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The Man Who Knew Too Much
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19880 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1992 |
4,836 Words |
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John Tibbetts
For more information on the availability of Mary Pickford
films, contact Keith Lawrence at the Mary Pickford Foundation,
9171 Wilshire Blvd., Ste. 32l, Beverly Hills, CA 90210. |
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF G.K. CHESTERTON
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991-98
50 Volumes
"It is one thing to invent a monster who does not exist," wrote Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936); "it is another thing to discern that the rhinoceros does exist and then to take pleasure in the fact that it looks as if he didn't." Chesterton was as improbable as the rhinoceros, almost as bulky, and he most emphatically did exist, to the pleasure (and occasional dismay) of millions of his enthusiasts and critics. Although in thirty-five years and almost one hundred books and thousands of poems and articles he wrote about everything under the sun (including the sun), we're still not sure if he was clown or sage. Despite a lifetime of professed religious devotion, we still don't know if he was an elf or a saint.
The assumption by the Ignatius Press of San Francisco of The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, a fifty-volume project, comes at the crest of a present-day revival of interest in Chesterton around the world. As if in response to the warning by Monsignor Ronald Knox in 1936 during his eulogy at Chesterton's memorial mass--" If posterity neglects him, it will pronounce judgement not upon him, but upon itself" Chestertonian activities now encircle the planet. Dozens of Chesterton Societies have been established in America, Canada, England, Poland, Japan, and Australia. International conferences convene almost every month on college campuses and in Chesterton archives and study centers at Notre Dame, Boston College, Wheaton College, Fordham University, the University of Toronto, Bedford, England, and many other places. New studies, reprints of his books, movies, stage productions, and television shows are appearing with greater frequency. And since 1974 The Chesterton Review, edited by Father Ian Boyd of Saskatchewan, has promoted "the Chesterton view of life" to more than two thousand subscribers. No longer is Chesterton only remembered as the creator of Father Brown, a detective ranked by most authorities as the equal of Sherlock Holmes. Fifty-five years after his death he has become, in the opinion of learned Chestertonians like John Peterson, who edits the Midwest Chesterton New, a kind of "answer man," a "source of doctrine" for art, society, and religion--at the very least a stimulus in not so much what to think as how to think as how to think. "And he has become the most quoted author after Shakespeare," says Peterson. "You hear his words repeatedly from the mouths of public figures ranging from Queen Elizabeth to Ronald Reagan to David
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