If the British thinker, writer, philosopher and novelist Colin Wilson deliberately set out to be reviled, mocked and excluded by Briitain’s academic and cultural mainstream, he has managed it brilliantly.
Looking back, he was doomed not to be accepted by the cultural “elite” from the off. First, he was a self-taught, working-class Midlander who never attended University, so he hadn’t been conditioned to think standard thoughts in a standard way. He was rather more interested in finding out the answers to the big life questions that fascinated him – why are we here? why are we the way we are? how should we live? etc. - than in simply taking his place amongst the self-important nonentities who comprise our intellectual elite. They know you’ll get nowhere asking questions like that – meta-theories about how one should discuss cultural “artefacts” are what’ll get you invited to hang out with the right sort of people – the smooth-mannered placemen and the ersatz revolutionaries.
Now, to be honest, much of The Outsider is – not to put too fine a point on it – utter bollocks: it isn’t particularly well thought-out or constructed and one rapidly tires of the blizzard of trendy European names: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre etc. etc. ad nauseam. But there are enough interesting ideas in there to make it worth reading. It didn’t deserve the ludicrous praise it received on its first appearance, nor the almost universal panning it has received ever since.
Wilson had a high opinion of himself: he would talk about “where my ideas differ from…” and then mention someone very distinguished, like Wells or Kant or his hero, George Bernard Shaw, as if he were on their level. He appreciated other thinkers, of course, but his unwillingness to adopt the cloak of modesty so beloved of his university-approved betters gave him a certain Pooterish air of sublime self-regard. Within a few months, an impoverished, utterly obscure young man from an extremely humble background found himself being hailed as the Genius of the Age: it turned his head and he didn’t half make a prat of himself as a result - but, then, he was a bit of a prat to start with.
He was working class, but he betrayed England’s cultural commissars by showing no interest in egalitarianism: he was, after all, interested in the strange, the exceptional, the outsider, and he was frankly contemptuous of ordinary people. Besides, he was interested in what went on inside people’s heads (other people have always been a mystery to him), not in changing the way they were governed - his only foray into politics in the ‘50s was truly embarrassing. At a time when the other “Angry Young Men” were all lefties (although many later recanted), Wilson’s lack of commitment was unforgivable. The chap was working class, he hadn’t gone to college, and he’d had to sleep out on Hampstead Heath to be able to afford to stay in London and access all the source materials necessary for the completion ofThe Outsider – for God’s sake, why wasn’t he burning with class hatred and advocating the overthrow of a system that had made him jump through such hoops? Where was his resentment?
He took up with a posh girl whose father turned up with a horsewhip (literally) to sort out this philandering oik (Wilson had married young and badly) – and the unseemly brouhaha was in all the tabloids: frightfully infra dig. One didn’t appear in that sort of newspaper.
But perhaps his greatest sin was being, at heart, an optimist: in the 1950s, great artists and thinkers vied with each other to proclaim how bloody horrible life was: any other attitude betokened complacency born of privilege or docility born of oppression. An intellectual must never be satisfied with anything (except with themselves, of course). Life is victimhood: the intellectual’s job is to highlight iniquity and suffering in their myriad forms. As for being cheerful, one left that sort of thing to one’s milkman.
Wilson took his positive outlook even further: he believed people could act to improve their moods, to increase optimism, to overcome angst: when faced with difficulties, he believed one should put one’s back into overcoming them. The source of energy for such effort, he insisted, lay within us: the human subconscious is a trove of untapped resources and unexplored abilities which, with effort, we can access. Wait! Didn’t this silly little upstart realize that being depressed and downtrodden was humanity’s role – and it was the result of inequality? If intellectuals were to start telling people to pull themselves together, where was their opportunity to show compassion or to advocate political action?
Another Wilsonian solecism resulted from his seemingly innate ability to express complex ideas with pellucid clarity: suddenly you didn’t have to be a fully paid-up, card-carrying, college-educated lefty to understand what psychologists and philosophers were on about. Bounder! Didn’t he realize that the cultural elite was like The Magic Circle: mystification and secrecy was its stock in trade, and here was this pipsqueak just giving it all away to the groundlings!
And some of the topics he became interested in were so ghastly. Philosophy, psychology, literary novels, classical music: fair enough. But sex murders? Sordid frightfulness! And then to have the effrontery to suggest that a lack of self-control and giving in to one’s desires leads to increasingly vile behaviour, jadedness, and, eventually, madness (he’s good on De Sade)! Surely, his detractors felt, it was thesuppression of our impulses that was the true sin? Self-control diminishes us, unless, of course, it’s undertaken for a higher - in other words, political - cause.
And not only sex – but the Occult! Ghosts! Poltergeists! UFOs! Didn’t he realize that Freud hated any mention of the occult, and Freud was King back then. Like Jung before him, Wilson found these phenomena deeply fascinating – and, like Jung, he treated them as if they might actually possess some form of objective reality. To compound matters, he started to churn out novels. Nothing political or sensitive or searingly “honest”, perhaps involving an unrecognized artist living in downtrodden, alienated misery in NW1: instead, it was all science fiction and horror, alien spiders and sex killers and occultists! The Space Vampires? Ye Gods!
And then he began writing about the sort of charlatans mainstream intellectuals utterly abhorred: the Georgian mystic, Gurdjieff; his Russian confederate, Ouspensky; Rudolf Steiner – spiritualist snake-oil salesmen who rejected reductionist materialism in favour of a model where the psyche could directly affect the physical world, and who denied the primacy of politics in favour of a world where individuals could escape their determinist shackles by harnessing their inherent internal powers. Mysticism. Fascism. Madness!
And then, year after year, decade after decade, Wilson committed the greatest cultural establishment sin of all – he was massively, insanely, unstoppably prolific (the novelist Anthony Burgess displayed a similarly vulgar Stakhanovite streak, starting about the same time – and saw his critical standing in the UK suffer as a result.) By 2009, Wilson had produced over 130 books – one or two as an anthology editor, certainly, and a few slim volumes along the way, and quite a bit of repetition when it comes to his key themes – but there are some truly monster tomes in the mix, and the sheer range of inter-related topics covered is dazzling.
Of course, not everything Wilson writes is of the highest quality, and many of his conjectures strike one as so much tosh, but I’m delighted that someone this eclectic and articulate has chosen to look at humanity from an overwhelmingly non-mainstream perspective. His writings have given me enormous pleasure and intellectual stimulation for 40 years - I began with his Encyclopedia of Murderwhen I was 17 – and my mental world would have been a lot duller and a lot thinner without him. Compared to the establishment pygmies who have sneered at him for 55 years – and still do - he is beginning to resemble the giant he has always been in his own mind. His sheer perseverance, the ability to overcome disappointments and setbacks, his determination to remain positive in the face of constant vilification and denigration is no doubt the sign of a hefty ego – but the sense of purpose and self-belief strike one as admirable, and a good advertisement for his essentially upbeat philosophy.
Mind you, one imagines that Wilson has probably been sustained by the fact that several of his books – The Outsider, The Occult, and Mysteries, for example - have been international bestsellers. And, as with Anthony Burgess, another non-political outsider (working class Manchester Catholic) with a high opinion of his own talent, Wilson’s genius has always been more readily recognized abroad than in his own country: that must be a comfort.
My own favourite Wilson book is A Criminal History of Mankind – another critically ignored bestseller - which does what it says on the tin. The work displays many of his strengths and weaknesses. First, despite being 670 pages long, it is ridiculously readable – his non-fiction tends to slip down like a thriller (another cause for academic suspicion, of course – it just shouldn’t be that easy). It is heavily reliant on the exposition of other people’s thinking (in particular, he draws heavily on psychologist Julian Jaynes’s fascinating The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, H.G. Wells’s Outline of History and Abraham Maslow’s article, A Theory of Human Motivation) – Wilson’s greatest strength is his ability to interpret, assimilate and bring together the theories of others, while giving full credit to the originators. From The Outsider on, this has led to criticism that he is really no more than an anthologist. Nonsense, of course: Wilson, in his own unique way, is a genius – and not going to university and over 50 years of being shunned by Britain’s intellectual “elite” were probably the best things that could have happened to him.
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