Norman Nicholson by Philip Gardner (review)

HUMANITIES 419 'necessity of opposites/ and a 'utopia of give and take.' The first of these is to be seen in the early romance, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, with its celebration of London neighbourhoods, no less than in later essays in which he criticizes 'those who attempt to rebuke spirit with mere matter, citing as examples of this error men as dissimilar as H.G. Wells, who mistakenly believes in a cosmos that dooms, and Herbert Spencer, who is "an imperialist of the lowest type," because of his "contemptible notion" that the size of the solar system ought to overawe ... man.' In one of the stories the smashing of a goldfish bowl is not liberation but death for the fishes - to restate the 'poetry of limits' from another angle. Yet liberation not bondage was what Chesterton set his heart on-wide limits, not narrow, and within them the greatest possible human diversity : the playful and the fanatical in Napoleon, the anarchists and the police in Thursday, the religious and the secular in The Ball and the Cross, the mediaeval Distributist and the modern syndicalist in The Return of Don Quixote. It is this inclusiveness and generosity of mind that enables him to conceive of a utopia based not on stringency and measured equality but on hospitality and give-and-take. Father Boyd communicates a respect for Chesterton's intelligence and artistry but avoids making any extravagant claims. Indeed, I think he might have given more weight to the originality and prescience of Chesterton's vision of psychiatry as an instrument of pseudo-liberal tyranny. He sees the crudity of the too-frequently-used images of sunrise and sunset; he rightly sees in The Man Who Knew Too Much a rapid sketch in which private vision remains untranslatable into public reality and in Four Faultless Felons an uneasy conflict between poetic logic and the official conclusion. Most troubling for him and for other readers of Chesterton is the practice of sending for the police in the later fiction - a possibility excluded in the early -, and the emergence of ominous omnicompetent royal figures, to the obliteration of the poetry of limits and the necessity of opposites. What is most admirable in The Novels of G.K. Chesterton is the clear exposition and analysis of the eleven books; what is most pleasing is the sense of their individual slant and texture and the demonstration that one neglected story, The Return of Don Quixote, ranks among the very best. (WILLIAM BLISSETT) Philip Gardner, Norman Nicholson. Twayne's English Authors Series. New York: Twayne Publishers 1974, 181, $5.50 Nicholson chose to end his Selected Poems (1966) with a personal manifesto : 420 LETTERS IN CANADA My ways are circumscribed, confined as a limpet To one small radius of rock; yet I eat the equator, breathe the sky, and carry The great white sun in the dirt of my finger-nails. ('The Pot Geranium') The 'radius of rock' he has clung to for most of his sixty-odd years has been Cumberland, the house he was born in, and the Anglican faith. When he was sixteen tuberculosis robbed him of higher education and hopes of a career. He set himself to write, and his early poems came to the notice of Eliot and Michael Roberts. Faber published three volumes of his verse between 1944 and 1954 and a fourth in 1972. He has also written verse plays, criticism, and topography. Regionalism, whose badge he has sometimes worn proudly and sometimes rejected as above, is the concept which dominates Philip Gardner's study of his friend. But Nicholson's appearance as No 153 among English authors at Twayne's makes us ask what more particular claims he has on our interest. Though always respected for integrity, craftsmanship, and the concern for universals which comes from being deeply rooted in place and belief, he is probably less read now than twenty years ago. As a dramatist his fame rose and fell with the vogue of religious verse drama, and among his poems, though quality is everywhere, there is no acknowledged masterpiece, little that is boldly or uniquely said. From the start he found poise as a poet...