Starry Nights
& Endless Miseries
Paul
Newman reviews
People
sometimes ask me what I do for a living, and when I tell them I edit an
occasional magazine called Abraxas centring on the work
and activities of a writer named Colin Wilson, they often frown and ask
"Who?" as if I were referring to an obscure Jesuit priest or a writer
of monographs on tobacco ash. However, no one should worry about putting one’s
foot in such intellectual cavities for, according to Bill Bryson, a third of
American university students were ‘polled’ and found to be uncertain as to
the location of Asia!
To
fill in any gaps, Wilson was born in Leicester in 1931 and, after receiving a
rather piecemeal education, took jobs as a laboratory assistant and later an
office worker. In his autobiography Voyage to a Beginning, he recalled
working for the Collector of Taxes. His boss was a jolly sympathetic gentleman
named Mr Sidford and he remembered the other employees: Joyce, "a highly
attractive young married woman who wore expensive clohes and obviously longed
for the Riviera"; Desmond, "a handsome, smart and highly efficient
young man in rimless glasses, who looked like Ian Fleming’s James Bond but
actually seemed to lead a blameless life"; Ken, "who was about to
marry, and often talked to me at length about the joys of married life";
Millicent, "an attractive short-sighted Jewish girl with a sensual mouth
and a contralto voice" with whom Colin Wilson was to become romantically
involved. There is little point in further summary – one can only recommend
readers to acquire this entertaining autobiography that so well captures the
flavour of the times as well as providing food for thought.
Although
his employers were more sympathetic to a deeply introspective young intellectual
masquerading as an average trainee than they would be in these ruthless times,
Wilson found it difficult to settle into a orderly rhythm. Eventually he jacked
in the clerical job and began looking around for other outlets – all the time
reading intensely and evolving his philosophy.
During
an interlude, he joined the RAF, but found the routines of service life
stifling. When his discontent became unbearable, he feigned homosexuality in
order to gain a discharge. Once again a citizen of the world, he met and married
his first wife, produced a son, Roderick, and wandered on the Continent,
settling eventually in London. There he worked as a washer-up in sundry coffee
bars and, during his spare time, drafted the outline of The Outsider
(1956). This turned out to be one of the major titles of the decade, a seminal
work, influencing the reading matter and outlook of a generation. Containing
arresting profiles of men like Van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, T.E. Lawrence, Herman
Hesse and Frederick Nietzsche, it explored their isolation and revolt. Even
their neuroses was made to appear vital, exciting, important, a necessary
distress rather than a dreary encumbrance. Only by feeling ‘outside’
society, Wilson argued, could such men have gained insight into its ailments and
thereby propose a route of healing.
The New Lost
Equally
significantly, The Outsider pin-pointed a new underclass of
more-than-averagely intelligent young men and women, too restless and
imaginative to settle for conventional jobs, yet not integrated and disciplined
enough to make it as free-standing writers or artists. These - disparagingly
called the "new lost" - are best epitomised – or satirised - by the
vehemence of Jimmy Porter, the hero of John Osborne’s play Look Back in
Anger, who vented his spleen on every available target. Although classed as
one of the ‘Angry Young Men’, along with John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and
John Wain, Wilson spurned both the label and Osborne’s play. He thought
Porter’s rantings should be the start of a long educative process and not an
interminable circulatory exercise like swallowing one’s tail.
James Dean of Literature
The Outsider found a prestigious, brilliant
publisher in Victor Gollancz, with the result that instant fame was accorded
this young man from the provinces. Prior to publication, Wilson had been
sleeping on Hampstead Heath in order to save money and secure time in which to
write and study. This anecdote made perfect fodder for the British press, and the young
intellectual was subject to a rapid makeover. One morning he was a nonentity;
the next photographers were perpetuating images of him enshrouded in his sleeping bag reading Nietzsche or Shaw or even Wilson.
Highbrow critics knelt in obeisance before his "luminous intelligence"
and every variety of human being - from milkmen to solicitors – pounced on him
exclaiming, "Mr Wilson, I believe I’m an Outsider!"
Looking
back on the fifties, a correspondent to an arts magazine summarised the
atmosphere. "I remember," wrote Louis Sterton,
"spending a good part of my youth drinking coffee and chatting with fellow
‘intellectuals’ about existentialism, the beat generation, etc. ad nauseam.
Wilson was a kind of young intellectuals’ icon, a James Dean of the book
world, who seemed both rebellious and individualistic, a bloke who was
determined to do things his way. Of course we understood hardly anything he
wrote – I’m afraid The Outsider lost me inside the first fifty pages
- but we were all happy to say, ‘Good on yer mate’ when he got up the
Establishment’s nose."
Oscar
Wilde remarked style is more important than sincerity – an aphorism borne out
in the press’s early treatment of Wilson. They mangled and mocked the
metaphysics and concentrated on the image to which they could attach stories.
Wilson provided them with the right type of bait. Tall, confident, romantically
scruffy and effortlessly eloquent, his views were sought on subjects as varied
as women's fashion, space satellites, CND and socialism. At one point in his
career, he was even asked to write an introduction to a gardener’s yearbook.
"But I hate gardening," he protested. "That’s fine," the
editor responded. "Just tell us how you hate it." So Wilson went ahead
and wrote the essay – a lively denunciatory piece that still reads well.
A Moody, Dangerous Quality
I
was Sterton’s age when I first read The Outsider. It was a Pan
paperback with an abstract cover, spotted with enthusiastic quotes, and I
thought at the time, being pretty ignorant, that if I made a concerted effort to
understand the book, I might assimilate many important things in one gulp. The
book had a dangerous quality, appealing to youth - a moody, powerful text, bound
together by a kind of passionate unease. Parts of it read like an initiatory
rite with chapters like ‘Crossing the Pain Threshold.’ States of mind were
pictorialised by dramatic metaphors; there was an undertow of intellectual
excitement as one sensed the pressure of an urgent thesis being worked out.
Eagerly
I showed The Outsider to my friends. They were moving out of the healthy
zone into more confused, complex areas. We passed it around and read the titles
it recommended, arguing over them in that heated, teenage manner that tends to
make adults criticise the arrogance of the young. Unfortunately we took these
discussions into pubs. Drinks would be ordered and a debate would start out
amiably enough. Then a point of discord would arise. The argument would get
tenser, more personal. Voices would get higher; verbal swords clash and, on one
occasion, I remember a burly-armed barman expelling me through the door onto a
cold wet pavement while I shrieked,"Plato was right!"
I
was now reading Colin Wilson compulsively, the next title being Religion and
the Rebel (1957), the ill-fortuned follow-up to The Outsider,
finding it less focused than its predecessor. I remember a long, fascinating
biographical introduction, fluent and candid, followed by a series of profiles
and commentaries on various mystics, divines and philosophers. After Religion
and the Rebel came The Age of Defeat (1959), lamenting the ‘lost
leader’ or the absence of the hero in contemporary literature, and The
Strength to Dream (1962), where the quest for depth and authenticity
continues in a work containing pages of spirited criticism on writers like
Lovecraft, Sartre, Huxley, Wedekind and Wells.
Sex and Metaphysics
Wilson
backed up criticism with novels. His first Ritual in the Dark (1959)
dealt with a series of Jack the Ripper type killings in London. It was in some
ways a gaunt, jokeless tract, heavily overcast in tone, but irradiated by a
prowling energy. There was plenty of violence, plenty of sex, plenty of
philosophy, and the odd thing was that all three areas were blended. If the
central character, Gerard Sorme, caught sight of the edge of a girl’s slip, a
lengthy disquisition might follow on what was taking place in the hero’s body
and soul. Entranced to learn that ogling was a major branch of philosophy, from
then on I’d pace the streets, ball-eyed, eager to drink in all the metaphysics
on display.
Savagely
attacked in several papers, Ritual received an accolade by Dame Edith
Sitwell writing in The Sunday Times and was followed by Adrift in Soho
(1961), a picaresque story of a young writer from the provinces seeking refuge
in the companionable squalor of bedsit London. The Kerouac-like charm of the
narrative takes in a varied cast of dropouts, actors, sex-crazed painters,
soulful poets and weasel-nosed landladies - "so good is Mr Wilson's prose
you can see and smell it all", The Times Literary Supplement
enthused.
Gerard Sorme
In
three of his novels Wilson used as an alter ego a man named Gerard Sorme who is
best characterised as a freelancing intellectual with a penchant for wine,
whisky and copulation. Sorme made his debut in Ritual as an owlishly
serious young man who was constantly taking off and putting on his cycle clips
before and after seducing some lapsed Jehovah's witness or pretty student nurse.
As he progressed through a cycle of novels, Sorme became more financially
secure, shedding his cycle clips for a saloon car, but somehow less human than
that dank fifties figure shivering as he holds a dripping raincoat over a
paraffin stove in some barren bedsit. "Poor Gerard Sorme," a critic
wrote of The God of the Labyrinth (1970) - an engaging phallocentric
jaunt amid the rakes of the 18th century - "nothing between the library
list in his head and that vital organ down there."
Leakage of Energy
Despite
these lighter moments, Wilson was regarded as a ‘serious’ – indeed
passionately earnest - young writer, an existentialist who sought to promote a
religious attitude, not like Kierkegaard, say, who was a Christian, but more
like Shelley who sensed and reverenced a principle behind creation far larger
than anything an individual might divine. The vastness of the cosmos and the
multiplicity of its created forms became a source of vexation to Kierkegaard,
creating fear and trembling, an abyss of potentialities, a dizzying maze of
meaning. And Sartre after him felt nausea and oppression at the manyness of the
phenomenal world, but Wilson denied the validity of such responses. Why be
forced into a leap of faith or be overcome with disgust merely because one is
faced with infinite variety? These are superficial responses, he argued. If you
look at all these living forms and choices with the right set of intentions,
they become merely tools and agents of your inner certainty or sense of purpose.
They have the power to trigger elation as well as doubt. So, in a sense, while
using an existential scaffold, Wilson reached a different conclusion. He saw
life as a bed of hope and inspiration while Sartre viewed it as a hard-faced
taskmaster.
Above
all, the problem of life-failure obsessed him or the inability of the human mind
to sustain hope and enthusiasm. Deploring the manner in which men and women of
genius (Keats, Byron, Shelley) had blazed trails of glory and later succumbed to
self-doubt or suicide, he wrote The Mind Parasites, an eloquent sci-fi
parable in which this process is demonised as an alien infiltrator. If only this
debilitating tendency could be overcome, mankind might take the next step
forward. Styling himself as a hedgehog - a thinker motivated by a single big
idea - Wilson restated this theme in essay and fiction. He regarded the human
will as fundamentally at fault, too prone to depression and self-doubt:
Van Gogh painted ‘The Starry Night’, which seems to be a pure
affirmation of life; but he committed suicide, and left behind a note that said,
"Misery will never end." According to Ayer [Freddy Ayer, the logical
positivist philosopher], this merely amounted to the expression of two different
moods, and it was as meaningless to ask which was "truer" as to ask
whether a rainy day is truer than a sunny day. My own feeling was that the
question was not only significant, but - literally - a matter of life and death.
Essay on the New
Existentialism (1986)
An
answer to this dilemma was found in the latent power of the will or the
transformative ability of the mind to convert plummeting ‘lows’ to surging
‘highs’. If we cannot alter the weather by our thoughts, we can at least try
to change the climate of our thinking. In such a context, the "peak
experience" offered an important lead, a euphoric state first chronicled by
the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Instead of trying to find out what made sick
people sick, Maslow decided to investigate what made healthy people healthy. His
answer was that ‘self-achievers’ are regularly topped up by the "peak
experience", a surge of unity and joy at being here. It is this
ability of the mind to energise itself - to re-fuel itself on distant horizons
and limitless possibilities - which is the key to overcoming depressed and
defeated states. Wilson criticised thinkers like Jean Paul Sartre for
underrating such moments of vision and putting undue emphasis on contingency or
the "absurdity" of the human situation.
Seeing Beyond
In
the same essay, he recalled a conversation with the French intellectual, Albert
Camus. Praising the latter’s work, he suggested that it contained the germ of
an optimistic existentialism. Shaking his head, Camus pointed to a Parisian
teddy boy slouching past in the street. "What is good for him must be good
for me also," he told Wilson.
"I
got very excited and said that was preposterous. I could see, of course, what he
meant: that his starting point had to be the same "triviality of
everydayness" (Heidegger's phrase) that confronted the teddy boy when he
opened his eyes in the morning. But Camus was saying that he was unable to see
beyond that triviality. And it is a philosopher’s job to see beyond. All
revolutions in thought begin with an attempt to "see beyond". What if
Einstein had decided that he could not publish his theory of relativity because
a Parisian teddy boy would find it incomprehensible?"
In
other words, it is the duty of men and women to rise to the challenge presented
by people like Einstein - by making an effort at understanding - rather than
negate their contributions. The idea that, if you cannot be heard by everybody,
you might as well talk to nobody, is hardly applicable to Camus, who was born to
a poor, practically bookless family in Algeria. All his innate ability would
have been wasted without the persistence and determination inspired by his own
self-belief. You have to convince yourself before you have half a chance of
convincing others.
Drawing Down Heaven
I
have dealt at length with the early years and The Outsider because they
hold the key to Colin Wilson’s subsequent development. But I am aware that
many people have become acquainted with him through books like The Occult
(1971) or compendious tomes on murder and mysterious happenings or through his
articles in the Daily Mail or occasional television appearances with
personalities like Yuri Geller. At this very moment, for instance, they might be
reading Alien Dawn, a superbly readable and profound exposition on the
implications of all those reports of UFOs and abductees. So how do these many
strands connect? What is their crowning knot?
Wilson’s
reply might run along these lines. Outsiders have often been rescued from misery
and oppression by moments of deep insight and near-drunken joy. Mystics and
occultists also seek this feeling of breadth and expansion; for magic is a kind
of ‘imaging’ or concentrating and deepening one’s mental powers. Phenomena
like UFOs force dramatic changes in those who see them; they are never quite the
same again, for they have glimpsed the potential of other worlds, other modes of
being. Murderers, too, crave expansion and release, but their methods are crude
and brutal. Repeated acts of violence release opiates in the brain but the
effect wears off, leaving them trapped in the coils of their viciousness.
So
Wilson is saying, despite different paths, the goal is identical. Men and women,
in order to fulfil the destiny implicit in being here, seek new
intensities of being. They long to open the door in the wall, the window in the
mind, the gate that leads to the farthermost shore. They want their lives to
stay permanently open to spiritual and physical possibilities. In a sense he is
a modern religious visionary, seeking to draw heaven down to earth and to
re-unite sensation and spirit.
But
this is a highfalutin way of describing a philosophy that is pre-eminently
practical, a method of grasping and configuring the reality with which each of
us is confronted. In further articles, we will examine Colin Wilson’s
existentialism in detail, demonstrating how it has inspired and extended a
lifeline to many, enabling them to live more effectively, more purposefully,
whether as salesmen, secretaries or writers.