A Merry Mystery

...So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter...

...These contain haphazard cryptic messages, such as "The word, I fancy, should be 'pink'," and are a regular orgy of clues as to the nature of the universe...

...When the implacable Monday demands, "Who and what are you...

...Sunday keeps his followers off balance, the better to train them for uncertitude, and proliferates their woes and confusions (as Jehovah did Job's) to make their faith more durable...

...Suddenly, Tuesday, a bushy-haired Pole, is denounced as a spy, and the next hundred pages are an agitated succession of fright, pursuit and exposure...

...The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark...

...Chesterton, a convert to Catholicism, wants less to keep us in the dark than to restrain us from seeing the light too quickly...

...Chesterton's style incorporates the same qualities-it is ingenious, playful and paradoxical...

...The book begins with an argument between two poets about law and order...

...Inns and taverns appear with comforting regularity amid the harrowing events, and an anomalous interest is taken in pate de foie gras, lobster and champagne...

...Syme gives a gentleman's promise not to betray Gregory, and counters with his own secret: He is a policeman recruited by Scotland Yard to thwart the advance of anarchism...

...Syme accuses Gregory of not taking his professed anarchism seriously, and Gregory replies by inviting Syme to a London underground meeting where he anticipates being elected to the Central Anarchist Council of Europe...

...Not entirely to our surprise, he proves, when they finally confront one another, to be still another policeman inducted, like Syme, by a mysterious Scotland Yard official in a pitch dark room...

...The answer, not in the realm of religion but of characterology, is that we all encompass contradictions, and we are all to some extent, though not wholly, deceived in one another...

...As the plot unravels with exquisite inevitability, and all the anarchists turn out to be anti-anarchists, performing both roles with equal fervor, one reaches the end of ideology and the beginning of moral fable...

...There, on a sunny balcony, the Council is seated in white jackets, cheerfully discussing over bacon and eggs how to assassinate the President of France and the Tsar of Russia at their forthcoming meeting in Paris...

...Sunday replies: "I am the peace of God...

...Syme replies it is chaos that is dull and order that is poetical...

...The decrepit Professor Worms (Friday), who trails the newcomer Syme around the streets of London with eerie agility, always shows up right behind his quarry in some wine or tea shop, coolly ordering a glass of milk...

...Chesterton relishes every opportunity to apply the frankly contrived touch of evil, and in each member Syme perceives some perverse demoniac detail-the lopsided, unnatural smile of Monday, the cruel Persian tyrant's coloring of Wednesday, Saturday's dreadful black spectacles, the staggering proportions and strangely enlarging face of Sunday, the President...

...Garry Wills' useful, theologically focused introduction explains that Chesterton's stories and poems were drenched in the imagery of the Old Testament, and that Gregory, sent to test the hero, resembles the Accuser in the Book of Job...

...they remind us that its order is not always sedate, but interlaced with whimsy and frivolity, subjecting us frequently to the unexpected and uncalled for...

...But plied with the eternal questions, he withdraws like an Olympian psychoanalyst, forcing the patient to make his own interpretations...

...Indeed it is hard to avoid, once he is seated upon a throne "draped plainly in a pure and terrible white," with his followers dressed in costumes for the days of creation: The professor, for instance, "whose day was that on which the birds and fishes-the ruder forms of life-were created, had a dress of dim purple, over which sprawled goggle-eyed fishes and outrageous tropical birds, the union in him of unfathomable fancy and doubt...

...But Chesterton, though he shared with James "the imagination of disaster," was lighter-hearted and more expansive than the transplanted American, and his interest in society was more abstract...

...Writers & Writing A MERRY MYSTERY BY ISA KAPP It is strange that two major writers living in a snug and relatively peaceful London at the turn of the century should have had premonitions of the end of the world by violence, and should both have written penetrating fiction about a revolutionary anarchist conspiracy-Henry James in The Princess Casamassima and G. K. Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday (Sheed and Ward, 199 pp., $7.95...

...The logic of the plot leads us to inquire, for example: Why did the anarchists, who were at bottom innocent and law-abiding, seem so wicked to Syme...

...When Syme asks him, with some justice, "What are you?," Sunday bounces from the balcony like a great ball of India rubber, jumps into a hansom and drives around London tossing bits of crumpled paper at his pursuing colleagues...

...At the last moment in the book, Syme, strong with pride in having suffered and survived, suddenly turns, with intuitive suspicion toward the great face of Sunday...

...Have you,' he cried in a dreadful voice, 'have you ever suffered?' " Chesterton was that kind of complex Christian...

...he even goes so far as to make Sunday resemble him physically...

...two is two thousand times one...

...we do praise the Lord, even if we do not believe in him...

...Fortunately, probably in deference to his view that true imagination is intensely materialistic, Chesterton's nihilists are endowed with a pronounced gourmet streak...

...It is a measure of the comic aspect of Chesterton's religious notions that he cast God in his own image, as an entertainer who puzzles, challenges and animates his audience...

...That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy...

...The Council has seven members named for the days of the week, and is waiting for the unit's choice of a successor to the deceased Thursday...

...Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe...

...The anarchist Gregory asserts that artists want to abolish all governments and conventions, and can thrive only on disorder...

...The reader has nothing left to do but to ponder, along with the characters, why these skirmishes were necessary, and, more basically, why Sunday is simultaneously leader of the rebellion and Scotland Yard's chief defender of society, the man in the dark room...

...Upon discovering that Professor Worms is really not a foe, Syme comments, "There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally...

...One of the pleasures of reading The Man Who Was Thursday is recognizing the undisturbed harmony between its ideas and its language: Not a hint of a shadow falls between conception and creation, emotion and response...

...There is something intrinsically appealing about this two-sided view of reality, as against single-mindedness, and I think a writer can be more eloquent about his religious feelings when they come grudgingly, like Chesterton's: "We do praise the Lord that there are birch trees growing amongst the rocks and poppies amongst the corn...

...It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two...

...But at the meeting Syme wrests the election from Gregory by outstripping him in militant rhetoric, and then he hops onto a tugboat that carries him to Leicester Square...

...His famous novel, written in 1908 and now reissued as the first volume in "The Permanent Chesterton," a series of 14 books to be edited by author and columnist Garry Wills, is one of the world's classic detective stories, with much of Robert Louis Stevenson's smoking-jacket charm and literary shivers...

...His mind, however, never lazy, undertook the most assiduous and subtle questioning of his doctrines...

...So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist...

...Eventually the identity of Sunday is allowed to dawn upon us...

...A man of enormous bulk, Chesterton was famous for never moving an inch along Fleet Street without the assistance of a hansom cab...

...Wills pursues meanings like some resolute hound of heaven, and brings us closer to the life-celebrating as well as the dark side of Chesterton, though not, disappointingly, to his special strength, which resides in a felicitous and imperturbable levity...

...Yet when there is a choice, Chesterton is disposed to take the more generous view of men and motives, and we can easily feel that he shares his hero's "high pride in being human," that he prizes fellowship...

...Moreover, he burdened his deity with the obligation to toughen up humanity...

...To match his sanguine disposition, Chesterton's prose is chiseled and colorful like a Mediterranean stone walk, and his choice tale ends not with a grand conclusion, but with the beguiling image of the red-haired young woman Syme once spoke to in a garden smelling of lilac...

...the gross, obvious thing is to miss it...

...Syme, in an ecstasy of understanding, cries: "Why does each small thing have to fight against the world itself...

...But two is not twice one...