We don’t tell stories anymore — 3 things to learn from a Charles Dickens expert
From the short story “The Secret Garden” by G. K. Chesterton
Is story-telling a lost art?
Do you back yourself if someone asked you to tell a story on the spot?
Thinker Alistair McGrath once said that university education in the 21st century focuses much on technicality and fine points.
As a result, we forget the art of story telling, due to lack of use. In its stead, we dismiss story telling as ‘lacking rigour’ or ‘biased’.
I’m not a very good story teller, so I don’t know why I wrote the few lines above as if I knew a lot. I guess all I’m saying is I agree with that viewpoint and want to get better at it.
What better than to learn from the greats? I’ve recently heard people recommend G. K. Chesterton (see an intro at the bottom), largely forgotten these days.
I thought I’d dive into his works for a bit.
I decided to start from his short stories, because they’re short, so hopefully I’ll keep going.
So I read The Secret Garden, and here are 3 things I’ve learnt which I hope you’ll benefit from too.
1. Lively details
How often do we stop and appreciate the small things?
“There’s been another murder you know.”
Both men on the seat sprang up, leaving it rocking.
Chesterton could’ve left the sentence at ‘sprang up’, but he added a brushstroke that makes the picture move. The chair rocks, intensifying the pace. The reader notices the chair, but quickly diverts their mind’s eyes towards what the two men are going to say.
“This was Commandant O’Brien, of the French Foreign Legion. He was a slim yet somewhat swaggering figure, clean-shaven, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, and […] he had an air at once dashing and melancholy.”
- Chesteron uses simple colours, colours we’re all familiar with. Rather than atroviren, celadon, eburnean, or other colours people have never heard of.
- “an air at once dashing and melancholy”. A nice juxtaposition. A man who is both stylish and a bit sad. The story later adds colour to this. We find out that the man, though he had a good career, has his (romantic) setbacks.
“He had left his country after some crash of debts, and now expressed his complete freedom from British etiquette by swinging about in uniform, sabre and spurs.”
- “Expressed his complete freedom … swinging about in uniform”. I’m not certain about this, but there seems to be a degree of irony here. He left his country due to debt, so by no means freedom.
- Yet he’s clinging onto a degree of dignity by working for his country’s then archenemy (the French), and no less, “swinging” about. That’s not really something to be proud of, yet he holds on to the little prestige that he could hold on to.
When he bowed to the Ambassador’s family, Lord and Lady Galloway bent stiffly, and Lady Margaret looked away.”
- “Margaret looked away” — it leaves the reader wondering why, but we can almost visualise the scene here. A man trying to please that family, not least because he has his eyes on the prize of their daughter. (Sure enough, he proposes to her in the story.)
Quite a good start, I thought.
2. Intellectual background
To me, there’s a difference between a novelist who knows and a novelist who just writes.
If a novelist is steeped in culture and history, you pick things up from them. Their stories have a deeper significance. Not just meandering streams of monologue that wears itself out to the ending doom.
“But O’Brien was an Irishman, with a kind of chastity even in his sins; and his gorge rose against that great brutality of the intellect which belongs only to France.”
- Here Chesterton refers to the Irish mentality. Ireland was then a Catholic country, and Catholicism was often associated with great sensitivity of conscience and burden of guilt.
- He also refers to the ‘brutality’ of the intellect in France. He refers to the French revolution (see further below), but he goes on to explain:
“He felt Paris as a whole, from the grotesques on the Gothic churches to the gross caricatures in the newspapers. He remembered the gigantic jests of the Revolution.”
- The things mentioned are united by a hideous appearance. He links these things to represent a deeper hideousness — a moral one.
“He saw the whole city as one ugly energy, from the sanguinary sketch lying on Valentin’s table up to where, above a mountain and forest of gargoyles, the great devil grins on Notre Dame.”
- The rest of the story sheds more light on why the ‘devil’ grins on the most famous religious monument of the city. The author was highly skeptical of the excesses of the French revolution. Yes, the aristocracy was removed, but there was also the guillotine, and some people proclaimed themselves the judge of all.
- But the grin behind a holy building is such a vivid, yet ominous, picture.
I like Chesterton even more.
3. The element of surprise
A murder took place in a garden.
Yet earlier on the story, the reader was told that the garden had no windows and was heavily guarded. No one can conceivably enter or exit the garden.
At this point in the story, there has been a murder. Everyone supposed that Mr. Brayne, an American millionaire who wanted to support the French church, did it:
“Dr. Simon […]: How did Brayne get out of the garden?”
“He didn’t get out of the garden,” said the priest, still looking out of the window.
“Didn’t get out of the garden?” exploded Simon.
“Not completely,” said Father Brown.
Simon shook his fists in a frenzy of French logic. “A man gets out of a garden, or he doesn’t,” he cried.
“Not always,” said Father Brown.
There is a twist. Father Brown, the quiet protagonist of the story, didn’t agree with the rest.
I found myself rather gripped. Indeed, Brayne was clearly the murderer, because he left the garden. What do you mean, Father Brown, by saying the murderer had never left the garden?
That’s all I’m going to say. To find out the rest, you’ll have to read it for yourself.
Which point will you take away?
The most important thing in learning a skill is, of course, to put it into practice.
For me, my biggest take away is point 2 — choosing stories that are steeped in learning.
Which one is yours?
Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton was a British literary critic at the turn of the 19th century. He was a Charles Dickens expert and wrote the entry for him in the Encyclopedia Britannica (14th ed).
The 20th century literary giant T. S. Eliot commented:
“His book on Dickens seems to me the best essay on that author that has ever been written. Some of his essays can be read again and again.”
The BBC invited him to give a series of radio talks in 1931. He did so until his death in 1936.
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