Observing the Sabbath

By Stefan Kanfer

THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

by G.K. CHESTERTON

224 pages. Sheed & Ward. $7.95.

In one of G. (for Gilbert) K. (for Keith) Chesterton's essays, he wanders the white hills of southern England. Drawing paper is at hand, but he has forgotten his pastels. Looking down, the artist enjoys a sudden epiphany. He is walking over his heart's desire: Sussex is a giant piece of chalk.

It was a typical bit of Chestertoniana. Everywhere he went, he restated the riddle of life: When is a miracle not a miracle? The answer: when it is seen for the second time. To preserve his sense of wonder, he regarded the world with the eyes of Adam. Like those other English riddlers, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and W.S. Gilbert, Chesterton was childless. Like them, he became his own child, a 300-lb. choirboy reveling in puns and paradox. But between Chesterton and the Victorians there was a profound difference. Traditionally, English eccentrics sought refuge hi nonsense. Chesterton found shelter in sense. His immense output (some 150 books and innumerable articles and poems) evidences a long wrangle with madness --the lunacy of the new century and the wildness of the mind. As Jorge Luis Borges observes, "Chesterton restrained himself from being Edgar Allan Poe or Franz Kafka, but something in the makeup of his personality leaned toward the nightmarish; something secret, and blind, and central."

That bizarre leaning is most noticeable--and most entertaining--in this odd little novel first published in 1908. If the works of R.D. Laing were placed at the North Pole (an idea that fills Chestertonians with equanimity), The Man Who Was Thursday would be in Antarctica. Chesterton here finds his inspiration in order, his thrills in sanity. To his hero, madness and chaos are not merely evil; they are dull. To this overdue reissue of the book Critic Gary Wills contributes a luminous introduction stressing Chesterton's search for revelation in the face of absurdity. The secret of the novel, he indicates, lies in its subtitle, A Nightmare.

The narrative proceeds with the leaping congruity of dreams. Gabriel Syme, a detective, is under orders to infiltrate a conspiracy to destroy society. He penetrates the Central Anarchist Council to find six other members, identified only as days of the week. Syme assumes the remaining role of Thursday. After a series of painful pursuits and duels, he learns the identity of five colleagues: they are all Scotland Yard detectives in disguise. And Sunday? It is his identity that provides the book's philosophical richness and tension.

Although Chesterton was to become a Catholic apologist, Thursday was written long before his conversion, and it does not yield to simple theological analysis. Sunday may be God; he may just as easily be Satan or the State. The council is a satiric conceit; it is also a social prophecy that antedates Kafka's The Trial by 15 years and the CIA by two generations. Syme's story rings with the sonorities of the Book of Job. It is also a splendid detective yarn.

Greater Puzzle. Small wonder that Chesterton attracted such Christian fabulists as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis --as well as such secular futurists as Shaw and Orwell. Yet not one of them reached a final interpretation of this deceptively slight work. The priest and critic Ronald Knox describes the book as a Pilgrim's Progress written in the style of The Pickwick Papers.

The Man Who Was Thursday is one of those rare works that stir fresh interpretations from each reader (Wills defines it as "a chase, an evasion and a dream"). Was Chesterton uncertain of his own meaning? At the close, the man who was Sunday tells Syme, "You will understand the sea and I will still be a riddle." Today the sea is alive with investigators, and Sunday remains as elusive as before. Only one greater puzzle hovers round the book: Why has this delightful and pertinent work never won a modern audience? The paradox is worthy of the man who was Chesterton. The neglect is not.

-- Stefan Kanfer

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