Literary Giants Literary Catholics by Joseph Pearce Page B
Authors: Joseph Pearce
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
Ads: Link
character were “too slight for satisfaction”. The book unravels like a heaven-sent game of hide-and-seek, similar to the plot of The Man Who Was Thursday , with the Man who was Francis remaining as difficult to pin down as the Man who was Sunday. Yet, as with the plot to the novel, there is something thrilling in the chase.
Whatever the book’s shortcomings as an entirely satisfying explanation of the saint, it remains an emphatically successful romp and romance in the true Franciscan and Chestertonian spirit. From start to finish, Chesterton plays cat and mouse with the Jongleur de Dieu. And, in keeping with the poetry of the saint, it doesn’t really matter that sister cat fails to catch brother mouse. The charm is in the chase. For those reading Chesterton’s Saint Francis of Assisi for the first time, you are in for a rare treat. Prepare to be charmed. Enjoy the chase!
5
_____
SHADES OF GRAY IN THE SHADOW OF WILDE
T HE DISCOVERY OF a “new” novel by G. K. Chesterton, sixty-five years after his death, has sent ripples of excitement through the literary world. It is, of course, not a new novel in the literal sense of the word but, as the cover of this attractively produced volume proclaims, “a first novel, previously unpublished”. It was also, prior to publication, a first novel, previously untitled—a fact that its discoverer, Denis J. Conlon, has rectified. Basil Howe: A Story of Young Love is, however, far more exciting as a detective story than as a love story, and far more alluring as a barely concealed portrait of the young Chesterton than as an inadequately revealed portrait of “Basil Howe”. It is the character of the author, not the character in the novel, who emerges from its fascinating pages.
Like all good detective stories, Basil Howe seduces the reader with tantalizing clues. Conlon, as both a dedicated Chestertonian and as a diligent academic, has uncovered many of these clues in the course of his work in preparing the manuscript for publication. We learn how the manuscript was discovered among Chesterton’s notebooks “which had long lain forgotten under articles of clothing in an old box trunk”; we discover how the notebooks themselves had been saved from the municipal tip (or garbage can, for our American readers) by Dorothy Collins, Chesterton’s secretary; we are taken through the painstaking process by which Professor Conlon assembled separated sections of the manuscript so that the novel could begin to emerge from the fragments. This, in itself, is an intriguing yarn—and we are still only on the first pages of Professor Conlon’s introduction, long before we get to the novel itself.
Most importantly, Professor Conlon is convinced, and is pretty convincing in his conviction, that the novel was probably written in late 1893 or early 1894, when Chesterton was only nineteen years old. If this is so, the plot really thickens.
On 6 October 1893 Chesterton began his studies at University College in London and the Slade School of Art. It was at Slade, by his own admission, that he had temporarily fallen under the spell of the Decadents “and their perpetual hints of the luxurious horrors of paganism”. Chesterton’s “decadence” was short-lived, but if his own account is to be believed, it was very real while it lasted. “I deal here”, he wrote in his autobiography, “with the darkest and most difficult part of my task; the period of youth which is full of doubts and morbidities and temptations; and which, though in my case mainly subjective, has left in my mind for ever a certitude upon the objective solidity of sin.” In Orthodoxy , a book he wrote in 1908, he confessed that “I was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen”. In 1893, at the age of nineteen and at the time he was apparently writing his first novel, he had regressed further:
I am not proud of believing in the Devil. To put it more correctly, I am not proud of
Whatever the book’s shortcomings as an entirely satisfying explanation of the saint, it remains an emphatically successful romp and romance in the true Franciscan and Chestertonian spirit. From start to finish, Chesterton plays cat and mouse with the Jongleur de Dieu. And, in keeping with the poetry of the saint, it doesn’t really matter that sister cat fails to catch brother mouse. The charm is in the chase. For those reading Chesterton’s Saint Francis of Assisi for the first time, you are in for a rare treat. Prepare to be charmed. Enjoy the chase!
5
_____
SHADES OF GRAY IN THE SHADOW OF WILDE
T HE DISCOVERY OF a “new” novel by G. K. Chesterton, sixty-five years after his death, has sent ripples of excitement through the literary world. It is, of course, not a new novel in the literal sense of the word but, as the cover of this attractively produced volume proclaims, “a first novel, previously unpublished”. It was also, prior to publication, a first novel, previously untitled—a fact that its discoverer, Denis J. Conlon, has rectified. Basil Howe: A Story of Young Love is, however, far more exciting as a detective story than as a love story, and far more alluring as a barely concealed portrait of the young Chesterton than as an inadequately revealed portrait of “Basil Howe”. It is the character of the author, not the character in the novel, who emerges from its fascinating pages.
Like all good detective stories, Basil Howe seduces the reader with tantalizing clues. Conlon, as both a dedicated Chestertonian and as a diligent academic, has uncovered many of these clues in the course of his work in preparing the manuscript for publication. We learn how the manuscript was discovered among Chesterton’s notebooks “which had long lain forgotten under articles of clothing in an old box trunk”; we discover how the notebooks themselves had been saved from the municipal tip (or garbage can, for our American readers) by Dorothy Collins, Chesterton’s secretary; we are taken through the painstaking process by which Professor Conlon assembled separated sections of the manuscript so that the novel could begin to emerge from the fragments. This, in itself, is an intriguing yarn—and we are still only on the first pages of Professor Conlon’s introduction, long before we get to the novel itself.
Most importantly, Professor Conlon is convinced, and is pretty convincing in his conviction, that the novel was probably written in late 1893 or early 1894, when Chesterton was only nineteen years old. If this is so, the plot really thickens.
On 6 October 1893 Chesterton began his studies at University College in London and the Slade School of Art. It was at Slade, by his own admission, that he had temporarily fallen under the spell of the Decadents “and their perpetual hints of the luxurious horrors of paganism”. Chesterton’s “decadence” was short-lived, but if his own account is to be believed, it was very real while it lasted. “I deal here”, he wrote in his autobiography, “with the darkest and most difficult part of my task; the period of youth which is full of doubts and morbidities and temptations; and which, though in my case mainly subjective, has left in my mind for ever a certitude upon the objective solidity of sin.” In Orthodoxy , a book he wrote in 1908, he confessed that “I was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen”. In 1893, at the age of nineteen and at the time he was apparently writing his first novel, he had regressed further:
I am not proud of believing in the Devil. To put it more correctly, I am not proud of
Similar Books
