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.

Borges, Other Inquisitions

This 1908 novel [The Man Who Was Thursday] has long enjoyed a kind of underground cult among those with a special interest in fantasy. It is the story of a conspiratorial council of seven anarchists, each one named for a day of the week, with the mysterious Sunday as their president. Admirers of the tale have included J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, and T. S. Eliot. Kingsley Amis has frequently written about it. Yet the wider reading public remains largely unaware of it.

No wonder. It is a detective story that seems to solve itself too easily, and lose its mystery. But those who stay with it, even after they think they have seen through it, are teased back and back by its ultimately unresolved nature, all the puzzles that remain after the last pages are read. It does not give up its secrets at a glance. Even Mr Amis, despite his enthusiasm for the tale, seems to misunderstand it—as when he writes: 'What I find indigestible in the closing scenes is… the person of the fleeing Sunday, who at one point makes off mounted on a Zoo elephant and who bombards the pursuit with messages of elephantine facetiousness, [Encounter, October 1973]. He is attacking the finest clue of all. But, more than that, he lapses into the condescending attitude he came to criticize—the view that Chesterton cannot resist buffoonery, even when he is onto something bigger and more startling than a good joke (or a bad one).

But Sunday's riddles go beyond joking, good or bad; they show a cruelty in humour like the cruelty of nature itself—they are taunts thrown back at men who have been tortured. The best parts of this racy entertainment, as Borges understood, are moments of weird near-break-down:

As he now went up the weary and perpetual steps, he was daunted and bewildered by their almost infinite series. But it was not the hot horror of a dream or of anything that might be exaggeration or delusion. Their infinity was more like the infinity of arithmetic, something unthinkable, yet necessary to thought. Or it was like the stunning statements of astronomy about the distance of the fixed stars. He was ascending the tower of reason, a thing more hideous than unreason itself.

The book is all a chase, an evasion, and a dream; a benign nightmare prolonged, page by page, beyond our waking. It has the compelling inconsequence of nightmare, its tangle of mutually chasing loves and hates, where the impossible becomes inevitable and each wish comes partnered with its own frustration. Nightmare is described in the book itself as a world of 'tyrannic accidents'. Auden and others have noticed Chesterton's power to evoke the despotic mood of dreams. Borges compared him to Poe in this aspect, and C.S. Lewis to Kafka. The reason we go on reading Chesterton's tale—after we have cracked its first secret (that all the conspirators are also, unbeknownst to each other, anti-conspirators)—is that a dream mood leads us on, linking all its incidents. It aims at an effect that intrigued Chesterton in his own disturbing dreams, one achieved in some of his favourite works of literature.

Here is the pursuit of the man we cannot catch, the flight from the man we cannot see; here is the perpetual returning to the same place, here is the crazy alteration in the very objects of our desire, the substitution of one face for another face, the putting of the wrong souls in the wrong bodies, the fantastic disloyalties of the night…

[Essay on 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', in W. H. Auden, G. K. Chesterton: A Selection, 1970]

So, even after we know that the anarchists are also cops, the dream-suspension of things in air continues—the flight from Age, through a crippling ache of snow; a slow climb up the mad tower of pure reason; the duel with a phantom who comes apart like meat being carved but will not bleed; the endless chase by anonymous somebodies who gradually become Everybody, embodying paranoia's logic. Then, after running as the quarry, the book's accumulating heroes turn and reach new stages of bewilderment as the pursuers. They knew more as the hunted than as hunters. Desperation gave them solidarity; but at a hint of victory they come apart again, each teasing at the private riddles addressed to him by Sunday. But this dominance of a nightmare mood should not blind us to the riddles addressed to us as readers. These are nicely differentiated, and cluster around two questions. Who are the conspirators? And: Who is Sunday?

THE CONSPIRATORS

Then thou scarest me with dreams and terrifiest me through visions.

Job 7.14

The first set of clues is almost too obvious—which makes men overlook further hints, to which the first set was only our introduction. The point is not only that everyone is in disguise, but that his disguise is revealing. Each man's secret is unwittingly worn like a shield instead of an emblem. The biggest clue can be overlooked because Chesterton has placed it so prominently in the title. A man can be Thursday only because other men are already Friday, Monday, etc. Granted, the Council of Days is a device that readers quickly penetrate; and most of them focus thence-forth on the identity of Sunday. But the riddle of Monday is not disposed of simply by knowing that he is Sunday's Secretary and also the hidden Detective's right-hand man. Chesterton tries to keep reminding us of this; but readers, so far as I can tell, still keep forgetting. When Dr Bull says, toward the end, 'We are six men going to ask one man what he means', Syme replies: 'I think it is six men going to ask one man what they mean.'

What does the Secretary, the first and most persistent of the Council, mean—with the cruel tilt of laughter as a doubt across his face? At the final banquet he will wear robes that make him more real—a pitch black garment with the struggle of first light down its expanse. He is Monday, light out of darkness, the first unstoppable questioning that is man's last boast—'And God said: Let there be light.' He comes after his fellow-conspirators in the long dream-scene of chase with a black mask on, his face a pattern of light and dark echoed in all his followers. He dwells in darkness, only to fight it, and is described from the outset as tortured with thought in its most naked form. Syme wonders why, when the Secretary gets tossed from the hood of the car, darkness comes on so soon—a minor riddle, but part of a large pattern. Monday, with his complex mind, is the simplest and truest of them all in his quest for truth. He will not stop asking impertinent questions even in the unknowable Emperor's palace.

Gogal, shaggy under his load of wild tresses, but transparent and easily found out, is as simple as the waters of the Second Day, Wednesday is the Marquis, whose absinthe philosophy brightens to the green clothing of earth. Thursday is Syme, a poet, a divider of planet from planet on a plan—as Michelangelo's sculptor-God on the ceiling shoulders moons off from the sun. Friday is the Professor, who has a nihilist's ethic of bestiality, but a deeper kinship, also, with the innocence of animals. Saturday is the last day, Man, a thing almost too open and childish to wear a disguise, an optimist of reason, the tale's French revolutionary, declaring the patent rights of man as king of the creation—each man a king.

All six of the men are puzzles, but elemental puzzles, the kind that one cannot really 'solve'. They represent man's status as a partner in his own creation—the question of man's questioning; the open energy of Gogol; the dim recesses of the Marquis; Syme's swagger; Friday's depths of despair; and Saturday's insaner hope. When Syme grieves that the conspirators have looked only on the fleeing back of the universe, we think his talk deals only with Sunday, since he is often glimpsed from behind in the story. But later, in the garden, all things—in dancing—turn a sudden face on the Council, each tree and lamppost. Everything has a story untold, an episode wandered into, a history only half-understood. And what is true of the clues is true of the detectives, who are themselves the main clues they must read. Each of them deceived the others because he was seen from behind or partially, at an odd angle. The 'back' of intellect is doubt; of subtlety, deviousness; of energy, rage. Everything in the tale, as in the world, needs deciphering, nothing more than oneself. We are all walking signs, signaling urgently to one another in a code no one has cracked. If anyone could understand himself, he would understand everything. So the last person to guess what the man called Monday means will be Monday. Sunday is not a greater mystery than the other Days, except in one respect—he is not only a clue, and a reader of clues; he also plants the clues. He may have cracked the code. That is why they go in search of him.

The tale is not an idle play with symbols. It gets its urgency and compression from the fact that it is the most successful embodiment of the seminal experience in Chesterton's life, his young mystical brush with insanity. In that sense, it is full of clues to his own mental crisis—his depression and near-suicide as an art student in the decadent 1890s. At the centre of Chesterton's best fiction there is always a moment of aporia, the dark seed of all his gaudy blossomings. In Thursday that moment comes when the chase is urged on by the masked Secretary:

The sun on the grass was dry and hot. So in plunging into the wood they had a cool shock of shadow, as of divers who plunge into a dim pool. The inside of the wood was full of shattered sunlight and shaken shadows. They made a sort of shuddering veil, almost recalling the dizziness of a cinematograph. Even the solid figures walking with him Syme could hardly see for the patterns of sun and shade that danced upon them. Now a man's head was lit as with a light of Rembrandt, leaving all else obliterated; now again he had strong and staring white hands with the face of a negro. The ex-Marquis had pulled the old straw hat over his eyes, and the black shade of the brim cut his face so squarely in two that it seemed to be wearing one of the black half-masks of their pursuers. The fancy tinted Syme's overwhelming sense of wonder. Was he wearing a mask? Was anyone wearing a mask? Was anyone anything? This wood of witchery, in which men's faces turned black and white by turns, in which their figures first swelled into sunlight and then faded into formless night, this mere chaos of chiaroscuro (after the clear daylight outside), seemed to Syme a perfect symbol of the world in which he had been moving for three days, this world where men took off their beards and their spectacles and their noses, and turned into other people. That tragic self-confidence which he had felt when he believed that the Marquis was a devil had strangely disappeared now that he knew that the Marquis was a friend. He felt almost inclined to ask after all these bewilderments what was a friend and what an enemy. Was there anything that was apart from what it seemed? The Marquis had taken off his nose and turned out to be a detective. Might he not just as well take off his head and turn out to be a hobgoblin? Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern painters had found there. He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

The dragging in of impressionism here makes no sense except by its connection with the morbid experiences of Chesterton at the Slade School during the years 1892 through 1895, when a fashionable pessimism was cultivated by the same people who were taken with fashionable 'impressionism'.

Much of the material for Thursday comes directly out of the notebooks and poems of those art-school years, almost a decade and a half behind him when he wrote the novel. An early poem on suicide lies behind Chapter 10. The account of an art-school conversation is drawn on for the lantern episode in Chapter 12. The emergence from solipsism into fellowship, described in Chapter 8, lies behind much of his poetry from this period—like 'The Mirror of Madmen,' from which I quote just the opening and closing stanzas:

I dreamed a dream of heaven, white as frost,
The splendid stillness of a living host;
Vast choirs of upturned faces, line o'er line.
Then my blood froze for every face was mine.
Then my dream snapped and with a heart that leapt
I saw, across the tavern where I slept,
The sight of all my life most full of grace,
A gin-damned drunkard's wan half-witted face.

The same experience lies behind the novel's dedicatory poem, with its tribute to the two men who meant so much to him in his personal ordeal—Stevenson of Tusitala, who also rebelled against the aesthetes of his art school in Paris; and Whitman of Paumanok, who praised the mere existence of multiple things in a democracy of existence. Indeed, the first sketch of what would become Thursday was written as an exercise in Whitman pantheism. It appears in an unpublished Chesterton notebook from the early nineties:

The week is a gigantic symbol, the symbol of the creation of the world:

Monday is the day of Lent. (Light? Ed.)
Tuesday the day of waters.
Wednesday the day of the Earth.
Thursday: the day of stars.
Friday: the day of birds.
Saturday: the day of beasts.
Sunday: the day of peace: the day for saying that it is good
Perhaps the true religion is this
that the creator is not ended yet.
And that what we move towards
Is blinding, colossal, calm
The rest of God.

Chesterton opposed the chaos in himself and the life around him by considering each man's life a re-enactment, day by day, of the first verses of Genesis. One of his student letters has this passage: 'Today is Sunday, and Ida's birthday. Thus it commemorates two things, the creation of Ida and the creation of the world… Nineteen years ago the Cosmic Factory was at work; the vast wheel of stars revolved, the archangels had a conference, and the result was another person… I should imagine that sun, wind, colours, chopsticks, circulating library books, ribbons, caricatures and the grace of God were used.' Chesterton took as the ground of his hope that very sense of dissolution that threatened his sanity. By the energy of existence things keep re-emerging from dissolution. Creation uses chaos as its working material—just as the spirit, freed in dreams, uses the world as a set of signs, shifting their meaning in ways that terrify man while making him the master of 'unsignified' matter:

If we wish to experience pure and naked feeling we can never experience it so really as in that unreal land. There the passions seem to live an outlawed and abstract existence, unconnected with any facts or persons. In dreams we have revenge without any injury, remorse without any sin, memory without any recollection, hope without any prospect. Love, indeed, almost proves itself a divine thing by the logic of dreams; for in a dream every material circumstance may alter, spectacles may grow on a baby, and moustaches on a maiden aunt, and yet the great sway of one tyrannical tenderness may never cease. Our dream may begin with the end of the world, and end with a picnic at Hampton Court, but the same rich and nameless mood will be expressed by the falling stars and by the crumbling sandwiches. In a dream daisies may glare at us like the eyes of demons. In a dream lightning and conflagration may warm and soothe us like our own fireside. In this subconscious world, in short, existence betrays itself; it shows that it is full of spiritual forces which disguise themselves as lions and lamp-posts, which can as easily disguise themselves as butterflies and Babylonian temples.… Life dwells alone in our very heart of hearts, life is one and virgin and unconjured, and sometimes in the watches of the night speaks in its own terrible harmony.

['Dreams', in The Coloured Lands, 1901]

Chesterton was drawn back, constantly, to the Book of Genesis because of its beginning in chaos. Once one has experienced that nothingness, the emergence of any one thing into form and meaning is a triumph, the foundation for a 'mystical minimum' of aesthetic thankfulness. Then, as Blake saw, each sunrise becomes a fiery chariot's approach.

When we say that a poet praises the whole creation, we commonly mean only that he praises the whole cosmos. But this sort of poet does really praise creation, in the sense of the act of creating. He praises the passage or transition from nonentity to entity.… He not only appreciates everything but the nothing of which everything was made. In a fashion he endures and answers even the earthquake irony of the Book of Job; in some sense he is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with the morning stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy.

[St. Francis of Assisi 1928]

The Council of Days not only praises this transition, but effects it—as God creates through his six days. Creation is not only the beginning, but is always beginning—with the Council of Days in on the battle against chaos from the outset. They overthrow their own darker side, their evil brother, as God had to wrestle the sea-god into bonds in the Book of Job. When the six Days gather in Sunday's garden, they have gone back beyond their childhood 'where a tree is a tree at last—to the primordial self they could only accomplish by a struggle that, illogically, forms that self. Their end is to arrive at their own beginning, in a puzzle Chesterton often returned to:

It is at the beginning that things are good, and not (as the more pallid progressives say) only at the end. The primordial things—existence, energy, fruition—are good so far as they go. You cannot have evil life, though you can have notorious evil livers. Manhood and womanhood are good things, though men and women are often perfectly pestilent. You can use poppies to drug people, or birch trees to beat them, or stones to make an idol, or corn to make a corner, but it remains true that, in the abstract, before you have done anything, each of these four things is in strict truth a glory, a beneficent specialty and variety. We do praise the Lord that there are birch trees growing amongst the rocks and poppies amongst the corn; we do praise the Lord, even if we do not believe in Him. We do admire and applaud the project of a world, just as if we had been called to council in the primal darkness and seen the first starry plan of the skies. We are, as a matter of fact, far more certain that this life of ours is a magnificent and amazing enterprise than we are that it will succeed.

[T.P.'s Weekly, 1910]