For a few dazzling months, Colin Wilson, who has died aged 82, was taken at his own valuation in his diary as "the major literary genius of our century", a writer destined to be "Plato's ideal sage and king". The phenomenal reviews and sales of his first book, The Outsider (1956), led him to be seen as a potential saviour of the human spirit, a thinker who might find a way through the spiritual nullity of the postwar years.
The book remains extraordinary, more for its reach than its grasp. It was an attempt to map a single, negotiable path of mysticism from the span of recent western art and philosophy. Wilson looked for the path through case studies of the agonies and ecstasies of thinkers, artists and men of action including Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, Vaslav Nijinsky, Vincent van Gogh, Hermann Hesse and Lawrence of Arabia. He condensed them into a single type, "the Outsider", a questing spirit straddled between devastating experiences of nothingness and moments of the highest insight.
"Our life in modern society is a repetition of Van Gogh's problem," Wilson said, "the day-to-day struggle for intensity that disappears overnight, interrupted by human triviality and endless pettiness." The book was excitingly written, with a sense of revelation. The failing, which took longer to emerge, was that it oversimplified and deformed some case studies to make them fit a thesis.
A review in the London Evening News was headlined "A major writer and he's 24". Philip Toynbee, of the Observer, called it "exhaustive, luminously intelligent". Other critics followed suit. The book gave Wilson a celebrity and a status close to that of a prophet, even in tabloid newspapers. That was in 1956 "how extraordinary my fame should coincide with Elvis Presley's," he noted. The Outsider sold more than 20,000 copies in its first two months.
His passionate inquiry into his themes continued but critics deserted him. He went out of fashion and though he published more than 100 works he survived financially only because many of those dealt with murder or the occult as pathways to the insights that fascinated him. His readership grew to include murder buffs, UFO spotters and new age believers. Typical of this later output was Alien Dawn (1998), marketed with the line "the evidence is overwhelming they are here". Serialised in the Daily Mail, it undoubtedly made more money than any of his philosophical books.
Wilson, who was based for more than 50 years in Gorran Haven, Cornwall, bore his literary disappointments gracefully. He remained sure that he would triumphantly find and remove the psychic impediment which, he thought, had blocked all human creativity in his time. It was by no means an ignoble cause, as the praise for his early work showed. He was greatly gifted. Almost entirely self-educated, he had huge mental energy, read prodigiously and explored the worldwide resources of literature, philosophy and science with earnestness. His role model from the age of 13 was George Bernard Shaw, also self-taught.
Sign up for Bookmarks: discover new books our weekly email
Read more
Wilson's defects enough to undo him as a thinker were an imperfect analytical ability and a protective conceit that left him virtually impervious to the rational or intuitive arguments of others. Yet the literary establishment's handling of his first books remains one of the more memorable intellectual disgraces of our time. He said, "I would like my life to be a lesson in how to stand alone and to thrive on it."
Wilson was born in Leicester to Arthur, a shoemaker, and his wife, Hattie, who passed on her love of reading. "My mother did not particularly enjoy being married, any more than my father did," he wrote in a memoir. Wilson went to a local technical school, where he did well at physics and chemistry, and left at 16 to work in a wool factory. He had spells as a laboratory assistant, tax clerk, labourer and hospital porter. Vehemently alienated from all materialistic and collective life, he grew obsessed, he said, with the notion of being a Buddhist tathagata (truth-seeking wanderer).
He moved to London where, to save money on rent, he spent the spring nights of 1954 in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath, while trying to write a novel in the British Museum reading room. He was befriended by a museum supervisor, the established novelist Angus Wilson. This novel, a variation on the Jack the Ripper story in which murder was viewed as an attempt to make life meaningful, was later published as Ritual in the Dark (1960).
A first draft of The Outsider was at first half-heartedly accepted by the publisher Victor Gollancz, a master of hype before the word was coined. The Outsider came out in May 1956, in the same month as the premiere of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court. He and Osborne were the first of the "angry young men" hyped, then harassed, by the press. Wilson, who later documented the era in The Angry Years: The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men (2007), trusted journalists too much, was too careless with hyperbole. "For 99% of their lives, most human beings are in a state not too far from that of lobotomised pigeons," he wrote. Though Wilson was a Labour voter, the then influential critic Kenneth Tynan and others spread word that he was a crypto-fascist.
The climax to an increasingly acrid campaign came when the father of his lover and later second wife, Joy Stewart, found Wilson's notes for Ritual in the Dark. Mistaking these for a diary, he burst into a dinner party with a horse-whip shouting: "You're a homosexual with six mistresses." The incident made the papers, and Wilson passed on his actual diary to the Daily Mail which published his claims to be "the major literary genius of our century".
This farcical uproar ultimately drove Wilson to Cornwall for good. His sequels to The Outsider, Religion and the Rebel, and The Age of Defeat, came out during the next three years. But pressure and isolation had left their marks: his analytical defects were more glaring; moreover he had gone off the boil.
Toynbee and the rest panned these without explaining, or apologising for, their earlier zeal, or offering any help or counsel to their one-time prophet. The key to the collapse of the Wilson phenomenon was perhaps that philosophy and religion ceased to be seen as mainstream topics after the 1950s. His promise failed as much for lack of a challenging or nourishing climate as for any other reason.
Wilson summarised The Outsider and its sequels in his 1966 book Introduction to the New Existentialism. He was Britain's first, and so far last, homegrown existentialist star. His later books tended more and more to go to niche readerships, though he said The Occult (1971) earned him £100,000. Dreaming to Some Purpose, a memoir, appeared in 2004. In Super Consciousness (2009), he focused on "peak experiences" or states of heightened awareness, a concept explored by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow.
He and Joy were able to offer (carefully vetted) guests smoked salmon and fine wine in their Cornwall hermitage, its rooms and sheds groaning with 30,000 books and 10,000 classical and jazz records. Wilson, still an unstoppably wide-ranging and oracular conversationalist, grew into a kind, mostly serene man. "The critics tried to take back what they'd written," he said. "They couldn't take back the passport they'd given me."
He is survived by Joy and their sons, Damon and Rowan, and their daughter, Sally, and by another son, Roderick, from his first marriage, to Dorothy, which ended in divorce.
Vale Colin Wilson (26 June 1931 5 December 2013)
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks