Dreaming to some purpose
by Todd Swift
[ bookreviews ]
If this review were written in the manner of Colin Wilson, it might be better titled COLIN WILSON: A REASSESMENT. I’ll avoid the portentous tone, but this is in fact a polemical defence of Wilson, indeed a re-evaluation, à la Leavis. There is much to say about this fascinating, sometimes brilliant, sometimes clunky, new autobiography, recently selected by the Observer as their ‘Paperback Of The Week’ (ironic, since they savaged it with dripping sarcasm in their hardcover review months before). But first a preliminary statement: if Colin Wilson was an American or French citizen, he would be widely considered an icon of popular culture and a national treasure; at the very least, Wilson is of the stature of a Ray Bradbury or Camus. However, Wilson has had the misfortune to have lived in an age and country obsessed with evanescent celebrity, where there seems to be little room for recognition of the “real thing”. It strikes me as astonishing that no one has made a film of Wilson’s life, which, for incident, character and subject would be extraordinarily compelling - I stand ready to write such a script tomorrow.
Likely the reader of the above paragraph will be scratching their heads in bemused indifference: who is this Wilson? I don’t like to name drop, but as we live in shallow times, perhaps it is wise to use the current currency: fame. Wilson was once as famous as it is possible for a living author to be (think Salman Rushdie) at a time (the 1950s) when he was coincidentally in his twenties, (Soho-stylish avant la lettre, with his black polo-neck sweaters and Michael Caine specs) and strikingly handsome, with cheekbones Johnny Depp would kill for. Check out the photos if you don’t find this credible.
To back my claim of major pop-cultural significance for Colin Wilson, let me cite a few examples. Who else could end up a guest at two parties in London in one night, once with TS Eliot, once with Marilyn Monroe? The answer, aside from Arthur Miller, would be Wilson. Time Magazine sent reporters to chase Wilson across Ireland as he scandalously travelled with his lover, and articles appeared internationally in all leading papers following his escape route (his infamous flight from fame). Wilson was friends with, or met and drank and talked deeply with, in no order, Graham Greene, John Braine, Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, Maslow and Camus; he suspected Greene of being a sexual pervert attracted to little girls. Jack Kerouac came to hear him speak in America but was too drunk to come in to the lecture hall. When Groucho Marx published his autobiography, he was asked by his agent who should be sent signed copies in England. Marx’s reply: Churchill, Chaplin, Wilson.
All this is detailed in the autobiography, and more. The cause of this fame was the publication of the great bible of English Existentialism, The Outsider, which must rank - along with Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye - as one of the most influential books on the teenage mind. I say this not because the book is adolescent, but because it inspires the sort of wonderment that best resonates with those still young enough to have an open mind. The Outsider was hailed as a work of genius by the major critics of the time, including Philip Toynbee and Cyril Connolly. Wilson was 24, described as one of the “Angry Young Men” - a label he has always detested - and the backlash was about to begin.
Dreaming To Some Purpose is written by a man 50 years older than the one who was universally praised; few people get to taste the sort of fame that Wilson had; fewer live to see their genius-status totally rescinded in their lifetime and watch as their works are increasingly marginalized, mocked, ignored. This near-absolute critical eclipse is, I believe, a sign of the true worth of Wilson’s actual contribution to 20th century culture. After all, in a world which saw the author of The Great Gatsby unable to sell his short stories and scripts in mid-life, what better sign of a great talent than to be ignored?
The problem - of course - is that Wilson soon left London, and by the time he was 30 was well on the way to becoming a non-stop freelance writer. That is, since The Outsider, he has written over 80 books - biographies, criminology, novels, works on the paranormal, even a play about Strindberg. This exploratory, endlessly curious, questing intelligence, matched by a will to write, has led to, perhaps, too many books written for profit and hastily edited; but it has also led to a fascinating one-man library focussed, as no other contemporary English writer has been, on three or four of the most pressing concerns of the 20th century. Further, his championing of Shaw, the writings of Nijinsky, and virtual discovery of Henri Barbusse, stand as significant acts of critical restitution.
Wilson is usually derided for moving from his serious and well-researched studies of artistic and intellectual outsiders to books that seemed to be sensationalist. What is generally, and rather ungenerously ignored, is the fact that Wilson was the first in English to seriously study, analyze and write about topics of great interest to many: serial sex-killers, the occult, and unexplained phenomenon - and their intersections - in such a way as to philosophically contextualize them. What is also often unsaid is that Wilson is a master of a certain kind of prose style that Maugham would have admired and is thus ill-favoured now: lucid, terse, dry and unflinchingly empirical. Many who do not read Wilson assume he blindly tolerates all manner of lunacy, but just the opposite is the case: his growing acceptance of the possibility of telepathy and other paranormal phenomena is grudgingly earned after many years of rigorous scepticism.
Wilson’s monumental The Occult and Mysteries are required reading in Hollywood and beyond. Wilson’s famous “Faculty X” was clearly lifted - along with his entire set of interests, by the creators of the X-Files (see the characters of Fox and Scully, each based on half of Wilson’s persona, the questing rationalist). Wilson is the (uncredited) inspiration for many of the seminal pop culture works of the last 30 years, including Alien and The Matrix, whose premise is similar to Wilson’s Spider World books. In fact, Wilson’s pioneering and often explicit writings in detective and science fiction (The School Girl Murder Case; The Space Vampires) were and are ground-breaking in their concentration on the psyches of perverted sex-driven killers and extreme states of mind. The Silence of the Lambs to CSI borrow from Wilson’s astute mix of the forensic, psychic and philosophical.
What I am saying is that, before almost any other major writer (Dostoyevsky comes to mind) Wilson saw the way that sexual deviance, violence, the urge to intensity, and Western society would dovetail in an increasingly negative - toxic - cocktail. His often transgressive and frank writing fixes a cold eye on human evil and the urge to evolve. Wilson, though, almost alone among the original generation of Existentialists, is an optimist (he argues for raising our consciousness to feel as if receiving “absurd good news”) and has provided a path any thinking person could follow out of the current swamp of sex-horror that, in fact, tends to define the culture of our era. Wilson is no freakish hybrid of Asimov, Bataille and Sartre, though his work has something of their scope. He is an original. Wilson should be regarded as at least of the cultural significance of Poe. The bizarre interpenetration of grotesque, antisocial subjects by a scientific mind - works written for profit, yes, but exceeding their low birth in terms of their uncanny, exemplary status - is similar for both writers.
Let me end this brief appreciation by returning to the autobiography itself, which, along with Bob Dylan’s recent book, is one of the key descriptions of young genius unfolding in a hipster context in a major city (Dylan New York, Wilson London).
Wilson has read thousands of books by other brilliant, often unappreciated writers like himself, and has modelled his memoirs on them. There is something vaguely Shavian about it. The book seems oddly disjointed at first, and strikingly specific (Wilson can describe what girls he dated were wearing when he was 16). It is however an unrivalled record of the journey of a young (in this case, working-class) writer and thinker of immense talent, moving from obscure naïvety to world renown and back to near-private solitude and never-ending thought in old age.
Wilson writes with extraordinary candour about his early sexual experiences and sex drive; he enjoys pretty, slim girls in summer dresses, and with his looks had many of them before settling down. The first few chapters set a compelling Psychopathia Sexualis mood, as the adventures of young men and women courting in seedy rooms and on windy heaths are described in precise detail. One is literally transported back to Soho, set adrift to pick up sexy young waitresses and aspiring novelists, slim-hipped and big-breasted with boyish haircuts.
However, as the author matures, the book shifts from detailing broken marriages, nymphomaniac behaviour and knicker fetishes, to discussing more adult preoccupations - married life, anxiety, book deals, authors tours - and eventually, his late interest in Atlantis and the possibility of mankind having immense intuitive powers over 100,000 years ago.
Wilson is poignant on the subject of the inability to emotionally communicate with one’s parents, and fascinating in his portraits of major writers, artists and philosophers that he has known. Ultimately, however, the book sets out Wilson’s beliefs - which I recommend the reader pursue on their own. Certainly, in a new century facing grave ecological melt-down, his conviction that humanity must - and can - evolve exponentially by an exceptional act of will - is at least worth considering, as much as, if not more than, the claims of more established spiritual practices. It is striking that, so genuine is Wilson, he has not managed to enrich himself as some kind of guru for the new age; instead he has managed to always retain that outsider status he was the first to properly identify in our time.
Wilson may not appreciate me saying this, but I consider that his reputation, like Yeats, will not ultimately be due to the facticity of his own system, but on the remarkable, long, fecund dedication of his life’s written journey towards one possible way of envisioning the world. Colin Wilson must be reclaimed - he is more than a crank or a curio. He is a great, odd, challenging writer whose generous enthusiasm for the lives of other creative characters deserves to be repaid by our renewed enthusiasm for him.
