'The Outsider' by Geoff Ward14th Jun 2006  FIFTY years ago this month, a literary phenomenon had burst on Britain. Against a background of teddy boys, skiffle groups, coffee bars, the Suez Crisis and Elvis the Pelvis, a book by an unknown 24-year-old writer was astounding the critics and on its way to becoming an international best-seller. The Outsider by Colin Wilson, a hard-up working-class lad from Leicester who had been sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath while struggling to write his first novel, has never been out of print since and has been translated into 30 languages. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of this groundbreaking work, author and journalist Geoff Ward went to interview Colin at his home in Cornwall.I VIVIDLY remember a school friend lending me his copy of a paperback edition of The Outsider back in the 1960s. I have to admit that I never returned it to him and, indeed, still have it in my possession today, along with a number of other earlier and later editions of the book which I have since collected. I identified immediately with Colin Wilson's inspired study of alienation in the modern world, and how certain writers, poets, artists and other thinkers reflected it in their lives and works. For me, it was a literary and philosophical turning point. C S Lewis once said: "A book sometimes crosses one's path which is... like the sound of one’s native language in a strange country." With The Outsider, that was it exactly. In retrospect, I have a lot to thank that school friend for. Today, I find that the cumulative effect of Wilson's ideas has led to a considerable expansion of my consciousness. Wilson is broadly a humanist thinker in the Romantic tradition, and doubtless this was the basis of his original appeal to me - his assertion of the importance of self and the value of individual experience, his insistence on the ability to realise human potential, his explorations of the non-rational, his sense of the infinite and the transcendental, and his response to the idea of pressure on the "reason why" of human existence. It seemed to me that Wilson set out to achieve a balance between the rational and the non-rational, between psychological and philosophical approaches. Because he wove a pattern which resonated with my own perceptions, the experience of the opposing pulls of that same duality, rational/non-rational, I was freely able to internalise the ideas, and begin to understand my personal entelechy, the vital principle guiding my own development and functioning. Wilson, indeed, encompasses all matters philosophical and psychological, his ideas impinging upon all aspects of existence, and offers persuasive explanations of human behaviour and endeavour. The existentialist approach, of course, is the oldest in philosophy, dating back to Plato, and existentialism necessarily embraces all other philosophies, but Wilson's brand of existentialism is not the pessimistic kind of the Continental school, that of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus - quite the opposite. Wilson's "new existentialism" provides an optimistic and practicable philosophy, complementing, for me, the Jungian idea of the individuation process, and Jung's view that a deliberate act of will on the part of the individual can choose a path of self-development. With more than a hundred thought-provoking books to his name, Wilson is living proof that a person from humble beginnings can rise to a pinnacle of intellectual achievement and develop into a powerful thinker of the age; it has been his works which have provided me with optimism about, and faith in, the realisation of positive human potential. Indeed, Wilson is one of the few thinkers who has stood out against the endemic pessimism and defeatism of our times, and the tendency to reject substance and meaning in favour of image and ephemera, and I have found his stance on these issues inspirational. It must be said that he came to be spurned by certain elements of the British literary establishment because of his eclecticism and the fact that he was an autodidact - characteristics both of which endeared him to me and, of course, compounded The Outsider image. Wilson and the playwright John Osborne, whose Look Back In Anger opened just three weeks before The Outsider came out on May 28, 1956, were the first writers to be labelled "angry young men". Wilson once described himself as being at that time, "A bit like an intellectual Elvis Presley - I’d get these groupies following me around." But he protests: “I wasn't in the least angry, except about my years of struggle, and now that I was recognised, even this hardly applied. I had no idea how much I would come to hate the label." Having moved to Cornwall with his wife Joy to escape the glare of publicity in London, Wilson went on to write a hundred books on philosophy, literary criticism, criminology, the paranormal and the occult, UFOs and ancient mysteries, biographies and 20 novels. But The Outsider remains the cornerstone of Colin's practical, intuitive philosophy for life, the ‘new existentialism’, which surely must make him the first optimistic philosopher in European history. I first met Wilson during a holiday in Cornwall in the summer of 1999. As I had chosen to study his existential criticism as part of an English and philosophy degree course I was pursuing as a mature student, I was keen to meet him and so, having pieced together his address from clues in Howard Dossor's biography, I had written him a letter, explaining my interest. I was amazed to receive a phone call from Wilson on the very morning he received my letter, inviting me to visit him at his home at Gorran Haven - a meeting where I received the gifts of two of his latest books, and after which he took the trouble to record on tape many further thoughts about our conversation, and mail it to me (addressed quaintly to "Mr G Ward, Esquire"). How many world-famous authors would go to such lengths for a stranger? Since then I have been fortunate to meet and interview Wilson on a number of occasions, the most recent being in May of this year (2006), when my objective was to find out what were his feelings were as he looked back on The Outsider after 50 years. "'The Outsider' seemed to me at the time one of the most important books ever written, and 50 years later it still seems so," said Colin, 75 this month (June, 2006). "Pessimism is lying across modern civilisation like some enormous fallen tree and somehow we've got to get a bulldozer and shift it out of the way. That's what I've been saying in various different ways in my books ever since." The Outsider's origins can be traced back to Colin's fascination as a teenager with the Romantics of the early 19th century, including the poets Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats. They were all saying the same kind of thing, that the world was a much more fascinating place than people realised. For the first time, nature was coming to be regarded as beautiful, and the poets instilled a sense of longing. Goethe had invented the character of the Romantic Outsider in his Sorrows of Young Werther, about a highly idealistic young poet whose unrequited love causes him to shoot himself, a fictional tragedy which led to copycat suicides across Europe, perhaps as many as 2,000 of them. There was a wonderful world there which people had never noticed before, but so many of the Romantics died young and tragically, all through the 19th century, in accidents, illness or suicides. They could experience "exquisite happiness" but then they would wake up the next morning and find that the real world contradicted this elevated state. "I remember when my daughter was a child and we took her to see The Wizard of Oz. She came out of the cinema saying: 'I wish there was a land over the rainbow'. That's an encapsulation of what the Romantics felt, this desire for the land over the rainbow, and they felt that once they'd glimpsed it that life wasn't worth living." This pattern in literature continued into the 20th century with, for example, Villiers De Lisle Adam's Axel who embodied the extreme Romantic position: the young lovers Axel and Sara commit suicide after Axel tells her: "Live? Our servants will do that for us." The trend culminated, or perhaps reached a nadir, with Samuel Beckett, 150 years on from the High Romantic period, and his notion that life was meaningless and not worth living, as expressed in his 1950s trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and later in Waiting for Godot (which had its London debut in 1955) and Endgame. "My feeling was that, somehow, all this has got to change," said Wilson. "In a way, it was the proper conclusion of this great cycle from Goethe onwards. We're obviously talking of some kind of real evolution. I've been certain of this for the past 50 years. I remember saying this in a lecture when 'The Outsider came out, that man is on the point of an evolutionary leap. "So when we talk about what a dreadful world we're in, with things going from bad to worse, and no way out, what we're missing is the fact that we are in change, the whole human race is changing, and the change is really happening now. This is what has always fascinated me. When I was younger, I started this thing off as a Romantic myself, and I gradually realised that it's all very well writing The Outsider, about all these people who felt the world was not for them, and they had to find something better, but it suddenly struck me that all we have to do is somehow become vital enough to overcome the problem. It demands something from us, a new kind of strength, a new kind of vision. This is what I've been preaching all my life, you see." While Wilson says that Samuel Beckett was at least serious in his intentions, there was no seriousness in any of the other writers of the 1950s, except Iris Murdoch, who was interested in existentialism. Wilson was appalled when Beckett, effectively the arch-pessimist and the antithesis of everything Wilson stands for, was awarded a Nobel Prize. Wilson dismisses British novelists since that time, down to the present day, as having nothing to say, as having no interest in ideas. "Things do seem to be going steadily downhill. There's absolutely nobody at all. This may sound terribly conceited, but I had never doubted from the time of my teens, when I started realising that I had something enormously important to say, that it really was terribly important to tell the history of the last two centuries, and I've gone on saying it to absolutely deaf ears" - he laughs heartily - "which, in a sense, is a contradiction because there are enough people who do understand me, like yourselves, to make sure that it is worth going on." And "going on" Wilson certainly is. His next book, Atlantis and the Kingdom of Neanderthal, will be out later this year, and he is currently writing The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men, about the Fifties literary scene. But there's more. Wilson believes that the increase in consciousness implicit in the "new vision" he seeks for the human race would enable people to live longer. Iris Murdoch once asked Wilson what he really wanted out of life, and he replied that what he would really like to do, as George Bernard Shaw had suggested, was live to be 300 years old. "That's remained the kind of basic feeling I have," said Wilson, "although at 75 I can see that, for the time being, that's an impractical aim, I'm afraid. But we are getting to live longer and longer, and the interesting thing is, people die, as Shaw said in Back to Methusalah, because they want to die, because they don't have any more purpose in living." Wilson is fascinated by the "mental mechanics" that lie behind the visionary and peak experiences - those fleeting moments of profound insight and bubbling enthusiasm - and how we could induce them at will. "If we could do that, we'd have the secret of living forever, or as long as we wanted, and this is where the promise of the future lies. This is the direction the human race is going to go in.” "The interesting thing is that most people, by my age, more or less feel that they are giving up, and like H G Wells, who was only 80 when he died, feeling that there's really no further that they can go. So to me, the extremely interesting question would be, could I be the first to go straight on, straight through that particular 'sound barrier', on to the next peak, the next hill-top?" If we could push ourselves up the "ladder of consciousness", through the "seven levels of consciousness", as Wilson first described them in his Beyond the Occult (1988), then we would be able to extend our lifespans. Briefly, level one is deep sleep; two, mere awareness; three, what Sartre called "nausea"; four, normal, everyday consciousness; five, happy "spring morning" consciousness; six, a "magical" or ecstatic state; and seven, "Faculty X", a godlike sensation, with the disappearance of time. "When you realise our normal, ordinary level of consciousness tends to be 4.5, I've managed to push myself up to something like 4.7. You can actually get very, very, very slowly up this consciousness ladder. I realised that if I can do it, then other people can do it. Once we know something can be done, it suddenly can be done quite easily. So this is my main hope. And what this will actually do, if we can achieve this, is enable us to live much, much longer." * The Outsider anniversary is marked by a new edition of Colin's monumental A Criminal History of Mankind (Mercury Books, £25), first published in 1984, and a tribute from the Canadian journalist Brad Spurgeon, Colin Wilson: Philosopher of Optimism (Michael Butterworth £9.99), obtainable on a print-on-demand basis from michael-butterworth@ntlworld.com, telephone 0161 225 7427. See also http://www.colinwilsonworld.co.uk, a website dedicated to an appreciation of Wilson and his works. © Geoff Ward - June 2006 Note: Click on photograph for an enlarged view. |
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