The unwieldiness of G. K. Chesterton, a "literary cornucopia"

One of my favorite contemporary authors, Roger Kimball, co-editor of New Criterion (see my 2005 interview with him), has written a review essay about new books by William Oddie and Ian Kerr about Chesterton. He begins:

In life, there was always something unwieldy about Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Mentally as well as physically, he was a man who tended to . . . overflow. Like Flambeau, the criminal mastermind of his Father Brown mysteries, Chesterton was fully six-foot-four. Vertically, he left off growing in adolescence. Horizontally, he kept going. Slender in youth, he was solid as a young man and positively rotund in his thirties. His body was the perfect correlative for the drama he enacted. Chesterton always seems to have favored pince-nez, but it was his wife, Frances, who advocated the familiar equipage that defined his public image. With billowing cape and wide-brimmed hat, brandishing a sword stick and often sporting a pistol from his pocket as he strode up and down his beloved Fleet Street, Chesterton cut a figure as imposing as one of his famous epigrams.

And:

Chesterton was a literary cornucopia. The tally includes some 100 books. His first two volumes, published in 1900 when he was in his mid-twenties, were collections of poems (of Greybeards at Play, the first, W. H. Auden said, that it contained “some of the best pure nonsense verse in English”). There followed many collections of columns and essays (he wrote some 4,000), biographical studies (of Browning, the Victorian painter G. F. Watts, Aquinas, and St. Francis Assisi, among others), hundreds of short stories (including the Father Brown series), more collections of poems, several plays, a clutch of famous phantasmagorical novels (The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday), and several classic—if also idiosyncratic—works of Christian apologetics. No less an authority than Etienne Gilson called Orthodoxy (1908) “the best piece of apologetic the century produced.” “I did try to found a heresy of my own,” Chesterton cheerfully acknowledges; “and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.” If you can read only one of Chesterton’s nonfictional works, make it Orthodoxy: it is as eloquent as it is insightful. (Although posterity regards Chesterton as Catholic through and through, he was raised Anglican and wasn’t received into the Church until 1922: Orthodoxy is a Catholic work by a practicing Protestant.)

Read the entire essay, "G. K. Chesterton: master of rejuvination", on www.NewCriterion.com.

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) Author Page | Ignatius Insight

• Articles By and About G. K. Chesterton
• Ignatius Press Books about G. K. Chesterton
• Books by G. K. Chesterton

Comments

[Gabriel Austin]

It is too bad that the extraordinary quality of William Oddie's books on Chesterton - CHESTERTON AND THE ROMANCE OF ORTHODOXY and THE HOLINESS OF CHESTERTON - continue to be underrated; as does Chesterton's astonishing intellectual capacities. Instead we are fed anecdotes about his size and his cape and his sword-stick. A little reflection on Gilson's admiration would be useful to appreciate the high level and solidity of GKC's thought.