The thing about the humourists and laughing Philosophers was that they were intensely human and profoundly divine. They understood the realities of life and saw them in that perspective. It is this which strikes us as we attempt to write on this other man ‘who was Chesterton’ — J. P. de Fonseka, author, controversialist, journalist, essayist, and poet—whose death occurred recently. The Chester-Belloc ideology claimed that ‘oddities only strike ordinary people, that oddities do not strike odd people, and this is the reason why ordinary people have a much more exciting time, while odd people are always complaining of the dullness of life.’
This is the keynote to that Chestertonian punch and antithesis of J. P. de Fonseka. His epigrams went home. They came from life. He gave ‘paradox’ all the essentials which Chesterton himself wanted it to have, and in a vast literary output, we find ‘truth standing on her head to attract attention’. The still smiles which J. P. provoked in us owed their origin, not merely to the cold logic of reason, but to the close observations and humour of the heart. Maisie Ward attributed the death of Chesterton to the physiological fact that he was a very big man with a very small heart. This was the paradox of G.K.C. himself. If ever a man had a heart as big as the world, that man was Chesterton. And J. P. fits the role well.
The bulk of his writings hits a most varied gamut. He wrote on ‘And and But Also.’ He wrote on ‘Cooks and Cook Appus,’ ‘On a Cat that became a Millionaire.’ He interviewed a crow. He drew up a gourmet’s ‘Guide to Ceylon.’ Like Chesterton he had that child’s virtue of endless surprise. As a metaphysical thinker, the ‘Philosophia Peicnnis’ worked itself out in the lucid reasoning of Aquinas, and in J. P. as in Chesterton we find the real man in the contemplative, and the fearless combatant when universal issues were at stake.
Little wonder he would bet his boots on Distributism and the ‘three acres and a cow’. He took all the fight off the new deal by vehemently protesting against the immorality of chopping the head of the capitalist just because the capitalist suffered from a headache. Professor Haeckel, the inveterate materialist, avowed that the ‘Sinhalese man’s vision of Heaven was that of a place provided with an infinite supply of rice and curry.’ J. P. added that gastronomically speaking it is true that in Ceylon everything begins with rice and ends with rice. And that the rice was a steaming rice and the curry, pretty hot stuff. J.P. refused to pick a hole in Professor Heackel’s theology, for he was more than content that there was none to pick in his rice.
J.P. had one obsession—the orthodox tradition that infiltrated everything up to the 20th Century. He addressed a letter to G. B. Shaw (without any address) and the letter reached Shaw. Shaw replied to J. P. de Fonseka, Ceylon—and the letter was delivered. But our humourist laughed at Shavian Socialism in politics and the worship of a vague and woolly life force in religion. In like manner he figured up Wells. J. N. Ewer claimed to write the shortest poem in the English Language:—
‘How odd,
Of God-
To choose
The Jews’.
On the day H. G. Wells paid a visit to Ceylon, J. P. submitted a shorter poem : ‘Wells—Sells’, and swore that it was the crown and glory of the magic of his pen that ‘Wells Sells’. The humour of orthodoxy however found full scope for an attack on Wells’ particular brand of Socialism along with his Utopia of the Republic of the World governed by Intellectuals.
When wars came, and we were hard put to it to define our own ills and those we intended to cure, J. P. wrote his thesis on Dogs and Democracy. It is hard to beat this: ‘The proceedings began with an English Bull-Dog taking the chair—that is he saw the chair and took it. A Grey-hound was proposed and seconded to act as secretary protem, which at one spring he did. Tyranny, I say shall not be tolerated any more. The Dog World must shake off its yoke and obtain its freedom. (Cheers). We have for centuries been kept in chains (Loud Wails), subject to leash and whop and muzzle (Louder Wails), and have carried out the will of the oppressor . . . .’
‘De Fons’ did not spare the adipose lump of humanity—a testament to fatness, and that fat men generally got the best out of life. .Chesterton when travelling in a London Bus got up and gave his seat to two buxom ladies. It was J.P.’s joke that similar chivalry might be shown by him in a train or a Bus that charged a double fare for the single journey. The days he captained the cricket team in his college days brought memories of a wicket-keeper completely obscured by an abnormal batsman, whose pads could hardly encircle the calves, and who consumed lime juice by the bucket rather than by the glass.
It was a little printer’s devil who made this observation of Chesterton : He sit down and he write, and he hold his stomach and he laugh,, and then he sit down and write again. J.P. wrote this way. He also shared the master’s weakness in wielding an extraordinary script. If J. P, (like Chesterton) was unmistakable in a crowd, his handwriting stood out too in ‘whole and in part, in majuscule and minusculae.’
It was the sincerity of the humourist that thought of a ‘plane ride to India with a tilt to a side, that compelled him to search through the streets of Bombay for a hat like Chesterton’s, and sit through with tears in his eyes at the mock trial of G.K.C. in the Old Bailey. Gilbert told the judge that he was not afraid that he would be unable to bear the weight of the prosecution’s arguments,, but rather that he feared the; dock might not bear his own weight. It was corpulence and the defence of being fat that was the elixir of humour. So J. P. went hammer and tongs ‘On the Abuse of Small Cars’; ‘The small ear is the Spirit of hypocrisy; a little she devil of dissimulation. We have no alternative but to adapt ourselves to her limitations; but we do this under compulsion. Time was when we walked or railed or barged into our car, without the slightest diminution of our personality (those alas! were spacious days)/
This Papal Chamberlain had his humour pat when the news came. The Roman tailors nearly succumbed at the dimensions of this worthy from the East—Chamberlain of Honour of the Sword and Cape. But our Chamberlain told the truth and the ‘American Digest’ told the world; in the early times the chamberlains may have been chosen perhaps also for physical magnitude, the kind of men who could protect the pontiff by blocking up the papal doorway against the ingress of unfriendly visitants.’
The humour of orthodoxy in the life of J. P. de Fonseka had something more. In advocating the ‘Rights of Women’ he said that an English Lady’s home was really her castle. So was J.P.’s palace with curtains to match, with large size caricatures of himself of the wall, with the autographs of his numerous friends, Chesterton, Belloc, Shaw, Wells, Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, E.V. Lucas, Francis Thompson, Walter de la Mare, Sybil Thorndyke, A.P. Herbert, Sir John Squire and others. There was a picture with J.P. in full dress suit and top hat. He had never walked down the aisle, but he had walked up the aisle to give away brides, it was in those supreme moments that ‘De Fons’ could blast the bogey of the mother-in-law and the eternal jokes about her. It was the indissolubility of marriage that brought all force into a man throwing furniture at his mother-in-law, since he was married to his wife for ever and ever.
There were times in our hero’s life when he was afraid that he too ran a hot favourite for the authorship of Shakespeare. In 1927 he wrote from Cambridge: I have been through the Cambridge University library with its prodigious store of print. I handled for the first time a first folio of Shakespeare, which any day can find a buyer for £10,000 with ease.’ Shaw repudiated his authorship of Shakespeare by ’roundly asking his voters how the devil they could think that he could stoop to such piffle.’ J.P. thought otherwise and fought otherwise. With dramatic irony he asserted: ‘Shakespeare was a female all right, and the greatest poet of the world was a poetess. Some distant day when the male has shaken off his dependence on women and has a room of his own, then, and not till then, will the world have the strange revolutionary pleasure of a male Shakespeare.’ Till then it would not be idle to see our bard, having a house of his own, and dreaming the dreams and visions of poetry.
At Cambridge he had spent pleasant evenings with Robert and Sylvia Lynd, and strolled in the Keats’ museum with its furniture and recollections of Fanny Brawne. He sat under the shade of the tree where Keats wrote the ‘Nightingale.’ It was the humour of orthodoxy that inspired the beat of ‘Lepanto’ in J.P.’s ‘Dona Catherina’. He caught the spirit that was intensely human. :
‘Shepherding through this world of ours,
Truth, Justice, Laughter and the Flowers.’
His lines on a Ceylonese Epiphany have that elusive touch again:
‘With them a courtly chivalry.
Of Prince, and warrior kin;
Uparaj, Eparaj, Pattabendi
Don, Don, Dona in palanquin’.
And in ‘Colombo Bound’ he shows us that wit in poetry is levelled not so much at the muscles as at the heart, and that the heart can smile without a single wrinkle on the cheek :
“She floateth in calmness discerning,
Like a high damoiselle in her mien;
But deep in her heart hides her yearning
That is human and poignant and keen.”
These few gleanings culled at random from the wealth of J.P.’s literary output brings to light a man who was profoundly divine and intensely human. They toned down the venom of sarcasm, the Chestertonian arsenal of pointed epigrams, the apt anti-thesis with resemblance and congruity, and point to a humour well-proportioned and balanced. The tragedy in all this orthodoxy is that we are left guessing whether these lines are his own epitaph:
“But she moveth full free from all sadness,
And she fleeteth along in her spray.
For the sea-song sings beauty and gladness,
And there’s home at the close of day.”
NOEL F. CRUSZ