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A prophet is never welcome in his own hometown. For a long time after the tumult of the Sixties, G. K. Chesterton's writings seemed to have lost a welcome anywhere, except, perhaps, among the detective fiction enthusiasts who have kept the Father Brown tales in circulation continuously on both sides of the Atlantic. According to Denis J. Conlon, an English literary scholar who has specialized in Chesterton for many years, much of Chesterton's work is still out of print and hard-to-get in his own merry England. A friend of mine studying in Rome a few years ago told me that the English and Irish Catholic seminarians he met almost universally regarded Chesterton a pre-modern, pre-Vatican II embarrassment. The situation was about the same in America for a long time. As of 1985 there were probably fewer than ten of Chesterton's books in print, and those were, aside from his detective fiction, mostly published by small and often obscure Catholic presses.
The situation was bound to change, however, as this particular prophet still had his faithful remnant, about thirty-five of whom (at most) met throughout the Eighties and early Nineties in Milwaukee every year and exchanged news and views in a little rag called the Midwest Chesterton News. On the more scholarly side, Ian Boyd, a priest and literary scholar, had since 1974 been running the Chesterton Review, a literary quarterly that printed forgotten pieces by Chesterton as well as scholarly essays on his life, thought, and interlocutors. Ignatius Press, a small but growing outfit run by Joseph Fessio, SJ (one of Joseph Ratzinger's doctoral students), decided to publish a collected works with scholarly introductions and footnotes that will eventually number roughly 50 volumes. And newly emerging publications like Crisis, New Oxford Review, and First Things quoted Chesterton incessantly and sometimes ran articles about him. He even began popping up in Christianity Today, where he had fans in Philip Yancey and Charles Colson.
Here one might briefly note the role of Christian rock in the revival of Chesterton in America. One of the younger people traveling to Milwaukee in those lean years was a young Baptist named Dale Ahlquist. While in college in the late Seventies, Ahlquist spent some time at the home of his sister and then brother-in-law working for the summer. His sister's husband, the so-called godfather of Christian rock, was the late Larry Norman. Norman found Ahlquist reading a book by C. S. Lewis and asked if he was familiar with Chesterton. Upon discovering that he wasn't, Norman cryptically remarked that after reading Chesterton one doesn't even "need" Lewis anymore.
Ahlquist didn't immediately read Chesterton. But three years later he brought The Everlasting Man to read on his honeymoon trip (no giggling, please—his wife brought Les Misérables). Ahlquist's love of Chesterton was born shortly thereafter. After several years with the Midwest Chesterton Society, Ahlquist spotted a need. In 1996 he founded the American Chesterton Society (ACS) as an umbrella group to help local societies share resources far beyond the Milwaukee range. The Midwest Chesterton News gave way to Gilbert: The Magazine of G. K. Chesterton (now Gilbert Magazine; I am, full disclosure, a contributing editor). After a late-Nineties appearance on EWTN, the Catholic television network, to talk about his own recent conversion to Catholicism, Ahlquist and Chesterton impersonator John C. "Chuck" Chalberg began the "G. K. Chesterton: Apostle of Common Sense" show on the same network (a show which has been reviewed favorably in The New York Times of all places). By 2001, ACS had become a full-time job for Ahlquist, who was speaking all over the United States and increasingly beyond. The annual Milwaukee meetings had moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, and by 2008 attendance topped seven hundred. The number of local groups grows annually: recent kick-offs include societies in Boston and Atlanta. Chesterton references abound, from Ravi Zacharias in his Veritas Forums to Christopher Hitchens' Atlantic reviews to Mike Huckabee's speeches. In 2008, the centennial of Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday, The New Yorker featured a critically admiring piece by Adam Gopnik. Not letting le hyperpower get a step ahead, the Parisian quarterly L'Atelier du Roman devoted their entire fall 2008 issue to Chesterton ("Le dieu bien tempéré de Chesterton"). Chesterton books in print now number over eighty, many containing material never before collected. It's not just Catholic presses doing all the lifting, either. Reformation Press put out annotated editions of Orthodoxy and Heretics. GKC's return to prominence seems nearly complete, at least in America and maybe France.
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