Fernando Kaskais posted: " Colin Wilson on Hampstead Heath in 1956. Photo by Mark Kauffman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock For thousands of fans, he made philosophy thrillingly relevant. Yet there is a deep unsavoury undercurrent to his worldview Jules Evans is " WebInvestigator.KK.org - by F. Kaskais
Which would you prefer: low to middling success your entire writing career, or a sudden rise to global fame, followed by an equally steep descent, then the rest of your career an anticlimax? While most writers get the former, Colin Wilson experienced the latter.
Wilson was a working-class high-school dropout, who escaped from a succession of boring jobs in Leicester to become a sort of British beatnik, travelling around the country with a knapsack full of books – Nietzsche, Plato, the Bhagavad Gita – and a burning sense of his own genius.
He moved to London and, aged 24, wrote The Outsider, a book on the alienation and meaninglessness of modern society, celebrating the rare superior individual who searches for a solution. He gathered quotes and anecdotes from his favourite artists, novelists and thinkers: Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Hesse, Sartre, Gurdjieff, Ramakrishna.
TheOutsider was a reaction to what Wilson felt was the absence of outlets for heroism in modern British society – his generation had missed the war, there was no longer an empire for adventures, or much of a church in which to become a saint. And Britain's rigid class structure suffocated opportunities for bright people from outside the Oxbridge upper-middle classes. Wilson offered his readers an escape – a DIY course in intellectual spirituality that anyone could follow, as long as they had the intelligence and self-belief.
His book was picked up by the Left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz and published in 1956, and was immediately a huge success. Philip Toynbee called it 'luminously intelligent'; Kenneth Walker said it was 'the most remarkable book upon which the reviewer has ever had to pass judgment'. Daniel Farson in the Daily Mail wrote: 'I have just met my first genius. His name is Colin Wilson,' and the paper declared that The Outsider had enjoyed 'the most rapturous reception of any book since the war'.
Why was The Outsider such a critical hit? In the late 1950s, Britain's intelligentsia was worried about cultural decline and the lack of postwar movements to rival modernism, or homegrown ideas to rival French existentialism. Here was a 24-year-old working-class autodidact bringing news of the New Thing. And the New Thing turned out to be… recycled modernism. This was reassuring for modernist mandarins in charge of book reviews. His fame was helped by being grouped together with other provincial and working-class writers such as Kingsley Amis and John Osborne, who were dubbed the Angry Young Men. As with existentialism and punk, having a group of people doing more or less the same thing made it easier to write about. Wilson, though a one-off, was part of the zeitgeist.
In addition, Wilson was catnip for the popular press. He told one newspaper he'd written The Outsider while sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath, and obligingly recreated the scene for their photographer. He helped to model the image of the young bohemian, in his polo neck and horn-rimmed glasses.
And then, just as suddenly, the London intelligentsia decided the provincial outsider should stay outside, that his fame was a bubble, that he was a ridiculous and even dangerous figure. His constant declarations of his own genius didn't help – he was 'the most important writer of the 20th century', he said, a 'turning point in culture'. Nor did his denigration of more established writers – he said Shakespeare was 'a thoroughly second-rate mind'.
Human beings, he wrote, 'are pretty trivial insects … No wonder most of them are so mediocre'
What really did it for Wilson was that he and two other Angry Young Men he was friends with – the writers Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd – got a reputation for being quasi-fascist Teddy Boys. Kenneth Tynan called them 'young fuhrers of the soul'; the Jewish writer Wolf Mankowitz called him 'the midget Leicestershire Zarathustra'. Kenneth Allsop wrote of him and his crew:
A cult of fascism has grown among a generation who were babies when Europe's gas-chambers were going full blast, a set of under-privileged romantics in the coffee bar network … who get their kicks in a low-pressure culture from wishful thinking about torture, pain and killing.
It's true that Wilson was a big fan of Friedrich Nietzsche. He believed that humans could ascend the evolutionary ladder and become supermen through sheer will. In practice, only a tiny minority could do this – the 'dominant 5 per cent' – and of them, only 0.05 per cent actually would. Like Nietzsche, he had little time for everyone else. Human beings, he wrote in his journal, 'are pretty trivial insects … No wonder most of them are so mediocre.'...
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