The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  The Man Who Was Thursday’s subtitle is the important clue in this respect. In his Autobiography, Chesterton impatiently pointed out ‘that hardly anybody who looked at the title ever seems to have looked at the sub-title; which was “A Nightmare”, and the answer to a good many critical questions’ (102). The novel is, moreover, as I have already intimated, a record of the dark night of the soul experienced by Chesterton in the 1890s. But, if it describes a nightmare, and a dark night of the soul, it also describes a nightwalk; a phantasmagorical ramble through the nocturnal streets.

  In its Dedication, Chesterton describes himself and Bentley roaming through the night, deep in discussion, seeking to surmount their sense of spiritual displacement:

  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 walked amain,

  And day had broken on the streets e’er it broke upon the brain. (xl)

  The novel’s narrative is thus framed as a compulsive, if not obsessive walk through the suburban night. It begins at sunset, a sunset that looks ‘like the end of the world’ (2), when Syme first encounters Gregory in the streets of Saffron Park. And it ends when, after fifteen fantastical chapters, Syme gradually comes to full consciousness and realizes that he has been ‘walking along a country lane with an easy and conversational companion’, that is, Gregory again. Dawn is breaking, and Syme is surprised to discover ‘rising all round him on both sides of the road the red, irregular buildings of Saffron Park’ (158).

  They are back where they began, after walking throughout the night. The entire feverish narrative, then, has been a sort of psychogenic fugue, one apparently unnoticed by Syme’s companion. In freeing himself from it, he feels as if he is ‘in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality’ (158). I too, at break of day, have experienced this euphoria, brought on by lack of sleep and utter physical exhaustion, after walking through the night.

  Chesterton talks in the Autobiography about emerging from the pessimism of the fin de siècle and forging instead a philosophy of optimism:

  When I had been for some time in these, the darkest depths of the contemporary pessimism, I had a strong inward impulse to revolt; to dislodge this incubus or throw off this nightmare. But as I was still thinking the thing out by myself, with little help from philosophy and no real help from religion, I invented a rudimentary and makeshift mystical theory of my own. It was substantially this: that even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting. Anything was magnificent as compared with nothing. Even if the very daylight were a dream, it was a day-dream; it was not a nightmare. The mere fact that one could wave one’s arms and legs about (or those dubious external objects in the landscape which were called one’s arms and legs) showed that it had not the mere paralysis of a nightmare. Or if it was a nightmare, it was an enjoyable nightmare. (93–4)

  In the concluding paragraphs of The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton depicts a daylight in which, metaphorically speaking, Syme cautiously but triumphantly waves his arms and legs about, supremely grateful for the mere fact of existence. ‘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,’ Chesterton writes (158). Syme has come out of the pessimism that he had slipped into like a coma; and finds himself susceptible at last to a spirit of optimism.

  Chesterton defines the basis of this optimism in the Autobiography as ‘a sort of mystical minimum of gratitude’ (94). ‘At the back of our brains,’ he affirms, ‘there [is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence,’ and the ‘object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder’ (95). It is this that inspired Chesterton, from the end of the nineteenth century, ‘to write against the Decadents and Pessimists who ruled the culture of the age’ (95).

  In Orthodoxy, composed at roughly the same time as The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton gives an important preliminary account of what he calls ‘this elementary wonder’, the principal function of which is to recall us, as in an artistic or spiritual epiphany, to a profound sense of being. In order to illustrate it, he sketches an archetypal subject – a modern, urban subject – who lives in an abysmal state of non-being:

  We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. … We are all under the same mental calamity; we have forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.45

  Who is the distinctly neurotic everyman, famous from ‘scientific books’ and romances alike, to whom Chesterton refers in this curious passage? I suspect that the ‘story of the man who has forgotten his name’, who roams the streets but cannot recall his identity, is that of the so-called ‘mad traveller’ that stalks in the background of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888).

  In 1887, a preacher who had abruptly disappeared from his home in Rhode Island a couple of months previously reappeared in Pennsylvania under a different name. He had no memory of his former identity. In France, in the same year, another instance of ‘ambulatory automatism’, as some specialists named it, came to light; and as a result of interest from the medical establishment it quickly acquired the status of a specific mental disorder. This precipitated what Ian Hacking diagnoses as ‘the fugue epidemic of the 1890s’.46

  For Chesterton, traumatized as he had been in the 1890s, the man suffering from this apparently inexplicable form of amnesia is paradigmatic, because all individuals, in the times in which he lives, seem oddly inured to the environment they inhabit. In this anaesthetic condition, ‘we have all forgotten what we really are’. Everyday life is a constant state of forgetting, and art or spiritual ecstasy alone can, according to a Freudian logic, make us forget for a moment that we have forgotten.

  If Chesterton’s Syme, who himself experiences a form of ambulatory automatism as he roams about the suburbs of London at night, can be seen as a mad traveller, then he too is finally made to forget that he has forgotten who he really is. The name Thursday is in this respect not simply the pseudonym he must adopt when, as he falls into the depths of the nightmare, he is forced to assume the identity of an anarchist. It is his real name. It is the magic formula that, as in an incantation, brings his real identity into being.

  When Syme is forced to dress ‘as Thursday’ for the final biblical masquerade, at the end of the penultimate chapter, he experiences it as a relief, for ‘though he affected to despise the mummer, he felt a curious freedom and naturalness in his movements as the blue and gold garment fell about him’ (175). And his co-conspirators, from Monday through to Saturday, undergo the same epiphany, since ‘these disguises did not disguise, but reveal’ (175).

  As Žižek has remarked of this passage, ‘it is no longer “If you want to show your true self, tear off the mask!”, but, on the contrary, “If you want to show your true self, put on the right mask!”’47 In becoming Thursday, Syme becomes himself; and it is the consciousness that he is secretly Thursday that makes him feel he is ‘in possession of some impossible good news’ when he resurfaces from the nightmare on a country lane at first light. In the terms provided by Orthodoxy, he is residually conscious of the fact that for one awful instant he forgot that he had forgotten who he is; and this is in itself enough to transfigure his everyday life. The deeper irony of the novel’s title, then, is that this man really is Thur
sday. He is not just called Thursday. It is not simply some disguise that he temporarily assumed; it is the originary identity that he managed to dig up. He is most himself when he finally becomes the man he pretended to be.

  So, The Man Who Was Thursday is framed in the form of an episode of mad travelling, a dreamlike nocturnal tramp in which Syme adopts the false identity that is in fact his true identity. The scene of his epiphany – though the reader is made to forget this until the final paragraphs of the book – is the road along which he has been walking through the night. For Chesterton, it should be emphasized, the street is the supreme repository of poetry. ‘Let us go through certain half-deserted streets,’ he appeals to his reader, like Eliot’s Prufrock. But Chesterton’s streets do not ‘follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent’.48 They twist and gyrate with a mysterious, sometimes grotesque sense of joy. They are not meaningless but pregnant with spiritual significance.

  In The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Chesterton’s narrator describes in some detail a volume of poems by one of his main characters, Adam Wayne. The poems themselves are apparently rather poor, but they are nonetheless remarkable for channelling all the spiritual passion of Romanticism from the countryside into the city, and for positing London as the supreme poetic subject. In one of the finer love lyrics in the collection, according to the narrator, this poet, ‘instead of saying that the rose and the lily contend in her complexion, says, with a purer modernism, that the red omnibus of Hammersmith and the white omnibus of Fulham fight there for the mastery!’49

  The Man Who Was Thursday is itself an instance of this ‘purer modernism’, which jams the most incongruous urban images up against one another in order to evoke the glorious chaos of wandering through early twentieth-century London. The spectacular opening sight of the anarchists, ‘all dressed in the insolence of fashion’, boisterously eating breakfast on a balcony overlooking Leicester Square, in Chapter 5, is an exemplary instance of this, for it concentrates Syme’s ‘eerie sensation of having strayed into a new world’ (41).

  Chesterton’s metropolitan city is an unstable, even at times explosive compound of the exotic and the everyday. Reality and Elfland. It is in the same spirit that, in the opening chapter of The Man Who Was Thursday, Syme insists that in so far as it embodies a kind of rapturous desire for order, the London Underground is ‘the most poetical thing in the world’ (4). Chesterton’s modernism is a triumphant form of urban romanticism.

  The narrator of The Napoleon of Notting Hill comments at one point that Wayne ‘was perhaps the first to realise how often the boundary of fairyland runs through a crowded city’.50 He was not of course the first to realize this. For Chesterton was conscious that Dickens had effectively been the poet laureate of the metropolitan city in the nineteenth century, and precisely because he possessed, ‘in the most sacred and serious sense of the term, the key of the street’:

  Few of us understand the street. Even when we step into it, we step into it doubtfully, as into a house or room of strangers. Few of us see through the shining riddle of the street, the strange folk that belong to the street only … Of the street at night many of us know even less. The street at night is a great house locked up. But Dickens had, if ever man had, the key of the street. His earth was the stones of the street; his stars were the lamps of the street; his hero was the man in the street.51

  Chesterton too had the key of the street, especially in the dreamlike conditions of the city at night, and the proof of this – evident especially in The Man Who Was Thursday – is that, as he said of Dickens, ‘he saw all his streets in fantastic perspectives.’52 Chesterton was capable, as almost none of the more famous modernists were, of defamiliarizing the mundane properties of the metropolitan city and making them seem miraculous.

  The image of the streetlamp, to which Chesterton recurred again and again in his fictional and non-fictional prose, is characteristic of this, because it is an emblem of what, in Orthodoxy, he calls ‘practical romance’. It combines ‘something that is strange with something that is secure’; ‘an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome’. Like other ordinary objects that only need to be estranged for a moment to seem extraordinary, it answers a ‘double spiritual need, the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly named romance’.53

  From its title on, then, The Man Who Was Thursday brings a fantastic perspective to bear on everyday life, and in particular the everyday life of the modern city. This fantastic perspective is of course informed by Chesterton’s Christian faith, which became increasingly confident in the first years of the twentieth century (though he did not officially convert to Catholicism until 1922). I am however convinced that Samuel Hynes was correct when, some time ago, he claimed that notwithstanding the important scholarship on Chesterton by religious critics, ‘above all, he needs secular attention.’54 For Chesterton’s commitment to estranging and transfiguring the commonplace is in literary terms consonant with the contemporaneous reaction against realism.

  The Man Who Was Thursday is perhaps the supreme modernist romance. It uses the emergent techniques of modernism in order not to disenchant but to re-enchant everyday life. It takes the man who ambles about the streets but cannot remember who he is, and, in a gesture as anarchic as it is ecstatic, spins him about in order to recall him abruptly to himself. Suddenly, this man seems to inhabit a fairy tale in which, though nothing makes sense, everything makes sense.

  Exemplary in this respect is one of the most sinister and darkly comic passages in The Man Who Was Thursday, where Syme discovers to his horror that the ancient, death-like anarchist Professor de Worms is stalking him through London’s ‘labyrinth of little streets’ (61). Here, Chesterton’s urban fairy tale acquires a particularly demented force. For, although the Professor appears to be decrepit, he displays an athletic capacity for keeping up with Syme that is deeply disturbing.

  However much Syme accelerates, however much he loses himself in the maze of alleys and lanes that lead from the main thoroughfares, when he stops to catch his breath he continues to hear ‘the clinking crutch and labouring feet of the infernal cripple’ (62). Chesterton is in this chapter consciously rewriting ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840), reversing the terms of its narrative so that, rather than the narrator pursuing Poe’s incomprehensible old man, the incomprehensible old man, even more unnervingly, pursues Syme.

  Finally, in a state of desperation that is almost ecstatic, Syme has ‘a new impulse to tear out the secret of this dancing, jumping and pursuing paralytic’, and he determines to turn and confront his pursuer:

  Professor de Worms came slowly round the corner of the irregular alley behind him, his unnatural form outlined against a lonely gas-lamp, irresistibly recalling that very imaginative figure in the nursery rhymes, ‘the crooked man who went a crooked mile.’ He really looked as if he had been twisted out of shape by the tortuous streets he had been threading. He came nearer and nearer, the lamplight shining on his lifted spectacles, his lifted, patient face. (63)

  The Professor thus comes closer and closer; and Syme, ‘remembering all the nightmares he had ever known,’ simply waits for him, ‘as St. George waited for the dragon, as a man waits for a final explanation or for death’ (63). In the Old English language, the word wyrm signified a serpent or dragon, so Chesterton deliberately identifies the Professor, a desiccated rationalist whose intellect alone resists ‘the last dissolution of senile decay’, with the legendary knight’s monstrous antagonist (46).

  It transpires, of course, that the Professor – his ‘pale, grave’ head grotesquely attached to a ‘bounding body’, ‘like the head of a lecturer upon the body of a harlequin’ (63) – is yet another police detective in elaborate disguise. The relief the reader feels at this revelation that he is not the hero’s foe, however, does not efface the indelible creepiness of the chase that Chesterton has so brilliantly described. The metropolitan city itself, after this episode, appears to be fatally haunted. On its streets,
criss-crossed by both satanic and angelic energies, identities are ceaselessly made and unmade.

  Chesterton, the descendant of Dickens and Poe, is one of the great modernist poets of the city. And he is one of the great modernist poets of the city even though he is generally classified as neither a modernist nor a poet; even though, as a kind of counter-modernist, he insists on returning to the pre-modern form of the chivalric romance, with its wandering hero, in order to defamiliarize or estrange the modern metropolis. His epiphanies take place on pavements.

  In the chapter on ‘Browning in Later Life’ in his monograph on the poet, Chesterton observes that ‘Browning was one of those wise men who can perceive the terrible and impressive poetry of the police-news’, before adding that ‘a great many of his works might be called magnificent detective stories.’55 ‘Childe Roland’ is one of these detective stories.

  Indeed, I am almost tempted to claim that, according to Chesterton’s interpretation, ‘Childe Roland’ anticipates the noir form. Chesterton is of course far from some proto-noir novelist himself, as the ‘Father Brown’ stories indicate clearly enough; but in his interpretation of ‘Childe Roland’ he implicitly identifies the configuration of generic influences that, half a century later, will shape the evolution of noir – epic, lyric and naturalism.

  The unshaven man Chesterton pictures in trying to evoke the seediness of the landscape described in ‘Childe Roland’ – ‘That sense of scrubbiness in nature,’ he writes, ‘as of a man unshaved’ – is in the context of Browning’s poem implicitly identified with the ‘brute’ that walks about ‘pashing’ the patchy, scrubby vegetation beneath its feet (‘pashing’, a rare word first recorded in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, means smashing or violently crushing).