Word: chesterton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Decades ago, a controversial novel stirred England and America. Its action took place in 1984, and its theme was the encroachments of a future authoritarian state. The book was The Napoleon of Notting Hill, written in 1904, when George Orwell was an infant. The author was Gilbert Keith Chesterton, a man perpetually in advance of, and behind, his time...
...Chicago Biographer Alzina Stone Dale indicates in her spirited biography, Chesterton doted on paradox. The lover of tradition was a radical populist; the Falstaffian clown was a deeply committed intellectual; the friend of such freethinkers as George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells converted to Roman Catholicism at 48, and thereafter engaged in eloquent public debates with his colleagues...
...Chesterton was happiest in an arena he never really left: the nursery. The happy child turned into a neurotic adolescent haunted by unspecified guilts. He could only assuage them with religion. "Dogma," he was to conclude, "does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought." The childless man endlessly tried to recapture a youthful sense of wonder; almost all his works blink out at the world as if they were seeing it for the first time. Yet when he could tear himself away from toy theaters and critiques about "The Ethics of Elfland," he could toss...
...prolificacy exacts a price; in Chesterton's case it was an excess of surface and a lack of consistency. At his death in 1936 he was called a master without a masterpiece, and his value rapidly diminished. If the writer's celebrity was disproportionate, so has been his recent neglect. The Outline of Sanity seeks to correct the imbalance...
...support himself and his wife, and to pay off the debts of his brother Cecil, who died young, Chesterton contracted for more newspaper and magazine assignments than he could decently fulfill. But even a breakdown at age 40 could not slow him. In self-defense he lauded the ephemeral: "The daily paper is more important [than books] because citizenship must be more important than art, Dale praises this attitude; after all, "Wells, Shaw, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy-all saw themselves involved with and influencing events." But those men attempted, with whatever ludicrous results, to reach far into the future. Chesterton...