The Man Who Was Thursday : and Related Pieces (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

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  Introduction, Note on Text, Explanatory Notes © Stephen Medcalf 1996

  Select Bibliography © Bernard Bergonzi 1994, 1996

  Chronology © D. J. Conlon 1987

  First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1996

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874-1936.

  The man who was Thursday / G. K. Chesterton ; edited with an

  introduction by Stephen Medcalf.

  The world’s classics

  Includes bibliographical references.

  I. Medcalf, Stephen, 1936-. II. Title. III. Series.

  PR4453.C4M4 1996 823'.912-dc20 95-52556

  ISBN 0-19-282359-0 (pbk.)

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by Graphicraft Typesetters Ltd., Hong Kong

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  Aylesbury, Bucks.

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

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  THE WORLD’S CLASSICS

  G. K. CHESTERTON

  The Man Who Was Thursday

  and Related Pieces

  Edited with an Introduction by

  STEPHEN MEDCALF

  THE WORLD’S CLASSICS

  THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

  G. K. CHESTERTON (1874–1936) was born in Kensington, West London, the son of an estate agent. He was educated at St Paul’s School and the Slade School of Art, and became a professional writer in his twenties. He worked in all literary genres, thinking of himself at first as primarily a poet, but soon as a journalist. His most ambitious poem is The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), but many shorter ones—‘Lepanto’, ‘The Donkey’, ‘The Rolling English Road’—remain loved. His enormous output of essays is still being collected into book form: the early Tremendous Trifles (1909) perhaps contains the best. Of his literary criticism Charles Dickens (1906) is commonly thought to remain the best study of Dickens. He is most famous as a fiction writer for his stories about the priest-detective Father Brown, but his longer romances, such as The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and Manalive (1912), are equally good, while if a single book can claim to be his masterpiece, it is probably The Man Who Was Thursday (1908).

  After being an agnostic in his youth Chesterton accepted the truth of Christianity, and argued for it in many of his books, implicitly in Heretics (1905) and explicitly in Orthodoxy (1908) and its sequel The Everlasting Man (1925); St Thomas Aquinas (1933) is important both as an exposition of his own thought and as the best short account of Thomism.

  STEPHEN MEDCALF is Reader in English in the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex. He has written widely on English literature, particularly on its relations with Greek and Latin literature and on the Middle Ages, and has edited Poems for all Purposes: The Selected Poems of G. K. Chesterton (1994).

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I should like to thank, for help with the notes and Introduction, Professors Margaret McGowan, Edward Timms, and Denis Conlon, William Wyndham, Caroline Wilson, Carol Wright Smith, Aidan Mackey, Astrid Diener, Francesca Murphy, and the staffs of the British Library Manuscript Room and Oxford University Press.

  I dedicate this edition to the memory of my father, who introduced me to The Man Who Was Thursday.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of G. K. Chesterton

  Maps of London

  THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

  A PICTURE OF TUESDAY

  THE BOOK OF JOB

  THE DIABOLIST

  Explanatory Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  (Among other things, The Man Who Was Thursday is a detective story. For this and other reasons, hardly any book gains more at first reading from knowing nothing about how it works out. Readers coming freshly to it may prefer to read the Introduction after the novel itself.)

  I

  G. K. Chesterton subtitled The Man Who Was Thursday ‘A Nightmare’, but it resists all classification, even that. Is there any other book which has quite its iridescent shifts of emotional colour, from what he would have called ‘jollity’, to outright terror or hints of some extraordinary metaphysical vision? It has the excitement, narrative mystery, and speed of a detective novel, and at least one quality of a poem as well, imagery that possesses the memory.

  As a detective novel, it comes from the same context, both in fiction and in reality, as its near contemporary, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: that is, the late-Victorian and Edwardian London of anarchist conspiracies and bomb outrages. The Secret Agent had its origin in the accident of a man’s blowing himself to pieces with his own bomb in Greenwich Park in 1894, and the consequent remark of a friend of Conrad’s: ‘Oh, that fellow was half an idiot. His sister committed suicide afterwards.’ The protagonist of Conrad’s story, who is responsible for sending the half-idiot on his mission, is the sister’s husband, a double-agent and agent provocateur who has worked his way into the International Red Committee. The mental eccentricities of the de
legates of the committee are expressed in physical grotesqueries, and Conrad sets both this world of near madmen, and the smaller one of intense family tragedy, against the deeply felt intention of the London police to preserve the peace of the mass of ordinary, decent people.

  It is possible that Chesterton knew this story, which was originally published at the turn of 1906/7 in the American Ridgway’s Magazine, though its publication in England in September 1907 seems too late to have influenced The Man Who Was Thursday, of which a small pilot edition was issued before the end of that year. Or possibly the two authors conversed about their projects at, for example, Edmund Gosse’s Tuesday literary luncheons, which they both attended.

  At any rate, the first third of The Man Who Was Thursday shares Conrad’s themes, though in a more various and more genial atmosphere. It opens at a garden party in an aesthetic community which lightly caricatures Bedford Park in West London, where a poet, Lucian Gregory, who fashionably supports anarchism as the true poets’ creed, is attacked by a newly arrived poet, Gabriel Syme, who disconcertingly supports order, and suggests that Gregory’s anarchism is only a pose. When they part, Syme reassures Gregory’s sister Rosamund that her brother would never actually throw a bomb, and begins to fall in love with her. After the party, Gregory, to prove his sincerity, takes Syme, under a vow of secrecy, to a meeting of anarchists who are about to elect Gregory himself under the pseudonym of Thursday to the Central European Council of seven anarchs, each named after a day of the week. Syme reveals to Gregory, equally under a vow of secrecy, that he is a police detective, and Gregory, attempting in his speech of candidature to mislead Syme about the aims of the society, so overreaches himself as to enable Syme to be elected Thursday. Syme goes to meet his six colleagues at breakfast in Leicester Square, and there, at the Feast of Fear, is terrified by their appearance of having, each in his own way, passed outside humanity: Monday, the intensely ascetic Secretary with a crooked smile; Tuesday, the barbaric Slav Gogol; Wednesday, the Orientally cruel-seeming French Marquis de St Eustache; Friday, the senile German nihilist Professor de Worms; Saturday, Dr Bull, the hygienic young scientist whose energetic health is made into nightmare by black spectacles; and dominating them all, their monstrous and physically gigantic President Sunday. Syme is sustained only by his sense that he is the representative of common and kindly people in the streets.

  The series of pursuits and unmaskings which constitutes the middle of the book will be dealt with later. It culminates in an apocalyptic second feast, at the house of Sunday, in which the seven councillors appear as the seven days of creation and Gregory comes among them as the very spirit of destruction. But the book ends with Syme walking at dawn through West London with Gregory to meet Rosamund, and since we have been told that her red hair has run through all that happened, it would be possible to interpret the adventure psychoanalytically, with its alternating awarenesses of loneliness and companionship, as a dream about Syme’s falling in love with her.

  Rosamund’s hair, and the qualities of the biblical days of Creation are among the images which make the novel work like a poem. Apart from these, the imagery’s power is greatest where it is associated with the novel’s sense of London, at once topographical, exact, and symbolic. Some of this sense is of its period: for example, that a girl with gold-red hair in the artistic suburb of Bedford Park should be part of a dispute about poetry, love, and revolutionary action both actually in the meeting of W. B. Yeats with Maud Gonne in 1889 and in the ‘Saffron Park’ of the novel’s opening chapter. But London becomes both the symbol of the modern city in general and, as is suggested in the introductory verses, a modern version of John Bunyan’s allegorical city of Mansoul. It becomes powerfully prophetic. I once heard an elderly man recall the blitz of 1940. ‘Every morning you’d look up at the dome of St Paul’s to see if it was still there, and you’d think “That’s all right”.’ It was like an echo of the detective Syme’s flight in the novel from Professor de Worms when he sees the dome, ball, and cross of St Paul’s picked out in snow against a smoky and sinister sunset. ‘The devils might have captured heaven, but they had not yet captured the cross.’

  In the middle of the Edwardian period, when The Man Who Was Thursday was published, H. G. Wells’s vision of St Paul’s would have seemed more natural, in the voyage down the Thames at the end of Tono-Bungay (1909)—‘soaring up, hanging in the sky over a rude tumult of warehouses, over a jostling competition of traders, irrelevantly beautiful and altogether remote, St Paul’s!… it has never been overthrown, never disavowed, only the tall warehouses and all the roar of traffic have forgotten it, everyone has forgotten it…”1 But it was Chesterton’s vision of St Paul’s as a symbol of heroism in a modern city which has become an abyss of nightmare that was genuinely prophetic.

  The reason for the book’s prophetic quality is perhaps that it draws on a number of contrasting phases, representative of the movements which formed the twentieth-century world, in Chesterton’s life between 1892 and 1907. There were the doubts and fears of the end of his time at St Paul’s School in 1892; the ‘maddening horror of unreality’ which descended on him while he was at the Slade School of Art between 1892 and 1894; the beginning of his emergence from that phase into something like traditional orthodoxy in morals and religion, and the brief mystic exaltation which was part of this emergence; the ten years or so of consolidation of what he had found, and his movement towards becoming a Christian under the influence of Frances Blogg, who married him in 1901; and perhaps the suicide of her brother Knollys in 1906 and its effect on her, which may have been one of the causes which finally made him relive the whole sequence as a kind of allegory in writing the novel, probably in 1907.

  The broad outline of this sequence was not at all peculiar to Chesterton. Sir Robert Ensor, in the 1870–1914 volume of the Oxford History of England, recommends the novel’s introductory poem as ‘a capital description of the contrast’ between the young men of 1885–95 who thought of themselves as fin de siècle, and the reaction against their mood of the young men of 1895–1905.2 But the range of Chesterton’s special experiences, the mental energy with which he encountered them, and the sheer sanity which he achieved, issue in a book whose quality Franz Kafka has best described: ‘He is so jolly’, Kafka said, ‘that one could almost believe that he has found God.’

  Gustav Janouch, who had elicited the remark by asking Kafka what he thought of The Man Who Was Thursday and the statement of belief, Orthodoxy, which Chesterton published later in the same year, was puzzled, and asked if Kafka thought laughter was a sign of religiousness. ‘Not always’, said Kafka. ‘But in a time as Godless as this, one has to be jolly … This is how one takes the ground away from under despair.’ Janouch objected that a forced jollity is sadder than an openly acknowledged sadness. Kafka, acknowledging this, said nevertheless that ‘sadness cannot see beyond itself. And it’s entirely a matter of seeing beyond, of hope, of moving on…’3 Chesterton, in the notebooks he kept in the mid-1890s, says some strikingly similar things. For example,

  It is not a question of Theology,

  It is a question of whether, placed as sentinel of an unknown

  watch, you will whistle or not.4

  He enlarges the image of a soldier on guard in another note, in which he says that a Christian is one who, ‘if there were no god, no Christ, no immortality, could declare that he loved and would love … it is such giants as these that form the bodyguard of the Lord… [who could] if need be, be the only god in a godless cosmos.’5 This imagination of the bodyguard of God, who would exist even if God did not, is a favourite one in Chesterton’s early work, and is still present in The Man Who Was Thursday, as when Syme feels that even if the devils had captured heaven his allegiance would still be to the cross. Syme, however, is not a soldier, but a police detective, indeed a double-agent. For the novel is, as Chesterton’s brother Cecil described it in his G. K. Chesterton: A Criticism published later in the same year (1908), ‘a detective story in which t
he criminal to be hunted and brought to bay is—God’.6 It reflects Chesterton’s own hunt for God, to which we now turn.

  Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who dedicated his classic detective story Trent’s Last Case to Chesterton in 1913 and, while still at St Paul’s School, invented and shared with him the writing of a classic form of comic verse, the clerihew, shared also with him in the doubts and fears of the early 1890s. In the poem dedicating The Man Who Was Thursday to Bentley, Chesterton pictures the two of them in variant images: of the sentinel who whistles on duty, of children building sand-castles against a bitter sea, of fools whose bells are heard when church bells are silent.

  In the same poem he implies that they learnt the philosophy of the sentinel in an unknown universe largely from Robert Louis Stevenson and Walt Whitman—from Stevenson the understanding ‘that we must worship good for its own value and beauty, without any reference whatever to victory or failure in space and time’, and that indeed ‘the stars in their courses fight against virtue, that humanity is in its nature a forlorn hope’7—from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, that ‘Real men were greater than gods’.8

  But these two giants had much to fight against in Chesterton’s mind. Studying art at the Slade School, he passed through a black despair which seems to have involved sadistic fantasy, a fascination with evil, and a vertiginous movement towards solipsism, a pathological fear that he might find that the existence of the whole world depended on him. This despair was overshadowed by the prevalent philosophy of the time, the pessimistic doctrine of Arthur Schopenhauer that the world of experience is simply the objectification of a universal blind will to life, fighting against itself in its innumerable manifestations. Chesterton’s fullest account of its ‘positive pessimism and materialism’ is in the foreword he wrote for his sister-in-law Ada Chesterton’s dramatization of The Man Who Was Thursday in 1926: