The Back of the World.(G.K. Chesterton's 'The Man Who Was Thursday')

This year is the hundredth anniversary of G. K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday," and it has come out in at least two new editions on the occasion. "The Man Who Was Thursday" is one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century writing, the place where, before our eyes, the nonsense-fantastical tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and becomes the nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and Borges. It is also, along with Chesterton's "The Napoleon of Notting Hill," the nearest thing that this masterly writer wrote to a masterpiece.

Chesterton is an easy writer to love--a brilliant sentence-maker, a humorist, a journalist of endless appetite and invention. His aphorisms alone are worth the price of admission, better than any but Wilde's. Even his standard-issue zingers are first-class--"Americans are the people who describe their use of alcohol and tobacco as vices"; "There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle"; " 'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no true patriot would think of saying. . . . It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober' "--while the deeper ones are genuine Catholic koans, pregnant and profound: "Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor." Or: "The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange." Or: "A key has no logic to its shape. Its logic is: it turns the lock."

But he is a difficult writer to defend. Those of us who are used to pressing his writing on friends have the hard job of protecting him from his detractors, who think he was a nasty anti-Semite and medievalizing reactionary, and the still harder one of protecting him from his admirers, who pretend that he was not. His Catholic devotees are legion and fanatic--the small Ignatius Press has taken on the heroic job of publishing everything he wrote in a uniform edition, and is already up to the thirty-fifth volume--but not always helpful to his non-cult reputation, especially when they insist on treating his gassy Church apologetics as though they were as interesting as his funny and suggestively mystical Christian allegories. He has a loving following among liberal Catholics, like Garry Wills and Wilfrid Sheed, and even nonbelievers, like Martin Gardner. But his most strenuous advocates are mainly conservative preVatican II types who are indignant about his neglect without stopping to reflect how much their own uncritical enthusiasm may have contributed to it.

Chesterton is one of that company of writers whom we call Edwardian (though they stretch back to the last years of Victoria), a golden generation that emerged in the eighteen-nineties with personas seeming as fully formed as the silent comedians of the Mack Sennett studio, complete with style, costume, and gesture. Writing in London at a time when hundreds of morning newspapers and as many magazines competed for copy, and where mass literacy had created a mass audience without yet entirely removing respect for intellect, they made themselves as much as they made their sentences. We see them as we read them: Shaw all crinkled, beaming rationality, Kipling beetle-browed, bespectacled imperial intensity. Chesterton embodied the hearty side of mysticism, cape thrown across his shoulders, broad-brimmed hat on his head and sword-stick at his side, a hungry Catholic Pantagruel in London. (The last generation of writers who had anything like the same signature presence were the Americans who first encountered television, in the fifties--Mailer and Capote and Vidal--and for the same reason: they lent prestige to a new mass medium that hadn't yet learned how easily it could get along without them.)

Chesterton's autobiography, begun in the late twenties and published just after his death, in 1936, tells his early story more or less accurately. Born into a conventional and unreligious family in suburban London in 1874, he had an extraordinary sensitivity to the secret life of things. In a chapter titled "The Man with the Golden Key," perfect in its delicate unwinding of the tension between truth and play in a child's life, he explains that the transforming event of his early life was watching puppet shows in a toy theatre that his father had made for him. (The man with the golden key was a prince whose purpose he can no longer recall in a play whose plot he can no longer remember; but the purposefulness and romance of the figure stay with him.) Chesterton's point is that childhood is not a time of illusion but a time when illusion and fact exist (as they should) at the same level of consciousness, when the story and the world are equally numinous:

If this were a ruthless realistic modern story, I should of course give a most heart-rending account of how my spirit was broken with disappointment, on discovering that the prince was only a painted figure. But this is not a ruthless realistic modern story. On the contrary, it is a true story. And the truth is that I do not remember that I was in any way deceived or in any way undeceived. The whole point is that I did like the toy theatre even when I knew it was a toy theatre. I did like the cardboard figures, even when I found they were of cardboard. The white light of wonder that shone on the whole business was not any sort of trick. . . . It seems to me that when I came out of the house and stood on the hill of houses, where the roads sank steeply towards Holland Park, and terraces of new red houses could look out across a vast hollow and see far away the sparkle of the Crystal Palace (and seeing it ...