“When do you do most of your writing, Mr. Chesterton?”
“Whenever I get a chance, I do not care much for the typewriter and I find pen or pencil much too tedious, for I am a rather slow writer. At present I do a considerable amount of dictating. I can compose just as readily this way.”
One of the last questions I asked my host was his opinion of Mark Twain,
“I have always admired the genius of Mark Twain which may truly be called gigantic. Mark Twain dealt so much with the gigantic exaggeration of imagination; the skyscrapers of literature. He was the greatest master of the tall story who has ever lived and was also, what is more important, a thoroughly sincere man.”
As the cab to take me to my London train was announced, Chesterton graciously inscribed his “History of England” in the following fashion,
“Greetings to the Mark Twain Society
from an Innocent at Home
G. K. Chesterton
Known as the Unjumping Frog of
Bucks County.”
and Mrs. Chesterton added,
“And from Frances Chesterton
Wife of the Innocent.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
FATHER BROWN.
Once in telling his creator what delight Father Brown had given him, the author asked if the spiritual detective was a real person.
“Indeed he is,” answered Chesterton. “His name is Father John O’Connor and he lives in Bradford, Yorkshire.”
“‘Trent’s Last Case’ had recently appeared,” Father O’Connor himself writes the author, “and Chesterton full of admiration for E. C. Bentley, was humbly envious, longing to add to the small (as it was then) crop of detective stories. He also was bitten with costume drama and would without provocation ‘lurk’ by the jamb of a doorway with cloak-and-sword (he had a sword-stick) as it were in wait for the Duke of Guise. He had a column the next week in ‘The Daily News,’ relating how the forest-keepers of Ilkley apprehended him for making passes at the local trees, but released him on learning that he was a guest of a Justice of the Peace.