The Essential Colin Wilson (3 page)

The theme is repeated in the first pages of
The Outsider
. Barbusse's hero watches a girl undressing in the next room; but when he tries to recreate the scene in imagination, it is only a poor carbon copy. 'These words are all dead. They leave untouched . . . the intensity of what was.' Again, he is present at the dining table when someone describes the sex murder of a little girl. Everyone at the table is morbidly interested—even a young mother with her child; but they all try to pretend to be indifferent. The irony, of course, is that Barbusse cannot speak his meanings clearly. If, in fact, he watched a girl undressing in the next room, he would probably masturbate; as it is, he tries to convince the reader that it was an experience of spiritual beauty. For all his talk about truth, the narrator cannot be honest.

In
Ritual in the Dark
, this inability to grasp the essence of sexuality becomes the symbol of our inability to grasp the essence of anything important—of autumn, of water . . . This, it seemed to me, is the basic difference between human beings. Some are perfectly satisfied with what they have; they eat, drink, impregnate their wives, and take life as it comes. Others can never forget that they are being cheated; that life tempts them to struggle by offering them the essence of sex, of beauty, of success; and that she always seems to pay in counterfeit money. In the novel, Nunne—the purely physical type—pursues his will o' the wisp with a despairing ruthlessness. The painter, Oliver Glasp, is obsessed by a ten-year-old female model, but horrified at the idea of any physical lovemaking; he sublimates his desire in decadent romantic pictures. Sorme, the intellectual outsider, also pursues his desires with a touch of ruthlessness, but a fundamentally kindly nature makes him incapable of causing pain . . .

Sometime shortly before that Christmas of 1954, I was walking along the Thames Embankment with my closest—and oldest—friend, Bill Hopkins, explaining to him the ideas of the novel. I explained that Sorme is an intellectual outsider; he has discipline of the intellect, but not of the body or emotions.

Glasp, like Van Gogh, is the emotional outsider; he has discipline of the emotions, but not of the body or the intellect. Nunne, like the dancer Nijinsky, is a physical outsider; he has discipline of the body, but not of the emotions or the intellect. All three are 'lopsided'. And all three are capable of becoming insane. I went on to point out that Dostoevsky had used the same categories in the three Karamazov brothers. This, I believe, was the actual seed of
The Outsider
. In due course, the chapter contrasting the three types of outsider ('The Attempt to Gain Control') became the core of the book.

When it came to the actual writing, there was a certain amount of material that had to be scrapped. I had, for example, intended to write a chapter about the Faust figure, from Marlowe to Mann's Dr Faustus—Mann's feeling about the un-attainableness of the ideal was obviously close to my own. There was a chapter on criminal outsiders that was abandoned after a few pages—the fragment was later reprinted in
An Encyclopedia of Murder
. And there was an interesting outline of a chapter on 'the weak outsider'—characters like Oblomov, the great Gatsby, Hamlet, the poets of the 1890s like Dowson and Johnson and Verlaine . . . I was particularly fascinated by Gatsby because the essence he craved was the essence of 'success'. I was convinced that this, like all the other essences, is a fraud. Yet my romanticism found this hard to accept . . .

A year and a half after writing the first page of
The Outsider,
I had a chance to find out for myself. I had written most of the book by the middle of 1955. (The most difficult parts, I found, were the links between the various sections; it cost me two weeks' hard work to write the link between Wells and Sartre in the first chapter; it finally came in a flash of inspiration as I was hitch-hiking on the back of a lorry near Oxford.) I tried sending a few pages, together with an outline, to the publisher Victor Gollancz. To my surprise, he replied almost immediately, saying that he liked the outline and would like to see the rest. At this time, I was working during the evenings in a coffee bar in the Haymarket, so that I could spend my days writing in the British Museum. In the autumn I sent him the completed manuscript and he accepted it. That winter, I gave up work for a few weeks—for the first time since I'd left school at sixteen—and lived on the £75 advance that Gollancz gave me. Somehow, I had no doubt that the book would be a success. I think I had too little doubt about the importance of what I had to say to feel misgivings. Gollancz, understandably, had no such confidence; he finally decided to take the risk of printing five thousand copies.

Publication day was set for Monday, 26 May 1956. Even before this, I was beginning to smell the breath of fame, and finding it exciting. Edith Sitwell, the poetess who had 'discovered' Dylan Thomas, had read the book in proof, and told Gollancz she thought I was going to be 'a truly great writer'. A journalist on one of the London evening newspapers asked to interview me; I spent an evening at his flat talking into his tape recorder—which struck me as a fabulous device—and listening to a record of the latest hit show,
My Fair Lady
. Gollancz told me he had been promised a review in the
Evening News
on the Saturday before publication. My girl friend, Joy, was spending the weekend with me—I was now living in a room in Notting Hill Gate—and we bought the paper as soon as it appeared; but there seemed to be no review. I went to bed that night oddly depressed—my bicycle had been stolen a few hours before, and it seemed a bad omen. The next morning, we woke up early and rushed to the comer of Westbourne Grove to buy the two 'posh' Sunday papers. Both of them had devoted their lead review to
The Outsider
, and both were full of praise. When we got back to my room, someone told us that there
had
been a review in the previous evening's newspaper; we looked again, and found a headline: 'He's a major writer—and he's only twenty-four'.

Before that day was out, I had no doubt that I was famous, whatever that meant. I had no telephone—naturally—but our neighbours in the basement had one, and it began to ring at about nine o'clock that morning—my editor ringing me up to congratulate me, and to ask my permission to give the telephone number to the press. Within a couple of hours I had agreed to be interviewed by half a dozen newspapers, and to appear on radio and television. Moreover, a playwright named John Osborne had achieved success on the same day; his play
Look Back in Anger
had been produced at the Royal Court a few days earlier, and reviews by Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson launched him to fame as the first 'Angry Young Man'. (The actual phrase was invented by J. B. Priestley, who wrote an article about the two of us under that title in
The New Statesman
the following week.) In fact, Osborne and I had only one thing in common—that both of us had been turned into 'outsiders' by our working-class backgrounds, and the suspicion that we would spend the rest of our lives stuck in dreary obscurity. But the fact that we appeared on the literary scene at the same time somehow doubled the furore.

It was a strange experience. On the 24th of May 1956, I had been totally unknown. I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that 'the world' would decline to recognize them. The 'famous' seemed to be a small and very exclusive club, and the chances of getting into it were about equal to those of winning the football pools. And then, suddenly, on the 25th, I had apparently been elected without opposition, and the pundits of the Sunday newspapers were assuring the public that I was at least as important as Sartre and Camus, a real British home-grown existentialist. And when the press got hold of the story about sleeping on Hampstead Heath, I became notorious as well as famous . . .

The enormous publicity was partly due to the fact that I was one of a group, a 'new group', not just of writers, but of all kinds of personalities who were always worth a paragraph in a gossip column. It included Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot and Arthur Miller and Sandy Wilson and Pietro Annigoni (who had painted the Queen) and Francis Bacon and Stirling Moss and Mort Sahl, and a couple of dozen more assorted celebrities who somehow seemed typical of the mid-fifties. And it included a large-ish crop of young writers—Amis, Wain, Iris Murdoch, Brendan Behan, Françoise Sagan, Michael Hastings (who was eighteen), Jane Gaskell (who was fourteen), and even a nine-year-old French poetess called Minou Drouet. I have a feeling that the newspapers had an unconscious urge to manufacture an 'epoch'—like the 1890s or 1920s. And, for better or worse, I was in the middle of it, cast as the 'boy genius'. Somehow, Osborne and I were supposed to prove that England was full of brilliantly talented young men who couldn't make any headway in the System, and were being forced to go it alone. We were supposed to be the representative voices of this vast army of outsiders and angry young men who were rising up to overthrow the establishment.

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'.