Gilbert Keith Chesterton - The autobiography of G.K. Chesterton

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF G. K. CHESTERTON

G. K. CHESTERTON

With Introduction and Notes by
Randall Paine

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Cover art: Photograph of G. K. Chesterton
Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum

2006 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-58617-071-4 (PB)
ISBN 1-58617-071-6
ISBN 978-1-68149-199-8 (E)
Library of Congress Control Number 2005933372
Printed in the United States of America

In November of 1936, critic Sidney Dark wrote, Perhaps the happiest thing that happened in Gilbert Chestertons extraordinarily happy life was that his autobiography was finished a few weeks before his death. It is a stimulating, exciting, tremendously interesting book. It is a draughtindeed, several draughts one after the otherof human and literary champagne.

Our edition of The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton is edited by Fr. Scott Randall Paine. Fr. Paine, a native of Kansas, is a priest of the Archdiocese of Brasilia, Brazil, and professor of philosophy at the University of Brasilia since 1995. He is the author of several articles on philosophy and theology, and of the book, The Universe and Mr. Chesterton , a study of G. K. Chestertons philosophical thought (Sherwood Sugden, 1999), also available in Portuguese.

While doing research at Top Meadow, Father Paine unearthed numerous photographs of Chesterton. We are grateful to Miss Dorothy Collins for granting Ignatius Press permission to publish them. In this volume, we included thirty-seven pictures. The photos include portraits as well as scenes from G. K. C.s everyday life.

George J. Marlin

Richard P. Rabatin

John L. Swan

General Editors

Joseph Sobran

Consulting Editor

Patricia Azar

Rev. Randall Paine, ORC

Associate Editors

Barbara D. Marlin

Assistant

The first American edition of The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton , published in New York by Sheed and Ward in October 1936, is used in this volume.

A NOTE ON THE PHOTOGRAPHS

The pages of many hitherto unpublished photographs of G. K. Chesterton offered in this volume are provided through the kindness of Miss Dorothy Collins, Chestertons personal secretary for the last decade of his life. They were recently unearthed among Chestertons manuscripts and belongings in Beaconsfield.

A NOTE ON THE NOTES

Chesterton never used footnotes, and he would be surprised and amused that we are propping up some of his pages with these little annotations. We have decided, however, both in deference to G. K. and for the training of the reader, to let the vast majority of the pages stand on their own and leave a host of generally familiar names and references unannotated. As a rule, therefore, notes are furnished only for references clearly crucial to the context and of sufficient obscurity to send even the well-educated reader to the encyclopedia, lest the thread of narrative or argument be lost.

The prospect of a humble man setting out to write an autobiography suggests an enterprise blighted with potential frustrationsfor both author and reader. Being humble, the author will hardly regard himself as sterling material for a book. The reader, already poising the book in his lap, obviously disagrees. Thus the two may find themselves standing at this ambiguous frontier, staring blankly at each other and comparing their complementary frustrations. But this is a gamble one must be willing to take, for there is many a modest soul with a magnificent tale to tell.

In the case of The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton, we do have a book that both falls short of and carelessly oversteps the usual framework of an autobiography. It is with this dilemma we must begin. Here is a self that reveals by effacing. Indeed, the very depth of Chestertons humility and the very extravagance of his intellectual hospitality join forces to lay open a landscape at once vast and various, and yet so full of the mans unmistakable presence that both author and reader promptly forget their frustrations and glue their eyes to a quite unexpected genre of self-revelation.

In the last years of Chestertons life, when he was visibly failing but still prodigiously active, the inevitable request for an autobiography was repeatedly made. Finally, he obligingly turned to the task, probably overcoming a natural modesty with an even stronger sense of humour at the books prospects, and began dictating. We are tempted to picture the books genesis in somewhat the following pattern: The aging and ailing G. K. C. would settle back into a chair in his studio, light up a cigar, and begin a long and misty reflection on the story of my life and development. His dozens of books all on display in a large circle around his likewise large and circular body, our author would proceed to cap these prolific literary labours with a pleasant reminiscencea kind of crowning occupation in the leisure of lifes evening.

Well, everyone knows that Chesterton never had that kind of leisure. Even in these later years, as a recent anthologist commented, He must have been composing sentences in his head, when he was not actually writing them, most of his waking hours. The jolly, bibulous journalist that Chesterton was happy to be considered had become almost pure mind. Still occupied full-time with G. K.s Weekly and its excessive demands on his health and meager organizing talents, Chesterton dictated his Autobiography with the same spontaneous volubility as his other books. One finds none of the shadows of fatuous self-contemplation so easily cast over a mans review of his life. But again, this very absence of self-contemplation may make one wonder if the book is really about the man at all.

Turning to the Autobiography from any other of Chestertons non-fiction works, even the avid Chestertonian might venture the hope that here, for a change, our author may be expected to stick to his topic. Who would want to digress from a topic that happened to coincide with ones own ego? And moreover such an entertaining ego! But suddenly the landscape we spoke of is beginning to slip into the picture. A frequent complaint regarding Chestertons biographies of other men, Robert Browning, for instance, is that one gets a lot of Chesterton and very little of Browning. It is no accident, however, that just the converse criticism has been levelled at his Autobiography . One looks forward to 300-some pages dominated by the figure of the great and lovable man, and finds instead pages on end full of everyone and everything else. He warns us early on. Having littered the world with thousands of essays for a living, I am doubtless prone to let this story stray into a sort of essay. Stray it does, but whither it strays tells us more about Chesterton than any quantity of biographical details.

Whatever his immediate subject, even if it be himself, Chestertons eye remains trained on some larger theme that seems to have a secret hold on the subject itself. Many a reader will be puzzled by the resulting mental itinerary. Again and again, he turns to this larger family of ideas that seem to encompass the universe. In his book on Rome, he writes:

I know it will be the general impression about this book that I cannot talk about anything without talking about everything. It is a risk that I must accept, because it is a method I defend. If I am asked to say seriously and honestly what I think of a thing... I must think about [it] and not merely stare at [it].

Chestertons close friend Hilaire Belloc put it like this:

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