News & Comments

coni scandal of 1912, in which the families of Samuel and Isaacs

were implicated, and in the upshot of which his brother Cecil was
found guilty of criminal libel. Goaded by a mix of family loyalty
and disgust at plutocratic sharp practice, Gilbert Chesterton lost
his sense of proportion and treated this smelly little saga of politi-
cal crookery as though it were one of the turning points in English
history. “It is the fashion to divide recent history into pre-War and
post-War conditions,” he wrote in his Autobiography (1936). “I be-
lieve it is almost as essential to divide them into pre-Marconi and
post-Marconi days.” Even that statement, though, seems rather less
dotty in the light of recent banking scandals. 

Chesterton’s critics also single out a passage in The New Jeru-

salem (1920), in which he insisted that Jews, being of foreign ex-
traction, should resist adopting the trappings of English gentle-
men. This barb, of course, was directed as much against English
gentlemen as against Jews. Chesterton went on, though, to allow
his whimsy too free a rein. Let Jews serve in any post in the land,
he suggested, “but let there be one single clause bill [enacting] that
every Jew should be dressed as an Arab.” It was not to be expected
that this “quaint” image, as Chesterton described it, should escape
the censure of bien pensants in this comfortable post-Holocaust era,
when use of correct words has become so much more important
than doing the right thing. A lifetime of benediction and brilliance,
however, is not to be annulled by the occasional frivolous phrase.

A Preference for Torquemada

—  Another review of William Oddie’s Chesterton Biography,1 and of The

Man Who Was Thursday appeared in the April 9, 2009 issue of the
London Review of Books (www.lrb.co.uk). It was written by Michael
Wood, whose books include America in the Movies, The Magician’s
Doubts, The Road to Delphi and, most recently, Literature and the
Taste of Knowledge. He teaches English and comparative literature
at Princeton University.

225
 The Chesterton Review

“I have often had a fancy,” G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book

Ortho­doxy (1908), “for writing a romance about an English yachts-
man who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England
under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.”
The man would arrive, “armed to the teeth and talking by signs,”
and try to plant the British flag on the Brighton Pavilion. A little
later Chesterton says: “I am that man in a yacht. I discovered Eng-
land.” He likes this trope and returns to it in detail in The Everlast-
ing Man (1925), adding the variant story of the boy who couldn’t
recognise the exotic secret of his village until he got far enough away
from it. “That, I think, is a true picture of the progress of any re-
ally independent intelligence today.” Home is not only where the
heart is, it is our only chance of having a heart. Everything else is
an abstraction.

Only understanding this proposition “can we contrive to be at

once astonished at the world and yet at home in it”; realise the ex-
citement of the “pursuit of the obvious”; acknowledge that “ordi-
nary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they
are more extraordinary.” In Heretics (1905) Chesterton even talks
about “the ecstasy of being ordinary,” which seems to be going a
bit far, even for an ordinary man. The trouble with Kipling, we
learn in the same book, is that “he is a man of the world, with all
the narrowness that belongs to being imprisoned in that planet. He
knows England as an intelligent English gentleman knows Venice.”
Chesterton, of course, is not quite claiming to be ordinary, or to
have always been at home. That is the point of his fancy. He discov-
ered England by mistake, and discovered his mistake in the process,
along with Kipling’s narrowness and a host of other national fail-
ures. His highest praise for H. G. Wells is that “he has come to the
most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclu-
sion that the ordinary view is the right one.”

It is not Chesterton’s fault that his idea should have become so

popular with people who didn’t have to go to Oz to find out that
home was best, but there is something baffling in his insistence on it,
especially since its interest varies so vastly with its forms of expres-
sion. Astonishment at the world is surely an attractive proposition,
and so, in a more subtle way, is the pursuit of the obvious—as long

226
News & Comments

as one pursues rather than parading it. But the claim that ordinary
things are more valuable than extraordinary things is a mess; as is
Chesterton’s announcement, in his preface to Orthodoxy, that he is
seeking to offer “an explanation, not of whether the Christian faith
can be believed, but of how he personally came to believe it.” If he
has come to believe it, it can be believed—what further demonstra-
tion could we want? The question is whether it should be believed.
Chesterton thinks it should, but is trying not to insist and so falls
into a logical hole. The same goes for all ordinary things. If that are
extraordinary after all, we just return to where we started, only to
take another path: extraordinary things are more valuable, they just
aren’t the things we thought they were. But why do we have to “con-
trive” to be astonished as distinct from just being astonished?

Reading Chesterton over the last few weeks, I came to feel I

was living out a tiny equivalent of his romance, but in reverse. I set
off expecting to find a version of Englishness and ended up off the
coast of a new island, an angry, troubled spot dominated by a man
armed to the teeth and talking by signs. It’s true I was not properly
prepared for the journey. I had read Chesterton on Dickens and on
the Victorian age; read all the Father Brown stories; and read or
heard quoted many memorable epigrams. I had seen shadows of his
invention in Borges, snatches of his thought in T.S. Eliot, echoes of
his paradoxes in Larkin, and an allusion to his imagery in Nabokov
(I’m thinking of the “democracy of ghosts” in Pnin, which recalls
Chesterton’s definition of tradition as “the democracy of the dead”).
I thought, and still think, that his assessment of the English nine-
teenth century is about as shrewd as such things get: “It is no idle
Hibernianism to say that towards the end of the eighteenth century
the most important event in Eng­lish history happened in France. It
would seem still more perverse, yet it would be still more precise, to
say that the most im­portant event in English history was the event
that never happened at all—the Eng­lish Revolution on the lines of
the French Revolution.” But I had not encountered Chesterton the
Christian apologist, and I was, I confess, the man who had not read
The Man Who Was Thursday.

P. D. James, in her introduction to a se­lection of Father Brown sto-

ries, says: “Chest­erton never wrote an inelegant or clumsy sentence.”

227
 The Chesterton Review

Almost everyone reaches for the word “genial” when they talk
about him, and we are told that he loved to argue. All of these
assertions are true in part. There are no inelegant or clumsy sen-
tences in the Father Brown stories, and not many in the work
anywhere, although the opening sent­ence of The Man Who Was
Thursday would the be a candidate: “The suburb of Saffron Park
lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of
sunset.” Chester­ton could be very genial, as in the following won-
derful sentence from Heretics, where he pretends to see Naturalist
writers as cheer­ful because they were clear, and even uses the word
“genial”: “In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidi-
ties, when genial old Ibsen filled the world with wholesome joy,
and the kindly tales of the forgotten Emile Zola kept our firesides
merry and pure, it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misun-
derstood.” And even when he is not genial, he is very funny. “Mr.
Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who has never written
any poetry.” George Moore “is in a perpetual state of temporary
honesty.” Wells “is the only one of his many brilliant contempo-
raries who has not stop­ped growing. One can lie awake at night
and hear him grow.” As for arguing, Chest­erton and Shaw quar-
relled publicly for a lifetime without losing their respect for each
other. “I have never read a reply by Bernard Shaw,” Chesterton
wrote, “that did not leave me in a better and not a worse temper or
frame of mind.” One assumes Shaw felt the same.

But Chesterton would damn me for such equable concessions.

He tells us he doesn’t believe in partial truths; he can’t stand com­
promise or resignation. He is an absolutist, even when urging mod-
eration on us. It’s absolute moderation or nothing. And when he is
invading England, he is far from gen­ial. In a fine undated ballade,
he acknowl­edges that laughter is “terrible and true,/A thunder given
of God before the Fall,” but goes on to say that

perhaps the last most blessed isle

Is not of laughter; maybe, after all:
The happy people hardly ever smile.

The final line appears three times more as a refrain, following the
tradition of the ballade form, and the envoi reads:

228
News & Comments

Prince, at the ballet when you have a stall

You roll about with laughter all the while
The “Star” describes your laugh as genial:
The happy people hardly ever smile.

Fortunately, Chesterton doesn’t always practise the happiness he

preaches, but he does, at least in his High Christian mode, love
words like “fierce” and “furious,” and he delights in images of ir-
revocable violence. His joke about the guillotine (it knows where
to draw the line) is witty but disturb­ing, and his equation of Zola
with Torque­mada—no, his preference for Torquemada because in
his time “there was at least a sys­tem”—is outrageous. He regrets,
or pre­tends to, that millionaires and tyrants (the same thing in his
view) are not “publicly whipped in Westminster Abbey.” He has
some astonishingly uncharitable pages on suicide, and he reminds us
that “real love has always ended in bloodshed.” Yes, yes, he means
Christ’s love for us, and the giv­ing of his life for our sins; but a ter-
rorist could be forgiven for misunderstanding the proposition.

And in Orthodoxy at least, Chesterton doesn’t argue—The Ever-

lasting Man is more conciliatory, and more elementary. Chest­erton
thinks he may have taken his imitation of innocence too far, exagger-
ating “even my own ignorance” in the process. In the earlier book he
just fills the world with straw men and waits for them to fall down. If
the intellectual world of his day is a madhouse, as he repeatedly says
it is, and if every intellectual is mad in some way or other, then the
only sane people left are us: Chesterton and his readers, a cosy com-
pany of people who have got it right without leav­ing the home of our
received opinions. Of course, Chesterton is not saying the com­pany
is cosy. He is saying “there never was anything so perilous or so excit-
ing as ortho­doxy.” But his style makes clear that the per­ils and ex-
citements are in-house attractions, aspects of the scope of Christian
thought, not a sign of its engagement with other traditions.

Both optimists and pessimists, for in­stance, talk “raving non-

sense” because one group thinks the world “as good as it could be,”
and the other thinks it’s “as bad as it could be.” Leaving aside the
question of whether optimism and pessimism mean anything like
this, it’s clear what’s wrong with this kind of talk. The world could be

229
 The Chesterton Review

better and it could be worse. Accepting this state of affairs, though,

produces just the sort of decent stoicism Chesterton detests, and his
next move is really brilliant. It’s not that the world could be better or
worse. It is better and worse, fully fallen and perfectly redeemable.
We are to go at it with “a fierc­er delight and a fiercer discontent,”
and rather than deny optimism and pessimism, which is where his
logic seemed to be leading us, we are to seek both of them in their
extreme, irrational forms. One needs to be “a fanatical pessimist and
a fanatical optimist.”

There is an important truth in these claims. It is possible to be

passionately committed to traditional, indeed ancient views; not all
devotion and energy belong to the opposition. But the claims mis-
chievously disguise at least three other truths: that the opposition is
unlikely to be wholly mad or degenerate; that fanaticism is not such
a wonderful idea, even if it’s only a rhetorical gesture; and that if
I am told that there is a terrific adventure in believing what I have
always believed, I am more likely to slap myself on the back than go
out and fight a dragon.

The most attractive pages in Orthodoxy successfully combat this

manifest temptation. Chesterton declares war on all forms of belief
and unbelief that allow us to settle in on ourselves. He wants us to
seek a severe and outward-looking happiness, and we need to be
willing to pay for it. Indeed, pay­ing for it is an essential part of the
appeal. We are to live in the world by means of “a sort of sacred
thrift”: we should treat everything as if it had just been saved from
a shipwreck. Fairy tales preach “the Doctrine of Conditional Joy.”
There is always a pro­hibition, absolute and arbitrary. “The vision
always hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conced-
ed depend upon one small thing withheld ... an incomprehen­sible
happiness rests upon an incomprehen­sible condition.” This doctrine
may seem as perverse as it is familiar, and Proust and Freud would
surely see it as a means of securing ourselves against happiness
rather than arriving at it; but its power and pedigree are obvious.
And whatever else it does, it places the individual irrevocably among
other people and unmistakable material things. “Of all horrible reli-
gions the most horrible is the worship of the god within.” And if we
are to find ways of “creating life for the world,” Chesterton can tell

230
News & Comments

us in no uncertain terms what our end will be:

Then when this kindly world all round the man has been black-
ened our like a lie; when friends fade into ghosts, and the foun-
dations of the world fail; then when the man, believ­ing in noth-
ing and in no man, is alone in his own nightmare, then the great
individualistic motto shall be written over him in avenging irony.
The stars will be only dots in the black­ness of his own brain; his
mother’s face will be only a sketch from his own insane pencil
on the walls of his cell. But over his cell shall be written, with
dreadful truth, “He believes in himself.”

This is probably closer to Poe than to Thomas à Kempis, but it’s a

wonderful pas­sage and it allows us to find elsewhere what Chester-
ton found in Christianity. Truth is stranger than fiction, he says in
Heretics, “for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.”

William Oddie’s book is a painstaking and intelligent study of

the man who was not yet quite the Chesterton we have been looking
at. This early life is a neglected area in Chesterton studies, Oddie
tells us, and he found “existing biographies of little help”—with the
exception of Maisie Ward’s 1944 book. He is very good on the sci-
entific and theological contexts of the time, and he takes us right
to the threshold of Chester­ton’s new/old encounter with England,
or of his report on that encounter; tracing, as he says, “the process
of intellectual discov­ery which comes to a fairly clear terminus ad
quem in 1908 with Orthodoxy.” The bohem­ian Chesterton attends
St. Paul’s School, then the Slade School of Art and University Col­
lege, London; becomes a journalist, writes poems, gets into many
arguments, often with himself; writes books on Browning and Dick-
ens, writes The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and pursues the religious
controversies that lead him to Heretics and Orthodoxy. It’s worth
remembering that even when fully declared, his faith at this time is
very broadly Christian, a matter of the Incarnation and its conse-
quences. He joined the Roman Church only in 1922.

Oddie occasionally writes as if he had learned his logic from his

subject. “His childhood was not without its sorrows; it would not,
nevertheless, be wrong to describe it as a cloudlessly happy one.”
Because sorrows don’t cause clouds, or because we can call it what

231
 The Chesterton Review

we like? I find Oddie’s claim for Chesterton as a Victorian hiding be-

hind an Edwardian journalist mildly implausible, but then perhaps a
person who doesn’t care for sages anyway shouldn’t insist on having
an opinion on this matter. And I am fully persuaded by Oddie’s sug-
gestion that The Man Who Was Thursday, published only six months
before Orthodoxy, is an intimately “self-revealing” book, and by his
careful reading of that text. I found his comments on Orthodoxy very
helpful too, since he makes it clear that Chesterton, in what he him-
self calls “a sort of slovenly autobiography,” is playing an interesting
double game. These is “a process of multiple remembering,” “a con-
flation of the period recalled with the process of recalling it.”

Jonathan Lethem, in his very sharp intro­duction to a Modern
Library reprint of The Man Who Was Thursday, says the novel is
“far too personal and strange to parse as an al­legory of Chester-
ton’s Catholicism,” and he is right. Or rather, it is too personal and
strange to parse as a straightforward alleg­ory (if there is any such
thing). The chief protagonist, Gabriel Syme, is usually taken to rep-
resent Chesterton. He is, he says, “a poet of order,” even “a poet
of respectability”—surely a contradiction in terms in the turn of
the century London where the story is set, and the close equivalent
of a person who can find perils and excitements in old dogma. He
is also a policeman, but “not merely a detective who pretended to
be a poet; he was really a poet who had become a detective.” He is
a detective because he wants to defend the poetry of order against
the death-wish of anarchy. He gets himself elected to the Central
Anarchist Council, whose seven members are simply known as days
of the week (the Thursday slot has re­cently been vacated and he has
taken it), only to discover, in a very nicely paced seq­uence, that five
of his colleagues are police infiltrators, too, and that his sixth col-
league, the vast and unfathomable Sunday, is work­ing both for and
against the Anarchists.

Chesterton is more critical of Syme than he is of himself—or

than he is of himself as himself. Syme defends respectability “with
violence and exaggeration.” “He was one of those who are driven
... into too conserv­ative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most
revolutionists.” He “had to revolt into something,” Chesterton says,
“so he revolt­ed into the only thing left—sanity. But there was just

232
News & Comments

enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his pro-
test for com­mon sense a little too fierce to be sensible.” He is touchy
too, “a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil.” There
may be an element of self-congratulation here, but mostly Ches-
terton is refining his self­-portrait. And of course he has left other
self-portraits in the book. If he is the re­spectable Syme he is also (or
could have been, or used to be) the arch-anarchist Gregory, and he
is all of Syme’s colleagues on the a council too, or at least he knows
their fears: their shared fear of nihilism, and the particular fears of
the Professor (“the tyrannic accidents of nightmare”), the Doctor
(“the airless vacuum of science”), as well as those less closely de-
fined, of the Secretary, the Marquis, the tragic Polish exile.

The person in the novel Chesterton is not, and by design cannot

be, is the President, Sunday, the man who leads the others into terror-
ism and appoints them to hunt themselves down. When Syme finally
claims to understand what has been hap­pening to them all, to have
grasped the full meaning of the intricate conspiracy that has entan-
gled them—when he therefore comes closest to being the Chesterton
of Orthodoxy—the narrator of the novel pulls the rug from under the
poor fellow’s already slid­ing feet, and manages both to endorse the
message of the essay and provide a devast­ating critique of it.

Syme thinks Sunday’s scheme was an in­strument for making

them suffer, and for turning suffering into knowledge. “We have
been broken upon the wheel ... We have descended into hell.” Sun-
day’s face as­sumes “a strange smile,” and he cries out: “Have you
ever suffered?” Then the smiling face grows until it fills the sky, and
Syme faints. Just before he loses consciousness he seems “to hear a
distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard some-
where: “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of ?” The text is Mark
10:38; the context Christ’s answer to the request of James and John
that they may sit with him in glory. He says the seats in glory are not
for him to give, but also, rather forbiddingly, that they will indeed
get to drink of the cup he drinks of. In the secular framework of
the novel. though, the voice is surely saying that Sunday is the only
man of sorrows, that no suffering is like his: that Syme and his col-
leagues haven’t even started to know anything about suffering. This
confirms much of the argument about mystery and awe to be found

233
 The Chesterton Review

in Orthodoxy; but it also makes Christ himself a sort of cipher, the

mere measure of everything we don’t know about pain. There are
many ways of learning such modesty, and it’s not at all clear that
orthodoxy is the best place to begin.

Chesterton’s subtitle for the novel is “A Nightmare,” and with

hindsight we can see the genres he is skirting. “Not quite a pol­
itical dream,” Kingsley Amis said, “nor a metaphysical thriller, nor
a comic joke in the form of spy novel, but it is something of all
three.” Lethem adds that the book is “not quite a roman noir nor a
simplistic religious allegory,” and thinks it is “much too com­plete
and legible to be a nightmare, and really, too happy.” It starts out
chatty and quaint and ends with an awakening from a bad dream. It
has many twists and surprises, a little preaching here and there, and
some great grim jokes: “Murderers respect human life; they merely
wish to attain a greater fullness of human life by the sacrifice of
what seem to them to be lesser lives.” But above all it has three se-
quences of especial brilliance and edginess, which point us to a cer-
tain complicated conclusion.

The first concerns the chase of Syme by the infirm and elderly
Professor de Worms, whom Syme at this stage still believes to be
an anarchist. The Professor moves “slowly and painfully,” or seems
to, and yet manages instantly to appear wherever Syme goes. Syme
walks through a snowy London and finds the Professor standing in
front of him, staring at a shop window. Syme wanders off, takes vari-
ous streets at random and has lunch at a restaurant. As he leaves he
sees the Professor sitting there. Now Syme races away, but as soon as
he stops, sure of having shaken off his pursuer, the Professor shows
up. Syme runs for a bus, knowing the ancient Professor can’t poss­
ibly compete with such speed. As he reaches the top deck and turns
round, the Professor is climbing the stairs. The chase has several
more episodes before Syme stops running. The plot point here is that
the Professor is also a policeman, not the terrible agent of the Anar-
chists’ Council. But the magical, impossible effect of his never failing
pre­sence becomes frightening in its own right, whoever he is.

Later in the novel, when the policemen have learned that they are
all policemen, they become convinced that Sunday, known to them

234
News & Comments

at this stage only as the evil President, is taking over the world (“he
has bought every trust, he has captured every cable, he has control
of every railway line”), and one by one their real and symbolic hopes
die: the noble peasant, the decent doctor, the local police, ordinary
people themselves, all gone over to the dark side. “We are the last of
mankind,” one of our heroes says. Then it turns out that this gang
of others is just an aggregation of good guys, convinced that our
men are the anarchists they are pretending to be. Again, the harmless
resolution makes the story more disturbing, rather than less.

And finally, when the six detectives con­front Sunday, he dashes

off, leading them on a fabulous dance across London and the Eng-
lish countryside, in which he uses as transport a horse and cab, a
fire engine, an elephant and a balloon, flinging enigmatic crumpled
messages to his pursuers as he repeatedly gets away from them. They
don’t catch him, he just reaches his country estate and invites them
in, and here there is an­other complete change of tone. This patch of
story, although it describes a chase, creates a sense of wild freedom,
of innoc­ent anarchy: let’s say, something in the line of Lewis Car-
roll, which is quite differ­ent from the oppression created by the ever-
appearing Professor, which is different again from the apocalyptic
semblance of the victory of evil.

In all three cases, though, the ordinary world is transfigured

or abandoned, and if the orthodox Chesterton might suggest this
was his way of showing us how extraord­inary the ordinary can be,
Chesterton the novelist would surely be happy to say it re­veals the
sheer fragility of ordinariness. “It is an act of faith to assert that our
thoughts have any relation to reality at all,” he says in a reckless mo-
ment in Orthodoxy. It is: an act of faith we make every day, whatever
our theories about the practice. The ubiquitous Professor, the world
gone bad and the evil President turned into a cosmic joker are all im-
ages of how it feels to need such faith and to make bad connections,
or to fail to connect. The world deceives us or escapes us, and at this
point we have to find our own way out of the not quite nightmare.

1 W. Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC

1874–1908 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008)

235