GKC Wednesday

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 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)

In his short memoir from the 1940's, "Not the Place's Fault," the British poet Philip Larkin recalls that his father's library contained the works of most English writers, but Chesterton was not among them. "I was therefore lucky," Larkin recalled, without precisely explaining the remark. Obviously he was more than content with his father's selections of "Hardy, Bennett, Wilde, Butler and Shaw." [Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin, New York: Farrar Straus, 1993, p. 27] For reasons unfathomable to the casual reader, Larkin once began a letter to his friend, the writer and anthology editor Robert Conquest, with,

Dear Bob,
I don't know if you've remarked this passage from "The Resurrection of Father Brown": "The local leader of the iconoclastic party was a certain Alvarez, a rather picturesque adventurer of Portuguese nationality but, as his enemies said, of partly Negro origin, the head of any number of lodges and temples of initiation of the sort such places clothe even atheism with something mystical.''

Larkin's letter then goes on to discuss an entirely different subject. It was typed and dated May 6, 1969, and posted from 32 Pearson Park, Hull. [Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, New York: Farrar Straus, p. 415]