Summerbook 3: Chesterton's Gateway

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Chesterton's Gateway, by G. K. Chesterton, compiled by Ethan Nicolle

I often listen to a comedic book podcast called The Book Pile, which features two guys, Kellen Erskine and David Vance.  Erskine is a full-time comic, and we knew him as a teenager with floppy 90s hair, so we're always interested in how he's doing.  Vance is a writer -- he's written sketches for a different comedy group I follow.   They're fun to listen to!

A little while ago they had a comic-book artist on the show, Ethan Nicolle, to talk about this book he'd put together.  (I have never read any of Nicolle's comics; my husband likes him.)  So he talked about how he'd gotten really into reading Chesterton, and even had a couple of discussion groups.  But he found that most people who wanted to read Chesterton would pick up Orthodoxy, and he didn't think that was a good place to start; Chesterton was mainly an essayist and it's better to start with essays.  So he'd put together a 'gateway drug' version for beginners.  (Of course anyone who has read Chesterton will see the play on 'Chesterton's fence' in the title, too.)

Now I've read quite a bit of Chesterton already, including a reasonable number of essays, Orthodoxy, all the mysteries, and other stuff.  So I wasn't really the target audience for the book, but I was curious about what essays would constitute a gateway drug, and it never hurts to have a little refresher.  I got hold of the book, and read about half an essay a day.

The essays are mostly very well-chosen and are often (but not always) famous ones, like the one where he talks about going out to draw without white chalk, is thrown into despair, but eventually realized that he's sitting on top of a massive pile of chalk, or the one featuring the fence, or the one about the boys who become large and small, or the cheese one.  I was perplexed, given that Nicolle says not to start with Orthodoxy, that he included three whole chapters of Orthodoxy in the middle of his book about starting to read Chesterton -- which is kind of a lot.

Nicolle also includes explanatory introductions and footnotes for the beginner reader who is not familiar with Chesterton's world -- he explains who various public figures were, who Mr. Micawber might be, or what the game of draughts is (checkers), that sort of thing.  But as he takes care to say, he's only googling things he didn't understand himself.  A few times he misses what Chesterton was actually getting at.

It was a fine selection of essays.  My main problem is just that I don't love Chesterton all that much.  The man couldn't pass up a clever paradox to save his life, and all the fireworks get old after a while.  It's a good thing he was an essayist, because in large doses I find him hard to take.  Give me George MacDonald any day.

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