>>23325096
>Chesterton
>Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent — though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one — was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who whose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’ Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it — as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine — had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous overestimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton's battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint Barbara, make The Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.

>In the winter of 1918-19, the do-gooding societies of the United Kingdom committed themselves to repatriating from France lunatics who were provably British subjects. This was not mere chauvinism, although the notion that Gallic asylums were at once too lenient and too barbaric did pervade, but also — correctly, I would say — founded on the thesis that the idée fixe of most madmen is that they are not being properly understood, and that if only they were understood they would not merely be released, but lauded for their incisiveness. If a madman and his keeper do not even share a language both are liable to great agitation. The second, and more money-spinning reason, was the forlorn hope that some of the names listed missing - death presumed on the rolls of companies, martial and voluntary, had not vanished into the maw of Passchendaele or Ypres but rather the back wards of the Republic’s rambling provincial madhouses then so ill-administered by the worst functionaries of church and state.

>By way of this enterprise, I found myself in an attic room of a cheap railway hotel overlooking the Gare du Nord, stripped of all its furnishing save a mattress and a tin jug, and locked from the outside.

>>23325096
Stein has some good stuff. Woolf is not bad.

>>23325096
Cristina Campo

>>23325108
>>23325127
Chesterton is female in the sense that fat is estrogenic and turns you into a bitch.

>>23325096
Simone Weil

Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Marilynne Robinson. The three Amigos

>>23326075
This (>>23325127) is not Chesterton.

>>23325096
Seconding the recommendation for Joan Didion.

>>23325096
>>23326633
>>23328075
I absolutely loved "Blue Nights." One of the best memoirs about grief and death I have ever read.