On G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare’

This great underread novel of the twentieth century explodes the nihilism and victimhood of the modern left

G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936) was a leading writer, philosopher and Christian apologist of the twentieth century

The novelist Sir Kingsley Amis described G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) as “the most thrilling book I have ever read”. Another reviewer was “completely dazed” after reading the work in a single sitting. It is a short spy novel, written in beautifully arresting prose, of late-night secret conventions, terror plots, mysterious identities, confused allegiances, and hot air balloon chases. Yet, within the labyrinthine story lies a deep hidden meaning: the nihilism and cynicism of the modern world are unravelled, and in their place a great vision of universal hope and salvation is presented.

Indeed, even Chesterton’s political opponents have consistently recognised the literary greatness of The Man Who Was Thursday. Christopher Hitchens, a lifelong leftist, observed that the novel “must have” influenced Franz Kafka’s and Jorge Luis Borges’ masterworks, which mirror the same sense of absurdity and dreamlike strangeness that Chesterton originally captured. Furthermore, the leftwing critic Adam Gopnik described the book as “one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century writing”: a pivotal moment at which the leading lights of the literary and intellectual world took notice of a work that was fascinatingly and vividly new. And yet, as we will see, beneath the modern style lies a call to ancient, timeless orthodoxy.

The novel depicts a young poet and police detective, Gabriel Syme, who infiltrates a secret meeting of anarchists that are plotting a war of nihilistic rage against civilisation. At an underground convention, Syme is elected to the position of Thursday, one of seven members of the High Council of Anarchists, each of whom is named after a day of the week. The Council’s chief is the terrifying, enormous Sunday. Syme learns that the anarchist syndicate is plotting a dreadful bombing in Paris and sets out to stop it. A thrilling chase through England and across the Channel ensues, in which the dark confusion and absurdity reach an apotheosis. Syme eventually discovers that, like him, the other principal anarchists are undercover policemen, and that Sunday is both the lead anarchist and the chief policeman. The novel builds to a mystifying denouement in which Sunday’s true nature as divine creator and conductor is unveiled.

What are we to make of The Man Who Was Thursday? On its surface, the novel presents a bewildering, absurd and nihilistic cosmos. Syme’s strange pursuit to the heart of the anarchist plot is seemingly akin to the endless, trudging confusion of Kafka’s Trial and Castle. Yet, Kafka’s nightmarish world is defined only by desolation and pain: there is no mirth, no wonder, and, critically, no redemption. At the end of The Trial, Joseph K. dies “like a dog”, executed by the nonchalant stooges of the corrupt, indifferent bureaucracy that tried him; whilst The Castle ends mid-sentence in the depths of a similar, unending despair.

Now, whilst Kafka’s pathetic protagonists remain locked perpetually in a ceaseless nightmare, The Man Who Was Thursday is in fact a tale of transcendent salvation and renewal. However, this message has been misunderstood by critics, who blithely misread the novel and fail to situate it within the intellectual arc of Chesterton’s life. The contemporary philosopher John Gray, for example, has argued:

“Though some have tried to interpret The Man Who Was Thursday as a type of Christian allegory, the world it describes has more in common with the interminable labyrinth of Kafka's Castle. In the orderly Christian cosmos, in which Chesterton wanted to believe, nothing is finally tragic, still less absurd. The world is a divine comedy, the ultimate significance of which is never in doubt. In The Man Who Was Thursday, the world is illegible and may well be nonsensical. This was the nightmare he struggled, for the most part successfully, to forget.”

Such interpretations are derived from shallow readings of the novel, and serve to project the critics’ own philosophical convictions, rather than accurately depict Chesterton’s intended meaning. Indeed, on 13 June 1936 (the day before his death), Chesterton published an essay in which he decried the commonplace pessimistic readings of The Man Who Was Thursday:

"The book…was not intended to describe the real world as it was, or as I thought it was, even when my thoughts were considerably less settled than they are now. It was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date; with just a gleam of hope in some double meaning of the doubt, which even the pessimists felt in some fitful fashion." — Illustrated London News, 13 June 1936

Moreover, it is simply a fact, founded in Chesterton’s intellectual and religious life, that this novel was not written by a nihilist. Born in 1874 and baptised into the Church of England, Chesterton subsequently underwent a period of profound atheistic angst as a young man. Yet, in 1901, upon marrying his wife Frances aged 27, he converted to Anglicanism. Twenty-one years later, he would, in turn, lead her to Catholicism. It was therefore only after rejecting the scepticism of his youth and committing wholly to Christianity that Chesterton wrote The Man Who Was Thursday, publishing the novel in 1908 whilst in his early thirties.

It is thus the work of a Christian, not a sceptic. Indeed, it is about the journey from juvenile nihilism to Christianity: from doubt and despair to hope and redemption. This true message is conveyed in the brilliant prologue to the novel, a poem addressed to Chesterton’s great friend and writer, Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The poem reminisces on the scepticism and doubt that bewitched the two men together in their youth. It opens with a vision of the spiritual and cultural rot that had infected not merely their own young minds, but the very fabric of the intellectual zeitgeist in which they were reared:

A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;
The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay;
Round us in antic order their crippled vices came —
Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.

For Chesterton, nihilism was a spiritual malaise – a sick cloud upon the soul. And with it come the broader societal decays: scientism and the rejection of classical theism; the decline of the arts; and the affirmation of vice and sin. This is the nightmare to which the novel’s subtitle refers: the veil of doubt and despair that mired Chesterton’s youth and which still entranced many of his contemporaries. Further, the poem reveals that this is a story about the awakening from that nightmare, and the return to solace and hope:

But we were young; we lived to see God break their bitter charms.
God and the good Republic come riding back in arms:
We have seen the City of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved —
Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.

This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells,
And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells —
Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash,
Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash.
The doubts that were so plain to chase, so dreadful to withstand —
Oh, who shall understand but you; yea, who shall understand?
The doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain,
And day had broken on the streets e'er it broke upon the brain.
Between us, by the peace of God, such truth can now be told;
Yea, there is strength in striking root and good in growing old.
We have found common things at last and marriage and a creed,
And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read.

Through marriage and their spiritual rebirth in Christianity, the trance of doubt was dispelled at a pistol flash, and the young men were anchored once more in reason and hope. For the ideal of salvation, of return, is the key to The Man Who Was Thursday — the great theme which differentiates it from the pure agony of Kafka or Borges, who could mimic only the nightmarish despair of Chesterton’s masterpiece.

The novel opens with an encounter in a London park between two poets: Gabriel Syme and Lucian Gregory, the protagonist and antagonist respectively. Chesterton, influenced significantly by Dickens’ use of meaningful character names, intends that Gabriel is the angelic representative of God and the divine order, whilst Lucian (derived from Lucifer) is Satan’s agent, rebelling against that order towards a nihilistic chaos. Their antithesis is illuminated through a disagreement over the nature and purpose of the poet. Gregory insists that “An artist is identical with an anarchist…The poet delights in disorder only…The poet is always in revolt.” The artist, so claims Gregory, “abolishes all conventions” and seeks to unveil only the chaotic abyss at the heart of nature and life. The purpose of art is to deconstruct beauty and order, not aspire to the highest ideals of goodness and truth.

Syme counters that the poet in fact exemplifies the cosmic order — he brings things together with immaculate precision; he edifies rather than destroys. “Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw who commemorates his victories.” It is this dichotomy — between the cynical and the hopeful; the breaker and the builder — that undergirds the remainder of the novel. It begins with a metaphysical distinction between the theist, who sees the world as immaculately ordered and purposeful, and the atheist, for whom the cosmos is nothing but an ungoverned, roiling abyss. The dispute then progresses naturally to political and cultural terrain, in which the conservative guardianship of order is pitted against the destructive neo-Jacobin revolt. Thus, Gregory outlines the true basis of his bitter rebellion:

“To abolish God!…We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations…We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves…We have abolished Right and Wrong.”

Critically, it is the very meaning of existence — nature itself — that is under attack. The war at the heart of the book is, above all, spiritual and metaphysical: order against disorder; meaning against the abyss; truth against falsehood; and, critically, the conservative against the leftist. We discover that Syme has himself rebelled against the mindless leftwing orthodoxy into which his contemporaries have slid: “Being surrounded by every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left — sanity.”

Syme, ironically, is rebelling against the cynical leftist “rebels” of his age. The radical movement, having attained immense cultural power, has itself morphed into mass conformity posing as a revolution — a new, warped orthodoxy to which obedience is assumed. Indeed, Chesterton satirises the stooges of the radical left in ways that remain strikingly resonant. Prior to Syme being elected to the post of Thursday, a party official describes the absurdly tragicomic death of the “comrade” that previously held the position:

“We all lament the sad decease of the heroic worker who occupied the post until last week. As you know, his services to the cause were considerable. He organised the great dynamite coup of Brighton which, under happier circumstances, ought to have killed everybody on the pier. As you also know, his death was as self-denying as his life, for he died through his faith in a hygienic mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which substance he regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to the cow.”

The anarchist movement is a collection of insane contradictions, comingling advocacy of the pettiest, “kind” causes with brutish, arrogant antipathy towards human opponents. It is this irrational, futile rebellion against God and Man that drives Gregory in his project of destructive terror. In the end, he is revealed to be the only true anarchist of the story — a maddened, fallen, pitiful ideologue, overcome with superfluous rage against existence itself. In his final confrontation with Syme, Gregory rants against the very foundations of authority and power:

“You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken? We in revolt talk all kind of nonsense doubtless about this crime or that crime of the Government. It is all folly! The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe! You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule all mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I—”

Gregory embodies the infantile victimhood of the radical: he despises power only because it is powerful. Of course, the problem lies not with the structures of order, hierarchy, and law: the problem lies within Gregory himself. He views his own existence as a thing of pure suffering, the blame for which sits first with the human authorities of civilisation, but finally with the “supreme power” — God. The existence of laws (and lawmakers), both human and divine, is the ultimate source of Gregory’s supposed existential oppression. He desires — or thinks he desires — a strange, unbounded, Nietzschean freedom. His revolt, as a kind of pathetic fallen angel, is nothing but a senseless rebellion against the cosmos, and indeed against the laws of nature and human culture by which it is governed.

Gregory’s plea that the supreme power should experience “a real agony such as I” pulls us into the true philosophical heart of the novel. For it is the essence of Christianity that God did in fact suffer real agony as a man — agony of a depth that Gregory cannot know. Critically, it is the mystifying, enormous Sunday that finally disillusions Gregory:

He [Gregory] had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday, which wore a strange smile.

“Have you,” he cried in a dreadful voice, “have you ever suffered?”

As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”

It is Sunday, who is revealed as the great binding creator and orchestrator of all order and chaos in the story, that finally explodes Gregory’s ingratitude and ignorance. “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?” was asked by Christ of his disciples in a veiled foreshadowing of his coming trial and execution by the Roman state: could they bear something akin to the suffering that he would soon experience for the salvation of Man. Likewise, it is Sunday, the great puppet-master in this tale of confusion and pain, who finally reveals that he — the grand mover — has suffered like none other, and that this is in fact the antidote to Gregory’s own suffering. Only through Sunday is Gregory’s ideological sickness finally broken and redeemed.

Thus, in the final passage of the novel, Syme literally awakens from the nightmare to discover that all is seemingly forgotten. He and Gregory are conversing easily in a country lane, with the madness far behind them. The dreadful labyrinth has finally dissolved, and he is uplifted by a great new spiritual mirth:

“But Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality.”

That “impossible good news” is of course the divine salvation in which Chesterton had himself recovered his faith. The dark night of doubt has passed; and in the light of the dawn has emerged a metaphysics by which the cosmos is intelligible and a morality that encompasses Man’s whole meaning. At its heart, The Man Who Was Thursday is about the dissolution of the sceptical nightmare and the return to sanity. For Chesterton, the nihilistic abyss is nothing but a pessimistic illusion in which the whole world is viewed through an obscured, inverted lens. When discussing the great mystery of Sunday with his companions earlier in the novel, Syme explains:

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stopping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—”

The sceptic stares, smirking, into the back of the world, denying that it holds any inner mysteries. Syme, however, strives to glimpse the front of the world — to search beyond superficial disorder for the great implacable cause of all existence. For it is only from the front that we might, perhaps, see a face.