Kevin Belmonte - Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life and Impact of G.K. Chesterton

Praise for
Defiant Joy

Chestertons explanation of Christianity makes absolute sense of the world. He reminds us that, free of our comforting delusions, reality is a tragic adventure in which we get to participate.

DONALD MILLER
Author of the New York
Times bestsellers A Million
Miles in a Thousand Years
and Blue Like Jazz

Just as Chestertons critical study of Charles Dickens sparked a revival of interest in Dickenss writings, Kevin Belmontes elegant biography of G. K. Chesterton is like a full-page, four-color ad enticing one to overspend his book budget filling a shelf with the rollicking wit and reasoned faith with which Chesterton cast a magic spell over his own generation... and now ours.

F. LAGARD SMITH
Compiler of The Daily Bible

DEFIANT JOY
The Remarkable Life & Impact of
G. K. CHESTERTON

KEVIN BELMONTE

2011 by Kevin Belmonte

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Belmonte, Kevin Charles.
Defiant joy : the remarkable life & impact of G.K. Chesterton / by Kevin Belmonte.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59555-201-3
1. Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 18741936. 2. Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 18741936Appreciation. 3. Authors, English20th centuryBiography. I. Title. II. Title: Remarkable life and impact of G.K. Chesterton.
PR4453.C4Z534 2011
828'.91209dc22
[B]

2010025075

Printed in the United States of America
11 12 13 14 15 RRD 5 4 3 2 1

To Kelly

Contents

[T]hat joy of living which was... so conspicuous a trait [in Chesterton].

NEW YORK TIMES (1936)

[Chesterton] for a time cast... his shadow over a considerable part of the world.

NEW YORK TIMES (1936)

[Chesterton] was in most respects an unusually kind and generous man.

NEW YORK TIMES (1987)

Chestertons writing [is] the only thing that justifies devoting a book to him in the first place. To sort out the good from the bad in his work... to characterize his still underrated virtueshis imaginative leaps, his brilliance as an aphorist, the music of his prose at its best...

NEW YORK TIMES (1987)

Mr. Chesterton talks about God because God is the most interesting subject for conversation that there is.

NEW YORK TIMES (1916)

There have been times when I read a lot of theology. The year I spent in England [after graduation from Harvard] I was very nervous and frightened, standing more or less on the threshold of my adult life and career, if any. One of the ways I assuaged my anxiety was to read a lot of Chesterton and C. S. Lewis.

JOHN UPDIKE (1986)

I have always admired G. K. Chestertons gift for the simple declarative sentence. Few knew better than he how to nail ones colors to the mast. So we find him writing in the introduction to his classic study St. Thomas Aquinas (1933): This book makes no pretence to be anything but a popular sketch of a great historical character who ought to be more popular. Its aim will be achieved, if it leads those who have hardly even heard of St. Thomas Aquinas to read about him in better books.

Such is the aspiration of this book: to introduce a life and legacy that should be better known. It does not in any way aspire to be a comprehensive or definitive study.

I would also add that to survey all of Chestertons important books is a task well beyond the scope of any one volume. But among these writings are works that can lay claim to being widely influential, classics of their kind. Such is the purpose of this study: to survey the best and most influential of Chestertons worksand to do so within the context of a remarkable life.

Chesterton commands attention in several fields: poetry, apologetics, novels, detective fiction, and literary criticism. Though not among the front rank of twentieth-century poets, he wrote some very fine poems. His epic poem, The Ballad of the White Horse, has been fulsomely praised by such trenchant critics and writers as C. S. Lewis, Graham Greene, and Garry Wills.

Chesterton wrote three great apologetic works: Heretics (published in 1905), Orthodoxy (published in 1908), and The Everlasting Man (published in 1925). C. S. Lewiss debt to The Everlasting Man was profound: it strongly influenced his return to belief in Christianity, and he habitually recommended it to correspondents curious about matters of faith. Two of Chestertons novels, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday, are considered classics. T. S. Eliot, Kingsley Amis, and Frederick Buechner are three of the more important writers to accord them special praise.

As the author of the Father Brown mysteries, Chesterton created a sleuth whom many see as a worthy rival to Sherlock Holmes. Dorothy Sayers and P. D. James are among the many who have written with great appreciation for Chestertons gifts in the genre of detective fiction.

Lastly, as a literary critic, Chestertons writings on the works of Charles Dickens earned him an enduring reputation as the greatest of all Dickens criticsa statement given in The Oxford Readers Companion to Dickens. Clearly, Chesterton was a literary force to be reckoned with.

Those who care to turn these pages will soon learn of my indebtedness to many excellent books. If this book spurs some to delve more deeply into Chestertons life and writings by way of these earlier works, I will count myself fortunate.

I also have great appreciation for a telling reflection made by Dr. William Oddie in his masterly Oxford University Press study, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy (2009): Chesterton scholarship is, in a sense, in its infancy. Though Gilbert Keith Chesterton died over seventy years ago, little serious work has been done on the implications of his writings.... His works are even now rarely studied.... Much remains to be done before Chestertons huge oeuvre can be adequately assessed as a major part of the cultural history of the last century. And so it is hoped that this book might encourage young scholars to enter the rich, largely untilled field of Chesterton studies.

I will close with one further thought, or rather second a statement made by Richard Ingrams that is both accurate and just. The new reader of Chesterton, Ingrams wrote, will be surprised by... how contemporary a figure he is. It was this statement (along with kindred convictions from my own reading) that served as a primary inspiration for my putting pen to paper. Chesterton is in many ways our contemporary, and our need of his wisdom, art, humor, love, and humanity is as great as that of the age in which he lived perhaps greater.