Long Futile Searches Through Chesterton

I’ve made several confessions of mental ineptitude recently. I’ve talked about my inability to stop boring my wife by rehearsing every detail of a history book I’m reading. I’ve admitted my susceptibility to distraction by emotions and by flies. And I’ve exposed my hitherto almost total ignorance on the number of existing sequels to one of my favorite novels.

Today I have to continue the streak by admitting a mistaken notion about one of my favorite authors that has deluded me for years. (The notion deluded me, not the author.) The story starts in 1982 at Baylor University. As a new master’s student, I eagerly checked out the library soon after my arrival in Waco. What led me to G. K. Chesterton, I don’t know. I had heard of him and had possibly read The Everlasting Man at that point. Whatever the reason may have been, in addition to books on music (I fell in love with the works of Donald Tovey at that library), I also checked out a book by GKC called Tremendous Trifles, a collection of weekly essays written for the newspaper.

I was instantly transported! These were the first British essays I had ever read, so I have to say first that I was enthralled by the form of these pieces. No direct context-setting introduction here. No outlining of three main points to be detailed in later paragraphs. Here was the classic British elliptical entrance, and I loved it. But I loved everything else about these essays as well: their clear prose, their logical twists (never actual paradoxes!), their respect for authors I treasured, and their forthright denouncement of modern vacuities that I previously had thought only started causing trouble in the 1960s. (Uggh. I only had learned what the Middle Ages were the winter before I started at Baylor, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I didn’t know anything about the history of modernism in thought.)

I read other sets of essays from the Baylor library including Alarms and Discursions. I enjoyed them so much, I actually drew a tick mark in the tables of contents next to the titles of my favorite essays. I’ve passed Waco on I-35 many times since then, and afterwards, I’ve always wished I had stopped, visited the library, and checked to see if my marks were still there. I’ve forgotten most of them and would probably have a lot of fun seeing what I thought especially noteworthy in 1982. Among the gems I do remember very well were “The Glory of Grey,” in which Chesterton praises the variety in the look of overcast days, and “On Cheese,” which began “If all the seas were bread and cheese there would be quite a lot of deforestation in my neighborhood.”

Some ten years later, I discovered that Ignatius Press was publishing the complete works of Chesterton in several volumes and that one could subscribe to the project. The subscription service never worked well, but I ended up with about twenty of the project’s thirty-odd volumes, including all of the essays from The Illustrated London News. I read sporadically in this bookshelfful of prose, but somewhere in the second Ten-Year plan, I started reading one year of essays from the ILN every year. By the end of that reading plan, though, I still hadn’t read any essays that pulled up dusty memories. For the Third Decade, I started reading two years’ worth of the newspaper columns every year (Chesterton wrote for the paper for a very, very long time!) with the vision of finally discovering and rereading “The Glory of Grey” and “On Cheese” and finishing all the essays by the end of the decade.

But this year, I looked through the table of contents of the assigned years and still saw no titles that sounded familiar. I picked up the remaining volumes of ILN pieces and searched their ToC’s. I went through all the ones I had already read to see if I had previously found “The Glory of Grey” and “On Cheese” and just forgot. But these titles were nowhere to be found. So I did some internet searching and found two disconcerting and embarrassing facts. (1) The collections I had read at Baylor were taken from the Daily News, a paper to which Chesterton contributed before he joined The Illustrated London News. (2) Ignatius Press had no plans ever to republish these earlier essays. So that’s several years, three feet of bookshelf, a lot of dollars, and a lot of reading time spent on an impossible quest. *sigh* The collections I read forty years ago are on Gutenberg, and I’ve changed my Plan to alternate between the familiar chestnuts and the remaining ILN volumes on my shelf. I’m sure I’ll have something to say in these posts about cloudy days and cheese sometime in the next few years.

While I’m confessing, I have to say it isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened, and coincidentally, the other incident also involved G. K. Chesterton. A girl I knew in high school (and just after) told me that I would like Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. (I think this is where I first heard of Chesterton. So for that, at least, I’m grateful to this girl.) She told me as an example that one involved a man who escaped from a prison using a rat that he trained to carry messages through the sewer opening in his cell. Several years later I finally got around to reading Father Brown. Again, I read a few stories each year for a while and then finally made a big push to the end, enjoying the stories greatly, but wondering when I would at last reach the story about the rat. But that rat never showed his head. It turns out “The Problem of Cell 13” was written by Jacques Futrelle, so naturally it had very little chance of showing up in a collection of stories by Chesterton. Alas, the misleading lead was not the only mistruth that girl told me. And that’s a story you will not see me blogging about in the next few years. Or ever.