God's journalist. - "Chesterton" - book review

Chesterton
Garry Wills
Doubleday, $14, 330 pp.

Why should Gilbert Keith Chesterton still matter? Born in Victorian England in 1874 and dead in 1936, before the outbreak of World War II, he ought to seem as quaint as the romantic cloak, hat, and stick that adorned his oversized body in its meanderings down a Fleet Street that now is only a historical memory rather than a living institution. The great allies and antagonists with and against whom he debated and whose ideas seemed then to matter so much (Belloc, Wells, Shaw, Kipling), are remembered now less for their ideas than for their personalities. Some of Chesterton's lesser collections of essays gather dust in libraries together with H. G. Wells's Outline of History. But Chesterton still has his major books in print, still is quoted respectfully, still is debated, still is named as an important intellectual influence by thinkers across an unlikely spectrum of ideologies.

Partial evidence for Chesterton's pertinence is the reissuing of Garry Wills's 1961 study with no alterations, only a new appendix and a brief new introduction. Wills says in this introduction that he has "reason to wince" as he looks back on a book he wrote as a graduate student forty years ago, but with no visible qualms, he offers it to a new generation. Now he thinks he should have been harder on some of Chesterton's failings (his anti-Semitism, glorification of war, whitewashing of the Middle Ages). Looking back on his youthful effort, Wills also sees that he had unsuccessfully camouflaged a deeply personal statement as an impersonal one. He first wrote the book to discharge a personal debt to Chesterton. He offers it now to share the genuine enthusiasm he was then trying to hide.

Wills's personal debt was not dissimilar to one incurred by many others. At a critical point in his intellectual life (when he "had succumbed to a nihilist mood that made me see no God or goodness in the world"), entries from Chesterton's youthful journal showed Wills a way to escape "the trapping of myself inside myself." Thinking that the journals might provide important clues to an understanding of the writer as a whole, he went to England, immersed himself in Chesterton's papers (still casually stored in an attic), and set about reading and writing through his works in chronological sequence, seeking links between the writer's personal notebooks--and experience--and his published compositions. As it turned out, Wills's first treatment of Chesterton owed less to the notebooks than anticipated. One purpose of the appendix to the present volume, an essay on Chesterton's novel The Man Who Was Thursday, is to show more adequately "how central were the notebooks to Chesterton's thought."

And it is Chesterton's thought that is very much the focus of this old-fashioned intellectual biography. The reader finds here none of the massive archival research, supporting or correcting this quotidian fact or that, burdening so many contemporary biographies. The events and persons of Chesterton's life remain those recounted in his autobiography. Still less is the reader titillated by the discovery of scandal. Chesterton's faults remain as plainly visible as he himself made them and appear even less important at this distance. Instead, the reader is treated to a walk through four stages of his life: Isolation (1874-99), Controversy (1900-12), Vigil (1913-24), and Incarnation (1922-36), with a consideration of the major intellectual preoccupations of the author and the works produced in each period.

For Wills, Chesterton matters because of the originality and strength of his mind joined to the greatness and humility of his spirit. And in this, Wills is correct. Chesterton mattered and still matters because he shows a way of thinking that is brilliant without being solipsistic, that is in touch with the everyday yet perceives in the ordinary the extraordinary richness of existence itself. The drama of Chesterton's life and thought, Wills argues, lies in the fact that, contrary to common simplistic interpretations, he was not gifted with either "some preternatural goodness" or "idiot serenity," but rather, as a young man tempted to nihilism, fought his way out of the dangerous illusions of the mirror-mind into the sanity of God's creation. His subsequent battles were therefore not minor skirmishes over literary or economic or political problems of the moment. They were a running campaign on behalf of a vision of the world within which humans can be real because their minds and hearts engage more than themselves. Although Wills fails to make the notebooks the interpretive key to Chesterton's life, he succeeds in showing how Chesterton's multifarious and often occasional writings cohere in expressing a consistent and compelling view of reality.

Chesterton's mind was original not just because, as Wills says, "even when he is wrong, he comes at a topic from such an individual viewpoint as to light up new scenery all around the topic," but also, and more important, because he literally perceived the "original" in everything. What most excites and matters to Chesterton's readers is his distinctive existential insight, so seldom available elsewhere, that the most important of all truths is that "things are." Chesterton was able to comprehend Thomas Aquinas's metaphysics and Francis of Assisi's mysticism in a single glance, because he, like them, grasped existence whole. He never ceased being stunned by the stubborn fact that things were rather than were not. Because things simply stand outside nothingness and impress themselves on us, they can all equally disclose the source of being.

As Wills properly observes, the basis for Chesterton's deep democratic instincts is his metaphysical sensibility. If existence is equally existence in all its forms, then there is the most radical egalitarianism at the heart of things. A tree can reveal "the One who is" as well as a tabernacle. This is why Chesterton's apparently light essays on trivial topics like brown paper, telephone poles, or lying in bed were never truly light because, for him, such topics were never truly trivial. The shock of existence is equally shocking in things small as well as great. He matters for many of us, because, unlike most thinkers of the twentieth century, he identified himself not with the theories of the intellectual elite but with the common traditions tested by time. In this he remains the perfect anti-Nietzsche. For him, greatness is found not in spurning the herd and surpassing ordinary humanity, but in discovering the depth of wisdom so often hidden (yet truly recoverable) in the common language and habits of ordinary people.

Wills shows effectively that Chesterton had no "idiot serenity" but rather something rarer, a capacious and humble spirit, which expressed itself in his deep loyalty. He was loyal to personal relationships that survived and even flourished despite failure and loss. He was loyal to the daily grind of journalism that demanded words and wit no matter what the season. And he was loyal to the God who showed him the way home. In our throwaway world, perhaps Chesterton matters today most of all because he was both smart and humble enough to understand that tending a tiny plot and protecting it is at once the deepest obedience and the sweetest praise to the God of all creation.

Wills gives us the best sort of intellectual biography, one that makes us want to read the man himself, and that reminds us why such reading matters.

Luke Timothy Johnson, a frequent contributor, is the Robert R. Woodruff Professor of New Testament at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University.

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