Word: chesterton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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RETURN TO CHESTERTON (336 pp.)-Masie Ward-Sheed & Ward...
Biographer Maisie Ward was entitled to a contented sigh when she finished Gilbert Keith Chesterton nine years ago. It was (and is) the most thorough account ever written of that man-mountain of modern English letters. But Author Ward's book was hardly off the presses before she began to find fascinating new bits and pieces of Chestertoniana. Return to Chesterton is her 336-page postscript...
Nothing in her discoveries "changed the picture of the man I knew, but fresh aspects came to light." They came from Chesterton's taxi drivers, barbers, secretaries, neighbors, and companions of childhood. Loosely strung together as they are, these reminiscences do not, of course, add up to a portrait of the artist. Indeed, most of them give so fantastic an impression of G.K. that, from this book alone, he would seem to have been hardly more than a remarkably likable lunatic...
...weakness for complicated railroad routes, crossroad puzzles and detective novels is more easily explained as the recreation of a naturally acute mind. Because he has a horror of propaganda, his whodunits (the most ingenious has the Knoxious title Double Cross-Purposes) are less theological than Chesterton's Father Brown stories. It is not true, as has been said, that you can always spot the murderer because he is sure to be a Catholic-though that too would be Knox all over; he would think it arrogant to make the hero a Catholic. Yet the London paper which once said...
...hand at religious subjects. To the orthodox, the results have usually seemed artistically outrageous, if not downright blasphemous. Epstein's phallephoric Adam was denounced as pornography; his Jacob and the Angel, billed as "the world's greatest shocker," went on tour in an artistic peepshow; G. K. Chesterton took one look at his square, squat Ecce Homo, then thundered at it as "one of the greatest insults to religion I've ever seen...