mr. Gopnik has besmirched the good name of the good Gilbert Keith Chesterton, even while sandwiching his comments between thick slices of praise. Maybe it’s just revenge. After all, Chesterton said, “New York reminded me of hell. Pleasantly, of course.”

For those of us who love Chesterton, we are always distressed to see him subjected to any vile charge. But we’ve gotten a little tired of the charge of anti-Semitism. He’s been absolved of that one too many times for us to count – from the tribute by Rabbi Stephen Wise to the official statements of the Weiner Library (the archives of anti-Semitism and holocaust history in London). Mr. Gopnik has added a new technique to making the charge stick – declaring that Chesterton’s admirers should not defend Chesterton against the horrible accusation. Hm. That is certainly one way to end the debate. I would meekly suggest that a better way would be for people to stop repeating charges that have already been dropped.

But we are still going to take Mr. Gopnik’s article as a sign of hope. Fifteen or twenty years ago, Chesterton was simply dismissed by the literary establishment as an anti-Semite and not taken seriously. Now he is at least being taken seriously before being dismissed as an anti-Semite. As the Chesterton revival kicks into high gear, we expect the trend to continue to the point where Chesterton is simply taken seriously without the obligation to mention anything about how Chesterton judges the Jews or how the Jews judge Chesterton.

In the meantime, we regret the unfortunate turn in Mr. Gopnik’s otherwise brilliant essay. There is something a little too desperate, too anxious in his attempt to prove that Chesterton is anti-Semitic. He is dancing as fast as he can to explain away Chesterton’s Zionism and his outspoken stance against Hitler for oppressing the Jews. (“I will die defending the last Jew in Europe.” What does it take to convince some people?)

Among the worn out arguments Mr. Gopnik uses is: Chesterton should not treat the Jews as if they are different because…well…they’re different. But far more troubling is his argument that Chesterton, the Catholic convert, has this pervasive nastiness woven into the very fabric of his philosophy. Whether consciously or not, Mr. Gopnik has broadened his implication to include the whole Catholic Church. Perhaps some future literary critic will be discussing Mr. Gopnik’s anti-Catholicism rather than Chesterton’s anti-Semitism. He can only hope that he will one day be considered so noteworthy a controversialist.

For now, however, the most important consideration should be of the following passage from Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man:

“…the world owes God to the Jews… [T]hrough all their wanderings… they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle…The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of Israel. [W]hile the whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe…”

Doesn’t exactly sound like the writings of an anti-Semite. Sounds more like someone who has a deep respect for the Jews. Also sounds like a pretty good argument for localism. Chesterton has thrown Mr. Gopnik’s main point into serious jeopardy. Either Chesterton is right to defend localism, which is what preserved the Jews, or localism is a menace and the Jews should have melted into their surroundings three thousand years ago. Mr. Gopnik cannot have it both ways.

Your servant,

Dale Ahlquist
President, American Chesterton Society

And the G.K. Chesterton Institute’s statement on the anti-Semitism question:

The question of G.K. Chesterton’s ‘anti-semitism’ has been thoroughly discussed in many biographies and journals. Chesterton certainly made anti-Jewish remarks, which today’s G.K. Chesterton Institute has no wish to condone or defend. These remarks, however, need to be undertood in their social and historical context, not in order to whitewash Chesterton, but to see how they do not invalidate his entire intellectual or spiritual legacy.

Above all they need to be read in the light of important statements he made repudiating anti-semitism towards the end of his life (he died in 1936, i.e. before the Second World War). As Kevin L. Morris writes in his C.T.S. booklet G.K. Chesterton (1994), Chesterton’s prejudice was largely political in nature, bound up with his opposition to plutocracy and the ’sleaze’ of his day, in which several prominent Jewish figures were implicated at the time:

‘far from being a racist, he ridiculed racism, had Jewish friends, admired individual Jews, valued the Jewish faith, wanted the Jews to have the dignity of a Jewish nation-state, and, with the rise of Nazi Germany, denounced the persecution of the Jews.’ ‘I am quite ready to believe now,’ he said, ‘that Belloc and I will die defending the last Jew in Europe’.

In the biography Gilbert (Jonathan Cape, 1989, pp. 209-11), Michael Coren noted Chesterton’s profound literary and personal friendship with the Jewish writer Israel Zangwill (not, by the way, his only such friendship), his cordial meetings with Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, and the important statement by the Wiener Library (London’s archive on anti-semitism and Holocaust history) that Chesterton was never seriously anti-semitic: ‘he was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on.’

For its part, the G.K. Chesterton Institute wishes to build on the positive legacy of Chesterton and the writers associated with him, purifying that legacy of the mistakes of judgment that afflict imperfect and inconsistent men and women embroiled in the controversies and ethos of their day. Anti-semitism is incompatible with the Christian religion, a religion that G.K. Chesterton did more than most to defend, explain and represent in a life and writings that many Jews have loved as well as Christians.

Ian Boyd C.S.B. | S. Caldecott | A. Mackey

George Wyndham on the Ballad of the White Horse

The Hon. George Wyndham (1863-1913) was the Member of Parliament for Dover from 1889 until his death.  He came of sturdy political stock, stretching back for several generations, and he was himself heavily involved in the political affairs of Ireland in the latter years of his life, especially (naturally) from 1900 to 1905, when he was Chief Secretary for Ireland.

In a letter to G.K. Chesterton written shortly before Wyndham’s death, he spoke unreservedly of the endless pleasure he derived from readings of the Ballad of the White Horse, finding in it the sort of satisfaction that would make a modern poet, similarly addressed, feel faintly suspicious:

I must thank you for the White Horse.  I cannot go on reading it to myself (4 times) and reading it aloud at the top of my voice (5 times) and refrain any longer from thanking you.  It is your due to be told that many eyes shine with delight at its strength, and that knots climb up the throats of men and women at its beauty.  It is wisdom we shall patiently learn.  ‘At last,’ and ‘Thank God,’ are what people say when they read it or hear it read.  I thank you in addition to thanking God and my stars for having given what I most needed in largest measure.  I am not selfish over it.  I do not hoard it for my own satisfaction.  On the contrary I read it aloud to all my friends and have a huge joy in watching it working in them.  This I can easily do over the top of the book, as I know most of the plums by the heart.  Like all great gifts, it goes around, it can be shared.  It is not like a diamond or a sonnet in a language which few people know.  To read the White Horse aloud is like bathing in the sea or riding over the downs in a company that becomes good company because of the exhilaration.”

Such sentiments seem alien to us now, for the most part, because we no longer produce poetry of a scope and caliber sufficient to inspire such feelings.  Well, that may not be entirely accurate; I vaguely suspect that we do, in fact, still produce such poetry, but that it languishes in the near-complete obscurity that afflicts all poetry that has not been set to three chords and subjected to electricity.

The Monday Mash

A few items of interest here this week…

=-= High-quality masher and sometimes-reader-of-this-blog mARKYbOY has released another track riffing on Amy Winehouse’s 2006 album, Back to Black.  This time he’s taken the subtle, mellow instrumentals from “Love is a Losing Game” (which never gets the attention it deserves, honestly) and used them as a worthy foundation for lyrics from The Temptations and The Supremes.  The result is a seamless and soulful number that sounds more like an undiscovered recording than something entirely new.  Click here to go to the download page, wait for the link to appear at the bottom, and then right-click and save the file.

=-= Katie Enlow, sister to Luke Enlow, contributes much to the mash-up world in the form of vocals.  That is, she records acapella versions of certain songs, both old and new, which are then used to add a classier touch to songs otherwise sullied by the gruff vocalizations of men.  An album, of sorts, produced with her brother, was recently (and at long last) released in its entirety.  Rockin’ the Boots is great from start to finish, but the standout is “Across the Air” (right-click and save), a six-minute Chemical Brothers-infused treatment of The Beatles’ “Across the Universe.”  It’s sort of a masterpice.  Check it out.

=-= DJ Freddy (the self-styled “King of Pants,” though I doubt the legitimacy of his claim) has taken the vocals from Estelle’s ubiquitous “American Boy,” cranked them up a bit, and stuck them over the instrumentals from Anita Ward’s once-ubiquitous “Ring My Bell.”  The result–“American Bell” (right-click and save)–is just as vexing as its source materials, but also, alas, just as catchy.  For a different take on “American Boy,” you might also check out the Hood Internet’s mix of her vocals with the instrumentals from The Ting Ting’s “Shut Up and Let Me Go” (also, I regret, pretty much everywhere these days).  “Shut Up, American Boy” (click the “start download” button, wait for the timer to count down, and then right-click/save from the link that appears) works very well indeed, and is eminently listenable, but it’s not quite transcending the source material.

Shadows (1922)

A difficult film to categorize, Preferred Pictures Inc.’s 1922 Lon Chaney vehicle treads the line between presenting a powerful moral message and indulging in racist caricature.  6.5/10