Chesterton, Intellect, Eccentricity, and Forgetfulness
On the whimsical and wonderful life of GKC:
It is often the case that those with brilliant intellects can also be the proverbial ‘absent-minded professor’. They are so wrapped up in thought, in ideas, in concepts, and the like, that the more ordinary affairs of life might go unnoticed. The basics of life can get overlooked when the mind is awash with grand ideas and great debates.
I had one such professor back in seminary days. The greatly gifted Richard Lovelace is known for many things, including his quite influential 1979 volume, Dynamics of Spiritual Life. Back in the late 80s. I took a class with him on the life and thought of the American theologian and pastor Jonathan Edwards at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston.
Lovelace could carry on lecturing for hours straight, armed simply with a few scraps of paper with some notes scribbled on them. Such was his phenomenal mind. But more than once he had to call his wife to discover where he was meant to be, or where he had left the car, and so on.
Having just had the joy of collecting 100 short quotes from the works of the superlative G. K. Chesterton, and then penning a second piece offering another 100 fav brief quotes, I am obviously a big fan of GKC. See them here:
https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/08/11/classic-one-liners-from-g-k-chesterton/
https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/08/15/another-100-classic-one-liners-from-g-k-chesterton/
Those who know much about him will know that he is another classic example of absent-mindedness and forgetfulness. As some of you recognise, when your mind spins around at a kazillion miles an hour, that just tends to happen.
On a much smaller scale, I too know a bit about this. As I recently posted on the social media: “Hmm, I was so deep in thought while walking Jilly dog that I forget to take her off the leash when we got to the park so she could have her usual little run. But given that I am always deep in thought, it is a wonder I have not forgotten so much else – like screwing my head on straight when I get up in the morning!”
But I can barely stand in the shadows of this larger-than-life figure. Both in his own autobiography, and in biographies of him penned by others, there are plenty of things that are said about all this. Let me appeal to just one biography which still may be the best one available. I refer to the 2011 biography Ian Ker wrote, published by Oxford University Press.
At 750 pages it covers a lot of territory – something that can be said literally about the tall and portly GKC. In a number of places Ker shares some anecdotes and examples of how this wayward genius operated. Like Lovelace, he also seldom remembered where his car had been left.
But let me simply share from one section of the book that speaks to this in some detail. The following comes from pages 93-99. Writes Ker: “He was conspicuous for three things: his dress including his sword-stick, his absent-mindedness, and his predilection for taking cabs, however unnecessarily and regardless of cost.”
One example of the last two items: “The story was told of him that he would take a cab from his home in Battersea to a Fleet Street newspaper office to claim money owed to him for an article, and then spend so much time talking to journalist friends that by the time he arrived back (in the same cab) at Battersea the fare practically came to the fee for the article that he had gone to collect.”
We know he wrote countless articles and essays. Says Ker: “Restaurants and pubs, in fact, not newspaper offices, were much more likely places to find Chesterton writing his articles.” As for his various eccentricities, Ker says this:
Chesterton was becoming a great London character like Dr Johnson. Unlike many eccentrics, he was well aware of his public image, but that does not necessarily mean that it was ‘put on’—although he no doubt enjoyed playing up to it to a certain extent. It is true that there was at least one contemporary who knew him well, Mildred Wain, who had her doubts. She used to meet Chesterton regularly in a café in Fleet Street before she got married when they were both students. Meeting another student there once, she observed Chesterton enter arguing with another man.
“They sat down at a table a short distance away and Gilbert ordered two poached eggs on toast and some coffee. They were brought to him in due course and he, apparently not noticing their arrival, continued to talk and argue, and, lifting his hand to emphasize some point, brought it down with great force on the edge of the plate and tipped the eggs right into his lap. He still continued talking and when the waitress came to him all he said was: ‘Will you please bring me two more poached eggs—I seem to have lost the others’.”
At the party celebrating her engagement to Waldo d’Avigdor, she discovered Chesterton in a distant corner of the house talking rapidly and walking up and down. She went up to him to say good night and found her sister sound asleep behind him. She had got bored with arguing and fallen asleep, but Chesterton continued perfectly happily, answering all his own questions. ‘You had to be careful not to give him an opening if you didn’t want him to talk. A chance remark would set him off for half an hour.’ Neither of these two stories necessarily suggests anything like cultivated eccentricity. What they do show is the sheer absent-mindedness of a mind totally detached from immediate practicalities and constantly engaged in thought—what Chesterton himself called ‘presence of mind on other things’—that bore fruit in a phenomenal amount of writing. Nor was there anything new about Chesterton’s extraordinary absent-mindedness: he had been noted for it even while still a schoolboy at St Paul’s, when he could scarcely have been accused of cultivating an image for publicity purposes. His insouciance about taxis was only an aspect of his absent-mindedness. As for his dress, Frances had merely chosen a simple costume that was likely to cause the least problems, as well as to accommodate his enormous size. The only deliberate eccentricity was the sword-stick that symbolized adventure and romance.
Like Churchill, he was a workaholic who usually had a glass in hand. Drinking and writing went together for GKC. Writes Ker:
No one can claim that Chesterton’s drinking habits were a cultivated eccentricity. Heavy drinking in the bars of Fleet Street went with the job. `Keith’ Jones herself, though a woman, joined in the drinking of her fellow male journalists. Chesterton would sit for hours in a wine bar opposite the Daily News with a bottle of burgundy. His brother Cecil described how he would ‘pour out conversation to anybody who happens be about. He talks, especially in argument, with powerful voice and gesture. He laughs at his own jokes loudly and with quite unaffected enjoyment.’ The brother noticed too how he would ‘take a cab halfway up a street, keep it waiting for an hour or so, and then drive halfway down the street again’. On one occasion, Cecil related, his brother met a friend in a bookshop opposite the Law Courts at one end of Fleet Street. A waiting cab then took them to a pub a few doors down, where they ordered a bottle of wine and talked for three-quarters of an hour while the cab waited. Finally, the cab took Chesterton to his destination, an office a few yards in the other direction, when the driver was probably given at least twice the proper fare.
Not surprisingly, Chesterton’s absent-mindedness included forgetting engagements. One evening in El Vino, ‘Keith’ Jones remembered him suddenly musing, ‘I oughtn’t to be here, I’m supposed to be speaking to the Literary Society at Bletchley—I should be speaking now!’ Even then there was time to order another glass of port. ‘Keith’ and Cecil hurried with him in a cab to Conrad Noel’s, the clergyman who had married him and Frances, where he was staying. On emerging from the bedroom he was sharing with Noel, he appeared wearing an evening dress coat far too small but without the trousers; he was still wearing the brown tweed plus fours in which he had entered the bedroom. Clearly, Chesterton explained, ‘some strange magic had been at work’: ‘Perhaps the Mesopotamian deacon staying at the flat had put a spell on him.’ Certainly, he had donned or attempted to don the required evening dress laid out on the bed he was sleeping on. Refusing to change again, he left in his cab for Bletchley. The return of Conrad Noel, who also needed to change into evening dress, revealed all: the wrong evening dress had been laid on the wrong bed. In his Autobiography Chesterton had a less bizarre version of the story: that he had merely made the excusable error of mistaking Noel’s black clerical trousers for his own evening trousers. Constantly writing not only in pubs with a bottle of Burgundy (his favourite drink) beside him, but also in cabs, buses, trains, and in the street, he was constantly preoccupied—’He was always working out something in his mind’—with the inevitable result that appointments were not kept—’and he frequently wrote to explain why he had failed to turn up’. He was certainly capable of eccentric behaviour that was without doubt beyond the imagination and invention of man—or of his own acting capabilities: ‘Once he called on a publisher at the exact hour agreed upon, but he spoilt the effect by handing the man a letter explaining elaborately why he could not keep the appointment.’ Indeed, his readiness to risk his life does not immediately suggest contrived eccentricity: ‘I have seen the traffic of Ludgate Circus held up for him, as he strolled by in cloak and sombrero like a brigand of Adelphi drama or a Spanish hidalgo by Velasquez, oblivious alike of critical bus-driver and wonder-struck multitude.’ And yet, in spite of his being ‘apparently oblivious of everything that passed before him’, his future secretary Dorothy Collins noticed, ‘really he was a much closer observer than most, and remembered what he had seen and what he had read’. But his memory was certainly not visual: ‘He always remembered what he had seen and those with whom he had talked, not so much by their faces as by their minds—for that is how he saw people.’
I urge you to grab Ker’s volume. It is a masterpiece. But if you prefer something slightly shorter, there is the 522-page work by Joseph Pearce: Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton (Ignatius, 2015). Those still wanting even shorter (and older) bios can see the ones I list in this article: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2011/01/24/notable-christians-g-k-chesterton/
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