I Also Had My Hour

I Also Had My Hour: An Alternative Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton
Dale Ahquist (Ignatius, $21.95 USD, 477 pages)

Chesterton scholar Dale Ahlquist has assembled a unique “autobiography” of G.K. Chesterton by taking snippets from GKC’s vast body of writing and arranging them into a collage of sorts – Ahlquist says the quotes are “cobbled” together — in lieu of an autobiography. (Chesterton wrote an autobiography, published in 1936, but it was mostly about the people he knew, not about himself, and what he thought about matters.) For the most part, Ahlquist’s effort works, although there are some stark and seemingly incongruent changes in tone along the way. The book opens with Ahlquist’s introduction and a thorough timeline of Chesterton’s life that takes up more than 100 pages. It is not until p. 129 that readers are treated to Chesterton’s own words. Ahlquist footnotes each comment and, when necessary, provides some context. By necessity, taking only what Chesterton has left in his writing and speeches about himself, Ahlquist strings together sentences and paragraphs to relate parts of Chesterton’s life, but mostly his thoughts about life in general. Still, we catch glimpses of the man, not merely the writer and thinker. In one example, Chesterton observes that for himself “dreary weather, what may be called useless weather,” stirs into him “a sense of action and romance.” On a beautiful day he is content contemplating life but when the sky turns grey he develops a “hunger for some change of plans.” On one particular day, that change of plans leads to an amusing story of missing his train and hopping aboard another, during which, knowing that a corpse was also on board, Chesterton could no longer enjoy his cigar. While not traditional fodder for an autobiography, that incident tells us as much about Chesterton as does the rest of this unconventional autobiography.

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