The Man Who Was Thursday (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): A Nightmare

By G.K. Chesterton and Bruce F. Murphy

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare 1908 is the most renowned and critically acclaimed novel by the prolific G. K. Chesterton. Equal parts mystery, suspense story, allegory, and farce, it is considered a classic of the spy genre while at the same time almost constitutes a genre of its own. Each rereading of The Man Who Was Thursday

The hero, Gabriel Syme, is Chestertons ideal of the virtuous Common Man. He must infiltrate and try to thwart an anarchist cell, whose heart is the mysterious and ambiguous Sunday, man whose powers seem almost godlike. Symes mission lead him through the back ways of Victorian London and on a wild Chase through the French country-side, and adventure at once madcap, surreal, and cosmically important. More than just charming tale of Dickensian characters and a mysterious man who was supposed to be "Thursday," The Man Who Was Thursday asks the dark questions: Will the human race survive? It is a question as relevant at the start of the twenty-first century as it was at the beginning of the twentieth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411428188

G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English writer, philosopher and critic known for his creative wordplay. Born in London, Chesterton attended St. Paul’s School before enrolling in the Slade School of Fine Art at University College. His professional writing career began as a freelance critic where he focused on art and literature. He then ventured into fiction with his novels The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday as well as a series of stories featuring Father Brown.

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INTRODUCTION

G. K. CHESTERTON’S THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY: A NIGHTMARE (1908) is the most renowned and critically acclaimed novel by a very prolific author. Equal parts mystery, suspense story, allegory, and farce, it is considered a classic of the spy genre while at the same time almost constitutes a genre of its own. The Man Who Was Thursday has fascinated readers for nearly a hundred years now, largely because it does something that mysteries rarely do: It repays rereading, each time revealing new meanings and nuances, while its jokes never become stale. The hero, Gabriel Syme, is both a poet and Chesterton’s ideal of the virtuous Common Man. He must infiltrate and try to thwart an anarchist cell, at whose heart is the mysterious and ambiguous Sunday, a man whose powers seem almost godlike. Syme’s mission leads him through the back ways of Victorian London and on a wild chase through the French countryside, an adventure at once madcap, surreal, and cosmically important. Chesterton took a fledgling genre that mostly concerned the struggles of nation against nation and turned it into a parable about the fate of civilization itself. With his deeply Christian and philosophical turn of mind, Chesterton could not simply write a charming tale of suspense full of Dickensian characters and a mysterious man who was supposed to be Thursday. Rather, he imbued The Man Who Was Thursday with the ultimate suspense of the human race, and the darkest question of all: Will we survive? It is a question as relevant at the start of the twenty-first century as it was at the beginning of the twentieth.

Perhaps no other writer of his time so deserved the title of man of letters as Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936). Author of literally scores of books and countless articles, he was a playwright, poet, journalist, novelist, mystery writer, and biographer, among other things. Born to a comfortable middle-class family in London, Chesterton attended the Slade School of Art before devoting himself to writing and was a talented illustrator. His rise to fame during the period from the Boer War to World War I has been described as meteoric. Possessed not only of a brilliant mind and enormous gifts as a stylist, Chesterton had an almost unnatural ability to pour out material in finished form—his book on St. Thomas Aquinas, which a prominent scholar called without comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas, was actually dictated to a secretary in spare moments between other work. His enormous literary productivity brought on a mental and physical breakdown in 1914—the year when all his worst fears for Western civilization seemed to come true. Chesterton, who converted to Catholicism in 1922, upheld traditional Christian culture in lively public debates with such adversaries as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. He lectured in the United States during 1921 and caused a sensation, attracting both those with serious interest and gawkers who came to see this witty, Falstaffian, and notoriously unkempt figure. Chesterton died in 1936; his reputation waned after World War II, partly because of his acceptance of the anti-Semitic views most dispiritingly typified by his close friend, Hilaire Belloc. He is best known today for two works of fiction, The Man Who Was Thursday and his series of Father Brown detective stories. Ellery Queen ranked Father Brown as one of the three greatest fictional detectives of all time. The secret of the enduring popularity of Chesterton’s mystery stories is that they are so much more than mystery stories. Many mystery authors have tried to incorporate in their works an analysis of human character; only Chesterton was able to make it a vehicle for an inquiry into the nature of the divine. The same theme that dominates his non-fiction runs all through his fiction, namely, that there is a permanent human ideal that must not be either confused or destroyed.

Chesterton was born in one age and as an adult found himself in bitter conflict with another which was destined to replace it. His conservatism, however, is not the blinkered and mulish preference for the past over the present, but a philosophical concern for whether there will be a future. His tireless struggle against what he saw as growing chaos and disorder took a physical toll, resulting in periods of illness and exhaustion. Chesterton’s political views do not follow simple lines. He attacked the jingoism of British nationalism and favored Irish home rule. He supported World War I and believed that Germany had to be defeated to prevent the triumph of barbarism—the nightmare of a plot to destroy the world, which he had concocted only six years before in The Man Who Was Thursday, seemed to have become a reality.

Chesterton was a child of the Victorian period, which he defended against the modernists who saw it as narrow, repressive, and hypocritical. One of his reasons, psychologically at least, was because of his basically happy upbringing in a household that was far from the Victorian stereotype. Chesterton’s father was a surveyor who had inherited a family real estate business. His mother had a reputation for sparkling wit and was fond of holding parties, at which her wit was displayed. It is interesting how nearly Chesterton’s family and social background matches that of the Forsytes, the property-obsessed and imaginatively impoverished clan of the Forsyte Saga, a series of novels by Chesterton’s near-contemporary John Galsworthy (1867-1932). But in contrast with the Forsyte’s repressed and basically miserable existence—the more their wealth increases, the more their souls and their horizons shrink—the Chestertons used their ease to cultivate themselves. Gilbert’s father, Edward, was semi-retired because of a heart problem, and devoted his leisure time to reading, painting, and puppet theater. The children were encouraged to think for themselves and were not pressured to adapt to any orthodoxy in religion, politics, or even dress (Chesterton’s absent-mindedness and frequently disheveled appearance showed the influence of his mother). That he was raised in an intellectually permissive household may seem ironic, given that Chesterton later wrote a book that was called Orthodoxy, but in fact it underscores that his defense of Christian civilization was based on spontaneous faith and philosophical inquiry. It was a spirited commitment to ideas, not a rigid clinging to institutions. Chesterton demonstrated his own principle that the only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.

One of Chesterton’s biographers has written that he was above all things a great champion of Liberty, and his defense of orthodoxy is not to be confused with a defense of authority. He could have said of himself what he says so memorably of one of the characters in The Man Who Was Thursday: Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it. He was not, like Rudyard Kipling, a man who would condone anything the British empire did because he was British; rather, Chesterton condoned some things it did and not others because he was a philosopher and a Christian. For example, Chesterton had been active in literary circles in the years before the turn of the twentieth century but it was really his writings on the Boer War that brought him fame. In contrast to another mystery writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who got his knighthood for a book on the Boer War that justified the conflict, Chesterton denounced the war. He attacked a petty nationalism that prided itself on the country’s raw power and ability to bully other nations, rather than on its contribution to Western civilization. The defense of what is good in Western civilization both from its external opponents and from rotten tendencies within it was to be one of Chesterton’s major themes, including in The Man Who Was Thursday. But his failure to throw off some of its prejudices was to haunt him, ultimately overshadowing his achievements.

In the dedicatory poem to his friend and fellow mystery writer E. C. Bentley that prefaces The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton writes of old fears and the dark days of their youth, when colossal gods of shame threatened and a cloud was on the mind of men. The period of Chesterton’s youth coincided with the heyday of literary decadence, the increasing power and prestige of science, and terrible political violence. The Christian philosophy Chesterton prized was under assault from all sides. Pessimism and nihilism became fashionable in intellectual circles; Darwinism had been extrapolated into social Darwinism. Materialism had introduced incredible brutality into industrial society, and Realpolitik had devolved into the cynical pursuit of power and the gross excesses of imperialism.

The whole fin-de-siècle trauma is epitomized in The Man Who Was Thursday by anarchism. Chesterton’s youth also coincided with the high water mark of this political movement, which sought to overturn in their entirety the existing forms and institutions of society. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, anarchists carried out a series of assassinations of prominent European political figures, including Czar Alexander II of Russia, the empress Elizabeth of Austria, President Sadi Carnot of France, the prime minister of Spain, and king Umberto I of Italy. Chesterton’s view is summed up in the novel when he writes the modern world is full of lawless little men and mad little movements.

Chesterton is careful, however, to distinguish between the struggles of the oppressed who have legitimate aims, such as the Irish or the Russian serfs, and the modern revolt against order itself. Chesterton is interested in what might be called anarchy of thought—intellectual fanaticism and perversions of thinking that he saw as willfully opposed to common sense. The anarchist philosopher Nikolai Bakunin’s famous statement that the passion for destruction is also a creative passion is an actual example of the kinds of things Chesterton’s fictional anarchists say and think. One of his characters says that they intend to destroy not only the state, but also God and the idea of right and wrong itself (leading Syme to quip that maybe they should do away with right and left, too). In contrast, Chesterton extols the values of the common people and the poor, who in all those unclean streets were all clinging to the decencies and charities of Christendom. It is the intellectual class that he distrusts, and sees as most likely to succumb to irrationalism and lawlessness. Thus, the story opens in the apparently inoffensive and even a bit ridiculous London suburb he calls Saffron Park, the abode of artists and poets—yet it is here that the dark plot arises.

In the novel, a group of average Britons do battle with an unnatural and in some ways superhuman evil. Their nightmarish passage through the streets of London and beyond is reminiscent of medieval quest literature, but C. S. Lewis also compared it to the hellish vision of the state of modern man depicted by Franz Kafka in such works as The Trial. The style is neither realistic nor intends to be; rather, it is adapted to the depiction of spiritual and moral chaos that opens, like an abyss, under quaint and comfortable Saffron Park. Fantastic developments occur, as when a pursuit by hansom cab suddenly becomes a chase by fire engine, elephant, and balloon. A table revolves and then disappears through the floor to an underground arsenal, as in a James Bond adventure; a spymaster who never lets his face be seen gives his operatives directions in a completely darkened room. But in this novel things are never quite what they seem, or perhaps we should say they never seem to be quite what they are.

The spy genre had begun in earnest a few years before with Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1903). An enduring classic, Childers’ novel was written for a more concrete and mundane purpose: to show the danger of a German invasion of Britain. Writers like Max Pemberton, E. Phillips Oppenheim, and especially William LeQueux (who was a spy himself) had depicted agents battling attacks on Britain from every conceivable direction, including not only Germany but also Russia and even France. Among the stock elements of the spy story Chesterton used in The Man Who Was Thursday are the nerve-racking fear of the undercover agent, the breakneck chase, the evil genius, and the surprise ending. But the surprise that Chesterton has in mind is unlike anything else in genre fiction, and while there is a real threat that has to be foiled in the novel, there is a far more important metaphysical or spiritual threat that lies at the heart of the nightmare.

Probably no English writer since Samuel Johnson worked so hard at being quotable as G. K. Chesterton, and like Johnson, he did not have to work very hard. He had a natural talent for parallelism and balance in his phrasing, particularly in the statement of his famous paradoxes. Thus, in his essay The Optimist as Suicide, Chesterton wrote that Freethinkers are occasionally thoughtful, but never free, because the modern skeptical freethinker is forbidden to believe in miracles. Here, he uses a paradoxical statement to remind us that the emancipated thinker is free of everything except the form of thought that emancipated him. In The Man Who Was Thursday, he writes a paradox might wake men up to a neglected truth, and in a sense the book is one great philosophical paradox transported to the realm of fiction, a freewheeling nightmare whose purpose is to wake us up. Chesterton asks us for a moment to believe the impossible, in order to bring us back to what he conceives of as the real.

Although he came to identify it with St. Thomas Aquinas, Chesterton’s belief in an objective reality stemmed in the first place from his common sense and a natural delight in the physical world, which he himself viewed as like that of a child—hence his characteristic playfulness. When in an essay he writes Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling, he isn’t joking: Chesterton actually covered the walls of his study in brown paper so that he could draw whenever the whim took him. He saw modernity as not only remote from absolute truth, but remote from ordinary pleasure. Without access to the rich fantasy element of the childlike imagination, he could not have written The Man Who Was Thursday. Children combine a groundedness in the concrete with exhilarating flights of imagination, in a way that appears magical to adults. The nightmare of the novel is on one level a metaphor for modern subjectivism, which Chesterton believed had destroyed any sense of something solid and real existing apart from the self; modern philosophy had plunged the mind into abstraction and unreality. In contrast with the child’s mind, it had lost the connection to the concrete, and its imaginative flights were downward, into nihilism, self-hatred, and solipsism. The arch-villain of this development for Chesterton is Nietzsche, who is symbolized in the novel by the great German Nihilist philosopher, as Professor de Worms.

Chesterton’s work has largely gone out of fashion. His formal conversion to Catholicism may have rigidified his positions in some ways. Sometimes it seems that he felt obliged to defend not only the Church’s doctrines, but all its actions, and so we find him in his life of St. Francis of Assisi justifying the Crusades and, to an extent, perhaps the Inquisition. Even the Vatican no longer seems to agree with Chesterton; in 2000, the Pope apologized for wrongs the Church had done over the previous two millennia. And in a philosophical rather than theological sense, probably few today would agree with Hugh Kenner that Chesterton is not so much great because of his published achievement as great because he is right (the statement does, however, illustrate how writing about Chesterton tends itself to become Chestertonian). Still, Chesterton remains one of the great writers of the twentieth century, and although The Man Who Was Thursday reveals Chesterton’s religion on a deep level, it is not constrained by it. The book’s perennial popularity rests on its author’s inexhaustible wit and superbly readable style. The novel continues to speak to us about the modern predicament through the medium of the mystery and suspense story, raised to the level of art.

Bruce F. Murphy is the author of The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery (2001) and the editor of the fourth edition of Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1996). His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Paris Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly and other journals.

CHAPTER ONE

THE TWO POETS OF SAFFRON PARK

THE SUBURB OF SAFFRON PARK LAY ON THE SUNSET SIDE OF LONDON, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its skyline was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not artists, the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face—that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat—that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of