Somewhat later in this article I am going to present an "interview" (or
something like that) with Gilbert K. Chesterton. At least I hope I am
going to present it. Yesterday it looked as though I might have to get
up my interview without having seen Mr. Chesterton. Though today the
situation appears somewhat brighter. "Seeing" Mr. Chesterton (on his
visit over here, at any rate) seems to be a complicated matter.
As anything which gives some view of the workings of the Chestertonian
machinery ought to be of interest to all who can lay claim to the happy
state of mind of being Chestertonites, I'll begin by telling the
proceedings so far in this affair. Then as matters progress to supply me
with more material (if they do progress) I'll continue.
I one time wrote an article in which I told with what surprising ease I
saw Mr. Chesterton several years ago in England. Without acquaintances
in England, some sort of a fit of impudence seized me. I wrote Mr.
Chesterton a letter, communicating to him the intelligence that I had
arrived in London, that it was my belief that he was one of the noblest
and most interesting monuments in England; and I asked him if he
supposed that he could be "viewed" by me, at some street corner, say, at
a time appointed, as he rumbled past in his triumphal car. Mrs.
Chesterton replied directly in a note that her husband wished to thank
me for my letter and to say that he would be pleased if I cared to come
down to spend an afternoon with him at Beaconsfield. Mr. Chesterton, I
later recollected, had no means readily at hand of ascertaining whether
or not I was an American pickpocket; but from the deference of his
manner I was led to suspect that he vaguely supposed I was perhaps the
owner of the New York _Times_, or somebody like that.
This escapade of my visit to Overroads I suppose it was that put into
the head of the editor of _The Bookman_ the notion that I was a person
with ready access to Mr. Chesterton. So I was served with a hurry-up
assignment to see him and to deliver an article about my seeing him for
the March number of the magazine before that issue, then largely in the
hands of the printers, got off the press. Thus my adventures, the
termination of which are at present considerably up in the air, began.
I at once wrote to Mr. Chesterton at the hotel where at the moment he
was in Boston. At the same time I wrote to Lee Keedick ("Manager of the
World's Most Celebrated Lecturers") at his office in New York. I had
picked up the impression that a lecture manager of this caliber owned
outright the time of a visiting celebrity whom he promoted, and that you
couldn't even telephone the celebrity without the manager's permission.
I didn't know that you couldn't telephone him anyway. Or that you
couldn't telephone the manager either.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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