INSIDE THE OUTSIDER
News filtered through at the beginning of
last week. The death of one of the most interesting individuals I’ve ever met
and someone who in the future will, I am sure, be seen as a valuable and much maligned thinker and writer. I’m talking
about Colin Wilson. Depending on where you are in the world, that statement
might seem baffling. In some countries (Japan ,
the US , mainland Europe ) he has long been taken seriously; his books still
in print and his past talks and lectures well attended. But in the UK
Colin was unfortunate (in retrospect, of
course) in having been something of “an overnight success”. His first published
book, The Outsider, which hit the
shops in 1956, rocketed him to fame and, initially at least, some fortune. A
recent article estimated that he earned, in today’s money, around £430,000
($800k) in the book’s first year of publication. During that year he was everywhere
and met everyone. From Marilyn Monroe to Albert Camus. He drank a lot,
travelled a lot and talked a lot. The result was Wilson Overkill. So much so
that when his next book, Religion and The
Rebel, appeared, it was – in the UK
The unfairness of it all is that Colin was
only 24 when his first book was published. He was a young, working class guy
who had never been to university and was in fact sleeping in a public park to
save money so he could spend all his time writing. Who, in those circumstances,
would not have bitten hungrily at any offered fruit when fame and fortune beckoned.
Despite his young age, he had already been
married once and had a son. Without an alternative source of income, he had no other
way of providing for himself and his family than by writing. And he wrote prodigiously.
In the 5 years following The Outsider
he published eight books, including his first novel, Ritual in the Dark. By the time of his death he had 115 full length
books to his name and numerous articles, essays and introductions to other
works.
His interests ranged wide, but came to
centre around crime, the sexual impulse and (following the publication in 1971
of The Occult) the paranormal. The
thread that connected all these was his lifelong investigation into the power
and untapped potential of the human mind.
However, the perceived “lurid” aspect of such interests, alongside his prolificacy,
led to a general perception of him, in the UK
Colin was very much aware of the brickbats being
lobbed his way by the literary establishment. Being a generally optimistic individual
he chose to set it aside, taking revenge via his prodigious output and comfort from
the large and varied global audience that found much of interest in what he had
to say, even if they didn’t (contrary to what the naysayers always assume) take
everythign he wrote at face value.
I don’t wish to portray him as a saint. I
only had a passing acquaintance with him, including a mammoth weekend session
of interviews for a documentary film, and he could be opinionated, argumentative,
naive and occasionally infuriating. But who isn’t? He was a human being, like
the rest of us. He was an autodidact and exhibited all the faults of same, but
also the virtues – a hunger for knowledge, a deeply held belief in the importance
of thought and ideas, and a strong desire to communicate.
In both his novels and non fiction, that
desire to communicate is the thing that shines most strongly. He is never less
than readable and often quite compulsively so. At his best he can explain
complex ideas in easy to digest forms. As one review said he can “make even a
detailed account of a severe attack of clinical depression sound like something
out of the last five minutes of the Choral Symphony”. At his worst, yes he can
be credulous, over simplistic, and bumptious. But that’s part of the mix. In aiming
at a moving target, there are always going to be lots of stray shots.
I first heard the name Colin Wilson when my
parents started discussing him after a TV appearance. I was a kid, so this
would have been in the 1960s. I remember my mother saying that she’d read The Outsider and it was “just a collection
of quotes from other books”. The implication being that he was some sort of
fake; that he’d let his readership down.
Years later, while at college, I came across
some paperback reprints of his “Lovecraft” themed books, The Philosopher’s Stone and The
Mind Parasites. The Wilson Wilson
I went on to read all of Colin’s fiction
and most of his non fiction. Later, while working in the publishing industry, I
was involved with a new edition of one of his earliest and perhaps least
typical novels – Adrift in Soho. It
was during that period that I began to communicate with Colin directly and,
eventually, to meet him. This was at a talk he was giving in central London Wilson Gary
told me that he’d spent much of his royalties
moving to the UK
I remember the talk well. It was a mixed audience
of wannabe hipsters, a few Wilson London
As the anecdote progressed, you could feel a
ripple of unease pass through the audience. Over the next few minutes a fair
number left and the mood chilled noticeably. But I remember thinking – here’s a
guy who’s totally fearless and completely honest. And, let’s be frank, what man
hasn’t at some point done what he did? But to do it as part of some existential
experiment. That’s near genius.
We kept in touch and some years later, following
discussions with fellow Wilson Cornwall
Over the course of the next three days he
was generous almost to fault, not only with his time but with his food and wine.
I’ll always remember both him and his wife Joy with great affection. Although I
was certainly old enough to be long past the gushing “fan” stage, I’ll admit I
was more than a little in awe of him. That didn’t stop us having a fair few disagreements
and I began to take some pleasure in provoking him from time to time. I thought
we’d get the best material that way.
Sadly, the documentary was never finished.
We planned to do a number of follow up interviews and license some archive
material, but Colin was hugely busy with his autobiography and a punishing work
schedule. His large global audience and huge list of publications hadn’t
translated into great wealth. He was a working writer who needed to work, and
that was what he remained all his life.
Over the course of the interview we discussed
the negative aspects that had been attached to him. Including the strange
notion that he was some sort of crypto fascist or Satanist. I can remember him
telling us with relish about an alleged quote from David Bowie (deep into his
Thin White Duke phase, I guess), that he had been initiated into a satanic
coven in the West Country whose eminence grise was Colin Wilson!
Much of this negative commentary comes from
the use in his work of such theories as “the dominant 5%” in human evolution
and the notion that most of us sleepwalk through life in a robotic state. What his
critics seem to miss is that, far from praising this state of affairs, Colin’s analysis
of it was centred around the notion of finding out the secrets of the dominant
so that we could all share them, and thus go beyond the robot phase and live
life to the full. Whatever one may think about such ideas in the first place,
his goals were the very opposite of fascism and elitism.
One of the aspects of his career that we discussed
was his status as a novelist and how this has increasingly been seen as
secondary. Interestingly Colin mentioned that in Japan
Interestingly, although he dabbled in genre
fiction, Colin was not a great fan of genre films. A number of his books were
optioned for the screen and he made money from writing treatments for, among
others, Dino de Laurentiis. However the only one of his books to reach the
screen was Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce,
based on The Space Vampires, a film I
have a lot of time for. To Colin it was not just a bad film, it was “probably
one of the worst films ever made”.
A friend has just pointed out to me that The Space Vampires has now been optioned
anew, this time for a TV mini series. We can only hope that the long form
version stays closer to the original novel and that, if it’s a success, it
leads, finally, to the publication of the follow up. The elusive Metamorphosis of the Vampire, of which
I’ve read a lengthy extract from what is apparently a 1500 page epic, is one of
the most eagerly awaited of all Colin Wilson’s unpublished works. Its
appearance now would be a worthwhile epitaph for this still controversial literary
figure.
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