The Essential Colin Wilson Read online

  Oddly enough, it was not particularly interesting or exciting to be involved in all this ferment. To begin with, the newspaper publicity was on such a moronic level (as it is more or less bound to be) that it seemed a travesty of what we were trying to do as individuals. It invited derision—and, of course, received it. I was delighted to know that I would never have to return to a factory or office. But otherwise, fame seemed to have no great advantages. It didn't bring any startling new freedom. I ate good food and drank wine, but since food and drink had never interested me much, this was unimportant. I wasn't fond of travel. If I hadn't been settled with Joy, the greatest bonus would probably have been the sexual possibilities; but since I had no intention of getting rid of her, I had to put that temptation behind me. I admit that this was my keenest regret.

  What the newspapers really wanted from this new generation was scandal. Early in 1957, I inadvertently provided it, when Joy's parents turned up at the room we now shared in Notting Hill Gate, determined to drag her away from this life of sin; her father had even brought a horsewhip. Joy and I were giving supper to a villainous old queer named Gerald Hamilton, the original of Christopher Isherwood's Mr Norris. As Joy's family tried to drag her off down the stairs, Gerald rushed to the nearest telephone and rang every gossip columnist he knew (and his acquaintance was wide). Ten minutes after I'd persuaded her family to leave (with some help from the police), the reporters and photographers started to arrive on the doorstep. After seeing the first ones, we sneaked out of the back door, spent the night with a friend, and then fled to Devon, to take refuge with the writer Negley Parson. The press caught up with us there after a few days, and then pursued us across to Wales and Ireland. The story occupied the front pages and gossip columns for about two weeks, until we returned to London. Victor Gollancz told me that my reputation as a serious writer was ruined, and that if I didn't get out of London, I'd never write another book. The man who lived in the room below us offered to rent us a cottage near Mevagissey, in Cornwall. We took Gollancz's advice, moved from London, and have been here ever since.

  On the whole, Gollancz was right. The silly publicity made it impossible for Britain's intellectual establishment to take me seriously, and they showed their displeasure when my next book appeared. I had, it seemed, achieved 'recognition', and then lost it just as suddenly. I never had any great difficulty in finding publishers—my notoriety at least had that advantage—but the critics made sure that I had no more best sellers. Books like Religion and the Rebel, The Age of Defeat and The Strength to Dream were received with the kind of review that began: 'More pretentious rubbish from this intellectually confused and thoroughly overrated young man . . . ' Ritual in the Dark achieved a certain success when it finally appeared in 1960, but critics who had decided that I was a flash in the pan had no intention of reconsidering me as a novelist. The Outsider had made me about £20,000 in its first year—a considerable sum in 1956. Subsequent books seldom made more than £1,000. We were never poverty stricken, but invariably overdrawn at the bank. In the 1960s, I made several lecture tours of America to try and stabilize my finances. I usually returned to England with just enough money to pay all the outstanding bills, and start again from square one . . .

  I suppose this particular story has a kind of happy ending. When The Outsider appeared, T. S. Eliot told me that I had achieved recognition the wrong way; it was fatal to become known to too many people at once. The right way was to gradually achieve an audience of regular readers, and slowly expand from there, if at all. As the 1960s drew to a close, I realized that this was what was happening. Second-hand shops told me that certain people were obsessive collectors of my books, and would pay fairly high prices for them. In The New Statesman, there was an advertisement asking for members for a Colin Wilson Society (apparently the founders were under the impression that I was dead). They succeeded in continuing for a couple of years (a remarkable feat, since they all regarded themselves as outsiders) during which time they met twice a week to study my books. I was becoming a 'cult figure'—but still having considerable difficulty making a decent living. In 1967, an American publisher commissioned me to write a book on 'the occult'. I had always enjoyed reading about such subjects, without taking them very seriously. The book, when finished, was a thousand pages long (in typescript) and I had now ceased to take the subject lightly. In fact, it was clear that my investigation into the mysteries of consciousness led straight into the heart of the 'paranormal'. Unfortunately, the English publisher who had also commissioned the book did not share my excitement; he gasped at the size of the manuscript, and asked me to take it elsewhere. Fortunately, a more enterprising publisher—Hodders—accepted it, and actually asked me to expand it. My editor, Robin Denniston, told me that he thought it was about time for a 'Colin Wilson revival'; he even decided to issue a pamphlet about me as advance publicity. I shook my head and thought: 'Poor devils, they'll lose their money'.

  To my amazement, they proved to be right. The reviews had a serious and respectful tone that I hadn't heard since The Outsider. With a kind of dazed incredulity, I realized that I'd finally become an 'establishment' figure. I was no longer the 'boy genius' who'd proved to be a pretentious fraud. As if conveying the blessing of England's literary establishment, Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee—the two critics who had launched The Outsider on that bewildering Sunday fifteen years earlier, and then damned my subsequent books—produced lengthy and thoughtful reviews of The Occult, full of the kind of praise that can be extracted and used in advertisements. Apparently all was forgiven. In fact, publication week of The Occult was rather like that of The Outsider, but more dignified: interviews, appearances on television, requests for articles and book reviews. What was rather more important was that the book sold as well as The Outsider, and since it cost five times as much, royalties were correspondingly high—even enough to compensate for inflation. If The Occult didn't actually make me rich—few non-fiction books ever sell that well—it at least managed to give me a delightful sensation of not being permanently broke and overdrawn at the bank. It has also supported me during the six years I have taken to write a sequel, Mysteries, whose last chapter I have broken off to write this introduction . . .

  And how do I feel about The Outsider in retrospect? In order to answer that question I settled down the other day to re-read it—and found it impossible to gain a sense of perspective. It still produces in me the same feeling of excitement and impatience that I experienced as I sketched the outline plan on that Christmas Day of 1954. Why impatience? Because it aroused some enormous anticipation. At the same time, I mistook this for anticipation of success (for somehow, I never had the slightest doubt that it would be a success). Now I recognize it for what it was: the realization that I had at last settled down to the serious business of living: that after the long-drawn-out and messy years of childhood, and the teenage agonies of self-consciousness, I had at last ceased to waste my time; I was starting to do what I had always intended to do. There was a feeling like leaving harbour. It made no difference that the critics later tried to take back what they'd said about the book. They couldn't take back the passport they'd given me.

  THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

  From The Outsider, 1956

  At first sight, the Outsider is a social problem. He is the hole-in-corner man.

  In the air, on top of a tram, a girl is sitting. Her dress, lifted a little, blows out. But a block in the traffic separates us. The tramcar glides away, fading like a nightmare.

  Moving in both directions, the street is full of dresses which sway, offering themselves airily, the skirts lifting; dresses that lift and yet do not lift.

  In the tall and narrow shop mirror I see myself approaching, rather pale and heavy-eyed. It is not a woman I want—it is all women, and I seek for them in those around me, one by one . . .

  This passage, from Henri Barbusse's novel L'Enfer, pinpoints certain aspects of the Outsider. His hero walks down a Paris street, and the desires that
stir in him separate him sharply from other people. And the need he feels for a woman is not entirely animal either, for he goes on:

  Defeated, I followed my impulse casually. I followed a woman who had been watching me from her corner. Then we walked side by side. We said a few words; she took me home with her . . . Then I went through the banal scene. It passed like a sudden hurtling-down.

  Again, I am on the pavement, and I am not at peace as I had hoped. An immense confusion bewilders me. It is as if I could not see things as they were. I see too deep and too much.

  Throughout the book, this hero remains unnamed. He is the anonymous Man Outside.

  He comes to Paris from the country; he finds a position in a bank; he takes a room in a 'family hotel'. Left alone in his room, he meditates: He has 'no genius, no mission to fulfil, no remarkable feelings to bestow. I have nothing and I deserve nothing. Yet in spite of it, I desire some sort of recompense.' Religion . . . he doesn't care for it. 'As to philosophic discussions, they seem to me altogether meaningless. Nothing can be tested, nothing verified. Truth—what do they mean by it?' His thoughts range vaguely from a past love affair and its physical pleasures, to death: 'Death, that is the most important of all ideas.' Then back to his living problems: 'I must make money.' He notices a light high up on his wall; it is coming from the next room. He stands on the bed and looks through the spy-hole:

  I look, I see . . . The next room offers itself to me in its nakedness.

  The action of the novel begins. Daily, he stands on the bed and stares at the life that comes and goes in the next room. For the space of a month he watches it, standing apart and, symbolically, above. His first vicarious adventure is to watch a woman who has taken the room for the night; he excites himself to hysteria watching her undress. These pages of the book have the kind of deliberate sensationalism that its descendants in post-war France were so consistently to be accused of (so that Guido Ruggiero could write: 'Existentialism treats life in the manner of a thriller').

  But the point is to come. The next day he tries to recreate the scene in imagination, but it evades him, just as his attempt to recreate the sexual pleasures with his mistress had evaded him:

  I let myself be drawn into inventing details to recapture the intensity of the experience. 'She put herself into the most inviting positions.'

  No, no, that is not true.

  These words are all dead. They leave untouched, powerless to affect it, the intensity of what was.

  At the end of L'Enfer, its nameless hero is introduced to a novelist who is entertaining the company with an account of a novel he is writing. A coincidence . . . it is about a man who pierces a hole in his wall and spies on all that happens in the next room. The writer recounts all of the book he has written; his listeners admire it: Bravo! Tremendous success! But the Outsider listens gloomily. 'I, who had penetrated into the very heart of mankind and returned, could see nothing human in this pantomimic caricature. It was so superficial that it was false.' The novelist expounds: 'Man stripped of his externals . . . that is what I wish to show. Others stand for imagination . . . I stand for truth.' The Outsider feels that what he has seen is truth.

  Admittedly, for us, reading the novel half a century after it was written, there is not so much to choose between the novelist's truth and the hero's. The 'dramas' enacted in the next room remind us sometimes of Sardou, sometimes of Dostoevsky when he is more concerned to expound an idea than to give it body in people and events. Yet Barbusse is sincere, and this ideal, to 'stand for truth', is the one discernible current that flows through all twentieth-century literature.

  Barbusse's Outsider has all of the characteristics of the type. Is he an Outsider because he's frustrated and neurotic? Or is he neurotic because of some deeper instinct that pushes him into solitude? He is preoccupied with sex, with crime, with disease. Early in the novel he recounts the after-dinner conversation of a barrister; he is speaking of the trial of a man who has raped and strangled a little girl. All other conversation stops, and the Outsider observes his neighbours closely as they listen to the revolting details:

  A young mother, with her daughter at her side, has half got up to leave, but cannot drag herself away . . .

  And the men; one of them, simple, placid, I heard distinctly panting. Another, with the neutral appearance of a bourgeois, talks commonplaces with difficulty to his young neighbour. But he looks at her as if he would pierce deeply into her, and deeper yet. His piercing glance is stronger than himself, and he is ashamed of it . . .

  The Outsider's case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnameable impulses, yet they keep up a pretence, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.

  That is his case. But it is weakened by his obvious abnormality, his introversion. It looks, in fact, like an attempt at self-justification by a man who knows himself to be degenerate, diseased, self-divided. There is certainly self-division. The man who watches a woman undressing has the red eyes of an ape; yet the man who sees two young lovers, really alone for the first time, who brings out all the pathos, the tenderness and uncertainty when he tells about it, is no brute; he is very much human. And the ape and the man exist in one body; and when the ape's desires are about to be fulfilled, he disappears and is succeeded by the man, who is disgusted with the ape's appetites.

  This is the problem of the Outsider. We shall encounter it under many different forms in the course of this book: on a metaphysical level, with Sartre and Camus (where it is called Existentialism), on a religious level, with Boehme and Kierkegaard; even on a criminal level, with Dostoevsky's Stavrogin (who also raped a small girl and was responsible for her death). The problem remains essentially the same; it is merely a question of discounting more or less as irrelevant.

  Barbusse has suggested that it is the fact that his hero sees deeper that makes him an Outsider; at the same time, he states that he has 'no special genius, no message to bestow', etc., and from his history during the remainder of the book, we have no reason to doubt his word. Indubitably, the hero is mediocre; he can't write for toffee, and the whole book is full of clichés. It is necessary to emphasize this in order to rid ourselves of the temptation to identify the Outsider with the artist, and so to oversimplify the question: disease or insight? Many great artists have none of the characteristics of the Outsider. Shakespeare, Dante, Keats were all apparently normal and socially well-adjusted, lacking anything that could be pitched on as disease or nervous disability. Keats, who always makes a very clear and romantic distinction between the poet and the ordinary man, seems to have had no shades of inferiority complexes or sexual neuroses lurking in the background of his mind; no D. H. Lawrence-ish sense of social-level, no James Joycian need to assert his intellectual superiority; above all, no sympathy whatever with the attitude of Villiers De Lisle Adam's Axel (so much admired by Yeats): 'As for living, our servants can do that for us.' If any man intended to do his own living for himself, it was Keats. And he is undoubtedly the rule rather than the exception among great poets. The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider.

  What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, of unreality. Even Keats could write, in a letter to Browne just before he died: 'I feel as if I had died already and am now living a posthumous existence.' This is the sense of unreality, that can strike out of a perfectly clear sky. Good health and strong nerves can make it unlikely; but that may be only because the man in good health is thinking about other things and doesn't look in the direction where the uncertainty lies. And once a man has seen it, the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward place. Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. 'He sees too
deep and too much', and what he sees is essentially chaos. For the bourgeois, the world is fundamentally an orderly place, with a disturbing element of the irrational, the terrifying, which his preoccupation with the present usually permits him to ignore. For the Outsider, the world is not rational, not orderly. When he asserts his sense of anarchy in the face of the bourgeois' complacent acceptance, it is not simply the need to cock a snook at respectability that provokes him; it is a distressing sense that truth must be told at all costs, otherwise there can be no hope for an ultimate restoration of order. Even if there seems no room for hope, truth must be told. (The example we are turning to now is a curious instance of this.) The Outsider is a man who has awakened to chaos. He may have no reason to believe that chaos is positive, the germ of life (in the Kabbala, chaos—tohu bohu—is simply a state in which order is latent; the egg is the 'chaos' of the bird); in spite of this, truth must be told, chaos must be faced.