It is always difficult to describe a man in full, but even more so when that man isn’t too interested in himself. Such is the case with the great Catholic journalist G. K. Chesterton, whose extensive body of work, comprising 80 books and thousands of articles, made him a giant in the realms of religion and politics in the early twentieth century. Sadly, he was also a man of deep depression. Catholic theology considers despair a sin, as a form of pride and egotism. And his life was filled with many tempting tragedies, enough that his poetic works include subtle snippets like “The strangest whim has seized me. After all / I think I will not hang myself today.”
Despite this temperament, Chesterton was also a defiantly joyful person. In a very Roman Catholic sense, he simply chose not to fall into despair. He refused to let the pride of self-hatred consume him. Unfortunately, this made him a poor author of his own life, as he simply wasn’t interested in it.
His famous 1936 autobiography is infamous in this regard, as any reader will notice it’s hardly about Chesterton. As the notable Chesterton scholar Ethan Nicole explains in his excellent Chesterton’s Gateway, “Chesterton didn’t like talking about himself, so he spends most of the book talking about other people, which is sweet of him, but that’s not what you came to a Chesterton biography for.”
Many great biographies have thankfully already been written about Chesterton. Maisie Ward’s comprehensive biography is considered the most definitive, while recent ones by Joseph Pierce and Ian Ker have also been highly praised. However, the gaping hole of a proper autobiography leaves regrettable gaps in his history. There is more to be said about this man, and happily, Dale Ahlquist, president of the Chesterton Society, has stepped into this gap with his newest book, I Also Had My Hour: An Alternative Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton.
To write another man’s autobiography is a brave and dangerous thing. Only an adoring devotee would dare to attempt it, and Ahlquist is that man. As one of the world’s leading experts and defenders of Chesterton, the book is the culmination of decades of research into the great apologist’s life.
The truth is, Chesterton did talk about himself, with details and personal anecdotes sprinkled across his vast corpus of writings. The body text of I Also Had My Hour takes advantage of this fact, using those snippets to create an unusual sort of collage. Ahlquist builds the narrative of his life by systemizing these quotes into a cohesive explanation of the major events of Chesterton’s life, unpacking many of the most notable things to happen to him, such as the Marconi scandal and his conversion to Catholicism. The book includes some familiar quotes, but also draws heavily on rarer Chesterton texts that sparsely see the light of day.
This methodology does create cause for concern, particularly with Chesterton. He’s already famous as an author for the preponderance of lofty out-of-context quotes floating around the Internet, many of which make no sense without proper context. There’s a danger in crafting an entire book entirely out of them; the editor brings his own biases into the text through clever inclusions and exclusions. How many writers would hesitate to allow any future biographer to do the same?
Ahlquist is certainly right to admit upfront that the book is “cobbled” together. The first chapter alone contains 367 cited snippets from Chesterton’s writing in the Illustrated London News, GK Weekly, The Daily Herald, The New Witness, and the various prefaces to several largely forgotten books, highlighting quotes that many Chesterton devotees likely have never read.
In execution, it reads almost more like a medieval florilegium than a proper biography, similar to C. S. Lewis’s book of George MacDonald quotes. The ambition to string them together into a coherent narrative is mostly successful, but results in a text with abrupt tone and momentum changes. Chesterton might be ranting against corruption in one paragraph, while the next contains calm reminiscences.
Like Chesterton’s own biographies on St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas, he attempts to tell the story of who Chesterton was rather than what happened to him, capturing the man rather than listing his life in a chronology.
The best thing the book has going for it is Chesterton’s whirling prose. Dale’s ability to drag a line of thought through digressions on Victorian politics, Anglican theology, and beer resembles Chesterton’s circuitous style. Chesterton’s ability to turn a rant about an umbrella into a remarkable metaphysics lecture is fully on display. Even if a sentence seems tangential, it’s still lovely to read because he wrote it.
The narrative that unfolds through these snippets is a deeply interior one, showing the emergence of Chesterton’s inner world amid the changes of Victorian England, with the cheer and justice of Old England degrading into industrialism, Darwinism, and socialism. Chesterton sees the whimsy and imaginative literature of his youth being replaced by less uplifting stuff, until he feels like the last man reading fairy tales in a crowd of humorless radicals. The paradoxical orthodoxy he advocated for his entire adult life amounts to a rejection of the “mode of the age,” the chaotic sophistry and fashionable ideology of modern Britain. He craved a solid foundation from which to fight corruption and temptation in its myriad forms. He found it in the Catholic Church.
Ahlquist borrows heavily from Chesterton’s views on biography to craft a narrative that is less a traditional biography than an unpacking of the meaning of the events of his life. An event as simple as his move from London to Beaconsfield becomes a lengthy rant on the snobbishness of a generation of English writers seeking rural simplicity. His brother’s work as an editor becomes a digression on Irish liberation. Like Chesterton’s own biographies on St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas, he attempts to tell the story of who Chesterton was rather than what happened to him, capturing the man rather than listing his life in a chronology.
This is largely what Ahlquist delivers, offering readers profound commentary on the core issues and controversies of his life, delving deep into his conversion away from Anglicanism, addressing allegations of anti-Semitism against him, engaging his critics, and unpacking the major events of his life. He succeeds (mostly) in systemizing Chesterton’s incredibly unsystematic thought process into something comprehensive. These collections are invaluable in laying out hundreds of scattered thoughts across his entire body of literature, but there is little narrative thread connecting these chapters.
The book that emerges reflects an uneven final product. Not only are more than half the book’s pages littered with exhausting citations and digressive footnotes, but the chapters themselves have little order or structure. Chapter lengths are random, large portions of his life are omitted, and his character faults are glossed over.
The book’s rawness is reflective of what must’ve been an exhaustive creative process. It would have taken decades for anybody to find and collect all of these quotes into a coherent work. The seams are often clearer than they should be, and some quotes are repeated several times, but altogether it is nothing less than a remarkable work.
I Also Had My Hour is a sincerely awkward book, in the best sense of the word. It is trying to systematize ideas that cannot truly be systematized, but readers can enjoy the way Ahlquist’s adoration for his mentor paints Chesterton’s life in a glowing sheen. It’s the fuel that makes a collection such as this possible, enabling him to casually collect three decades of research into a single condensed volume. If it has any flaw, it is simply that Alquist adores Chesterton too much. The book gives Chesterton the glow of a Saint, and downplays all of his potential faults to mere eccentricities. But as Dale argues, many have tried and failed to make the case that Chesterton is overrated.
As it stands, the book is a benevolent Frankenstein monster; an act of hagiographical graffiti. It seems likely Chesterton would appreciate the beauty of that.