Book review: 
G. K. Chesterton: 
A Biography

G. K. Chesterton: A Biography by Ian Ker (Oxford University Press, 2011) has been one of the most enjoyable books I have read for some time, full of laughs, and strangely, by the time I had reached page 729, I had become such a good friend of Chesterton that I became somewhat emotional reading about his final days.

Although one should always read the author at first hand, Ker’s book provides a wonderful insight into this giant of a man – in every sense – and his marvellous writings. But more than anything else, he reveals the true nature of this good humoured and genial, absent-minded commentator of English life and thinking in the 1920s and 1930s. Ker refers to “the sheer absent-mindedness of a mind totally detached from immediate practicalities and constantly engaged in thought” (96).

GKC was an inveterate controversialist and perfect journalist, who delighted in debating the major issues of the day, always with good humour and showing respect for those who disagreed most vehemently with his views. In fact one of the most appealing qualities of his character was his deep and genuine friendship with key figures like George Bernard Shaw and H G Wells, with whom he had on-going, major differences of opinion. Shaw, Wells and many other public figures were strong promoters of eugenics and population control, which Chesterton vehemently opposed. Looking back on his friendship with Shaw, he said he had “learned to have a warmer admiration and affection out of all that argument than most people get out of agreement” (202). He was also very close to Hilaire Belloc and many other major writers of this period, and the depth of his friendship with these people is illustrated clearly by their reaction on his death.

The book also provides wonderful insights into his loving relationship with Frances, who, because of his disorderly approach to life, had to put up with his many defects, but did so with great love. In fact, if hopefully the process of his beatification comes to fruition sooner rather than later, there is sufficient evidence in this volume for a double beatification on the same day. How much our contemporary secularised society badly needs the example of this wonderful married couple. Indeed, our contemporary society badly needs a person of Chesterton’s stature to make sense of the muddled thinking that so badly affects political life in these times.

It is remarkable that Chesterton wrote his book Orthodoxy fourteen years before he converted to Catholicism. It is clear that his conversion did not come easy, and he was particularly sensitive about how it might affect Frances, who took a number of additional years before she also converted. But if Chesterton was not a cradle Catholic, it is difficult to believe that compared to many such cradle Catholics, that his thinking was not already deeply Catholic since his youth. In fact he explains that “even during the period when I practically believed in nothing, I believed in what some have called ‘the wish to believe’” (107).

He always seems to have had a thoroughly metaphysical way of viewing life and existence. In many respects he viewed life through the eyes of a child, who wondered with awe at everything he saw and experienced. This wonderment with the world is reflected in the remarks he makes about spending time in dreary rooms, whether in a waiting room, or some other such very ordinary place, and how such moments can allow us to deepen in our awareness of what our life is about. His child-like wonderment with the world is also revealed in the ease with which he could relate to children and how he could make the apparently least important person feel quite important and understood.

Perhaps the most striking feature of his voluminous writings is the very clear metaphysical framework in which he interpreted human existence, and as his life went on this framework was increasingly influenced by his deep Catholic faith, which he was so capable and willing to explain and defend. It is clear that he developed an enormous love for the Catholic faith and a deep appreciation of the answers it provided, saying that “faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all its conquerors” (124). He had remarkable insights into how Catholicism was to be lived and applied in the ordinary life of every day. He had to work exceptionally hard to make a living as a writer, and in many ways he had more appreciation for the wisdom of people who lived quite ordinary lives as opposed to those who felt that their gifts, in some way, raised them above working people. As a young journalist in the Daily News, he was startled to discover that his immediate superior was ashamed of living in a suburb like Clapham, where he and his wife also lived.

His typical reaction to the pompous atheist who told him he did not believe there was any God was to say that there were moments when “I did not believe there was any atheist” (32). Again, typically, he viewed mere existence as “extraordinary enough to be exciting. Anything was magnificent compared with nothing” (34). He noted that the first effect of not believing in God is that one loses one’s common sense which leads to superstitious gullibility (286).

He was filled with “fiery” determination “to write against the Decadents and the Pessimists who ruled the culture of the age”, and said that “no man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything” (35). Again he conceived the scoffer as begging God to give him eyes and lips and a tongue that he might mock the giver of them.

Chesterton believed it is impossible to be without some kind of “a metaphysical system”, otherwise one ends up believing in the “dogma of facts for facts sake” (148). Thus “religion not only makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary, but makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary” (165). He goes on to say that “to be without ideals is to be in permanent danger of fanaticism. The most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all, and bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions, the appalling frenzy of the indifferent” (147). Chesterton said of his great friend Shaw that he would be worried if the evening newspaper disagreed with him, but “that the tradition of two thousand years contradicted him did not trouble him for an instant” (244).

On a final note, it would appear that Chesterton’s growing love for the Catholic faith throughout his life was not unrelated to his love of Ireland and his appreciation of its difficult history. Towards the end of his life in 1932, he visited Dublin to witness the massive turnout and public display of devotion at the Eucharistic Congress. One of the memories he later wrote about was of the old lady referring to the possibility of the great day being spoiled by heavy rain said in her own very Irish way: “well, if it rains now He will have brought it on Himself” (673). It would appear that the great man himself had met his match in Dublin.