It was a long time I wanted write something
about Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the great English
Catholic writer, author of phenomenal
books, like that about St. Thomas
Aquinas, which earned him the appreciation of the Pope, Pope Pius XI (the Pope
forgotten, who was about to utter the historic encyclical against racism and
anti-Semitism, when he died in 1939 before signing it).
In appreciation, Pope Pius XI appealed
Chesterton with the title of Defensor
Fidei , a title that was not disclosed in England as it would appeared humiliating that a British subject
was called in the same way inherited from the kings of England, since Henry
VIII. But so is the story: Chesterton, who converted himself to the Christian
faith, gave so many proofs of true conversion in his writings to earn to
himself the praise of the Vatican. 
At his death to
officiate the ceremony of the funeral was called another Catholic writer and
prelate, Msgr. Ronald Knox, author of several mystery novels.
The conversion to all effects is on 1922. But
evidently it had to take place in stages, and already some time earlier, at
least a decade: in his writings were hints, not so hidden, to a desire to
convert. Even those among his writings, that would appear less suited to this:
I'm speaking about the Father Brown
stories, detective stories centered on the figure of Father Brown, a very keen
Catholic priest in his reasoning, who knows go down the hearts of men and
discover the worst atrocities by the force of Faith. The figure of Father Brown
was conformed to that of the priest who worked in him the conversion, Father
John O 'Connor, Irish Catholic, who stood close him until the death. However,
while the protagonist of his Father Brown stories is a scruffy little man,
always with an old umbrella, the original was not so scruffy.
To Father Brown were dedicated several books,
once the character gained an unexpected success: The innocence of Father Brown is the first of them. It’s formed by
the first dazzling tales: The Blue Cross, The Secret Garden, The queer feet , The Flying Stars, The Invisible Man, The honor of
Israel Gow, The Wrong Shape, The sins of prince Saradine, The Hammer of God , The eye of
Apollo, The Sign of the Broken Sword, The three tools of death'. The first four of them to be
published, were put together to form a collection called The Father Brown
stories, then extended to bring together all the stories. The most metaphysical
of the first stories, an authentic masterpiece, like The Blue
Cross, is The Wrong Shape.
The story begins with a description: it’s showed
a low building, coloured white and pale green, with shutters and a terrace,
with umbrella sheds, and with a strange T-shape. In this – it’s a summer villa,
just outside of London, to the countryside -lives the poet Leonard Quinton, famous
for his exotic poems, in which he often speaks about havens and eastern hells.
Here is also hosted Father Brown, because his friend Flambeau had been a friend
of the owner in Paris. Just arrived, the priest warns at the atmosphere, a
strange, wicked aura. And perhaps the same T-shape, a T imperfect feeds his
doubts. This T-shape, is such that the leg of the T, the shorter arm, is made
up by only two elongated and interconnected rooms: “..the first of these two rooms was the study in which the celebrated Mr.
Quinton wrote his wild Oriental poems and romances. The farther room was a
glass conservatory full of tropical blossoms of quite unique and almost
monstrous beauty, and on such afternoons as these glowing with gorgeous
sunlight”, where Quinton, aided by narcotics, dreams and ponders his outbursts of
fancy.
In
the villa, the poet hosts an Indian guru who enjoys hospitality there,
supplying the poet inspiration for his poems. Besides him, other few people:
the wife of the poet, a woman who for many years caring for her husband who has
exceeded opium to describe dreamlike states it caused, and now it has become
sullen and by unstable nature ; instead she is a lovely creature, serious,
poised and with a great mass of golden hair, but, as Brown says, “That woman’s over-driven,”
said Father Brown; “that’s the kind of woman that does her duty for twenty
years, and then does something dreadful”.Finally there is the brother
of the woman, Atkinson, a parasite which appears dressed in white, with a
garish red tie askew and a hat on the crown of the head, which is always on the
hunt for money to squander, without a job and an occupation. He’s detested by
the poet's physician, Dr. Harris, a little man with a mustache, very
ordinary-looking but capable.
Father Brown felt something evil there.
Attributes it not only to the shape of villa but also to the Indian holy man, a
magician. Wrong shape for him has also a strange dagger with a wavy blade, made
not to cut but to torture, in the tall grass of the garden: “Why, look at it,” cried Father Brown, holding out the crooked knife at
arm’s length, as if it were some glittering snake. “Don’t you see it is the
wrong shape? Don’t you see that it has no hearty and plain purpose? It does not
point like a spear. It does not sweep like a scythe. It does not look like a
weapon. It looks like an instrument of torture.” Father Brown look at the Indian holy man, and at his Indian writing: “They are letters and symbols in a language I don’t know; but I know
they stand for evil words,” went on the priest, his voice growing lower and
lower. “The lines go wrong on purpose—like serpents doubling to escape” .Father Brown scowls, getting lost at a mystical fog. The same his friend Flambeau
recognizes before to the astonished doctor, that when Brown seems lost in
mystical discourses that seem crazy, bad things happen then. In a way Father
Brown is a psychic. In front of the
doctor who denies his allegations, Father Brown says that while the house is
ridiculous in shape but it is not wrong, that dagger is wrong: it is the
prologue to the wrong forms.
At that moment Quinton greets the onlookers
because it has to go for the usual afternoon nap. Mrs. Quinton comes home, and
the doctor goes by his client to make sure he sleeps well and takes the tonic,
but in that while the inept brother manages to sneak in the study before the
door is closed, so to check an half pound to same Quinton until before the poet falls asleep.
The clouds are gathering and air manifests the
typical electricity announcing the impending storm: Father Brown and Flambeau
see the Indian holy man who passes in front of them; for them he’s like a bird
of ill omen . As they see him once again stand in the garden near the house,
gets out of breath doctor Harris learned who accuses the brother-in-law of
Quinton, to have done something against
Quinton: in fact he has seen through the window that his client lies in an
unnatural position. Worried, rushes toward the house, followed closely by
Father Brown and Flambeau, while Atkinson remains behind.
They open the study and behold, found on his
desk a sheet oddly shaped on which with cryptic words are written: " I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!" While Father Brown looks stunned the sheet, the doctor rushes for
greenhouse, just to get back immediately behind and announce the death of
Quinton: he’s stabbed in the heart. The hand lies on the dagger. And the dagger
is just what first found in the grass, by the wavy shape.
They call the police.
The suicide is self-evident. Still it doesn’t
convince Father Brown. What is not convincing:? The shape of the sheet. Another
thing wrong, wrong. In fact it is not a rectangular sheet but from a corner is
missing a part, as if it had been removed.
Father Brown is to meditate, look, even looks at
the cards thrown in the wastepaper basket, finds the scissors and a stack of
any missing sheets of a corner. He tries the scissors, conjectures, counts the
sheets (23) and corners (22) and then, while they’re waiting for the arrival of
the police, he and Flambeau sit under a shed in the garden to smoke and discuss
the affair. Father Brown calls the case "very strange". The deductive
approach of the priest defines the psychological complexity of the matter:
“You call it queer, and I call it queer,” said
the other, “and yet we mean quite opposite things. The modern mind always mixes
up two different ideas: mystery in the sense of what is marvellous, and mystery
in the sense of what is complicated. That is half its difficulty about
miracles. A miracle is startling; but it is simple. It is simple because it is
a miracle. It is power coming directly from God (or the devil) instead of
indirectly through nature or human wills. Now, you mean that this business is
marvellous because it is miraculous, because it is witchcraft worked by a
wicked Indian. Understand, I do not say that it was not spiritual or diabolic.
Heaven and hell only know by what surrounding influences strange sins come into
the lives of men. But for the present my point is this: If it was pure magic, as
you think, then it is marvellous; but it is not mysterious—that is, it is not
complicated. The quality of a miracle is mysterious, but its manner is simple.
Now, the manner of this business has been the reverse of simple.”
The storm that had slackened for a little seemed
to be swelling again, and there came heavy movements as of faint thunder.
Father Brown let fall the ash of his cigar and went on:
“There has been in this incident,” he said, “a
twisted, ugly, complex quality that does not belong to the straight bolts
either of heaven or hell. As one knows the crooked track of a snail, I know the
crooked track of a man.”
The white lightning opened its enormous eye in
one wink, the sky shut up again, and the priest went on:
“Of all these crooked things, the crookedest was
the shape of that piece of paper. It was crookeder than the dagger that killed
him.”
“You mean the paper on which Quinton confessed
his suicide,” said Flambeau.
“I mean the paper on which Quinton wrote, ‘I die
by my own hand,’” answered Father Brown. “The shape of that paper, my friend,
was the wrong shape; the wrong shape, if ever I have seen it in this wicked
world.”
Basically, if others think that Quinton has
committed suicide, because no one can have killed him, because he was asleep at
the time since he died, before their eyes, beyond the greenhouse, and all the
characters were present in garden, Father Brown suspects, indeed already
he already knows that he was killed. But
how? A crime that seems so much illusion. Could be the Indian guru the killer?
But he was in the garden! A murder case with hypnotism? No. Yet the facts do
not give reason to the priest. But he pins his whole house of cards, on that
other paper by the wrong shape: it was written on a piece of paper by the wrong
shape. Twenty-three were the sheets with the cut corner, including the one with
the sentence, but only twenty-two paper corners Father Brown found, and so the one that came from the
offending sheet had to be destroyed. Why? Because of it there was something no
wider than a comma, that is ... two commas. In other words, who has cutted the
corner he has done it because a phrase with quotes, which by chance was
beginning a white sheet, was deprived of the quotes and seemed to punch a
written sentence by a suicide.
Father Brown knows who killed the poet among
Atkinson, the indian guru, the doctor or the Quinton wife. Yet he gives the killer a way to escape: his purpose
is not to catch the culprit and bring him to justice, but rather to redeem a
sinner, to save another ewe that was being lost. He offers him to write a report mentioning
things that only the killer knows and to deliver it in the belief that he, the
priest, engaged in a completely confidential profession. In essence, he asks
him to confess in a letter that he will deliver. Thing that he will make.
The murderer confesses and confesses because he
killed the poet, and at the same time confirms the hypothesis of the priest
about the wrong shape of the sheet. And
confessing his crime, the killer admits that for the first time he feels
remorse for what he did.
The story is one of those by Chesterton whom
Carr so much liked, so that the character of the Doctor Fell was created
looking right at the mammoth figure of Gilbert Keith Chesterton himself. It’s in fact a story with an Impossible
Murder, rather with a Classic Locked Room: the greenhouse is a space enclosed
by glass walls, whose only entry / exit is made from the door intercom with the
study, the door of which is in turn It remained closed, and indeed all the characters
in this mini-drama interacted outside the greenhouse, in the garden, except his
wife, who went to his room, but that was visible from the garden below; and
each of them was guarded - so to say - by the other. So it becomes difficult to
demonstrate how the murderer has killed, if it is true that until a given time
Quinton was alive and then he is died, suicide victim..ma not so much.
Locating
the murderer does not seem to me so daunting, but instead is understanding how
he killed and especially understanding the motive of the murder, because each of the
actors in the drama, apparently has no reason to kill Quinton ... indeed. For all
persons in fact the poet is the classic "goose that lays the golden
eggs."
It
'clear that at the actio delicti a very important part is a kind of
illusionistic game, which goes well with the atmosphere in which moves, for
example, the Indian guru; but also the screening of the paper from the wrong
shape is a must, being a surprisingly wise of deduction.
Also there is no trace of a text that Quinton was writing, which concerned
the possibility that apparently an Indian holy man (another guru) could result
with the power of thought the suicide of a British army officer. It has disappeared : burned in the fireplace? The fact that there dwells an
Indian guru does not mean automatically that he is the murderer.
It seems that Chesterton is liable at least of Zangwill,
as well as the same Carr may have drawn inspiration from this story for those
of his works that speak about the distance murder, like "The Reader is
Warned". It may have influenced both Vindry and Agatha Christie.
The staging is embodied in three distinct phases
that are indispensable to each other: youmust wait for Quinton sleep (and the
doctor then gives him thenarcotic); you have to create the last fake message of
the suicide; and finally you have to kill . However, I emphasize how the same
message of suicide reveals in its duplicity, as the same premeditated murderer
was not quite free from a reflection on what he was doing: the murderer is not
an evil being who kills for interest ( oh my God is also that !), but it is not
said that his purposeis no less noble than others, because it tends to a better
situation as for the murderer as for the victim (which it’s better it’s dead, once for all instead living
ill destroying the life of his wife). Moreover, being a person who conceals his
moral nature, in the amorality of the act the killer has made, it is as the
killer had, when performed the act, wanted to suggest suicide was not really
such: in fact using a script of the dead in which the victim claims to die by
his own hand but instead he died killed from another (the officer of the
British army), anticipates exactly what it will happen to Quinton. It therefore
insinuates that although the appearance of the situation suggests that it was
suicide (the victim was found with the hand that was still holding the dagger, sunk
in the heart), in reality the exact interpretation
of the unfolding of the facts is proving the murder . For more, premeditated. At this
point, since the killer premeditated since some times to kill the victim, it would
not have been easier forging a letter and carrying a message that spoke only
about suicide?
However, we are faced with a masterpiece, also
for the refined writing (the description of the places reveals expertise
fiction for example). No coincidence Antonio Gramsci , the greatest Italian Marxist thinker and founder of the Italian Communist
Party in the '20s, died in prison for anti-fascist activities, in his letter to (sister) Tania, of 6 October 1930 (from “ Letters from
Prison”), analyzes the work of Chesterton comparing it for example to that of
Conan Doyle:
"Thank you for all that you have sent me. Two books haven’t been delivered yet: the "fascist
Bibliography" and the tales of Chesterton that I will read again for two
reasons. First because I imagine that they are as interesting as the first set
and second because I will try to reconstruct the impression that they had to
make on you. I confess that this will be my greatest delight. I remember
exactly your state of mind when you read the first set: you had a happy
disposition to receive more immediate impressions and less complicated from
cultural sediments. You were not even able to realize some Chesterton wrote a
delicate caricature of detective novels more properly said than the detective
stories. Father Brown is a Catholic who mocks the way of mechanical thinking of
Protestants and the book is basically a defense of the Roman Church against the
Anglican Church. Sherlock Holmes is the "Protestant" detective who
finds the thread of a criminal skein starting from the outside, relying on
science, on the experimental method, on induction. Father Brown is the Catholic
priest, who through refined psychological experiences given by the confession
and by the workings of moral casuistry of the catholic ancestors, without
ignoring the science and experience, but relying especially on deduction and
introspection, beats Sherlock Holmes in full , he makes he looks a little
pretentious boy, it shows the narrowness and pettiness. On the other hand
Chesterton is a great artist while Conan Doyle was a mediocre writer, even if was
done knight for literary merit; therefore in Chesterton there is a stylistic
gap between the content, the intrigue thriller and the form style, i.e. a subtle irony towards the subject matter that
makes more tasty the tales. Do you think about? I remember you were reading
these stories as if they were chronicles of true facts and you identified
yourself up to express a sincere admiration for Father Brown and his marvelous
acumen, in a manner so naïve than it extraordinarily enjoyed me." [1]
The reflection of the Marxist historian, seems
to me perfectly centered, both for the time at which is created Father Brown
(more or less that of Doyle) and for the fact that Father Brown is entailed in
practice, however, in an alter Sherlock Holmes, but Catholic . Indeed, while SH is an example of
the society in which the mechanistic positivism reigns (SH analyzes a given
fact based on evidence and scientific experiments, and thus solves a problem
based on the induction), Father Brown is an example of psychological insight
and deduction, and he’s a combination of faith and reason (a denial of
fideism), as well as Aristotelian thought applied to the patristic. In
addition, the way of thinking of Father Brown leverages high psychological
reflection that is completely lacking in SH: Father Brown, as claims to go down
to the heart of man to find the Evil (or the Good), ends up understanding the
culprit as he can think like him. In addition, he bases all his actions, on
theological reflections applied, which are always extremely well-aimed to probe
the problem that is proposed.
Pietro De Palma
another Catholic writer and prelate, Msgr. Ronald Knox, author of several mystery novels
ReplyDeleteRonald Knox's mystery novels are very good indeed.