The man mountain of Fleet Street

A. N. Wilson has a queasy feeling that he won’t be re-reading the works of G. K. Chesterton for a while

Yet another book on Chesterton! William Oddie is only half way through his immensely detailed two-volume biographical-cum-theological study of the man mountain of Fleet Street. Last year we had Aidan Nichols on Chesterton’s theology. And now Ian Ker comes with the familiar account of how the son of a Kensington estate agent, educated at St Paul’s and infected with the spirit of the Nineties, moved from being a Bedford Park aesthete-agnostic, through socialism and liberalism to distributism, and from unbelief to a broad, generous sympathy with the Anglo-Catholicism of his wife, Frances Blogg.

Then, in 1922, when Chesterton was in his late forties, he became a Roman Catholic. By then, he was a literary legend, immensely tall, hugely fat, never known to turn down a speaking engagement or a commission to dash off a book or an article. Slapdash but brilliant, the master of the paradox, he had become the defender of religious orthodoxy against the atheism of Wells and Shaw.

Ker’s book is immensely long, and it is full of details which Chestertonians will savour. Everyone knew that GK was fat, but I had never realised quite how fat he was until I read this book: he was scarcely able to get into the bath, and his wife had difficulty persuading him to wash. He never went to the dentist. And, although Ker tries to play this down, I had never fully appreciated before just how drunken GK became. Ker tells us that Frances would go to bed early and that GK sat up with the bottle, working.

This would certainly explain what must have puzzled many of Chesterton’s admirers, of whom I have always been one.