The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

Chestertober, my informal, monthlong exploration of GK Chesterton’s fiction, concludes with his best novel and the one that has always been my favorite: The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare.

Where to begin? I think with a favorite line from Flannery O’Connor, who once wrote that “A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and it continues to escape you.” Any time I reflect on that line, this is one of the few books that comes to mind, vividly and specifically.

The Man Who Was Thursday is Gabriel Syme, an English poet who, when the novel begins, is at a garden party in a fashionable London suburb. There he finds himself in conversation with the beautiful Rosamund and her testy brother Lucian, who, like Syme, is a poet. He takes himself dreadfully seriously and the puckish Syme can’t resist goading him. Finally, dared to prove that he really means what he says in his nihilistic modernist poetry, Lucian reveals that he is an anarchist. He invites Syme to a meeting of his anarchist terrorist cell that very night.

“Your offer,” Syme says, “is too idiotic to refuse.”

Syme and Lucian arrive early and, just before the others enter, Syme repays Lucian for his dangerous revelation with one of his own—he is an undercover cop.

In a masterfully suspenseful scene, Lucian, who is nominated for a position on the supreme anarchist council under the codename Thursday, attempts to downplay the violence of their group. Syme denounces him—the path to success among radicals—and is elected the new Thursday, at which point he is whisked downriver to Westminster. There, at a luxurious breakfast on a balcony overlooking Leicester Square, Syme meets the five other members of the council and the man behind them all, Sunday.

The other members—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday—are all grotesques. One is a cadaverous German professor named de Worms, another a crooked French aristocrat, another, one Dr Bull, a man who grins ominously from behind opaque sunglasses. But their leader is the most frightening of all. Sunday, an enormous man, a giant who fills Syme’s senses with his overpowering presence, announces that he has uncovered a spy among their number. Syme thinks he has failed just as he’s begun, but it turns out to be one of the other members, a Pole named Gogol who tears off his wig and beard to reveal a Cockney policeman underneath. After threatening Gogol with death, Sunday sends him on his way.

Sunday then reveals the council’s plot: the Tsar is en route to Paris for a meeting with the President of France. Wednesday, the French marquis, is to blow them up with a bomb when they meet in three days. Syme’s goals at this point become clear: stop the assassination and bring down Sunday—the former because he is a policeman, the latter because Sunday terrifies him.

But as Syme leaves Leicester Square he discerns that he is being followed. After failing to elude his tail, he turns and confronts him. It is Friday, the elderly Professor de Worms, who insistently asks whether Syme is a policeman. When Syme finally denies it, the professor is crestfallen: “‘That’s a pity,’ he said, ‘because I am.’”

With astonishment and frustration, Syme and Professor de Worms realize that three of the seven anarchists at the council meeting were actually undercover detectives. Only their ignorance of the fact prevented them from moving against Sunday on the spot. They determine to stop Sunday’s plot together by forcing Saturday, Dr Bull, to reveal the marquis’s plans for carrying out the bombing. Once they find and interrogate the inscrutable Dr Bull, a scene in which the hapless Syme and Professor de Worms struggle to break through the man’s defenses, it turns out that he, too, is a policeman.

From this point on, the three race to cross the Channel and find and stop the marquis—who turns out to be a policeman.

One by one, every member of the supreme anarchist council, the organization working to overthrow the entire world, has been revealed to be an undercover agent of the forces of law and order. And one by one, each reveals that he was recruited by the same man—a Scotland Yard official who questioned them in a completely darkened room in which, despite their inability to see him, they felt awed and overpowered by his presence. Each has derived an extra measure of strength for his work from remembering that interview. Each wants to please their unseen boss by defeating Sunday.

After repeatedly cheating death by fighting a duel against an expert swordsman and fleeing a zombie-like mob in northern France, Syme and his allies, eventually including Gogol and the menacing council secretary, who is second only to Sunday himself, decide to turn the tables on Sunday by returning to England and confronting him.

“This is more cheerful,” said Dr. Bull; “we are six men going to ask one man what he means.”

“I think it is a bit queerer than that,” said Syme. “I think it is six men going to ask one man what they mean.”

What they discover defies expectations or explanation.

“A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and it continues to escape you.”

— Flannery O'Connor

Likewise, The Man Who Was Thursday defies easy summary or explanation. It’s hard to describe the plot without giving too much away, but I’ve tried to avoid spoiling important episodes, major plot points, and most especially the ending. It’s also hard to describe, period. See again that quotation from Flannery O’Connor.

A good place to begin is that subtitle: A Nightmare. The subtitle, as I noted earlier this month, is easy to overlook, especially once one has started reading, but important for both stylistic and thematic reasons.

Artistically, Chesterton’s most effective tool in establishing a nightmare feeling, and the one that sets The Man Who Was Thursday most clearly apart from all of his other fiction, is pacing. This novel maintains a breakneck speed that creates a sense of barely controlled panic as crisis flows into crisis and surprise piles upon surprise. There is no lag or dull spot and Chesterton metes out his surprises and twists expertly. Kingsley Amis, in a line commonly reprinted as a blurb on paperback copies, called The Man Who Was Thursday “the most thrilling book I have ever read.” High praise, and well earned.

The book’s atmosphere and tone are also crucial. Chesterton evokes better and more subtly than any other writer the feeling of being in a nightmare. Anyone who has dreamt of being chased will know the feeling. Over and over again, Syme is followed or chased by enemies of obscure purpose who always keep up with him no matter how hard he strives to get away. And, as in a dream, the familiar—Chesterton, a lifelong Cockney, sets the first half of the book in a believable and realistic London—mutates almost imperceptibly. Under the influence of this paranoia, which prefigures that of the political thrillers of John Buchan and his successors, home becomes a foreign battlefield, nothing appears quite right, and the human face and form both prove horrifyingly changeable.

But alongside the pursuit and paranoia of the nightmare is the reversal. Enemies turn out to be allies, being chased turns into chasing, disguises do not conceal, and, in the climax, the villain flees his accusers only to welcome them. The reversal, the inversion, the topsy-turvy turning of the world on its head—this is one of Chesterton’s recurring motifs and the great load-bearing structure of this novel.

It is also the key to Sunday, who is both a threat and the solution to the threat, both feared and trusted, both hated and loved, both a destroyer of the world and its creator and preserver.

I can say little more without revealing too much. The Man Who Was Thursday can be described, even spoiled, but must be read. It has to be dreamt.

When Chesterton published this book in 1908, he had taken a live issue, the waves of anarchist terrorism and assassination in both Europe and America at that time, and used it to explore doubt and despair and madness. The plot, in a way hard to explain but easy to describe, provides an answer by rejecting the question. On this read-through, as I read the novel’s concluding scenes, with Sunday and the six policemen of his council reunited, I thought of a passage from Chesterton’s “Introduction to the Book of Job” in which Chesterton describes how Job, after all his questions, finds himself

suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

Chesterton’s message is all the more powerful because, unlike some of the other novels we’ve read this month, it is never made explicit, much less preached.

I’ve read elsewhere that readers wrote to Chesterton to tell him that The Man Who Was Thursday had saved them from despair. I can believe it. This time through, my fourth or fifth in about fifteen years, I finished it feeling steadied and content, something I had not expected to get out of this rereading. I finally understood. The Man Who Was Thursday is not just witty, surrealist fun and genuinely thrilling espionage action, it is an allegory that strikes to the heart through the imagination.

Our world is no more settled or peaceful than it was in Chesterton’s time. If you’re feeling that, especially if you’re feeling that right now because of the forces at work to destroy civilization—whichever forces you think they might be—The Man Who Was Thursday may be the nightmare you need. A paradox worthy of its author.

GKC and me

Last week Paul Kingsnorth, a writer I’ve enjoyed and admired since reading his experimental historical novel The Wake almost a decade ago, posted an appreciation of Chesterton and The Everlasting Man on his Substack. The Everlasting Man vies with Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday as my favorite Chesterton book so I was interested in Kingsnorth’s thoughts, but it’s his introduction, in which he describes how he came to read Chesterton, that I found most arresting.

Briefly, Kingsnorth discovered Chesterton almost by accident as a godless environmental activist, finding in his work—beginning with The Napoleon of Notting Hill—a salve for the “push-and-pull of apparently conflicting tendencies and views” inside himself. He learned to love Chesterton for his localism and rejection of both socialism and capitalism but had no time for Chesterton’s Christianity. Only after his own conversion did he find that it was Chesterton’s Christianity that undergirded and gave shape to the rest.

Though the specifics are different, the trajectory of Kingsnorth’s story resonates with me—as does the feeling that Chesterton was, at first, a private discovery: “I liked G. K. Chesterton before anyone else did.”

My first GKC—The paperback reprint of Orthodoxy that I read in college

My own story with Chesterton begins, like I suspect many people’s does, with CS Lewis. I started reading Lewis as a freshman in college and somehow became aware of Chesterton as an influence on him. When I stumbled onto an Image paperback of Orthodoxy in Barnes and Noble one day as a sophomore or junior, I snapped it up. At some point I bought matching paperbacks of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox. I still have all three.

I ended up reading Orthodoxy the same summer I took my deep dive into the Icelandic sagas, the reading of which resulted in No Snakes in Iceland a few years later—that was one formative summer—and read the other two as a burgeoning medievalist sometime before I graduated.

At Clemson I dug into The Everlasting Man, which I even managed to work into my master’s thesis, and from there I read everything else I could get my hands on—What’s Wrong with the World, Heretics, Eugenics and Other Evils, Magic, A Short History of England, Charles Dickens, The Ballad of the White Horse, the Autobiography, Father Brown, and criticism and essays galore. Chesterton’s work startled, amused, confused, and stretched me. I marveled at his range. I collected quotations by the bushel. I remember testing the longsuffering of a friend by texting—in the primordial texting days, with only a ten-digit keypad to type on—a whole paragraph of Eugenics and Other Evils during an argument.

Like Gabriel Syme in The Man Who Was Thursday, I had deeply felt but essentially shapeless and purposeless convictions in college, and the chaotic environment of opinion and argument into which I was thrust after a pretty tranquil upbringing as well as personal upheaval in grad school proved difficult for me. Lewis helped over those years, as did Peter Kreeft. Chesterton continued their work and challenged me even more than they did. He tested many of my assumptions, forcing me to rethink or abandon some and affirming and reinforcing others. He helped give my beliefs a consistent shape. It took years for me to recognize just how much he changed me.

Only much, much later did I become aware of the subculture—or, when I’m feeling less charitable, the industry—that has grown up around Chesterton. And by then that world’s Chesterton didn’t feel much like the Chesterton I had sat at the feet of for a decade. Kingsnorth nods unmistakably toward the kind of Chesterton cosplayer I’m thinking of. I’m not knocking those Chesterton fans—I’m glad he still has enough readers to keep his books in print—but I feel like we’re adoring different Chestertons. Theirs is all tweedy whimsy and cigar smoke and strained cheerfulness and the same endlessly repeated decontextualized quotations and really bad attempts to write like Chesterton. (Don’t attempt to write like him, ever.) Their Chesterton strikes me as a cartoon, a simplification, without the thread of darkness and lifelong self-examination running through the real man.

And yet, their Chesterton is present in the real Chesterton. He contains multitudes. Like the undercover detectives in The Man Who Was Thursday, we’re all pursuing the same gigantic, surprising, seemingly unknowable man, and there is healthy unity in that. As Kingsnorth puts it, “I don’t resent their incursion on my turf, though. Indeed, I welcome them into the fold of true believers.”

But that feeling of difference and my natural un-clubbableness has kept Chesterton a somewhat private love. Which has, with a completely appropriate sense of paradox, made it that much better when I discover that a new acquaintance is also a fan. To bring Lewis back in, he wrote that “[t]he typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too?’” That feeling is a joy when shared with anyone who stumbled into Chesterton the way I did, and cherishes his work the way I do.

I greatly enjoyed getting Kingsnorth’s perspective, especially his story. You can read all of his reflections on GKC as well as his takeaways from The Everlasting Man here. You can read his conversion story, which came as a great and welcome surprise to me when I stumbled across it, at First Things here.

Chestertober concludes later this week with The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. The subtitle is important. Stay tuned for that.

The Flying Inn

When I began this monthlong celebration of Chesterton’s fiction with his first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, I noted that the novel balances his storytelling capabilities and his love of ideas in combat perfectly, unlike some of his other fiction in which the ideas drown the narrative. Today Chestertober enters its final week with a museum-quality example of a Chesterton story overpowered by its ideas, the 1914 satire The Flying Inn.

Set in the near future, The Flying Inn begins with a peace settlement between Britain and her allies and the Ottoman Empire at the end of a long war. Though presented as a treaty among equals, it soon becomes clear that the Turks have had the better of the agreement, as the treaty obligates the British to abide by Muslim religious laws—specifically the prohibition of alcohol. The British signatory to the treaty, Lord Ivywood, a cold and unimaginative bureaucratic tyrant, immediately enacts the ban through roundabout legislation related to inns and pubs. Another signatory, the Irish naval hero Patrick Dalroy, resigns in protest and returns to Britain disillusioned but not defeated.

Ivywood and his cronies’ method is to ban not alcohol itself, but to require a public sign—as for a pub or inn—to be displayed outside any establishment serving alcohol. They then eliminate all the inn signs in Britain.

All but one—the sign of The Old Ship. This is an inn run by Humphrey Pump, an old friend of Dalroy’s, and when the ban goes into effect Dalroy, enraged, pries up the sign, takes a wheel of cheese and the one remaining cask of rum in The Old Ship, and hits the road. If the law says you can only serve alcohol wherever there’s an inn sign, Dalroy ensures there will always be both.

While Dalroy and “Hump” travel the countryside between the fictional beach town of Pebbleswick and London, an Islamic “Prophet of the Moon” named Misysra Ammon goes to work on the people, attempting to convince them of the rightness of prohibition and the cultural and historical superiority of Islam. The people, including the object of Ivywood’s intentions, Lady Joan Brett, mostly giggle, but Misysra finds a better reception among the elite, who need little encouragement to indulge their power-hungry vanity, their oikophobia, and their superficial love of the foreign.

The bulk of The Flying Inn is an old-fashioned picaresque, with Dalroy and Hump falling into slapstick scrapes involving pro-Prohibition rallies, vegetarian banquets, diet cranks, modern art, and a poet who has a conversion experience. Everywhere they go, Dalroy plants his sign, Hump starts pouring, and a grateful crowd gathers—to the befuddlement and humiliation of some establishment figure who tries to stop it.

Ivywood, in multiple attempts to crush Dalroy, fiddles with the law, amending it to enforce prohibition through legal nitpicking. Dalroy outmaneuvers him every time, and between his growing folk-hero status and popular outrage at the treaty that has visited an unwanted theocracy upon England, public opinion turns on Ivywood. The thrilling climactic action, with a mob of ordinary people marching on Ivywood’s stately country house—which, imperceptibly, has come to resemble a Turkish palace complete with harem—is a great revolt against the remote, all-powerful, but incompetent tyranny. The people, thirsting, finally call it to account.

The Flying Inn has an arresting hook—Islamic law imposed on Britain!—but while that has generated some comment and notoriety a hundred years after the fact online, it is not really Chesterton’s point. Neither is the alcohol at the center of the story, which misled the novel’s first batch of critics. If The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a hymn to the local, The Flying Inn is a populist anthem—in the best sense of a tribute to the people and a condemnation of those who would presume to rule them.

Chesterton’s target, the aloof, bloodless, but cruel Lord Ivywood, won’t confront Dalroy but tries to work behind the scenes, slipping in new regulations here and ratcheting up his program of reform there, all without consulting the object of his schemes—the people. He is a stand-in for all the soft despots of modern progressive bureaucracy who treat the public as raw material to be shaped and nudged into compliance with a revolutionary vision, for their own good.

The abuses of know-it-alls in high places was a topic Chesterton returned to again and again, perhaps most ferociously in Eugenics and Other Evils. In the Eugenics movement, Chesterton saw an elite who, like Lord Ivywood prohibiting alcohol, strove to deprive ordinary people of one of their only joys in life—the gift of children. Their pursuit of some external ideal—the purity of Islam for Lord Ivywood, the purity of genetic hygiene for the Eugenicists—ends up destroying the little things that give life meaning.

And as with so many such despots, his chief targets are the simple good things that even the poor can enjoy. Ivywood sees an inn and thinks only of the alcohol, which he must prohibit in order to “help” and reform the people, but does not think of the networks of friends who gather there or the relief they feel to enjoy a drink with each other after work. In The Flying Inn, not only Lord Ivywood but all the other cranks in the book have made similar errors of priority. (Reading about Peaceways, the milk-drinking colony, or Lord Ivywood’s hypocritical vegetarian party, one thinks of Orwell’s critique of the diet obsessive as someone “willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase.”) It is Dalroy, the outlaw, who actually helps the people, not by providing alcohol but the occasion and excuse for community.

The Flying Inn has something important to say, one of Chesterton’s most enduring messages. But it does not work very well as a novel. Though filled with amusing episodes, fun takedowns of everything from modern art to the experts who can explain away anything, and a handful of colorful characters, it has a ragged, discursive structure and little forward momentum—a fact underscored by my rereading The Man Who Was Thursday for next week, a book that starts fast and never lets up. Lady Joan has little to do throughout, Misysra the prophet flits aimlessly in and out of the story, and many of the other characters are flat stand-ins for the movements and isms Chesterton wishes to critique. In The Flying Inn, the ideas are foremost, the story a distant second. Enjoy it though I did, of the novels by Chesterton that I’ve read, it is the weakest.

That said, it is still worth reading as a critique of managerial progressivism, of an elite that seeks to shield itself from accountability while manipulating the public, and the very notion of the nanny state. And, in Lord Ivywood, Chesterton has created one of his best villains, a prototype of all the tyrants of CS Lewis’s own near-future dystopia That Hideous Strength, who similarly cloak their control-freak inhumanity in gentleness and advancement, and all the smothering tyrants of our own time.

One wonders who our Dalroys will turn out to be, and whether our culture as it stands today is even capable of producing one among its legions of Ivywoods.

Magic

This inaugural Chestertober continues with a brief dramatic interlude. The rest of this month I’m looking at Chesterton’s novels, but this week the subject is his first play, written at the behest of Chesterton’s old friend and philosophical sparring mate George Bernard Shaw, 1913’s Magic.

Magic takes place in the drawing room and grounds of a wealthy Duke but begins in a remote part of his garden on a cool drizzly evening. An Irish girl named Patricia, the Duke’s niece and ward, is searching the woods for fairies when she encounters a cloaked and hooded man. She takes him to be a giant fairy and reacts with awe but he is, in fact, the Conjurer, a magician arriving to perform for the Duke and his guests.

The Duke is an eccentric of the type familiar from Chesterton’s stories. He speaks in barely connected, allusive fragments and, though friendly, remains aloof through sheer inscrutability. He donates generously to rival causes—to both a vegetarian activist group and a group trying to stop vegetarianism, for example—and is meeting two men with petitions for support. One is Dr Grimthorpe, a skeptical doctor who used to know Patricia’s family in Ireland and believes her to be crazy but harmless, and the other is the Rev Smith, a broadminded Church of England clergyman more interested in social causes than religion. The Duke asks them to join him for the Conjurer’s performance, which will begin once Patricia’s brother Morris arrives.

Morris has been living in the United States for years and returns very “practical,” which is to say: materialistic, pragmatic, and aggressively skeptical. He scoffs at Patricia’s story of having met a fairy in the woods and, when the Conjurer arrives and reveals himself to be a mere magician, humiliates her. Patricia’s embarrassment turns to resentment. Morris looks over the Conjurer’s props and declares that he knows the secret to all of them. What he would really love to know, he says, are the secrets behind the tricks great religious leaders used to fool people:

Morris: Well, sir, I just want that old apparatus that turned rods into snakes. I want those smart appliances, sir, that brought water out of a rock when old man Moses chose to hit it. I guess it's a pity we've lost the machinery. I would like to have those old conjurers here that called themselves Patriarchs and Prophets in your precious Bible…

Patricia: Morris, you mustn't talk like that.

Morris: Well, I don't believe in religion…

Doctor: [Aside.] Hush, hush. Nobody but women believe in religion.

At this point, an already frustrated and embarrassed Patricia declares that she will perform “another ancient conjuring trick . . . The Vanishing Lady!” and leaves.

Morris becomes belligerent with the Conjurer, especially once the Conjurer moves a painting and knocks over a chair, apparently by magic. “Do you reckon that will take us in?” Morris asks. “You can do all that with wires.” The Conjurer concedes the point and Morris, in a sweeping rant against superstition, asserts that Joshua could no more stop the sun than a priest or magician could change the color of the red lamp shining at the end of the garden. As soon as he says this, the lamp turns blue.

Morris goes mad, working himself into a frenzy trying to determine how the Conjurer did it. When pressed, the Conjurer, with no satisfaction at having bested a critic but rather a spirit of deep sadness, reveals his secret: it was magic. He commanded devils to do it for him and they did.

The third and final act begins with Morris insane and confined to bed and the other characters attempting, one by one, to persuade the Conjurer to help him. The Duke offers to pay for the real secret behind the lamp trick. The doctor tries to get him to reveal the trick, assuming it must be so simple that it will make Morris laugh and break the hold of the madness that has taken him. Smith, the clergyman, attempts to reason sympathetically with the Conjurer. Only Patricia, to whom the Conjurer confesses that he fell in love with her the moment he saw her in the garden, is able to change his mind.

I’ll leave the details of precisely how Magic concludes for you to discover. Brisk, surprising, lighthearted but earnest, and steadily escalating in tension, this is a wonderful short play and was critically praised—including by Shaw—when it premiered in the fall of 1913, 111 years ago next month.

It’s easy to see why. Magic excels at the one thing Chesterton always used his stories for: pitting worldviews against each other. The whimsical, half-serious folk-spirituality of Patricia; the sentimental, largely political do-gooder formal religion of the Rev Smith; the liberal-minded but shapeless and ineffectual humanitarianism of the wealthy Duke; and the scientific materialism of the Doctor and, more aggressively, Morris all run up against something that they don’t believe in and are forced to confront its reality. Just as each character disbelieves in magic for different reasons, each reckons with its use by the Conjurer in different ways.

Perhaps the most sympathetic character besides the Conjurer is the Rev Smith. A Christian socialist and establishment figure, Smith is nevertheless not an object of mockery—Chesterton’s stage directions make it clear that Smith is “an honest man, not an ass.” (By contrast the Duke “though an ass, is a gentleman.”) In one of the play’s most dramatic scenes, the Conjurer furiously dresses Smith down for enjoying a position based on the supernatural when he is too urbane to believe in spirits:

Conjurer: . . . I say these things are supernatural. I say this was done by a spirit. The Doctor does not believe me. He is an agnostic; and he knows everything. The Duke does not believe me; he cannot believe anything so plain as a miracle. But what the devil are you for, if you don't believe in a miracle? What does your coat mean, if it doesn't mean that there is such a thing as the supernatural? What does your cursed collar mean if it doesn't mean that there is such a thing as a spirit? [Exasperated.] Why the devil do you dress up like that if you don't believe in it? [With violence.] Or perhaps you don't believe in devils?

Smith: I believe… [After a pause.] I wish I could believe.

Conjurer: Yes. I wish I could disbelieve.

Smith, chastened, confronted his his own lack of faith despite his position, is transformed—one might say converted. This is a subtle but powerful character arc, and a clear counterpart to Morris’s absolute refusal to believe in what he has seen. One, confessing himself unable but willing to believe, is saved; the other goes mad.

Madness is, of course, a major theme of Chesterton’s writings throughout his career but especially early on, and in Magic he suggests that madness is ultimately the only alternative to faith.

This is not to say that Magic is a sermon. Far from it. The balance of art and ideas which I’ve been exploring since we began the month with The Napoleon of Notting Hill is perfectly struck in Magic. Chesterton creates and sustains a mood of wonderful ambiguity from the first scene and maintains it throughout, and each character is permitted his or her own say. The result is a play that dramatizes exceptionally well the humility needed to face reality, especially those realities we often ignore or exclude, and the arrogance that leads to damnation.

Manalive

Today Chestertober continues with perhaps the most overtly, characteristically, even stereotypically Chestertonian of all of Chesterton’s fiction, his 1912 comedy of ideas Manalive.

The entirety of Manalive takes place at Beacon House, a boarding house on a hill overlooking London. Here a variety of lodgers move comfortably through their lives, among them an heiress named Rosamund and her maid Mary Gray; Diana Duke, the niece of Beacon House’s imperious landlady; a young man named Arthur Inglewood, who nurses secret feelings for Diana; a dour Irish journalist named Michael Moon; a Jewish cynic named Moses Gould; and the successful and intelligent but utterly humorless Dr Herbert Warner. The bland, peaceful routines of Beacon House are disrupted by the arrival of Innocent Smith, an eccentric whose coming is heralded by a blast of evening wind that drives the residents indoors just as Smith throws his luggage over the back garden wall and clambers over into the yard.

Smith’s eccentricities do not stop there. A gigantic man with unkempt blond hair, he speaks in a torrent of disjointed allusions and metaphors and partial quotations and half-formed jokes, invites the other lodgers to a picnic which he hosts on the roof, and carries a large revolver in his bag.

Despite his strange arrival and effusive, off-putting manner, Smith quickly wins over most of the other lodgers. His overwhelming energy inspires Arthur to confess his feelings to Diana and ask her to marry him, Michael Moon to win back the affections of Rosamund, with whom he used to be in love, and Mary Gray to agree to marry Smith. Beacon House resounds to song and laughter as love is either kindled or relit, and as Smith and Mary prepare to elope in a cab. All is going well until Smith takes his revolver and shoots at Dr Warner.

Warner, who is already hostile to Smith, understandably objects and calls in an American criminologist to examine him. Warner means to have Smith declared insane and committed. Arthur and Michael rise to Smith’s defense, and Warner and Dr Pym, the criminologist, present new charges that Smith is not only insane but a burglar, a repeat attempted murderer, and a serial seducer and bigamist who has abandoned several wives.

The second half of the novel is a long trial held at Beacon House with Warner and Pym as prosecutors and Arthur and Michael as Smith’s defense. Chapter by chapter, Warner and Pym produce statements from Smith’s past that suggest a life of depravity and crime and Arthur and Michael counter with clarifying and exonerating testimony.

When Warner and Pym relate an incident from Smith’s university days in which he chased a professor out a window and shot at him—much like the incident with Warner—it turns out that the accusation is based entirely on the testimony of a witness. The professor himself never pressed charges or even complained. The professor, it turns out, was a scientific skeptic and pessimist who had become convinced that life was meaningless and worthless. Being shot at revealed to him, for the first time, life’s value, and he emerged from the incident a changed man. When Warner and Pym bring eyewitness testimony from a minister of the Church of England that Smith had once led him down a chimney into a house where he stole goods, it turns out that the house was Smith’s own.

And, in the climactic series of accusations and testimonies, in answer to the charge that Smith has led astray a series of young women all over England who agreed to elope with him and were never seen again, Arthur and Michael prove that all of these women, all along, have been Smith’s actual wife—and so is Mary Gray.

“Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.”

— GK Chesterton

Smith, from a place of despair as a young man, had plunged into the joy of rediscovery, of turning life on its head and seeing it from a fresh angle. He shoots at the despairing to make them want to live, burgles his own house in order to appreciate home, travels all the way around the world to discover his country as if it were a foreign and exotic land, and repeatedly loses and rescues his wife to keep the thrill of marriage alive.

In the conclusion, Smith is acquitted and waves a burning log from the roof of Beacon House—making the name literal—and, just as when he arrived, a great evening wind blows. In the midst of Arthur and Diana and Michael and Rosamund’s festivities, Smith and Mary disappear.

I first read Manalive many years ago and, though I enjoyed it and have enjoyed revisiting it, it is not my favorite of Chesterton’s novels. This is curious to me since, as I suggested in the introduction, it is a very characteristically Chestertonian entertainment. Light, frothy, energetic, with painterly descriptions throughout and a gallery of over-the-top characters who still manage to feel like real people. It also includes some of my favorite passages from all of Chesterton’s work, among them:

If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments.

Often the thing a whole nation can't settle is just the thing the family could settle. Scores of young criminals have been fined and sent to jail when they ought to have been thrashed and sent to bed.

Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.

Or this, one of Chesterton’s best, truest, and most often quoted lines:

Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

And this, which speaks deeply to me:

I think God has given us the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.

I think what keeps me from loving Manalive is that Chesterton, for lack of a better way to put it, really leans into his Chestertonness here, almost to self-parody. It is too whimsical by half, a fact one has more of a chance to contemplate since it unfolds at novel length unlike, say, some similarly twee poems or short stories. And I think both form and structure present problems. This is a novel that desperately wants to be a play, as the single setting and very, very long trial scenes in the second half suggest. And as a play Manalive would be smashing, and probably use the repeated surprises of Innocent Smith’s topsy-turvy life to maximum effect. As a novel, it is only good.

“Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.”

— GK Chesterton

Again—it is good. Manalive might suffer in comparison to The Napoleon of Notting Hill, with which we started the month, or The Man Who Was Thursday, with which I intend to end October, but it is still worth reading, and that is on its strengths not as a novel but as a fable.

Back in the summer I posted about Joseph Epstein’s thoughts on “the novel of ideas” in his book The Novel, Who Needs It? Drawing from sources as various as Ortega y Gasset, Northrop Frye, and Michael Oakeshott, Epstein argues that a proper novel is not straightforwardly about its ideas, concepts, theories, or ideologies, but allows any such underlying philosophy to be dramatized subtly through character relationships. As I noted later, there’s an element of snobbery to this narrowing definition, but there’s also an element of truth.

In Manalive, Chesterton’s ideas are clearly in control, and the pitched battle he constructs between the haughty and reductive scientism of Warner and Pym, who can explain away anything through biology, sociology, and psychology; the wry cynicism of Gould; the untested idealism of Arthur; the disillusion of Michael; and the pious wonder of Smith is more important than the characters themselves. That does not reduce Manalive’s value as a story, but just as the form suggests it is better suited to the stage, the role of each character as the stand-in for a philosophy of life makes it more of a fable.

And as a fable, Manalive is both moving and profound. Through the disruption of Chesterton’s greatest Holy Fool, who renews the minds of those who are open to befriending him, the residents of Beacon Hill are forced to reckon with truths they have up to this time ignored or actively fought against. Some of these are confoundingly simple: life is better than death, for example. When people say that Chesterton’s ideas are “more relevant than ever,” it is these most obvious, common sense ideas that they have in mind. Only these can fortify a soul against the madness of our age—another theme Chesterton explored repeatedly, and to which we’ll return.

Manalive is neither Chesterton’s best nor best-remembered novel, but it is a worthwhile read as distilled essence of Chesterton, especially if his non-fiction covering similar ground—What’s Wrong with the World, Eugenics and Other Evils, and his many, many essays—don’t appeal as strongly. Even with its artistic flaws, Manalive leaves the reader refreshed and revived, just as Innocent Smith would want, as well as wanting an Innocent Smith of our own to scare a mad and death-loving culture back to life.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

After a slight delay, I’m pleased to introduce a new project that may or may not become an annual event on the blog. I’m calling it Chestertober, a dedication of the month of Halloween to the work of GK Chesterton, the prophet of the kind of madcap but meaningful topsy-turvydom that Halloween at its best embodies. For this inaugural Chestertober I wanted to look at some of Chesterton’s novels, and I figured I would start with Chesterton’s first: The Napoleon of Notting Hill, published in 1904.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill begins in 1984. A king still rules England, but only as a formality—he is selected at random from among the citizens. Real power is exercised by the bland professional functionaries of a smooth, efficient, and utterly joyless technocratic state, a state that has gradually absorbed and homogenized the entire world.

The last holdout, Nicaragua, has recently fallen, and in the novel’s opening chapter a group of London bureaucrats encounter the deposed Nicaraguan president wandering the city alone. They witness him cutting up a poster to make ribbons with the national colors of his country and, failing to find any red paper, he soaks some paper in his own blood and pins it to the breast of his uniform jacket. The government functionaries treat the former president to lunch at a café, where he makes his pitiful case to them before they go their separate ways. Most of them revile his backward, tragic attachment to his former country. One, a small, wide-eyed man named Auberon Quin, is intrigued. They find out later that, after this encounter, the president died of heartbreak, alone.

Not long after, to the surprise of his unimaginative bureaucratic friends, the eccentric Auberon receives word that he has been selected as the next King of England.

Auberon, a prototype of hipster irony, thinks this is a grand joke. He underscores the absurdity of his own position by reinstating medieval titles, honors, and customs, requiring strict court etiquette and elaborate costume, and issuing a charter to all the neighborhoods of London granting them specific rights and duties under him as their sovereign. Heraldry and courtesy make a comeback. The bureaucratic types bridle at the uncomfortable robes and chains of office that King Auberon insists upon, but beyond the superficial trappings of pennants and coats of arms and sumptuary codes business continues pretty much as usual. No one, least of all Auberon, takes any of this very seriously.

No one until a young man from Pump Street, Notting Hill named Adam Wayne. Having been a child when Auberon ascended the throne and surprised and annoyed everyone with his charter and reforms, Wayne grows up in the world Auberon created and sees it with utter sincerity. The red and gold of Notting Hill’s coat of arms is dear to him, and he does not find the idea of Notting Hill as a place with cherished customs and a distinct identity born of the people who share life there a joke.

So when the bureaucrats propose a massive new highway project that will obliterate Pump Street, Wayne, as Provost of Notting Hill, begs audience of King Auberon and appeals to him to spare his neighborhood. And he is shocked to discover that Auberon only thinks him amusing and that, to the bureaucrats who actually make the decisions, Pump Street is mere raw material for their projects. The road will go through. Defending Notting Hill is up to Adam Wayne.

And so a war begins. After raising a few hundred men from some of the other London boroughs under Auberon’s charter, the bureaucrats, chief among them a cold-blooded calculator named Barker, launch an invasion of Notting Hill meant to crush Wayne’s resistance movement and force compliance with the road project. Wayne’s men, knowing the neighborhood and its streets and byways, allow the army to penetrate to Portobello Road and then turn out the streetlamps. Most of Barker’s army is lost and the survivors are driven back to Auberon in humiliating defeat.

The war escalates, with larger and larger forces brought against Wayne and his neighborhood army and Wayne resorting to more and more desperate stratagems to defend Notting Hill, like building barricades out of stolen hansom cabs—thus protecting his streets and depriving the enemy of mobility. Finally, like a besieged medieval lord on the verge of defeat, Wayne sallies forth from Notting Hill, striking south into Kensington before apparently being halted and surrounded at the local waterworks. Barker is delighted, thinking Wayne finally defeated, but then Wayne issues an ultimatum—surrender and guarantee Notting Hill’s rights under the charter or Wayne will empty the reservoir and flood London.

This is not the end—there is a coda in which the war is renewed and finally ended ten years later, with Auberon abdicating to fight on Wayne’s side against the forces of Barker and the rest of the technocratic state—but this is a good place to leave off. Without giving anything away, the final chapter, a dialogue among the wounded through the long night after the last battle, is among the most moving scenes in Chesterton’s fiction.

Chesterton was only thirty when The Napoleon of Notting Hill was published, and it is remarkable for a first novel for its control, its imaginative world, and its thematic richness. Its characters, as heightened as any in Chesterton’s fiction, nevertheless feel like real, recognizable people, not mere avatars for the isms Chesterton wishes to pit against each other. Quin and Wayne are the highlights, but the many side characters, especially the quietly villainous Barker, contribute to the teeming, energetic feel of the book. And while not having the breakneck plotting of his fictional masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thursday, it is more tightly and briskly paced than some of his more meandering later novels. In some of those the ideas threaten to overwhelm the the story, but The Napoleon of Notting Hill feels always like a marvelous fable first.

And what is the point of this fable? The Napoleon of Notting Hill is Chesterton’s anthem to localism. Pump Street, with its handful of shabby shops, is an irrational place to love, but Wayne loves it not out of some rational, material conclusion. That’s the way Barker’s type thinks. For these deracinated globalists, all places everywhere are fundamentally interchangeable and attachment to home is a risible relic, especially in the face of Progress. All their studies and statistics show that the road through Notting Hill will be a quantifiable improvement, and so the people must bow to the greater good.

No, Wayne loves Pump Street not because it is perfect or beautiful or scientifically useful to do so, but because it is home. The heraldic trappings and ceremony only allow him to act out his love in visible ways. The love is already there; the ritual deepens it by giving it shape.

And so The Napoleon of Notting Hill arrays sincerity on one side against detached irony and chilly pragmatism on the other. It is easy to imagine it taking place today, especially given the way the clique at the top scoff at Wayne and the terrifying speed with which Barker and the bureaucrats, in their assurance of progressive righteousness, move from disdain to brutal violence. What is heartening in the novel’s tragic, almost Arthurian ending is that Auberon allows himself, at last, to be won over by Wayne. What had started as a joke at everyone’s expense transforms him, suggesting that even the ironic still have hope since they still have a sense of humor.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill may not be the most famous of Chesterton’s novels but it is deservedly well-remembered. It has all the best qualities of his later fiction and few of their faults, but most importantly it is a fun, rollicking adventure in a strange near-future Edwardian dystopia. Wayne’s defense of Notting Hill is genuinely thrilling in places, and I’ve read several times that this novel has been a favorite of urban guerrillas like Michael Collins. But in addition to its fun and odd story, it presents a compelling vision of the goodness of place and the ever-present need to protect hearth and home, to defend the small in the face of Leviathan.

The Novel, Who Needs It? and The Decline of the Novel

Speaking of the good old days and present decline, this summer I read two books about novels. Or rather, The Novel, in the abstract. The first was The Novel, Who Needs It? by Joseph Epstein and the second The Decline of the Novel, by Joseph Bottum. Though starting from a similar point and assuming both the embattlement and the necessity of The Novel, they are quite different books.

Epstein’s book, which is more of a loosely structured long-form essay on a series of interrelated topics, defends the traditional novel as an essential medium for the exercise of the imagination and the cultivation of moral character. It is quite good, though with its discursive structure and a few other limitations, about which more below, I felt it never cohered into a single compelling argument. So while I may agree with some of the points in The Novel, Who Needs It? more, it was Bottum’s Decline of the Novel that I found more thought-provoking and insightful.

Bottum builds on a thesis from his earlier book An Anxious Age, which looked at the cultural and psychological effects of the collapse of the shared mainline Protestant culture of the US, but narrows his view here to fiction. The novel, Bottum argues, is a fundamentally Protestant form given its interiority, individualism, and concern with personal transformation. Long fictional narratives served to playact the sanctification of souls in individual imaginations. They were a form through which “we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves.”

As such, the novel became the preeminent artistic medium for meaning and self-understanding in the modern world and enjoyed a three hundred-year reign, from the early picaresques and moralistic epistolary novels of Defoe and Richardson to the 800-page potboilers of the 1970s.

But no more. With the decline of a shared culture has come a decline of the narrative form that once fed and shaped its imaginations. Novelists today do not occupy the taste-maker or thought-leader status a John Updike or Norman Mailer once did, nor do the educated need to have read any recent novels to be in the know—what Bottum calls “the Cocktail Party Test.”

In the best chapters of the book, Bottum traces this decline through the careers of four novelists: Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, and Tom Wolfe. Faced with a “thin” or disenchanted world, all four sought to infuse meaning into life through fiction, albeit in different ways. Scott sought meaning in stories of the past, inadvertently inventing—to all practical purposes—historical fiction. Dickens, a generation on, strove to make fiction meaningful as a vehicle for pursuing the truth, for uncovering and exposing evil. But both these ends proved inadequate, giving rise to the modernism exemplified, in Bottum’s argument, by Mann, who made the novel its own point—novels for novels’ sake. It may not provide meaning, but it’s all we’ve got—let’s fuss over the artistry. By the time of Tom Wolfe, who attempted the unblinking truth-telling of Dickens in the realistic modern mode of Zola, narrated with journalistic attention to detail and rendered in frenzied prose, neither he nor his characters had the old “vision of the good life” that could give his shambling novels power and his readers no longer believed in the novel enough to take him seriously. Indeed, Wolfe became an object of scorn among the literati, especially when he dared to tip the sacred cow of the sexual revolution in I am Charlotte Simmons.

Successive failed attempts to find meaning, maintenance of empty forms without belief, and finally disbelief and disavowal—this is a deconversion story, a loss of faith. A “failure of nerve,” as Bottum puts it, but ours, not that of the novel. “The novel didn’t fail us. We failed the novel.”

There’s a lot to this argument, and Bottum argues it well. Certainly much of it jibes with my own observations, such as the way novels now tend to mean more to rabid subcultures than to any broadly shared culture—with one or two important exceptions. But I remain unconvinced by the overall thesis. Something is missing, or simply off. His narrative of disenchantment and decline is persuasive, but not because of the evidence brought forward through Scott, Dickens, Mann, and Wolfe. Since reading it a few weeks ago I’ve continued to puzzle over this.

Other reviewers have pointed to The Decline of the Novel’s narrow Anglophone focus, imprecision in how Bottum uses the word Protestant, or over-selective case studies as problems. This criticism has some merit. Here are two reviewers, Darren Dyck at Christianity Today and science fiction author Adam Roberts, who both sympathize with Bottum’s book while raising important questions about his thesis. Both reviews are worth your time for these lines of criticism.

“Ultimately,” Dyck writes in his review, “it all depends on how you define novel.” Whatever other points I could raise, I suspect this is the real problem. The Novel, capitalized, in the abstract, is probably too protean and slippery a form to describe in enough detail to prove a thesis like this.

This becomes especially clear in the book’s final chapter, about popular fiction, in which Bottum points out the way children’s fiction has taken the place of grownup novels as tools of imaginative instruction. Novels do, then, still form part of a broadly shared culture as theatres of moral drama and objects of debate and controversy—it’s just the novels of JK Rowling, not National Book Award or Booker Prize shortlisters, that matter now.

That last chapter works as an important caveat to the narrative that makes up the bulk of the book. It is also one of the several things that make The Decline of the Novel better than The Novel, Who Needs It? For Epstein, popular and genre fiction, which get barely a mention, mostly serve to prepare readers for the exquisite, lip-pursing pleasures of Henry James and Proust. Per Dyck, Epstein’s definition of novel doesn’t seem to include much beneath these delights. Blunter reviewers than I have accused Epstein of snobbery. Though Bottum doesn’t fully explore the implications of his observations in his final chapter, that he meditated on genre fiction at all makes his argument more serious and more open to emendation.

The survival of something of the novel’s function, as Bottum sees it, in however limited and compromised a form in children’s and popular fiction inevitably brought Chesterton to mind. In his early essay “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” Chesterton stuck up for the crude, sensationalistic popular fiction of his own time for precisely this reason:

One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy’s novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense . . . but it is not vulgar intrinsically—it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.

Which means that however much The Novel has declined, as long as good stories set young imaginations on fire and keep them lit, there is reason for hope. The task is to preserve and, when possible, keep writing good stories.

Despite the limitations imposed on it by its author’s standards, The Novel, Who Needs It? offers serious, impassioned support to good fiction, and despite my minor misgivings about its overall argument, The Decline of the Novel is worthwhile as a thought-provoking, incisive look at fiction and the role it plays—or perhaps played—in our culture. I hope, alongside both Epstein and Bottum, for the novel’s return.

Chesterton on the arrogance of civilization

detail from The Course of Empire: Desolation, by Thomas COle

Last night I finally started reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill, an early Chesterton novel that I’ve just never gotten around to. The opening chapters are vintage Chesterton, and probably even a little more fresh and brisk than his later fiction. The novel is set in the London of far-distant 1984 (another underrecognized Chesterton-Orwell connection?), a sort of dystopia of efficiency where everything is regulated, everything is chugging along successfully, and everything is dull.

In the opening chapter, two bureaucratic functionaries, both dull men in black suits, are walking to work in the pre-dawn twilight when they run into the deposed President of Nicaragua. They are immediately drawn to the President not just because of his elaborate and brightly colored costume, but because of his magnetic air of regal authority. That he produces a pocket knife and soaks his handkerchief in his own blood, next pinning the bloody rag to his breast as a flag to commemorate the loss of Nicaragua, only cements their interest in him.

Nevertheless, the two fall into an argument with the President. Barker, the intellectual of the two (“He had a great amount of intellectual capacity, of that peculiar kind which raises a man from throne to throne and lets him die loaded with honours without having either amused or enlightened the mind of a single man”), condescendingly argues that the President’s overthrow and the absorption of a once-independent Nicaragua into a North American superstate is not a bad thing, because Progress. That absorption brought education, science, and progress even if it meant the decline of the things that made Nicaragua unique.

The President, understandably, assumes that Barker’s sympathies are with the unnamed larger nation that took Nicaragua over. “My sympathies are with no nation,” Barker replies. “We moderns believe in a great cosmopolitan civilisation, one which shall include all the talents of all the absorbed peoples.” Consumed, assimilated, brought up to some external standard, scientifically progressed into a deracinated copy of every other “absorbed people,” the Nicaraguans have lost even their once famous ability to capture and tame wild horses.

“‘I never catch a wild horse,’ replied Barker, with dignity.”

Such folk skills are, to him, “a mere barbarian dexterity.” But the President cannot help but feel “that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilised.” 

“Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”

“Something, perhaps,” replied Barker, “but that something a mere barbarian dexterity. I do not know that I could chip flints as well as a primeval man, but I know that civilisation can make these knives which are better, and I trust to civilisation.”

“You have good authority,” answered the Nicaraguan. “Many clever men like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”

It is not the point of Chesterton’s novel, but this is a striking preview of the globalist blender—well before it was set to puree by the internet—complete with the self-satisfied moral superiority of the big as they wield their bigness against the small. And the President’s final line is a good reminder of the fate of all civilizations, no matter how confident, successful, and progressive. At the very least it is a warning against the tyranny of the present.

As for the President, he departs the story with an even sharper and more evocative line, and possibly one to live by:

“Every man is dangerous,” said the old man without moving, “who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.”

And with a pleasant smile he finished his coffee and rose, bowing profoundly, passed out into the fog, which had again grown dense and sombre. Three days afterwards they heard that he had died quietly in lodgings in Soho.

For those of us who sense the going of “something” from the world with the advance of “civilization,” see this reflection on Paul Kingsnorth from back in January. For the “theological task” of the present age, that of making modern man have even “an inkling of what has been taken from him,” see this passage from Jünger’s The Forest Passage that I posted last year.

Orwell, Camus, Chesterton, and bad math

Earlier this week I read this really interesting piece by William Fear on the most distinctive trait shared by Orwell and Albert Camus: “Both of these writers took the view that truthfulness was more important than ideological allegiance and metaphysics, that the facts should be derived from the real world, rather than the world of ideas.” I can’t weigh in on whether this is true of Camus—I think I read The Stranger and The Plague somewhere around seventeen years ago in college—but it strikes me as a good assessment of Orwell.

Fear uses a particularly striking example to illustrate the closeness of Orwell and Camus’s thought on truth and the threat posed to truthfulness by modern ideology, a major concern for both men—what Fear calls “common ground.” He begins with a line from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:

“There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death.”

— George Orwell, 1949

He then points out that, in fact, “these words are not Orwell’s at all. This is a quote from Albert Camus’ novel La Peste, which was published two years before Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1947.” Fear doesn’t give the exact quotation but this is what I turn up in searching for it:

“But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four.”

— Albert Camus, 1947

Orwell’s quotation is almost exact, and the import of the quotation—the ideological threat, enforced through peer pressure and naked authority, to admitting what is objectively true and the courage required to do so—is precisely the same. Again, common ground for these writers.

So Orwell got the idea from Camus. But… did Camus get the idea from Orwell? Fear quotes one of Orwell’s book reviews from 1939:

“It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so.”

— George Orwell, 1939

Fear declines to speculate on precisely whether Camus got this mathematical example from Orwell, noting that the nature of each man’s influence on the other is really beside the point, and continues with his essay. I recommend reading the whole thing.

But a longtime reader of Chesterton cannot read the these three variations on one idea without going back yet further, to a column by GK Chesterton published in the Illustrated London News in 1926. I quote this at greater length because the context makes it clear that the parallel runs deeper than the use of 2+2 as an example:

“We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four.”

— GK Chesterton, 1926

But there is not only doubt about mystical things; not even only about moral things. There is most doubt of all about rational things. I do not mean that I feel these doubts, either rational or mystical; but I mean that a sufficient number of modern people feel them to make unanimity an absurd assumption. Reason was self-evident before Pragmatism. Mathematics were self-evident before Einstein. But this scepticism is throwing thousands into a condition of doubt, not about occult but about obvious things. We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.

And this in itself recapitulates something Chesterton wrote as early as his essay collection Heretics, published in 1905. Its stunning final paragraph includes this passage:

The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.

So did Orwell get this example from Chesterton? We know Orwell read Chesterton, and that Chesterton even published some of Orwell’s earliest work. So I’d add Chesterton to the lineage of this idea.

But alongside Fear, I’d also say it doesn’t entirely matter. What does matter is the reason Chesterton and Orwell and Camus kept coming back to the childish simplicity of 2+2: an abiding concern for the truth, a truth to be found out there in reality rather than in here in personal perception or political ideology, and a shared—and quite justifiable—anxiety about the threats it faces.

I’ve written before about Orwell’s view of the relation of the modern historical discipline to objective truth, here and here, and about Chesterton and Orwell’s overlapping concerns with language and clarity here. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni quoted the Heretics version of Chesterton’s line in a clip that went mildly viral—at least among Chesterton fans—several months ago. I still know next to nothing about Camus, largely owing to a prejudicial suspicion of twentieth-century French thinkers, but Fear has convinced me to look again, and more closely.

My problems with Glass Onion

Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion: “No, it’s just dumb!” Note the literal lampshade.

I’ve mentioned twice now, once in my initial review and once in my 2022 at the movies post, that I had some nagging misgivings about Rian Johnson’s latest Benoit Blanc mystery, Glass Onion. I’ve been mulling those problems over ever since I saw the movie around Thanksgiving and wondering whether I should ever try to work through them in writing. Well, a couple weeks ago my friend Danny Anderson of The Sectarian Review offered a short, pointed critique of the film that I’ve taken as permission and encouragement to do the same.

As I wrote at the time I first saw Glass Onion, I can’t lay out my problems with it without giving too much away, so consider this a spoiler warning.

Briefly, what I most admired and enjoyed about the film when I first saw it was its intricate structure and its humor. I think I mostly stand by that, though what I remember of the humor has somewhat soured on me since I first saw it. We’ll get to my deeper problems momentarily.

In his post, Danny faults Glass Onion for being clever but hollow, for jerking the audience around by offering a mystery without an actual mystery, and for its self-righteous indulgence in pillorying shallow, cartoonish characters.

Any disagreements I have with Danny’s assessment are only in degree, not kind. Or to put it another way, I agree with every point here, albeit with differing levels of intensity. To take these one at a time:

• Glass Onion’s structure still impresses me, but as other elements of the story have continued to bother me I’ve come to see the film’s fugue-like transparent layers as unworthy of the story it tells. It’s like a perfectly crafted sonnet in praise of cannibalism.

• I agree completely with Danny about the way the film manipulates the audience. Johnson’s self-awareness, the constant calling of attention to storytelling conventions and what he is doing, goes beyond the tongue-in-cheek or the meta to the pathological. Johnson displays an utter contempt not only for the characters he creates—leading one to ask “Why bother?”—but for his audience. Again, why bother? Is this purely about showing off?

• Danny’s last criticism, Johnson’s political point-scoring via ridiculous caricature, is where he spends most of his time, and while I agree completely on this point the characters bother me somewhat less because Glass Onion is pretty clearly a farce. For all the music-box intricacy of his plotting, Johnson doesn’t deal in nuance when it comes to human beings. I don’t necessarily like that (note that in my original review I described every character as “annoying”) but I’m willing to give it a pass purely for the sake of the genre.

To these I would add a few more misgivings of my own, some minor and technical but others, like Danny’s most serious complaints, what John Gardner called “faults of soul.”

First, and related to Danny’s point that Johnson continuously plays false with the viewer, Glass Onion breaks some of the classic rules of fair play in a whodunit story—namely Ronald Knox’s ten commandments of detective stories. The film bends or breaks several of these, as you can read about in greater detail here, including artificially withholding important clues. But the biggest and clearest cheat is against rule ten: “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.” Compare The Prestige, a film in which twins are part of the mystery’s solution and Christopher Nolan sets this revelation up expertly.

Two possible rejoinders occur to me: First, that rules are made to be broken, a point I’ve made plenty of times myself. Agatha Christie rather famously violated a number of Knox’s rules. And second, Glass Onion is not really a whodunit after all, but a combination revenge story/heist caper. To these I say: Rian Johnson is no Agatha Christie, who could match her mastery of plot and boldness in experiment with genuine compassion and a keen understanding of human nature; and to argue that presenting the audience with a mystery but having it turn out to be something else is just another dodge. And don’t make me bring up “subverting expectations.”

Second, and related to Danny’s argument about political point-scoring, there is Johnson’s obvious and already much commented-upon pandering to leftwing identity politics. But this is so much the norm for Hollywood now that it feels pointless to complain about. (Interestingly, both Danny and I discerned that Johnson’s worldview is shaped entirely too much by the anti-discourse of Twitter, a point that even made its way into the Honest Trailers spoof of Glass Onion.)

But—to use the same note about politics as a jumping-off point—my most serious misgivings always had to do with the climax of the film. When the aggrieved Andi finds her mission of vengeance stymied by Miles Bron and company, she simply starts smashing his collection of glass curios, a spree of vandalism that culminates in a (somehow) non-lethal explosion that destroys Bron’s glass onion house, an act Andi can only top by deliberately destroying the Mona Lisa.

Remember Johnson’s political pandering, and the strawmen he has peopled his film with, and remember as well that Glass Onion takes place in the late spring of 2020, a setting Johnson is not only mining for quarantine and masking jokes. I’d wager that a climax in which injustice is not corrected but simply reacted to with a childish tantrum—by breaking other people’s stuff, setting things on fire, and destroying art—is not coincidental. And I’d argue absolutely that this is an instinct that does not need to be encouraged, much less held up as the satisfying final act of a drama of theft and restoration.

So the more I’ve reflected on Glass Onion, the more it’s struck me as precisely what Danny described in his post: hollow and self-satisfied, slick but contemptuous, a triumph of “precociousness over substance,” and a marriage of political shallowness with irresponsible virtue signaling. And these problems—“faults of soul,” as I mentioned above—originate with the film’s creator.

As so often, Chesterton comes to mind: “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

Missing the point

Or, “Inadequacy of response revisited.”

Ben Sixsmith, a young British writer and a contributing editor of The Critic whose work I enjoy, recently published an interesting review of a new book on “Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment” in the Washington Examiner. This ostensibly academic study includes a chapter on “Jackass,” a show that apparently “takes aim at America.” I’m guessing it also does a lot of “calling into question” and, especially, “interrogating.”

The less said about the state of academia, the better, perhaps, but the book’s “opportunistically ideological” section on “Jackass” is where Sixsmith zeroes in. Having noted that the author suggests that the show’s self-inflicted comic violence is some kind of reaction to “the contextualizing bleakness of America” post-September 11th even though “Jackass” premiered in 2000, Sixsmith makes a more broadly applicable point:

It might seem peculiar to take an analysis of an obscene stunt show quite this seriously, but the point I am prowling toward is that intellectual analysis of pop culture that purports to expose its hidden aesthetic or social relevance often misses the point on the most basic level. Writers would never get away with saying The Waste Land was inspired by World War II, but the lofty heights from which they judge more unsophisticated entertainment allows mistakes to sit unnoticed.

The charge of “politicization” is often philistinic. All culture can have political or at least social implications. When culture is assessed through a specific political lens, though, it can diminish rather than expand its significance.

Coincidentally, this morning a friend passed along this video essay on antiwar filmmaking and the new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. It compares 1917 unfavorably to the new All Quiet because it is not bleak or nihilistic enough to get an antiwar message across but does so without stopping to consider whether that was actually the point of 1917.

You might recognize that this is similar to Slate’s accusation in 2020 that, by not explicitly sermonizing against nationalism, 1917 was an “irresponsibly nationalistic” film. As I wrote then:

These are manifest absurdities, but are apparently what Slate writers and their ilk want out of a movie like 1917. Tell us how bad the British officer class was. Don’t other the Germans. Don’t “validate the nationalist impulses that led to such terrible bloodshed.” Don’t give us a movie, give us a disquisition. Give us a sermon. Give us a Slate article.

All of which cheapens or, in Sixsmith’s well-chosen words, diminishes the story and its power.

See again my remarks on inadequate political or ideological responses to art from a couple of months ago. Or go, as is always recommended, to Chesterton: “Missing the point is a very fine art; and has been carried to something like perfection by politicians and Pressmen to-day.”

Three great sages on talking to oneself

Point: CS Lewis in chapter VIII of A Preface to Paradise Lost, writing of self-referential and -reverential modern “poetry which exists only for the poet”:

“There is nothing especially admirable in talking to oneself. Indeed, it is arguable that Himself is the very audience before whom a man postures most and on whom he practises the most elaborate deceptions.”

Counterpoint: GK Chesterton in a tongue-in-cheek review of his own short comedy play Magic, a quotation I once shared in the very early days of this blog:

“If a man does not talk to himself, it is because he is not worth talking to.”

Case study for your consideration: This exchange from “Tankin’ it to the Streets,” an episode from season six of “King of the Hill”:

“Hank: You know, Dale, sometimes I think you say things just to hear yourself talk.
Dale: What do you want me to do, ignore myself?”

Project for synthesis: In what ways is Dale Gribble A) the self-deceived man described by Lewis and B) a man worth talking to, as described by Chesterton? Is he either A or B or both A and B? Is he B despite or because of A?

File under either “Silliness” or “Questions Hank would never ask.”