"I did not buy the pistol to murder myself or my wife; I never was really modern."

A man does not generally manage to forget his wedding-day; especially such a highly comic wedding-day as mine. For the family remembers against me a number of now familiar legends, about the missing of trains, the losing of luggage, and other things counted yet more eccentric. It is alleged against me, and with perfect truth, that I stopped on the way to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in another. Some have seen these as singular wedding-presents for a bridegroom to give to himself; and if the bride had known less of him, I suppose she might have fancied that he was a suicide or a murderer or, worst of all, a teetotaller. They seemed to me the most natural things in the world. I did not buy the pistol to murder myself or my wife; I never was really modern. I bought it because it was the great adventure of my youth, with a general notion of protecting her from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads, to which we were bound; where, after all, there are still a suspiciously large number of families with Danish names. I shall not be annoyed if it is called childish; but obviously it was rather a reminiscence of boyhood, and not of childhood.

-Autobiography (1936)

Al Capone and GKC

The following anecdote from Chesterton's trip to Italy is quite interesting (and which I have mentioned before, but found a new source confirming it):

While Dorothy Collins [GKC's secretary] had been taking Chesterton's dictation or Gilbert was visiting or lecturing, Frances [GKC's wife] was sometimes at a loose end. Fortunately, a fellow guest in the hotel, a pleasant American gentleman with a very large Packard limousine and his own chauffeur, was happy to put his car at Frances' disposal when it was not needed by himself. Gilbert would no doubt have been delighted in the chauffeur's name, Dominic Cinderella, but it would have been interesting to have been able to note his reaction when some time later, after may kindnesses by the American, Frances introduced nice Mr. Capone to Gilbert: Alphone Capone was perhaps enjoying a quiet holiday after all the excitement of the previous February's St Valentine's Day massacre.

-G.K. Chesterton: A Reappraisal, Denis J. Conlin (2015), p. 198

From Maisie Ward's book Return to Chesterton (p. 75):

To [Chesterton's] friends his ways seemed amusing, to strangers puzzling or even alarming. A policeman called one day in the country to say to Mr. Mills: "Is the gentleman all right who's staying with you? He's been seen going about with a drawn sword."

H.L. Mencken and G.K. Chesterton

I found this anecdote hilarious. :-)

Some time afterwards, G. K. Chesterton told me how his host in New York had written to [H.L.] Mencken, in the hope of bringing the two men together. Mencken had replied, "I am very sorry I cannot go to meet Chesterton. For I have long cherished an ambition to take him out and make him drunk, and then hand him over to the police while he was in that condition, to the shame of Holy Mother Church."

I told Mencken afterwards of Chesterton's comment: "Why, I could put Mencken under the table any day!" "Yes," said Mencken, "I suppose he could." [Source]

Of course,  I hasten to add that Chesterton in multiple places condemned drunkenness (as distinct from temperate drinking, which he praised). However, perhaps my favorite quote that includes such a denunciation of drunkenness (as an example in making a larger point) is this one. 

A journalist, describing in the Daily News an interview with Chesterton, includes this delightful tidbit:

At this [Chesterton] drew his basket chair menacingly nearer to me, and I drew my chair nearer to him, while for an hour or more we hurled defiance at each other's creeds. I continued the struggle with indomitable perseverance until he had proved, to my satisfaction and his own exuberant delight, that my Protestantism was merely undeveloped Vaticanism. When, however, he proceeded to disprove my existence, which I value, I ventured to change the subject.

-December 13, 1907, Daily News, "'G.K.C.' at Home"

From Maisie Ward's Return to Chesterton (1952), p.63:

A charming story is told by a man who saw Gilbert starting to chase his hat in the street. Plunging through the traffic, the passer-by rescued it to his own imminent peril, and was not pleased when Gilbert received it with the remark that his wife had just bought him a new one and would be sorry to see it again.
"Then why on earth did you run after it?"
"It's an old friend. I am fond of it and I wanted to be with it at the end."

Chesterton cheered at the dedication of Notre Dame Stadium

Chesterton, at the dedication of Notre Dame Stadium:

The Chesterton party arrived at Notre Dame on the evening of October 4th, 1930. The lectures began on the following Monday. On Friday, the 10th, in the evening, the stadium was solemnly dedicated. Navy had come on for the dedicatory game, and [University President] Father O'Donnell was busy with them. He had told Johnny Mangan, the University chauffeur, to look after the Chestertons, and to see that they got into the stadium and that Mr. Chesterton had a seat on the platform from which the speeches were to be made, There were about twenty thousand people present, and when the students saw the magnificent bulk of Chesterton going toward the platform, they cheered wildly: "He's a man! Who's a man? He's a Notre Dame man!" Chesterton turned nervously to Mangan, saying: "My, they're angry!" "Angry!" exclaimed Johnny, "golly man, they're cheerin' you!" Whereat Chesterton began such a fit of laughing and sputtering as almost to choke himself.

-"Notre Dame: One Hundred Years" (Arthur J. Hope, C.S.C.)[emphasis mine]

Chesterton in a letter to Mrs. John Lane, writing concerning a group called "The Peckham Ethical Fellowship":

Isn't it too beautiful? I'm sure they come out of a book. I only wish they'd go back into it.

[quoted in G.K. Chesterton: A Biography by Ian Ker, p. 139]

Sorry, but that made me laugh, so I had to share it for some light-hearted fun. :-)

"What's Wrong With the World?" "I am"

According to a popular story that has circulated for a long time, a well known London newspaper in the early part of the twentieth century (usually stated to be The Times) asked the question "What is wrong with the world?" and received many replies. The shortest was from G.K. Chesterton, simply consisting of "I am."

Now, the story as told seems to be apocryphal, but it does seem to have a grain of truth in it. Since recently in a couple of places I came across people mentioning (correctly) that the story as told is apocryphal, I did state what the grain of truth seems to be, and so I decided just to post one of the replies I made below, for others who may be interested or doing research on it:

Well, even though the story as usually told is apocryphal, there is a grain of truth in it. In 1905, the Daily News in London published a letter called "What's Wrong With the World" by "A Heretic" that generated a huge correspondence from readers for months. Chesterton was one of the people who responded, and while his response was much longer than the apocryphal story indicates, it did include among other things this passage:

"In one sense, and that the eternal sense, the thing is plain. The answer to the question , 'What is Wrong?' is, or should be, I am wrong.' Until a man can give that answer his idealism is only a hobby."

(-Letter to the Daily News, August 16, 1905, "What is Wrong")

UPDATE: You can read the whole letter here.

An amusing anecdote :-)

After she had married and come to live at Overstrand Mansions, Annie [Firmin] recalled an evening when Chesterton came round to their flat on his way to dinner at the House of Commons with a shoe on one foot and a slipper on the other. Did it matter? Chesterton asked, when it was pointed out to him. 'I told him I was sure Frances would not like him to go out like that- the only argument to affect him'

-G.K. Chesterton: A Biography Ian Ker (2011), p.121

Chesterton the athlete! :-)

GKC, in addition to his other talents, played cricket, on the team founded by J.M. Barrie (a close friend of his)!

JM Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan in 1904, was another enthusiastic cricketer. Between 1923 and 1932 Barrie rented Stanway House in Gloucestershire each summer from the Earl of Wemyss, whose daughter Lady Cynthia Asquith was a good friend of the author. During these stays, Barrie organised matches between his own team and others in the area. Barrie called his side the Allahahbarries, a pun on the Arabic phrase which he thought meant "Heaven help us", but in facts means "God is great". It must have caused great intrigue among the pre-Great War rural community in remote Stanway when members of the Allahahbarries, who included many of the foremost literary figures of the time, donned whites to play on the village strip. HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jerome K Jerome, GK Chesterton, AA Milne, PG Wodehouse, AEW Mason and EW Hornung were all players in the side. Barrie wrote a slim book about his celebrity team which was reprinted with a foreword by Don Bradman, the legendary Australian batsmen, in 1950. The thatched pavilion that JM Barrie built at Stanway's cricket ground is still in use by the way. [Source]

One is reminded of Chesterton's essay The Perfect Game when trying to assess his own attitude towards playing games....

"Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated" - Mark Twain

Cyril Clemens (a relation of Mark Twain) wrote a book on Chesterton, called "Chesterton as Seen by His Contemporaries". It is a fascinating book and a source for many great sayings and anecdotes concerning GKC.  (For instance, it is here we learn Chesterton's famous reply concerning the book he would wish to have if he were stranded on a desert island: "Thomas's Guide to Practical Shipbuilding)

That being the case, it is interesting to read this concerning Cyril Clemens' own father, James Ross Clemens, a cousin of Mark Twain:

My father was James Ross Clemens whose illness in London was the innocent cause of Mark Twain's most famous saying, "The report of my death is greatly exaggerated." For the newsmen had confused the two Clemenses and had Mark not merely ill but actually dead!

[Source]

Or, to give Mark Twain's version of the incident (from which the quote first originated)

"James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London but is well now. the report of my illness grew out of his illness. The report of my death was an exaggeration"

[Source]

Of course, the saying took on a life of its own (with some tweaking later on by Twain himself, such as adding the word "greatly"), resulting in the more familiar version quoted today. 

Granted, this is only somewhat related to this blog, in that it deals with a famous Mark Twain quote, not a Chesterton quote. But given that the occasion for the Twain quote was when Twain was confused with the father of the author of a book on Chesterton, it was something I wished to share in this place, in that there is a Chesterton connection in that respect

Terry Pratchett on GKC

Some excerpts from a recent interview with Terry Pratchett in the New York Times Book Review

(H/T All Manner of Thing )

Sell us on your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer. 

G. K. Chesterton. These days recognized — that is if he is recognized at all — as the man who wrote the Father Brown stories. My grandmother actually knew him quite well and pointed out that she herself lived on Chesterton Green in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, here in the U.K. And the man was so well venerated that on one memorable occasion, he was late in sending a piece to The Strand Magazine and a railway train actually waited at the local station until Mr. Chesterton had finished writing his piece. When she told me that, I thought, Blimey, now that is celebrity.

[...] If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? And the prime minister? 

Well, it would have to be "The Man Who Was Thursday." It’s a damn good read that I believe should be read by everyone in politics.

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited? 

Mark Twain, G. K. Chesterton and Neil Gaiman, because he’s a mate who knows how to order the most excellent sushi.

"Rich [Mullins] once literally forced me to read Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton."

Rich [Mullins] once literally forced me to read Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. I vividly remember him sitting across from me while I read the first chapter, craning his neck to see what page I was on, fidgeting in excitement and anticipation, hardly able to contain himself. I was rather self-consciously aware that he was studying my face, waiting for my reaction when I got to the good parts. Within the first few lines of chapter I, Chesterton explains that Orthodoxy was written as an answer to a critic who had challenged him to support his ideas and explain his philosphy. "It was perhaps an incautious suggestion," Chesterton says of the critic's challenge, "to make to a person only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation." Rich waited impatiently for me to read that line and then roared it out loud- "only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation!"- and slapped his knee as he relished a favorite punch line.

-Wrestling with Angels: Adventures in Faith and Doubt, Carolyn Arends, p. 39 

Al Capone takes Chesterton for a Ride

An interesting anecdote which I had never heard of before, related by Neville Braybrooke, son of Patrick Braybrooke (the latter a cousin and biographer of Chesterton.)

In a short memoir that my father published in 1938 after Chesterton's death, he refers to G.K.'s sense of fun and love of the ridiculous. His high-pitched laughter I can still recall. So, too, can my wife, who lived as a child in a flat in Westminster next to the Chesterton's. Her mother and Mrs. G.K. became close friends. The following story, which has never been published before, occurred in Assisi in the 1920s. Staying at the same hotel as the Chesterton's was a charming American-Italian called Mr. Capone; he had a large comfortable car and offered to drive the English couple to see the local shrines, including the Carceri and La Verna. Only in 1929 did Chesterton discover from a photograph in the newspapers, after the St. Valentine's Day massacre in Chicago, that their nice American friend- "our Mr. Capone" as G.K. called him- was none other than the famous American gangster, Al Capone.

-from the December 21-28 issue of The Tablet, and quoted in the August 1986 issue of The Chesterton Review (p. 400)

Update: Here's a link to the same article online in the archives of The Tablet

In any case, I'm not quite sure how a trip to Assisi would fit chronologically as far Chesterton is concerned, or if there is some confusion (as for Capone I know nothing at all). Perhaps the story is apocryphal, though given the closeness of the source, I hesitate to state that, either. But this was too good of an anecdote for me not to mention it.

Before the visit was concluded there came to that small house containing so large a man a serious-miened delegation...They had come, their spokesman said between four-syllable coughs, to request Mr. Chesterton to accept the honorary post of under-sheriff for Bucks-Buckinghimashire County. Mr. Chesterton's roll-top torso writhed nervously. He shrank, he said, from honorary appointments of whatever kind. He bore not title to which he did not deliver duty. And would they be so good as to tell him the principle duty of an under-sheriff? The spokesman coughed and defined:

"To suppress riots against His Majesty's peace."

"Quite impossible," chanted Mr. Chesterton, for his speaking voice was a rising rhythm, cadenced and lofty. "It wouldn't do at all." He beamed explanatorily. "If there is ever any riot around here," he added, "I couldn't conscientiously suppress it, for I should be the principle rioter."

John B. Kennedy, June 28, 1936, New York Times
(quoted in Defiant Joy by Kevin Belmonte, pp. 270-271, [2011])

One reviewer pointed out that Chesterton [in his book on Dickens] had said that every postcard Dickens wrote was a work of art; but Dickens died on June 9th, 1870 and the first British postcard was issued on October 1st, 1870. [Chesterton responded:] "A wonderful instance of Dickens's never-varying propensity to keep ahead of his age."

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Maisie Ward (1943)

Chesterton, Belloc, Wells, and Shaw

An anecdote that Lance Sieveking (a godchild of Chesterton's) remembered:

I was present in my godfather's house when those four giants- [H.G.] Wells, [George Bernard] Shaw, [Hilaire] Belloc, and Chesterton - were shouting, interrupting each other, arguing and laughing...

Once, I remember, they argued about the desirability or reverse of personal immortality. Chesterton remarked: "H.G. suffers from the disadvantage that if he's right he'll never know. He'll only know if he's wrong." Wells gave an exasperated exclamation, whereupon Belloc said: "There is something sublimely futile about discussing the desirability or undesirability of the inevitable." At which Shaw accused Belloc of habitually begging the question and then he trounced Chesterton for consistent evasion of all points at issue in any argument on any subject and then, without letting the other three get a word in, he proceeded to hold forth on immortality, personal, impersonal, metaphorical, mythological and so on and so on and so on. At last, after twenty minutes, he paused and [Chesterton] observed to the ceiling: "That, I suppose, is what is known as putting the whole thing in a nutshell.

[quoted in Wisdom and Innocence by Joseph Pearce, p. 133 (1996)]

Sinclair Lewis and GKC

[Chesterton] refused to follow Sinclair Lewis's elitist "Henry Jamesianism" and despise Main Street, but when Chesterton met Lewis at Marshall Field's State Street store in the rare book department, they liked one another....The writers sat down to talk books....Then someone suggested that they write a play together, an idea Chesterton happily agreed to...Lewis named their play "Mary, Queen of Scotch," and Chesterton said that if he wrote the first act it must be a detective play about a mysterious murder: "There's nothing like a nice murder...to get real human interest into the play..." He said Lewis could arrive at the solution and write the happy ending to a plot which he sketched out to be the story of "an American ex-distiller from Peoria found dead in his hotel, hit on the head with a quart bottle."

-The Outline of Sanity: A Life of G.K. Chesterton, Alzina Stone Dale (1982)

An anecdote of absentmindedness I have to laugh at.... :-)

The Chesterton's own maid told Mrs. Saxon Mills, to whom for a while the Chesterton flat was let, of her troubles in cleaning up after him. Especially was she worried over the bathroom. He would flood the floor, to the imminent danger of the ceiling below. So she tried to get into the room as quickly as possible after him to mop up. One day she had heard him get out of the tub and was hovering around, waiting for her moment, when a tremendous splash assailed her ears. Then came a deep groan and the words, "Dammit, I've been in here already."

-Return to Chesterton, Maisie Ward (1952)