Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life and Impact of G. K. Chesterton

by Kevin Belmonte Narrated by Robertson Dean

Overview

You may be aware that G. K. Chesterton authored influential Christian biographies and apologetics. But you may not know the larger-than-life Gilbert Keith Chesterton himself-not yet. Equally versed in poetry, novels, literary criticism, and journalism, he addressed politics, culture, and religion with a towering intellect and a soaring wit.

Chesterton engaged his world through the written word. He carried on lively, public discussions with the social commentators of his day, continually challenging them with civility, humility, erudition, and his ever-sharp sense of humor. Today's reader can find the same treasures, for as Chesterton said, "What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century."

In Kevin Belmonte's fresh new biography, you'll get to know the real G. K. Chesterton and his literary and cultural accomplishments. A giant of his time, Chesterton continues to live large in the imaginations of twenty-first-century readers.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Regardless of theological bias, no one can help being charmed by the writings of G.K. Chesterton. His Father Brown mysteries, as well as his many works of theology and literary criticism, shine with wit and insight. Belmonte approaches his task of biography with the same fondness for his subject as he demonstrated in William Wilberforce: A Hero for Humanity. Reading this is a bit like taking a tour of literary and social England through the eyes of a man who lived, and loved, the world around him. And even as we read H.L. Mencken’s barbed comments about Chesterton and Chesterton’s assessment of George Bernard Shaw (“three of the more incandescent minds of the era”), we get lost in an earlier time and world taken with Chesterton’s undeniable brilliance. The articulate Belmonte makes his material sing. Chesterton was that rarity of a man: a convert to Catholicism, whose life can be celebrated by an evangelical publisher.A wonderful book on all counts. (Jan.)

Library Journal

This study, described as a biography, professes to survey G.K. Chesterton's (1874–1936) most important works to draw attention to his life. The emphasis, however, is on the works; once the book moves beyond Chesterton's childhood, biographical detail becomes sketchy. Belmonte (visiting author, Gordon Coll.; William Wilberforce: A Hero for Humanity) covers Chesterton's prodigious output in the fields of poetry, apologetics, novels, detective fiction, essays, and literary criticism, noting that his subject was known as the "prince of paradox" and a champion of Christianity who used humor to reveal profound truths. While Belmonte acknowledges the important role of religion in his subject's life and works, he skirts the issue of Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism and does not include either the circumstances or the date of this significant event. Also missing is Chesterton's relationship with Hilaire Belloc, an association so close that G.B. Shaw dubbed them "Chesterbelloc." VERDICT This book will be of interest to readers seeking an overview of Chesterton's works, but those looking for biographical information might do better with Maisie Ward's Gilbert Keith Chesterton, written over 50 years ago, but from which Belmonte quotes extensively.—Denise J. Stankovics, Vernon, CT

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169638219
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	11/28/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

DEFIANT JOY

The Remarkable Life & Impact of G. K. CHESTERTON

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By KEVIN BELMONTE

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2011 Kevin Belmonte
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59555-201-3

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Chapter One

"My Earliest Path"

I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us. —Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, one of the twentieth century's most gifted men of letters, was born on 29 May, 1874, at Campden Hill, Kensington—a district of West London, England. It would prove to be a year of portents. For it welcomed not only Chesterton but also Sir Winston Churchill into the world: both men of keen intellect, ample girth, and literary skill.

They met once as young men, in 1902. Churchill was then a newly minted MP; Chesterton was the newest light in the literary firmament of London. Their careers would thereafter diverge markedly, but both had an enduring influence.

Churchill's legacy is, of course, one of the ages. He will, it seems, always have something to say—something we need to carry forward. Chesterton's legacy is much the same: the passing of time only seems to underscore the worth and relevance of so much that he wrote and said. He cast a long shadow, and people have cherished walking amid his shadowlands ever since.

"My people," Chesterton wrote in the opening pages of his Autobiography, "belonged to [the] old-fashioned English middle class." His father, Edward, "was the head of a hereditary business of house agents and surveyors, which had already been established for some three generations in Kensington"—people who "were always sufficiently successful; but hardly, in the modern sense, enterprising."

Edward Chesterton, if unambitious in matters of business, was not to be faulted for it. His life was that of a semi-invalid because he was prone to heart trouble. Given to domesticity by inclination as well as necessity, he "filled his own house with his life" and made it the center of what was, by any measure, a colorful existence. His son would later call it an "abnormally happy and even merry existence."

The portrait of Edward Chesterton that emerges in his son's Autobiography is that of a man who was kind, contemplative, and intellectually curious—a man of personal integrity and artistic sensibility. He was "serene, humorous and full of hobbies." A garrulous man in the best sense of the word, he was fond of talk on any subject. As his son recalled:

My father was very universal in his interests and very moderate in his opinions; he was one of the few men I ever knew who really listened to argument; moreover, he was more traditional than many in the liberal age; he loved many old things, and had especially a passion for the French cathedrals and all the Gothic architecture opened up by Ruskin in that time.

So far as politics were concerned, the younger Chesterton's memories of his father's views prompted both a flash of humor and an appreciation for the liberalism of the classic tradition to which his father adhered. "My father," he wrote, "was a Liberal of the school that existed before the rise of Socialism; he took it for granted that all sane people believed in private property."

A gifted watercolor artist, Edward Chesterton also had a deep and abiding love of literature. As his son recalled: "[M]y father knew all his English literature backwards, and [because of this] I knew a great deal of it by heart, long before I could really get it into my head. I knew pages of Shakespeare's blank verse without a notion of the meaning of most of it; which is perhaps the right way to begin to appreciate verse."

If Edward Chesterton fostered a great love of literature in his son, his interest in toy theaters also stirred the dreamy boy's first memories and ideas of beauty.

The very first thing I can ever remember seeing with my own eyes was a young man walking across a bridge. He had a curly moustache and an attitude of confidence verging on swagger. He carried in his hand a disproportionately large key of a shining yellow metal and wore a large golden or gilded crown. The bridge he was crossing sprang on the one side from the edge of a highly perilous mountain chasm, the peaks of the range rising fantastically in the distance; and at the other end it joined the upper part of the tower of an almost excessively castellated castle. In the castle tower there was one window, out of which a young lady was looking....

To those who may object that such a scene is rare in the home life of house-agents living immediately to the north of Kensington High Street, in the later seventies of the last century, I shall be compelled to admit, not that the scene was unreal, but that I saw it through a window more wonderful than the window in the tower; through the proscenium of a toy theatre constructed by my father.

Speaking of this incident in his Autobiography, Chesterton wrote, "[T]hat one scene glows in my memory like a glimpse of some incredible paradise; and, for all I know, I shall still remember it when all other memory is gone out of my mind." He underscored this when he wrote: "Apart from the fact of it being my first memory, I have several reasons for putting it first ... [for in it] I recognise a sort of symbol of all that I happen to like in imagery and ideas." Lastly, he stated: "I have begun with this fragment of a fairy play in a toy theatre, because it ... sums up most clearly the strongest influences upon my childhood."

Chesterton's response to his father's toy theater recalls C. S. Lewis's childhood response to the toy garden that his brother, Warren, built on the top of a biscuit tin:

Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What [a] real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature— not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant.... As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother's toy garden.

Other images of beauty crowded in upon Chesterton's memory as a child. "Among my first memories also," he wrote, "are those seascapes that were blue flashes to boys of my generation; North Berwick with the cone of green hill that seemed like the hill absolute." Still another kaleidoscope of memory from these years would later form the basis of his epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse:

One of these glimpses ... is a memory of a long upper room filled with light (the light that never was on sea or land) and of somebody carving or painting with white paint the deal head of a hobby-horse; the head almost archaic in its simplification. Ever since that day my depths have been stirred by a wooden post painted white; and even more so by any white horse in the street.

* * *

Chesterton's mother was no less a figure of affection and formative influence than his father. Marie-Louise Grosjean was of Swiss-Scottish descent. Her mother was descended from the Aberdeen family of Keith, hence the origin of G. K.'s middle name.

Once described as "the cleverest woman in London," Marie-Louise Chesterton not only possessed a keen intellect, but she had a "ready, and very sharp wit" that her son inherited. Described as "immensely kind," she was also unconventional in her opinions and lively. She reveled as well in the pleasures of the dinner table, preparing "gargantuan meals" and practicing the kind of hospitality that enjoined her guests to "eat enormously." It was little wonder, then, that her famous son would become so ardently devoted to taverns and inns.

Much about his mother's family and forebears seemed larger-than-life, including one fact that most certainly was: she was one of twenty-three children. Her father's family, the Grosjeans, though long settled in England, had come originally from French Switzerland. As stated above, her mother's family, the Keiths, were Scottish. Both ancestral lines were steeped in romance, or so at least Chesterton believed them to be:

My mother's family had a French surname; though the family, as I knew it by experience as well as tradition, was entirely English in speech and social habit. There was a sort of family legend that they were descended from a French private soldier of the Revolutionary Wars, who had been a prisoner in England and remained there; as some certainly did.

The air of legend and martial intrigue Chesterton associated with his French relations was complemented by traits he discerned in his Scottish ancestry. "On the other side," he wrote,

my mother came of Scottish people, who were Keiths from Aberdeen; and for several reasons, partly because my maternal grandmother long survived her husband and was a very attractive personality, and partly because of a certain vividness in any infusion of Scots blood or patriotism, this northern affiliation appealed strongly to my affections; and made a sort of Scottish romance in my childhood.

* * *

And what of the homes in Kensington where Chesterton spent his early years? The first of them, the home at Sheffield Terrace, was a place he scarcely knew. But the family's second home, 11 Warwick Gardens (where his family relocated when he was five), was a place long remembered:

Warwick Gardens ... stood out from its neighbours. As you turned the corner of the street you had a glimpse of flowers in dark green window boxes and the sheen of paint the colour of West country bricks, that seemed to hold the sunshine. The setting of the home never altered. The walls of the dining room renewed their original shade of bronze green year after year. The mantel-board was perennially wine-colour, and the tiles of the hearth, Edward Chesterton's own design, grew more and more mellow. Books lined as much of the wall space as was feasible and the shelves reached from floor to ceiling in a phalanx of leather. The furniture was graceful, a slim mahogany dining-table, a small sideboard, generously stocked with admirable bottles, and deep chairs.

The portrait of G. K. as a child smiled from a wall facing the fireplace. Walking with his father in Kensington gardens, the fair and radiant beauty of the boy, the flowing curls of graceful poise, held the eyes of the Italian artist, Bacceni, who did not rest until he had conveyed the vision to canvas.... On party nights wide folding doors stood open and through the vista of a warm yet delicate rose-coloured drawing-room you saw a long and lovely garden, burgeoning with jasmine and syringa, blue and yellow iris, climbing roses and rock plants. The walls were high, and tall trees stood sentinel at the far end.

Amidst such a setting, it comes as no surprise that in Chesterton's first years he enjoyed a "sheltered and happy childhood in a comfortable middle-class home, where his interests in art and literature were encouraged by his parents."

This can be seen in the fact that once Chesterton learned to read, he became "a passionate reader, particularly of fairy-tales." Further, he made his father's hobby of constructing toy theaters his own, and his devotion to them continued unabated for the rest of his life. On the less positive side of the ledger, he showed himself to be an "absent-minded [and] untidy child." However, in this he was aided and abetted by his mother, who was far from a martinet in matters of order and cleanliness. She often appeared with "her clothes thrown on anyhow." If G. K. entered a room with dirty hands or unkempt hair, she seems to have been the kind of parent who took no special notice of it. If he was late for a meal, he wasn't chastened. It is not surprising, therefore, that he never shook free of these traits, nor wanted to. In fact, they would become indistinguishable from the man who was G. K. Chesterton, and two of the more colorful aspects of his legend.

* * *

Pleasant as the home at Warwick Gardens was, what with happy eccentricities seasoning the supportive environment Chesterton and his parents knew, one great sorrow overshadowed his childhood. Death forever changed everyone's lives when his elder sister Beatrice, whom the family called "Birdie," died at the age of eight. G. K. was only three years old and just learning to speak, but he would always remember the shadow this tragedy cast over his home. For a time, he became seriously ill, and his parents' grief was compounded by worry over his condition. His recovery relieved that worry, but a collective and searing sense of grief lingered.

Edward Chesterton's grief was so overwhelming that he turned within himself and further burdened the grief his wife and young son felt. He would not allow Marie-Louise to speak Beatrice's name, and turned her portrait to the wall. Marie-Louise had lost her daughter. Now she had lost her husband to grief and had lost any solace he might have given—or could have received from her.

Things were simply painful and confusing for G. K., barely old enough to remember the bright light that his sister had been in their lives. In the years following the birth of his little brother, Cecil (born when G. K. was five),both boys were made to live a life in which any reminder of death was shunned. They were forbidden to attend a funeral or even gaze upon a funeral procession. If one was making its way through their street, they were quickly gathered up and told to stay in one of the back rooms of their home until it had passed.

The silence concerning death soon extended to all matters relating to sickness. Edward Chesterton refused to speak of his serious heart condition and tried to ignore others in the family if they were injured or became sick.

Marie-Louise is known to have spoken of Beatrice's death only once after it occurred—a brief and deeply touching moment when she confided to a friend. "I was the mother of three children," she said, "and I had a beautiful girl."

G. K., witnessing his father's grief-stricken behavior, could not help being affected by it. As biographer Michael Ffinch has written,

Chesterton inherited, or rather imitated, these phobias. A childhood friend, Annie Firmin, remembered how if his brother, Cecil, gave the slightest sign of choking at dinner, Gilbert would "throw down his spoon and fork and rush from the room. I have seen him do it many times." When, many years later, his father lay on his death-bed "it was only with real pain and difficulty that he summoned sufficient fortitude to see the dying man."

Years later, Chesterton wrote of this crushing experience in his Autobiography. "I had a little sister who died when I was a child," he wrote:

I have little to go on; for she was the only subject about which my father did not talk. It was the one dreadful sorrow of his abnormally happy and even merry existence; and it is strange to think that I never spoke to him about it to the day of his death. I do not remember her dying; but I remember her falling off a rocking-horse. I know, from experience of bereavements only a little later, that children feel with exactitude, without a word of explanation, the emotional tone or tint of a house of mourning. But in this case, the greater catastrophe must somehow have become confused and identified with the smaller one. I always felt it as a tragic memory, as if she had been thrown by a real horse and killed.

And so it was to little Cecil Edward, the newest addition to the family, that G. K. and his father and mother turned as a welcome arrival—a baby who could help them assuage their grief and begin to rebuild their shattered lives.

As one might expect, the two brothers became extremely close. They often went at it hammer and tongs, as most brothers are wont to do. But their mutual affection was unimpaired. Later in life they would often, sometimes famously, spar in argument. But for now, one thing was clear: G. K. had a companion whom he loved and could rollick with.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from DEFIANT JOY by KEVIN BELMONTE Copyright © 2011 by Kevin Belmonte. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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