No, not yet (it's on the list). Didn't they trade responses after that, too?

Yes. Belloc opened with A COMPANION TO MR. WELLS' OUTLINE OF HISTORY. Wells replied with a smaller book, MR. BELLOC OBJECTS. Belloc's retort was MR. BELLOC STILL OBJECTS.

I love them all, but Chesterton's work was more substantial and more comprehensive.

Wells and Belloc really did dislike one another, most of the time. This was not the only topic they crossed pens on.

GKC

Currently, for classes I'm reading Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks, the Lombard Law Codes, and St. Augustine's Confessions for a Latin directed study. Plus a whole slew of source material on nuclear energy regulation and Three Mile Island.

For pleasure, I'm reading Umberto Eco's the Name of the Rose and starting Aristotle's Organon.

Afraid so. While GKC has a gift for colorful phrases, he also has the gift of... uh... verbosity. He says as much in one paragraph as many say in a sentence. Sometimes I enjoy taking the time to read him.

I prefer Waugh. I also prefer Pope Benedict XVI's style over Pope John Paul II. I like economy of words. Waugh is to Chesterton what B16 is to JPII.

I did enjoy Orthodoxy, actually.

I've always found Chesterton hard to read as well. The verbosity is an obstacle sometimes.

Different tastes, I guess. I fell hard for him from the first book I read.


GKC

I like Waugh, too. But I find him acerbic, with a bite, and Chesterton almost always more irenic. Not just the verbosity but the flavor differs. As a steady diet, I like Chesterton.

GKC

I was about to post to much the same effect, except that (with some exceptions), I don't particularly like Waugh. His sense of humor is much too mordant.

And I admit to no strong desire to reread The Everlasting Man. It is tedious in places.

I've had enough of this sacrilege, and am moving on to more agreeable literary company.

Now, now. What would the self-effacing Chesterton do?

GKC

[GrammarPolice]I had The Everlasting Man in italics. Someone (I shan't say who ) removed them in quoting me. [/GrammarPolice]

I was thinking more along the lines of what the self-effacing Chesterton's bellicose best friend would do. I hadn't the time to think up a set of rhymed couplets, so I thought I'd just leave a snotty post.

Hey Obi (arch liberal/modernist anti-Chesterton heretic) - I fixed those italics

That much is true, and I prefered Edmund Campion and Brideshead Revisted to The Loved One. I'm not saying I don't like anything by GKC, but I was a bit surprised by Everlasting Man. I might just be going through an impatient phase.

Gilbert is patient. He'll wait.

I actually like Waugh, in his BLACK MISCHIEF, HANDFUL OF DUST, VILE BODIES, etc, stuff, as well as his CAMPION, ST. HELENA, and RONALD KNOX. It's just ....well, my name speaks for itself.


GKC

"Remote and ineffectual Don..." Something like that?

GKC

When i hear these sort of complaints about some Chesterton (All of his writing isn't so dense) I really do understand what you mean. Some passages I've had to read a dozen times over a period of several years before it starts to dawn on me what exactly is his point. Some of his stuff goes over my head simply because he's so deeply literate, yet he likes to make his literary/historical allusions in oblique ways - as if to say, "if you don't know just to what I'm referring, then so much the worse for you - you can't even begin to step up to this subject". But I think also that the common level of cultural literacy was perhaps significantly higher in his day than in ours - hence my troubles with some of his writing. As for the more well-read folks who complain of him I would suspect that this isn't so much a problem as it is for me.

The other reason that he's so difficult at times is that he's writing prose sometimes in almost a poetic way - he's trying to represent, I think, the density, complexity and profundity of an idea with a reflection that's equally so on all counts. Of course he can be devastatingly simple, but he can also tie you up in knots. I recall one passage, "The Meaning Of The Crusade", from The New Jerusalem. I read that passage about once a week for a year before I finally understood it (and that with a lot of other reading in between). But when I finally grasped his point, I wanted to jump up and shout hallelujah.

My first area of study was literature, and I wrote my thesis on Pynchon (which required a healthy dose of Joyce and to capture adequately). So that isn't my problem with GKC.



That's the dimension on which he can be annoying. Being "poetic" is one thing if you focus on the imagery conveyed by the language. Otherwise, it's not so "poetic" but verbose. Also, he seems to owe some of his style to the Victorians, and while some of that might be charming, people who got paid by the column inch would not have been noted for economy of words. Dickens's Pickwick Papers is a prime example.



Yes. That's when I like him best. He so frequently delivers the bon mot.

I would hope my problem is not cultural literacy either--I love his autobiography, which takes a lot of background to understand. I think my objection to The Everlasting Man is that, in a sense, it's a little too focused. He clearly has Wells in his sights and spends so much time blasting away at him (in the genteel GKC way) that the book has limited universal appeal.

My primary training is in music, and as an instrumentalist. So I'm naturally drawn to raw displays of virtuosity and Chesterton can certainly give you that - much like the Victorians with their triple-decker novels and 20 page descriptions of a drawing room. I love Chesterton, and Chesterton loved Dickens, and I've had problems with Dickens for much the same reason as contemporaries might have problems with Chesterton - he writes a lot of words, and belabors a point because he is such a virtuoso and in his day that kind of virtuosity was wanted. One also thinks of Newman's rhetorical style (which he of course gets from Cicero). Chesterton gives you that in abundance.

The other thing I get out of GKC is his pure joy of ex tempore thinking. He dictated his books and seldom edited them, if they were edited at all, from what I understand. If he was called to give an address, do you think he would bring any notes? Or even make any? No. He'd just talk until it was time for a meal, most likely. Reading him can be like listening to the entire Goldberg Variations at one sitting. It's the same tonality and the same theme being spun out and spun out again, and it either delights or enervates according to your tolerance. Every time Keith Jarrett sits down to the piano it could be a record, and if he made a record every day for a year I'd want to listen to them all.

And then of course, Chesterton was right, and I never get tired of that.

You are correct about his method of writing. ST. THOMAS AQUINAS is the most famous example. He wrote it off the top of his head, for about half the book. Then, deciding it might need some thickening, he sent Dorothy Collins to town for a few books on the Good Doctor. Read over those, set them aside, and finished dictating the book. Lack of editing or re-writing resulted in such things as the lines of non- Browning poetry, in the book on Browning. As I often say, one doesn't go to Chesterton for scholarship, or precision (only 3 dates, IIRC, in his HISTORY OF ENGLAND), but for insight and understanding.

On speeches, you are right in principle. But he was also known to scribble cryptic words on random scraps of paper, dig them from his pocket, and proceed to orate.

GKC