Manalive!

I’m irrationally fond of Chesterton myself, in an embarrassed kind of way. The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon Of Notting Hill are both worth reading, if you’ve gotten interested.

My favourite GK Chesterton is Iron Maiden’s Revelation. A masterpiece!

If I was going to describe the appeal, it’s that Chesterton puts forth a combination of ideas I can agree with, and frankly horrific ideas I associate with right wing maniacs, in a way that seems just wrong, rather than malicious. The central idea of The Napoleon Of Notting Hill is that people leading boring, contented lives would be much happier if you killed them a little occasionally, which seems fundamentally misguided to me. But I find myself not holding the craziness (and oh, the anti-Semitism and racism) against Chesterton personally. It’d be nice if everyone that desperately, horrifically misguided were that pleasant.

I enjoyed _The Man whose name was Thursday_. There’s supposed to be a bunch of sporadically good but unsystematic Chesterton out there in periodicals and such; I think Empson credits him in 7 Types with being a great close reader but I’ve forgotten why.

The Man Who Was Thursday is a great piece of writing, and possibly Chesterton’s only great piece of writing. The Father Brown mysteries are both formulaic, and not very good even as formulaic mysteries. The Napoleon of Notting Hill has the energy that comes from it being a Gary Stu book (i.e. the main character is really who Chesterton would like to be, the person who awakens everyone to the joys of killing each other honorably over trifles, as opposed to all that tiresomely leveling and peaceful universality).

The Man Who Was Thursday is great partly because it’s so over-the-top — haven’t read Manalive, but I suspect something similar. In Thursday, the anarchists don’t just throw big black round anarchist bombs. They have an underground lair and an armory in that lair filled with racks of big black round anarchist bombs, the armory room itself being shaped like a bomb. The other part of the greatness of Thursday is its frankly religious component. Chesterton, perhaps because he considered Thursday to be a sort of description of a nightmare, was able to confront a rather more anguished spirituality than e.g. Lewis.

Thursday. Read it in my teens. Have found my several other attempts at GKC disappointing. Father Brown has been dramatized very well on radio, which makes reading it pointless. But Thursday is fantastic.

My Chesterton problem is the smugness. He adds something to mask the taste, but it’s there, and eventually cloys altogether. Rich objects to Father Brown, while I found at least some of them enjoyable; it’s possible the relevant properties aren’t really to be discovered in the texts as such, but build up like toxins in the reader’s system. As LB’s comments show, he’s always promulgating ideas, which ought to be annoying, but the annoyance is at least deferred.

*The Man Who Was Thursday* is amazing, agreed.

But the Father Brown mysteries are only formulaic in the same way that Poe’s mysteries were formulaic from the start: the mystery is not the point. The point is the essay that the stories really want to be.

What I enjoy about the FB stories is the way Chesterton works his main conceit over and again: priests are up to their necks in the shit and pain and horror of life, and so who could have a better understanding of the criminal mind than the seemingly innocent and meek Father Brown. The stories’ sharp juxtaposition between rabid violence and FB’s mild exterior keeps them interesting to me.

My experiences with C.S. Lewis are identical to mine with Tom Wolfe: nearly every sentence screams out its stupidity and immorality, but I nevertheless feel as though I’m enjoying the work completely unironically, somehow. Is Chesterton the same way?

Er, LB in my late comment was meant to be LizardBreath, not Luther Blissett.

I stayed away from the FB stuff entirely, but in addition to above-mentioned would recommend The Club of Queer Trades … later fiction did less for me. His take on Dickens also of interest.

I never could get in to the Father Brown stories and also dislike much of Chesterton’s ideas, but I do like the “Philosophical policeman” in TMWWT:

we say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigimists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential idea of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish they property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or else they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murders respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by sacrifice of what what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s

I think, however, that I might like this bit for the wrong reasons.

I’m not sure I should bring this up (maybe we’re due for a harmonic convergence of CT themes), but Zizek is very interesting on Chesterton in general, and TMWWT in particular. In TMOC SZ attaches particular importance to Chesterton’s claim that, on the cross God became, just for an instant, an atheist. Given how many folks Zizek is scornfully dismissive of, I’ve always found his fondness (I really think that’s the right word) for Chesterton intriguing (although not intriguing enough for me to reread any of the oeuvre.)

M, I kinda see that. Orthodoxy is a can’t-put-down read, and it felt afterward to me like a beautiful, elegant pogrom.

As detective stories go, I liked The Paradoxes of Mr Pond better than a lot of Father Brown. But I think Luther’s right; and the first, second, and fifth Father Brown volumes contain some gorgeous and witty writing (the others way too much hectoring).

I picked up the two Chesterton volumes Borges repeatedly alludes to, Four Faultless Felons and G.F. Watts. Loved the latter, but the former left no impression good or bad, not even in its anti-semitism.

And The Man Who Was Thursday is, like, perfect.

I read Father Brown right after Sherlock Holmes, as a teen, and I liked ’em fine. But generally I agree with Vance’s #11. After all the above hosannas I hate to admit it, but I recently read Thursday, and (except for the amusing over-the-top-ness) it left me cold. Maybe it’s me — too many of the toxins Vance mentions.

Just finished “The Ball and the Cross” which is… interesting; similar to The Napoleon of Notting Hill in that it’s about the importance and value of fighting for stuff rather than just debating it in a “views on shape of earth differ” way, although it’s about a prolonged duel between an atheist and a Highland Catholic, rather than a civil war. (Morally preferable)

I agree that TNONH seems to believe that “war is a force that gives us meaning”, which is an unpleasant, though not necessarily untrue, line to take. Just because war is harmful and wasteful and even on occasion evil doesn’t mean it’s not fun for a lot of the people involved.

I think that TNONH is a bit more complex than LB thinks: Auberon Quin doesn’t want to bring back war, he wants to bring back pageantry. He has a decade of peaceful silliness as King before war breaks out. It’s his opposite number, Adam Wayne, and his followers like Turnbull who takes Quin’s policy to its logical extreme – those mediaeval city states that Quin loves so much were the way they were because they were very frequently at war with each other. And the first battle between Notting Hill and South Kensington is described in a rather unheroic way; chaotic scuffles in the streets, followed by (basically) Wayne’s threat of a London-scale weapon of mass destruction.

I’d agree that the Father Brown stories are best seen as narrative essays rather than conventional mysteries. Of his other works, I’d comfortably say Thursday is Chesterton’s masterpiece, being a work of weird and unclassifiable genius. Sadly, the best edition of it I’ve ever seen – the OUP World’s Classics one from the mid 1990s – is no longer in print, which is a shame, as it had an introduction that nailed the text and included the two essays that help most to decode it. Heretics and Orthodoxy act as kind of companion pieces to Thursday.

The idea that Adam Wayne in Napoleon is meant to be a fantastic version of Chesterton himself doesn’t work; the book’s final chapter features a rapprochement between Wayne and Auberon Quin, the book’s other key character, playing with the idea that neither of them is a complete person. If you put them together you have a whole human, but neither is really healthy in isolation. It might be right to say that Chesterton views them as aspects of himself, but they are only aspects – fragments, even. The book’s about a lot of things, but its core idea isn’t that violence is a good way of livening things up, but that small is beautiful. His love on London, local traditions, and medieval pegeantry all underpin the book, as does his opposition of a few years earlier to the Boer War. As with Thursday, there are a couple of essays in Heretics, in this case notably those on Kipling and Wells, that help to unlock Napoleon

The anti-semitism charge is guaranteed to pop up pretty much whenever he’s discussed, and while you’ll find no shortage of instances of anti-semitic statements in, say, The Flying Inn, it’s worth keeping in mind that London’s Wiener Library scrutinised his record on this pretty intensely, and found that he was never seriously anti-semitic either socially or philosophically, and that ‘when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on’.

Not so much the novels, I used to love the little newspaper pieces he did (clearly, I read collections, not as he was doing them). The tale is that he would be out drinking around Fleet Street, run out of money, dash one off, get a messenger boy to deliver it to an editor and use the money coming by return to carry on.

Whether the poetry is actually good poetry I’ve no idea given my literary philistinism. But these two are famous at least:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~martinh/poems/SECRET

“They have given us into the hands of the new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evenings; and they know no songs.

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/rolling.html

My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

Late-19th-century Englishman occasionally wrote racist things.

We’ll have more on that breaking story after this.

Orthodoxy for me.

John – Shouldn’t we be getting along?
F.B. – No if we stay here long enough he will come back to us. A lie always returns to its point of issue. Lies are fired around the globe as though in a giant collider and when they meet the showers of quodlibets that are created contain truths which fly to each other and make one big truth.
John – What is that truth.
F.B. – You’re sitting on my hat. Let’s go, here he is now.

Where’s Kipling in this thread? Did I miss something?

lb said she kipled, way up.

43: They’re both by Emily Dickinson.

41: Oh, I don’t think Kipling ever said anything as rude about Americans as he did about the Germans. And I’d agree that he was less racist than plenty of other writers of his time.

32: I think that TNONH is a bit more complex than LB thinks: Auberon Quin doesn’t want to bring back war, he wants to bring back pageantry. He has a decade of peaceful silliness as King before war breaks out.

Yes but. You’re right that the goal is small-scale patriotism and pageantry, but a certain amount of slaughter is presented as a proportionate and necessary route to that goal. There’s a really disturbing conversation between Quin and Wayne, where Wayne acknowledges that his Notting Hill patriotism sounds absurd to most people, and says that it won’t sound absurd once some blood is shed for it. Here.

To the extent that we’re supposed to take that as argument for a position that Chesterton sympathizes with, it’s impressively wrongheaded. And I don’t think the harmlessness of the battle as presented in the book helps it — one of the scariest arguments for war, that we’ve seen a lot of in the last decade, is that this time the casualties are going to be negligible: this one will be a fun little war.

49: I wasn’t saying that the battle is presented as harmless – just that it’s not presented as heroic. There’s no great moment with Wayne, sword in hand, facing off against the oncoming hordes of Kensington. He just makes a strategic retreat to Campden Hill and threatens to drown them all like rats in a trap. Utterly unheroic and very effective. (Of course, the final battle is quite the opposite.)

Agreed that Wayne’s views on the sacrament of bloodshed are really disturbing: but Quin finds them horrifying too, remember. Of the two, he’s definitely the one closest to being Chesterton’s author-mouthpiece.

Wayne’s views, meanwhile, sound disturbing, but they’re pretty accurate. How many tourists does Carroll Valley, PA, get every year? How many go to the little town just up the road? If you want people to hold your cause sacred, as hundreds of patriots and rebels and terrorists have found, there’s no ink brighter than martyrs’ blood.

“The Ballad of the White Horse” was an inspring epic poem, and “Lepanto” in the same vein.

Man who was Thurs. Awesome. Everything else. Meh.

Unsurprisingly, I find myself entirely in agreement with Lizardbreath (Hi LB!).

Man Who Was Thursday and Napoleon of Notting Hill are both great. I’d also recommend The Club of Queer Trades. The appeals of Chesterton are, I think, as follows:

1. Prose style. Either you like it or you don’t, but it’s not usual.
2. Imagination. In “Club of Queer Trades” the retired Major Brown walks down a random suburban street to find a garden in which “Death to Major Brown” is spelled out in a vast pattern of pansies. The rest of the story is explaining this arresting tableau.
3. Unpredictability. Chesterton is quite explicitly a dogmatist. But he’s also an odd duck. This makes him interesting.

A defense of the father Brown stories: They are deliberately gimmicky beyond belief. One of the clever plans a villain uses (in “The Wrong Shape” I believe) relies crucially on the use/mention distinction.

It’s as if Chesterton has set out to show that there isn’t anything that can be used to motivate a mystery story.

Yes to TMWWT — a lot of fun. Bored by Father Brown, more bored by the religious stuff. And while I was never a big fan of most of CS Lewis’s stuff, The Screwtape Letters is great, not so much for the devils as for the insights into human nature.

45: Okay, whoever wrote that, I am willing to read more by him.

C.S. Lewis: the charm of his works is that Lewis is writing to convince himself. The tedium of his works is that Lewis is writing to convince himself. You can go back & forth between these poles in many a given paragraph.

I recall great excitement reading Orthodoxy and delight with The Coloured Lands, forty years ago. I had just come from a Catholic boarding school (the one that Christopher Buckley sometimes pokes fun at) where Chesterton, Belloc, and Lewis were commonly assigned or cited, and one of the memorable (and packed) Christian Doctrine courses centered on “Lewis, Tolkien, and The Inklings”. Somehow I never read TMWWT.

Meanwhile, I’m sure that many folks here also read Adam Gopnik’s appreciation in the The New Yorker, but anyway:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_gopnik

This year is the hundredth anniversary of G. K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday,” one of the hidden hinges in twentieth-century writing, the place where the nonsense-fantastical tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and becomes the nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and Borges. Chesterton is an easy writer to love. His aphorisms alone are worth the price of admission. But he is a difficult writer to defend. …

[That’s from the NYer abstract, but I think it’s quoting Gopnik directly.]

More from work cited in 68:

“It is difficult to know whether [the Victorian atmosphere] should be called doubt or faith. For if, on the one hand, real faith would have been more confident, real doubt, on the other hand, would have been more indifferent. The attitude of that age of which the middle and best parts of Watts’ work is most typical, was an attitude of devouring and concentrated interest in things which were, by their own system, impossible or unknowable. Men were, in the main, agnostics: they said, “We do not know” but not one of them ever ventured to say, “We do not care.”

@67, Anderson:
It is a terrible thing to be politically suspect but a much worse fate to be both political and suspicious, to doubt whether any piece of fine writing which is not approved might not be the thin edge of some wedge. A wedge is a good thing to stay a door but it is unlikely to be supplanted by a subjunctive.

‘Orthodoxy’, as the Irish say, does not dig with the right foot or in this case jerk with the left knee. There are all manners of genuflexion none more tiresome than the ‘Young Socialists guide to Correctness’.

The problem with ‘Orthodoxy’ is that GKC cannot find the switch that toggles the paradox generator. We all love surprises and proceeding by lateral lunges but less is more in this case. Two Belgian chocs with your coffee is a treat, 6 will leave you sickened.

I belong to the one of the smallest clubs in the world: leftists who like G.K. Chesterton. Zizek is also a member of this club.

A bit more should be said about Chesterton the literary critic. His writings on Dickens are superb, and he has interesting insights into most of his contemporaries. In Othodoxy, GKC destroyed Kipling’s power-worshiping pseudo-patriotism.

Chesterton’s politics were mostly silly and/or bad. But to his credit he did oppose eugenics and imperialism.

Also, The Ballad of Saint Barbara is not to be missed.

They are firing, we are falling, and the red skies rend and shiver us,
Barbara, Barbara, we dare not loose a breath–
Be at the bursting doors of doom, and in the dark deliver us,
Who loosen the last window on the sun of sudden death.

Obviously, a WWI poem.
*Saint Barbara–the patron saint of artillery.