The Life and Theme of G.K. Chesterton | Randall Paine | An Introduction to The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton

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The prospect of a humble man setting out to write an autobiography suggests an enterprise blighted with potential frustrations–for 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 Chesterton's 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 man's 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 Chesterton's 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 book's prospects, and began dictating. We are tempted to picture the book's 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 reminiscence–a kind of crowning occupation in the leisure of life's 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." [1] 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 man's 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 Chesterton's nonfiction 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 one's 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 Chesterton's 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, Chesterton's 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]. [2]
Chesterton's close friend Hilaire Belloc put it like this:
Truth had for him the immediate attraction of an appetite. He was hungry for reality. But what is much more, he could not conceive of himself except as satisfying that hunger; it was not possible for him to hesitate in the acceptance of each new parcel of truth; it was not possible for him to hold anything worth holding that was not connected with the truth as a whole. [3]

It is only because this larger theme of Chesterton bears in a most intimate way upon any subject whatsoever that his many digressions are not really distractions at all–providing, of course, you know the theme. It is of the very nature of a digression to be off the subject and on the theme. The uniqueness of this autobiography is that the dominant theme in the work and life of G. K. Chesterton is stated just as energetically by his neglect of himself as by his ardent appreciation of everything else.

The theme to which Chesterton is forever returning is the world. Reality! Again, Belloc: "The whole meaning of his life was the discovery, the appreciation of reality. But his work was made up of bequeathing to others the treasure of knowledge and certitude upon which he had come." [4] Chesterton never really got over the fact that God created the world, and he somehow pities the rest of us because we have. His writing is therapy for us in our handicap. Whatever he says, whatever he writes, rebounds off this sense of astonishment that refuses to grow stale. He invites us to follow him on this quest of the real and see where it leads us. He looks at his reader across the pages with a twinkle in his eye and promises adventure. In his essay "The Wooden Post", Chesterton gives us two sentences we could take as his "Manifesto of Wonder":