The First Part of “The Donnington Affair”

In 1914, Max Pemberton published part of a murder mystery in a magazine called The Premier. It was titled “The Donnington Affair.”

Pemberton sent proofs of the story to G. K. Chesterton, inviting him to complete the mystery with a pleasing solution.

Chesterton obliged, bringing in his sleuth Father Brown. The result is an oddity in Chesterton’s oeuvre, not included in the first Father Brown omnibuses.

After Chesterton fans rediscovered the story, anthologists began to include “The Donnington Affair” in collections of the Father Brown stories—but usually only Chesterton’s part. The result is less than fully coherent. (A 2012 edition of The Complete Father Brown is indeed complete.)

Pemberton lived until 1950, so his work remained under copyright protection in the U.K. until 2020. That year, the Chesterton Review published the whole story, but that issue is behind a paywall.

Fortunately for people who like a complete narrative, Metropolitan Magazine bought the U.S. serial rights in the story, and Google has digitized the issue that includes Pemberton’s part. So you can start reading the tale here. There’s even a picture by Dalton Stevens.

The same volume of Metropolitan includes stories by Booth Tarkington, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Richard Harding Davis, Joseph Conrad, E. C. Bentley, and more; nonfiction by John Reed, Lincoln Steffens, Walter Lippmann, Francis Ouimet, and H. G. Wells; and humorous tales each with one illustration (not, unfortunately, comics) by Harry Grant Dart.

“Every statement is an overstatement”

This passage appeared in a an essay by Adam Gopnik that appeared in The New Yorker in 2008. I’ve found it to offer one of the most useful observations of the millennium.

Gopnik was discussing how G. K. Chesterton had gone out of style:

The second big shift occurred just after the First World War, when, under American and Irish pressure, and thanks to the French (Flaubert doing his work through early Joyce and Hemingway), a new form of aerodynamic prose came into being. The new style could be as limpid as Waugh or as blunt as Orwell or as funny as White and Benchley, but it dethroned the old orotundity as surely as Addison had killed off the old asymmetry.

Chestertonian mannerisms—beginning sentences with “I wish to conclude” or “I should say, therefore” or “Moreover,” using the first person plural un-self-consciously (“What we have to ask ourselves . . .”), making sure that every sentence was crafted like a sword and loaded like a cannon—appeared to have come from some other universe. Writers like Shaw and Chesterton depended on a kind of comic and complicit hyperbole: every statement is an overstatement, and understood as such by readers. The new style prized understatement, to be filled in by the reader.

What had seemed charming and obviously theatrical twenty years before now could sound like puff and noise. Human nature didn’t change in 1910, but English writing did. (For Virginia Woolf, they were the same thing.) The few writers of the nineties who were still writing a couple of decades later were as dazed as the last dinosaurs, post-comet. They didn’t know what had hit them, and went on roaring anyway.

In the years since 2008, I perceive, our popular rhetoric has undergone the opposite shift. People now once again speak in hyperbole, especially online. We no longer simply have a fun time; we enjoy “the best Day EVER!” We no longer dislike someone; we say they “deserve to die.” I see people express anxiety about not having enough exclamation points in their business emails.

For someone who learned to write before this shift, I say with characteristic understatement and deflection, it’s a bit disconcerting.

On Having to Hang About a Station

Today's a travel day for me, with tickets and stations and transfers. Naturally, I'm not looking ahead with unalloyed joy.

However, I've been visiting some young fellows who are still young enough to enjoy nothing more than train systems. So I remind myself of what G. K. Chesterton wrote in "On Running After One's Hat":

And most of the inconveniences that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences--things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train?

No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains.

Shrieking can definitely be involved.