THE MAN WHO WAS A PARADOX

“A man of colossal genius.” -George Bernard Shaw

“The man with a gigantic power of enjoyment goes through life very quietly, for he can enjoy quiet things.” - G.K. Chesterton

rowsing bookstore shelves and coming upon Chesterton’s name in multiple categories, and observing such a wide range of styles and genres from a single author, what are we to conclude about this man? What kind of mind could produce so much, and so much that is iconic and revered, in so many genres and interests? The Father Brown mysteries have rarely wavered in popularity and have been adapted many times for the screen. Chesterton’s theological and polemical works Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, along with their predecessor Heretics, continue to fascinate and provoke on the subject of religion, philosophy, and literature. His fantastical novels, The Man Who Was Thursday, Manalive, and The Napoleon Of Notting Hill remain landmarks of fantasy, intrigue, and even dark comedy. There is still the great poetic epic The Ballad of the White Horse, the shorter but no less rhythmically powerful Lepanto, the Christmas poems, and the many, many essays. To call him merely ‘an author’ is to sell him far short: he was a public (and private) debater, playwright, critic, biographer (in which capacity he was responsible for a revival of the works of Dickens), news journalist and columnist, lay theologian, poet, political activist (his ideas on nationalism inspired Gandhi), and painter. He has been called “the most quoted man in the English language,” and although that moniker is debatable, its truth is partly attested by the mountains of quotes mis-attributed to him. When asked what book he would bring stranded on an island, his response was characteristic: “why, Thomas’s Practical Guide to Shipbuilding, of course.”

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born May 29, 1874 to a small family in Campden Hill, Kensington, London, England. Chesterton himself said he grew up extremely happy and loved. Despite that, he was misunderstood. Troubles with reading led his parents to believe he might have an intellectual disability and send him for specialized testing. The results proved precisely the opposite: young Gilbert had a photographic memory and could recite anything he’d read. As a boy, he would recite complete passages from his father’s favorite, Shakespeare, without necessarily understanding what they were about. In G.K.C : A Criticism, Chesterton’s brother Cecil described their parents:

“His father was by profession a surveyor; by temperament something of a craftsman and something of a philosopher. Of his mother I need only say that, though, so far as I know, she has never written a line for publication, anyone who wishes to know from whence G.K.C gets his wit need only listen for a few minutes to her conversation.”

The first great struggle in his life was the untimely death of his older sister when Gilbert was only three. The tragedy affected the Chestertons deeply. Gilbert’s father became neurotic, especially in regards to the subject of death, forbidding his children to attend a funeral or even look at a funeral procession. The birth of his younger brother Cecil two years later brought some joy back to the family. But young Gilbert would never be the same. When his father was on his deathbed Gilbert struggled to even look at his father, and he himself developed a neurosis about death.

Like many young men he had certain plans for a career mapped out but landed somewhere else. His original passion was painting. He attended the Slade School of Art in late 1892.  He was also part of the Junior Debating Club. Here he met some of his closest friends, including Edmund Bentley who would introduce him to Frances Blogg, his wife. Chesterton’s brother Cecil quipped that the club was founded to talk about Shakespeare but quickly turned into an overall debate society, talking and writing about literature in general. The JDC was an important part of Chesterton’s life— the club’s self-published magazine gave him firsthand experience in publishing, the foundation of his later career as a journalist and publisher. More importantly to him, he wrote for the magazine still believing he wanted to be a painter.

At school he faced the second major struggle of his life: being  away from his tightly-knit family. He fell into a deep depression, what he called his dark night of the soul. “I did not very clearly distinguish,” he wrote, “between dreaming and waking; not only as a mood but as a metaphysical doubt.” In a desperate attempt to find his way through that doubt, he became entangled with spiritualism and the occult. He teetered on insanity, as he described in his memoirs, looking into the abyss. Yet, in this time of true darkness, he found his way back to faith. This experience would later help him write The Man Who Was Thursday. In GKC: A Criticism, Cecil writes that his brother’s writing didn’t develop his trademark humor until he went through his darkest hour: through suffering he found a true sense of humor— only through pain did he understand happiness. In this experience we can glean some inkling of Chesterton’s literary romance with paradox. People are made up of all  their experiences, good and bad. Struggle is essential to understand life and yourself more. To know what real happiness is, you have to have felt despair. To learn why you love something, it may first be taken from you.

Upon emerging from his darkest hour, he came to his brightest. In 1901, after an engagement of three years, Chesterton married Frances Blogg. They had met during a visit with a mutual friend, Bentley, to her home five years earlier. In a letter of 1898 Chesterton wrote of one of their encounters:

If I had anything to do with this girl I should go on my knees to her; if I spoke with her she would never deceive me; if I depended on her she would never deny me; if I loved her she would never play with me; if I trusted her she would never go back on me; if I remembered her she would never forget me. I may never see her again. Goodbye. It was all said in a flash: but it was all said.

Frances was his friend, partner, editor, muse, his great and only love. She was independent, intelligent, kind, and a writer in her own right. Chesterton often said that she was his inspiration. Without her, he may never have written one of his greatest works: the heroic narrative poem: The Ballad of the White Horse, which is dedicated to her. Published in 1911, ten years after their marriage, the Ballad is a deft amalgam of Chesterton’s major influences— Shakespeare, the Psalms, the King James Bible— but the end result is purely Chestertonian.

any of his friends could have been enemies, espousing wildly different philosophies and ideals, yet each of them recounted their time with him with joy and fondness. He described his friends in two categories: skeptics and true believers. Often they all would eat together, debating, laughing, and sharing. Chesterton believed everyone should be able to make their point and have the freedom to disagree. He never turned down a good argument, and he came at everything with humor, which made him an excellent debater. “Pride,” he writes in Heretics, “is weakness in the character; it dries up laughter, it dries up wonder, it dries up chivalry and energy.” Chesterton understood the important fact of life that just because you disagree with someone, you need not hate them. Some of his best works were responses to conversations with his friends on life and religion.

The chief feature of Chesterton’s literary style is his love of paradox. Called ‘the Prince Of Paradox’, he used it so often that he often confused and amused his friends and companions. Chesterton’s fondness for paradox probably came from his love of the Bible and poetry, with their use of parable, paradox, and strange juxtapositions. His brother noted that critics tried to discredit G. K. C. by calling him a paradox. But to criticize Chesterton as a paradox is merely to recognize his humanity, for to be human is to be a paradox. We are made up of two elements that contradict each other: the head and the heart. Both have different impulses, one often canceling out the other. Who among us does not have these contradictions? Chesterton understood how human he really was, which is why his writing is evergreen.

Paradox is woven throughout his work. Often it evokes feeling as well as shows a deeper truth; paradox exposes human conflict, how we oppose ourselves. In The Man Who Was Thursday we find Chesterton’s paradox of “rebelling against rebellion”; in the figure of Father Brown Chesterton has his perfect detective because “only the innocent can know the guilty”; in the madcap Manalive we find one of Chesterton’s favorite paradoxes, that “to be cured of exile one must become a pilgrim.” In The Man Who Knew Too Much, he uses the paradox of holding so much knowledge that you can do nothing with it in the end. If you know everything, can you really do anything about it? Does knowing too much actually make your life harder? Is ignorance bliss or does it only breed ignorance? The concept of “too much knowledge” runs through the biblical stories: Adam and Eve eating from the Tree, causing them to understand shame; God’s blessing of Solomon with wisdom, making him a great king but with the great burden of knowledge and judgement. In Manalive Chesterton explores the paradox that only through facing death do you understand what your life is worth to you. The philosophers of the book are in love with the idea of death until Innocent Smith threatens their life with a gun.

I’ve already mentioned his two most popular books: The Man Who Was Thursday and Orthodoxy. Published in 1908, both had a great impact on his readers of the time and continue to be among his most widely-read works. The Man Who Was Thursday is his greatest fictional work to date in his life: an absurdist, nightmarish journey into oneself. The novel defies easy categorization. Both thriller and philosophical mystery-dream,it is a stirring paranoia disguised as a spy story. The day before he died, Chesterton himself described the book in the Illustrated London News:

The Man Who Was Thursday...was not intended to describe the real world as it was, or as I thought it was, even when my thoughts were considerably less settled than they are now. It was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date; with just a gleam of hope in some double meaning of the doubt, which even the pessimists felt in some fitful fashion.

It’s an odd final summary for such an odd book, but we can glean his meaning, and it rests in the paradox of doubt. For in Thursday the characters are so entangled in psychological machinations that they doubt even themselves— they are exposed therefore to a simple loneliness which belies their seemingly purposeful actions. Their seriousness leads to farce, and when every double agent discovers the others are in the same situation, we have a redeeming camaraderie.

he major paradox at the heart of his great nonfiction work, Orthodoxy, is the tension between the philosophies of pessimism and optimism. He found both ideals to have their shortcomings because they made no room for balance: one discounted the other, neither giving the other its due. “I came to the conclusion,” he wrote, “that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.” A sequel to Heretics, which was about the philosophies put forth by various authors like George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling, Orthodoxy was written as an answer to a discussion with Shaw, where the phrase “he believes in himself” provoked a debate that led to the writing of the book.  Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy,

A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth....The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aim, which will make him stop working altogether.

Further on, Chesterton battles the idea of Materialism with a paradoxical parable. Comparing materialists to madmen he wrote, 

Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom.” Materialists, he wrote, shrink their world, taking wonder, mystery and vastness out, defining everything through science and logic and leaving behind the idea of miracles— and thus only see the world as narrow and trivial. They limit their world and never question it, doubting nothing, never questioning their own perspective. Just as the madman sees no other point but his own, so does the Materialist.

To quote the great Bruce Lee, “it is like a finger pointing a way to the moon...don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all the heavenly glory." Fairy tales remind us that not everything can be explained with mathematical logic, and don’t need to be to live happily. No one is born knowing the fantastic, or born knowing science— both are taught. If we believe in God we believe He created everything, including science, so we believe in both. Chesterton deeply believed in reason, but he decried in Orthodoxy “reason used without root, reason in the void. The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad; he begins to think at the wrong end.” Chesterton fought not against logic, but the idea that nothing can live outside logic; imagination and logic are both virtues, necessary for balance. People are not just a mind or a soul alone, but a composite of the two, and both need tending. 

In delineating the divide between idealism and logic, Chesterton contrasted the old fairy tales with psychological fiction— asserting that the former had held up through time while the latter ended up forgotten the moment one finished reading it. In Tremendous Trifles (1909), Chesterton wrote about striking up a conversation with a young man who did not believe in fairy tales (it’s never clear in Tremendeous Trifles if the racontres are true or fiction— they sway easily between both). The arguments of rationality, law and tendencies— anything outside of these the young man considered ridiculous, especially fairy tales. In his reply to the young man, Chesterton writes that, “in the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos. " In Orthodoxy he wrote similarly that, “the poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.” 

The heroes of our popular films are perhaps not so unrelated to the kind Chesterton grew up reading: Luke Skywalker is the inevitable Arthurian figure, humble and immature until circumstances change him; Rocky is the everyman underdog whose parable is one of spiritual struggle made external; even Ferris Bueller, though perceived as an antihero, is a ruder Jim Hawkins whose adventures put him far away from the cares of a humdrum existence. All concern ordinary people put into extraordinary situations. The world goes mad, but they remain sane; people are ordinary, life is extraordinary.

hesterton died at home on June 14, 1936, leaving behind a small loving family, many friends, and a body of work that remains ever-current. At the height of his fame he could not walk down the street without being recognized. Wherever he went, people noticed, not only because of his hefty proportions and Einstein-like shock of hair, but his cheerful disposition. A great defender of wonder and reason, he loved life and found joy and humor in everything. He was a man who had great personal struggles, yet became a man of great faith. He was a man who hardly knew where he was going, yet always seemed to arrive where he was meant to be. His reason and logic were extraordinary, but it came from the ideas of miracles and the fantastic. Edmund Bentley, his lifelong friend, said at his funeral, “With Gilbert Chesterton gone, the world can never be the same again.”

After reading George MacDonald’s The Princess & The Goblin Chesterton said that it “made a difference to my whole existence.” That best describes the effect The Man Who Was Thursday had on me. I knew that it made a difference to my whole existence, for when I read it I was going through my own dark night of the soul. In his words I found comfort, inspiration, and joy. That’s the power of great writing: stopping someone in their tracks with words, and changing them. So to Chesterton I owe what every reader owes to the books that changed their lives— to share them with whomever they can. I once read that what makes a good writer is someone who can create a context in which people can think. Chesterton created a vivid context for readers to think and explore. His way with descriptions came from his artistic background: he understood a scene and how to capture it. He knew color, contrast, dimension, and most importantly,  how it felt. He wrote like a painter, evoking feeling. An example from The Man Who Was Thursday: 

“Dawn was breaking over everything in colours at once clear and timid; as if Nature made a first attempt at yellow and a first attempt rose. A breeze blew so clean and sweet, that one could not think that it blew from the sky…”

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Belmonte, Kevin. Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life & Impact of G.K. Chesterton. Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, 2011.

Chesterton, Cecil. G.K.  Chesterton. Alston Rivers, London, 1908.

Chesterton, G.K. Manalive. Dover Publications, 2000.

Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy. Image, 2001.

Chesterton, G.K. Tremendous Trifles. Dover Publications, 2007.

Chesterton, G.K. The Man Who Was Thursday. Watchmaker Publishing, 2010

Pearce, Joseph. Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton. Ignatius Press, 2004.