Background: When I was the editor of Gilbert Magazine, I was responsible for the "Tremendous Trifles" column. It was occasionally hard to find a sufficient amount of interesting GKC material to fill the page, so John Peterson sent me a file full of Chesterton ancedotes. They were idiosyncratic, historical, and Chestertonian. He recently gave me permission to use them here. I hope y'all find them as interesting as I have over the years. Most of them have never been published.
Chesterton Short(s)
Cyril Clemens interviewed George Bernard Shaw in 1934 on the subject of the playwright's views of Mark Twain. Shaw who, the interviewer noticed, had a copy of G.K.'s Weekly on his desk, endorsed Chesterton's view of Twain: "Chesterton has hit the nail on the head," he told Clemens. "The exaggeration of Mark Twain is his most salient characteristic." The series of interviews Clemens conducted for the International Mark Twain Society also included an interview with Chesterton and was published in book form to celebrate the centennial of Twain's birth. [Mark Twain and Mussolini, 1934, pp. 10-12. The interview with Chesterton also appears in Clemens' Chesterton as Seen by His Contemporaries.]
