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.

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 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.

Song of Songs and particularity

I’m finally finishing Peter Kreeft’s Three Philosophies of Life, the final section of which is a 26-point meditation on love as described in Song of Songs. Here, Kreeft considers the particularity or specificity of love:

“The object of love is a person, and every person is an individual. No person is a class, a species, or a collection. There is no such thing as the love of humanity because there is no such thing as humanity. If your preachers or teachers have told you that the Bible teaches you to love humanity, they have told you a lie. Not once does the Bible say that; not once does it even mention the word humanity. Jesus always commands us to love God and our neighbor instead.”

If, as I’ve often argued here, particularity is the key to good literature, it is fundamental in love. Sine qua non. If it’s not particular, it’s not love.

Particularity is also important philosophically, as Kreeft makes clear in the next paragraph:

“How comfortable ‘humanity’ is! ‘Humanity’ never shows up at your door at the most inconvenient time. ‘Humanity’ is not quarrelsome, alcoholic, or fanatical. ‘Humanity’ never has the wrong political, religious, and sexual opinions. ‘Humanity’ is never slimy, swarmy, smarmy, smelly, or smutty. ‘Humanity’ is so ideal that one could easily die for it. But to die for your neighbor, to die for Sam Slug or Mehetibel Crotchit—unthinkable. Except for love.”

To paraphrase Edmund Burke: Abstract humanity is not to be found; “humanity” inheres in specific people. Each of whom is more important than the abstract category, I would add.

Compare the people who talk a lot about “the planet” or “our species” but not about our families, friends, neighbors, communities, hometowns, countries, and nations. The people who love those things love them very specifically for themselves, flaws and all, and not because they are part of a whole too big for any honest person to grasp. Abstractions, “thinking in categories” as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, are dodges—or, increasingly, solvent.

The one spot where I’ll disagree with Kreeft—provided he isn’t being ironic, and I’m more inclined to think so the more I reread this passage—is when he calls humanity an abstraction “so ideal that one could easily die for it.” I’m not sure that actually happens. Soldiers, famously, die for each other far more readily than for democracy or freedom or big-picture geopolitical objectives. (See the Chesterton quotations here.) Likewise martyrs, whether religious or political. Stories of far-seeing men approaching the gallows with the class struggle on their lips smack of Soviet propaganda, not reality.

No, your neighbor—whether the person singing off-key in church or the dipstick you have to share a foxhole with—are easier to die for than “humanity.” Because they’re easier to love. After all, we’ve been commanded to. ‘humanity’

Here’s some of what Kreeft had to say about Job in the middle section of this book. I’ve written about particularity in storytelling several times: with regard to John Gardner here, in a short note on what novels are for here, in much more detail with regard to James Bond and Honeychile Rider in Dr No here, and in memory of Cormac McCarthy here.

A vain aspiration to self-sufficiency

“The mistake is to see No Country for old men as being about the bad guy.”

I’ve argued for years, including here on this blog, that despite its darkness and violence Cormac McCarthy’s work is not nihilistic. Good and evil have clear meaning in his novels, and the tiny flame of hope shines all the brighter for the omnipresence of evil—a burning tree in the desert, a horn full of glowing embers. This theme recurs especially often in his later novels.

In a review of an anthology titled Film and Faith: Modern Cinema and the Struggle to Believe posted today, Anthony Sacramone considers an essay on the Coen brothers’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men by Carson Holloway. The essay mounts a “successful effort to redeem No Country for Old Men from the charge of nihilism,” a view Sacramone himself had previously held:

I, too, had dismissed No Country as another affected, self-consciously “cinematic” Coen brothers’ dead end, but Holloway’s careful reading converted me. The mistake is to see No Country as being about the bad guy. Instead, it’s about a traditional Hollywood good guy, the local sheriff, Bell (Tommy Lee Jones): “a kind of traditionalist conservative, … a lifetime lawman, a proud member of a line of lawmen.” But when this old-fashioned guy is confronted with radical evil in the person of Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who possesses not “an inordinate attachment to some real good” but a sadistic need to show everyone who crosses his path the utter worthlessness of their existence, Bell is lost.

Why? The lawman is unable to contend with Chigurh’s perverse brand of lawbreaking because he fears God has abandoned him and that “he may somehow be drawn into this evil.” In the end, Bell “quits” the fight because a “low estimate of himself arises from a vain aspiration to self-sufficiency.” When you believe you’re in a fight against the odds all by yourself, that you’ve lost God as your backup, what else is there to do but turn tail and run?

A great insight, and one that I hadn’t considered before. Bell’s despair, an outgrowth of his self-sufficient isolation from God, is underlined in the film by small changes the Coen brothers made to the novel. For one, Bell’s father in the novel “was not a lawman,” though his grandfather was. The “line of lawmen” Holloway notes—three generations in the film version, with Bell and his grandfather serving as sheriffs in separate counties at the same time—is the Coens underscoring this aspect of Bell’s history. A subtle but important detail.

But having just reread No Country I thought immediately of the ambiguity of this exchange between Bell and his elderly Uncle Ellis. After a long bit of dialogue from Ellis:

Bell didnt answer.

I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didnt. I dont blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion of me that he does.

You dont know what he thinks.

Yes I do.

He looked at Bell.

Ellis continues the conversation at that point, but who exactly is saying what here? The paragraphing and lack of dialogue tags leave it unclear. I’ve puzzled over it since that last reading. But in the film, the Coens assign the despair of that first line not to Ellis, whom Bell worries has “turned infidel” in the book, but to Bell himself.

Not only Sheriff Bell—who we learn in the novel was the sole survivor of his unit during World War II and only lived because he ran away when holding out alone proved hopeless—but also Llewellyn Moss and Carson Wells aim at self-sufficiency and fail utterly. Their greed and pride tempt them into isolation, where Chigurh destroys them both. Bell at least survives to receive prophetic word that hope remains alive. God or grace is reaching for him.

June 13 will mark the one-year anniversary of McCarthy’s death. I paid tribute to him following his death here.

Thomas vs Thomas vs Thomas

My wife got me a membership in The Rest is History Club for Christmas, so for the last four months or so I’ve been enjoying the back catalog of Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s bonus episodes as well as the regularly released new ones. These are great fun, and offer a lot of food for thought.

This past week’s club episode ended with an intriguing counterfactual game submitted by a listener: “Of the three executed Tudor-era Thomases—Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer—you have to execute one, imprison one for life, put one of them back in power. How would you decide?”

Holland’s answer:

• Execute: Cromwell

• Back in power: Cranmer

• Imprison: More (“but I’d let him write”)

Sandbrook’s answer:

• Execute: More

• Back in power: Cromwell

• Imprison: Cranmer

My verdict: Holland’s answers are good, not great. Sandbrook’s are wrong at the two most crucial points.

Sandbrook expressed some hesitation about imprisoning Cranmer, preferring to “let him crack on” as Archbishop of Canterbury if he could, but was firm on one answer: “Definitely execute More.” Shortly thereafter:

Sandbrook: I mean, Thomas More’s ultimately disloyal, Tom.

Holland: Not to his God. Not to his God.

Sandbrook: No, but to put God above your king, and your country, is unbe—it’s to put your petty prejudices—

The discussion continues in what I think is a tongue-in-cheek tone. I hope so. Because More had his priorities exactly right.

I was surprised at Sandbrook’s reasoning. Given his jocular John Bull way of playing up his English Protestantism since the show’s Martin Luther episodes I was prepared for some kind of invocation of John Foxe, the slanders in his Acts and Monuments (aka Foxe’s Book of Martyrs) being what I most often see presented as grounds for criticizing More. But the view that More, a good classicist and Christian Humanist, should have been more loyal to the City of Man than to the City of God is a strange one.

It’s funny to me that, given that I probably agree with Sandbrook’s perspective about 90% of the time, whenever I blog about the show I seem to be taking exception to something he’s said. Regardless, kudos to Holland for—again, lightheartedly—sticking up for More.

My own choices:

• Execute: Cromwell, this being the only proper fate for a hatchet man

• Back in power: More, because the state needs more people who are obstructively “disloyal” to tyrants and keep God in his place above state and nation

• Imprison: Cranmer, but, as Holland would for More, “let him write,” since despite my misgivings about him his religious rhetoric in the Book of Common Prayer is second only to the King James Bible in its value to English

Fun stuff, and fun to discuss with my wife afterward. It also occurred to me that, if we could loosen the “execution” requirement, we could make things even more interesting by throwing Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey into the mix.

Might be time to break out my old DVD of A Man for All Seasons.

In the meantime, let me recommend Peter Ackroyd’s Life of Thomas More or, if you’re in a more fictional and speculative frame of mind, RA Lafferty’s Past Master, in which More is saved from the scaffold by agents of a far distant human space colony and asked to untangle their political problems. If you’re curious about the space I carve out for Cranmer’s masterful religious language, definitely read Alan Jacobs’s The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography.

Pilgrimage back to Bunyan

“Someday you will be old enough to read fairy tales again.”

— CS Lewis, in his dedication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

I’m finishing work on a “life story” project for a church group today, which has got me in an even more than usually reflective mood as I consider family history, personal debts, and the things that have made me who I am. Among these are the books that have most shaped me. Ages and ages ago, sometime early in grad school, I wrote a multi-part series of blog posts on precisely this topic. One of the most important early books I mentioned was Dangerous Journey, a lavishly illustrated adaptation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

This came to mind because just a few days ago Alan Jacobs wrote about teaching The Pilgrim’s Progress and the “great joy” it gives him—not only teaching it, but the mere fact that “so utterly bonkers a book was so omnipresent in English-language culture . . . for so long.” He goes on, in a strikingly incisive paragraph, to note how

One of the “tough” things about [The Pilgrim’s Progress] is the way [it] veer[s] from hard-coded allegory to plain realism, sometimes within a given sentence. One minute Moses is the canonical author of the Pentateuch, the next he’s a guy who keeps knocking Hopeful down. But the book is always psychologically realistic, to an extreme degree. No one knew anxiety and terror better than Bunyan did, and when Christian is passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and hears voices whispering blasphemies in his ears, the true horror of the moment is that he thinks he himself is uttering the blasphemies. (The calls are coming from inside the house.) 

This captures both the strangeness and the power of Bunyan’s book, as I’ve lately been rediscovering.

I grew up with Pilgrim’s Progress as a load-bearing component of my imagination. My parents had Dangerous Journey at home and I pored over the incredible, grotesque, beautiful, frightening illustrations (by Alan Parry in a style reminiscent of Arthur Rackham) over and over again. My friends and I read a children’s version—with an excellent map—in school. Another time we acted out Christian and Faithful’s trial at Vanity Fair for a school music program. (I played Lord Hategood, the judge.) Occasionally during our church’s summer Bible school the nightly story would be a version of Pilgrim’s Progress in five short installments. I taught this version of it myself once shortly after graduating from college. There was even a two-part “Adventures in Odyssey” adaptation I listened to many times on cassette tape.

I knew Pilgrim’s Progress thoroughly without ever having read it cover to cover.* But you know what they say about familiarity.

Then, late in high school, I discovered Dante. I was on my first medieval literature kick and wanted all the epic poetry I could get ahold of. Dante’s Comedy struck me as both 1) a proper classic, the kind of thing a kid like me should be reading and 2) lurid enough to be interesting and entertaining. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into—it blew my mind. I ended up reading Dante over and over again for several years straight, right through college, and Dante has been a profound influence on me ever since.

But discovering Dante also led me into an easy contempt for Bunyan. Dante, I thought, had fashioned a real allegory. Bunyan—in addition to his other faults, like his Calvinism**—seemed cloddish and simplistic by comparison. What were the ad hoc, making-it-up-as-I-go plot points and symbols of Pilgrim’s Progress worth when I had the masterful intricacies of the Comedy as an alternative?

It’s a typical fault of immaturity to set in opposition things that should really complement each other, but there I was, pooh-poohing Pilgrim’s Progress. I’m bothered even to remember this attitude. And yet, Pilgrim’s Progress stayed with me. And now I’m rediscovering it, having grown old enough to read it again.

Two things have helped rekindle my interest and reopen me to the story, which I freely acknowledged was fundamental to my imagination even when I was most disdainful of it. The first is John Buchan. Anyone who’s followed my John Buchan June readings will know that Pilgrim’s Progress was his favorite book, and that it informed and influenced everything in his fiction from his novels’ stern moralism, hardy sense of adventure, the fact that many of their plots are journeys, and even character names and motivations. Buchan’s love of Bunyan started to bring me back around, the same way a good friend might convince you to give one of their friends another chance despite having made an awkward introduction.

But more important has been revisiting Pilgrim’s Progress itself. A few years ago I broke out my parents’ copy of Dangerous Journey to look at with my own kids and, like me thirty-odd years before them, they found the pictures mesmerizing, horrifying, and impossibly intriguing. They wanted to know more, to find out what’s going on in the story behind these images. The pictures cry out for the story to be told.

And then, right now a year ago, I read Little Pilgrim’s Progress to them a few chapters at a time before bed. Little Pilgrim’s Progress is a children’s adaptation of Bunyan by Helen Taylor, first published in 1947, that abridges, simplifies, and somewhat softens some of the original. The edition I read was a new, large-format hardback illustrated by Joe Sutphin. In Sutphin’s pictures, the characters are all adorable anthropomorphic animals: Evangelist is an owl, Christian is a rabbit, Great Heart is a badger, Giant Despair is a genuinely terrifying hare, Apollyon—rendered “Self” by Taylor—is a wolf, and others are otters, squirrels, toads, dogs, and more. I was worried it would all be a little too cutesy, but I wanted to introduce this story to my kids and I was glad to find the pictures and the adaptation perfectly suited for their ages. It’s brilliantly done.

What I was not prepared for was the way Bunyan’s story, even filtered through an abridgement and fuzzy animals, would wreck me. I had to stop reading Little Pilgrim’s Progress several times—most especially as the characters approached the River of Death and their final, long-awaited but fearful entry into the Celestial City—because I couldn’t hold back my tears. The raw emotional and, as Jacobs notes, psychological power of Pilgrim’s Progress ambushed me. The fear, guilt, anxiety, doubt, grief, and—above all—hope were so real, so true to life in our fallen and wounded state, that the story cut deep. All the more so because I was so familiar with Pilgrim’s Progress that I was, ironically, unprepared to meet it again. I’m glad I did.

I’ve had a long history with Pilgrim’s Progress, a history I should cap by finally reading the whole thing. I think that will be a good post-Buchan summer project. Until then, check out Dangerous Journey and Taylor and Sutphin’s Little Pligrim’s Progress, especially if you have kids and you want something that will really shape their faith and imaginations.

* A lesson in just how literate people who don’t read a book can still be when they have a culture to support their knowledge and understanding of it, something I often think about with regard to medieval people.

** Thank you, I will not be taking questions at this time.

Grace and the Grinch

I’m home with a sick four-year old today, which means I’m also home with the Paw Patrol. This morning began with “The Pups Save Christmas,” an episode in which Santa crashes in Adventure Bay on Christmas Eve, losing his reindeer and scattering presents over a wide area. It’s up to Ryder and the pups to help Santa or “Christmas will be canceled.” Naturally they pull through.

There’s more to the episode than that, but I was struck for the first time by how many Christmas shows and movies center on a team of good characters helping Santa “save” Christmas. They have to work to make Christmas happen, otherwise there’s a real possibility that it won’t. “There won’t be a Christmas this year” is an oft-repeated foreboding in these stories.

By contrast, think of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” a story the daring of which has been lost on us through sheer familiarity. The Grinch, not just a villain but a Satanic figure, does all he can to stop Christmas. He removes all of the Whos’ material means of joy, all the trappings of Christmas that characters in other stories work to save, and Christmas still happens. “It came without ribbons,” he says in outrage that turns to wonder. “It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes, or bags.”

“Paw Patrol” and other “save Christmas” stories show us the logic of magic or paganism—or, for that matter, computer programming, which is more like magic than devotees of either science care to admit. Certain conditions have to be met to get the desired result. If presents, then happiness. Mistakes or missing parts will crash the whole system. All of these stories have a lot to say about “Christmas spirit” and “believing” but this rhetoric is belied by the stories themselves, which always feature a desperate race to help Santa on his way.

What “The Grinch” shows us, on the other hand, is the logic of grace. It shows better than any other Christmas entertainment the pure gratuitous gift of Christmas, a gift that comes into the world through the goodness of someone else and that we have no control over. We can reject it, as the Grinch does at first, but we can neither make it happen nor stop it.

The nearest that that episode of “Paw Patrol” can get to grace is to assert that “Christmas is about helping others,” which is still making Christmas happen through your own best efforts. Again, compare the Grinch. Having put a lot of work into stopping Christmas and failed, he is transformed by it. You might even say converted. The grace given to the Whos extends even to him, and he returns the literal gifts that have proven, through grace, immaterial to them. Now that the presents and ornaments and roast beast don’t matter to him either, he has the grace to share them. Material blessing comes from joy and grace rather than the other way around, which is the Grinch’s starting assumption—and that of a lot of other Christmas stories in which mere mortals have to create the conditions for Christmas themselves.

This is the wonderful paradox of Christmas. The promise that Christmas will happen no matter what we do is a purer hope than any moralistic message about spending time together or helping others. Joy comes from grace, and that joy will produce everything else that makes Christmas meaningful—including helping others. We just have to let it transform us.

CS Lewis, 60 and 125 years later

Last week I was too busy critiquing Napoleon to note the 60th anniversary of the death of CS Lewis here—one more thing to hold against Napoleon—though I did manage to slip through an Instagram memorial. Fortunately, today is Lewis’s 125th birthday, so in the spirit of commemoration and appreciation here are a few good things I read from others to mark sixty years since his passing.

CS Lewis (1898-1963)

At her Substack Further Up, Bethel McGrew has an excellent reflection on her own lifelong connection to Lewis and the way the endless quoting of his work risks simplifying him into a generator of therapeutic fortune cookie messages:

Lewis is much-quoted, for good reason: He is prolifically quotable. (There are also a few famously misattributed quotes, like “You are a soul, you have a body,” which no doubt would have annoyed him greatly.) And yet, there’s a paradoxical sense in which his quotability almost risks watering down his true value as a thinker. There’s a temptation to see Lewis as a one-stop “Christian answer man,” the super-Christian who always had the perfect eloquent solution to every Christian’s hard problems. To be sure, he came closer than most Christian writers to providing a sense-making framework for hard problems. But even he wouldn’t claim to have “solved” them. Indeed, his very strength as a writer was that his work swung free of top-down systematic theologies which claim to provide comprehensively satisfying theological answers.

She continues with a particularly poignant example from A Grief Observed. I recommend the whole post.

At Miller’s Book Review, another outstanding Substack, Joel Miller considers Lewis’s humor in the years just before his death, when failing health should have robbed him of his joy:

Sayer says that Lewis “never lost his sense of humor.” Indeed, he was famously good natured, even amid dire circumstances. On July 15, 1963, he suffered a heart attack and slipped into a coma. Friends feared the worst; some came and prayed; a priest gave the sacrament of extreme unction. Amazingly, an hour after the sacrament, Lewis awoke, revived, and asked for a cup of tea.

True to form, he found a joke in it. “I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma,” he wrote Sister Penelope, an Anglican nun with whom he frequently corresponded. “Ought one honor Lazarus rather than Stephen as the protomartyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.”

Miller also reflects on his own experience of reading and rereading Lewis. Like Miller, I came to Narnia late, well after many of Lewis’s other books, and I have also read and reread Lewis’s work many times. As Miller notes, though Lewis did not expect his work to be remembered, it’s a safe bet that readers like him and myself will continue to find and appreciate Lewis’s work.

At World magazine, Samuel D James has a good short essay on Lewis as a prophet:

Precisely because Lewis knew that the claims of Christianity were all-encompassing, he recognized that no civilization that abandoned it could function. This was not because Lewis desired some kind of baptized Anglo-Saxon ethnonationalist state (born in Belfast, Lewis never forgot the high cost of religious intolerance), but because modern man’s alternatives were quite literally inhumane. Lewis saw from afar, with striking prescience, that humans had no choice but to retreat from personhood if they wanted to escape the implications of Christian revelation.

At The Critic, Rhys Laverty elaborates more deeply on the same theme:

At the close of the Second World War, Lewis was one of a number of Christian intellectuals (alongside Jacques Maritain, Simone Weil, W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot) who had begun to consider what world the Allied powers would now make for themselves. Lewis saw a future in which the rejection of transcendent values would allow a technologised elite to re-make nature as they saw fit, ultimately overthrowing human nature itself — a process made possible through the ideological capture of education.

Laverty invokes not only The Abolition of Man, as James does, but Lewis’s dramatization of those ideas in the final novel of The Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, in which the elite of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE) pursue genuinely diabolical technological progress and control:

With N.I.C.E, Lewis anticipated our contemporary technocracy. “Progress” is our unquestionable sacred cow, and its faithful handmaiden is technology. Whether we are tearing up areas of ancient natural beauty in order to build infrastructure supposedly intended to help protect the environment, prescribing new cross-sex hormones and surgery to enable greater self-realisation, or developing artificial wombs which we unconvincingly insist will only ever be used for the care of premature infants, there is now no technological innovation that we will deny ourselves today if it supposedly contributes to the nebulous “future good of humanity”.

It is only Green Book education which makes N.I.C.E possible. If truth, goodness, beauty, and so on are merely relative then there is nothing to rein in man’s “conquest of nature”. His scruples are mere hang-ups to be educated out. He will be driven by pure reason or pure appetite, with no sentiment to regulate their respective metrics of efficiency or pleasure. 

I commend all four of these essays to y’all. They’re good celebrations of a worthy life and a worthy mind, and have gotten me wanting to reread pretty much all of my Lewis shelf. Which might take a while.

Let me conclude with a brief personal reflection of my own. Growing up in the environment I did, I don’t remember ever not knowing about Lewis. He was a byword for intelligent Christian thought, something that stood out to me among the generally anti-intellectual atmosphere of fundamentalism. My earliest accidental exposure was probably the BBC Narnia films. I recall catching a long stretch of The Silver Chair on PBS at my grandparents’ house one morning. As dated as those adaptations are now, it scared me. But it also riveted me, and stayed with me. Indeed, The Silver Chair may still be my favorite of the Narnia books.

But it was a long time before I actually read anything by CS Lewis. My parents got me a set of his non-fiction books at our church bookstore when I was in high school. I started The Great Divorce one night and something about the Grey Town and the bus ride into the unknown disturbed me so much that I put it away. That nightmare quality again. But when I tried the book one sleepy Sunday afternoon in college—my way prepared by Dante, whom I discovered my senior year of high school—I read the entire thing in one sitting. It’s still among my favorite Lewis books.

From there it was on to The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity and The Four Loves. I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and liked it but returned to the non-fiction, devouring Lewis’s essays on any topic. After college I read The Space Trilogy—all three in one week, if I remember correctly—and delved into his scholarly work: An Experiment in Criticism and, crucially, The Discarded Image. I also read as much about Lewis as I read by him, and dug into the works that Lewis loved only to discover new loves of my own, most notably GK Chesterton.

Only with the birth of my children did I seriously return to Narnia, and now I genuinely love them. My kids do, too. They’ll be yet another generation entertained and blessed by Lewis’s work.

He is one of the few authors who has grown with me for so long—guiding me, enlightening me, introducing me to great literature, telling me entertaining and meaningful stories of his own, and deepening both my understanding and my faith. Where the fictional Lewis of The Great Divorce meets George MacDonald as his heavenly guide, the Virgil to his Dante, Lewis could well play that role for me.

On this, his 125th birthday, just over a week from the 60th anniversary of his death, I am more grateful than ever for CS Lewis. RIP.

The Four Reformers

On my commute over the last week I’ve been listening to the audiobook edition of The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky, a series of lectures by Russell Kirk presented in the early 1980s. The themes are decline and decadence, and the topics range across the loss of humane letters, the ideological capture of government and educational institutions, and reasons for hope. It’s good, and Kirk brings plenty of still-pertinent insight, even if his selected examples are often dated. Criticism of “Dallas” seems quaint when you know what the blood-drenched fleshpots of American culture in 2023 are like. Call it the Neil Postman problem.

In one of the final lectures, Kirk quotes a story by Robert Louis Stevenson from a book I’d never heard of: “The Four Reformers,” from Fables, an 1896 collection of twenty very short, pointed stories. Here’s the story in its entirety:

Four reformers met under a bramble bush. They were all agreed the world must be changed. “We must abolish property,” said one.

“We must abolish marriage,” said the second.

“We must abolish God,” said the third.

“I wish we could abolish work,” said the fourth.

“Do not let us get beyond practical politics,” said the first. “The first thing is to reduce men to a common level.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to give freedom to the sexes.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to find out how to do it.”

“The first step,” said the first, “is to abolish the Bible.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to abolish the laws.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to abolish mankind.”

By “reformer” Stevenson means the radical activist agents of societal change, of which there were plenty in his age and ours. The more radical the reform, the more radical the means of its implementation—especially when humans get in the way, as they do.

If I’ve run across this somewhere before I’ve forgotten it, but the final line must surely be the inspiration for the title of CS Lewis’s masterwork The Abolition of Man. Lewis, who was born four years after Stevenson’s untimely death, lived to see many such reformers put their plans into action, as well as the results.