Colin Wilson
The Outsider
1956
Broadbent:...I find the world quite good enough for me—rather a jolly place, in fact.
Keegan (looking at him with quiet wonder): You are satisfied?
Broadbent: As a reasonable man, yes. I see no evils in the world—except of course, natural evils—that cannot be remedied by freedom, self-government and English institutions. I think so, not because I am an Englishman, but as a matter of common sense.
Keegan: You feel at home in the world then?
Broadbent: Of course. Dont you?
Keegan (from the very depths of his nature): No.
BERNARD SHAW
John Bull’s Other Island, Act IV.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank the following for giving permission to quote extracts:
Cambridge University Press: George Sampson, Concise Cambridge History of English Literature; George Fox, Journals.
Dodd, Mead & Company: Rupert Brooke, Collected Poems; Alexei Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan llytch.
Doubleday & Company, Inc.: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence. Copyright, 1925, 1936, by Doubleday & Company, Inc.
E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.: A Buddhist Bible edited by Dwight Goddard. Copyright, 1938, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.; The Everyman’s Library Edition of The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by E. M. Martin); The Everyman’s Library Edition of Letters from the Underworld by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by C. J. Hogarth); The Everyman’s Library Edition of Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (translated by John Rodker).
Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.: In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky. Copyright, 1949, by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.; Speculations by T. E. Hulme; All and Everything. Copyright, 1950, by G. Gurdjieff; Collected Poems 1909-1935 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright, 1936, by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.; Selected Essays 1917-1932 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright, 1932, by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. The above quotations are reprinted with the permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
Heritage Press: Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (translated by L. and A. Maude). Copyright, 1938, by The Limited Editions Club.
Henry Holt & Company, Inc.: Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf; Magister Ludi.
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: Albert Camus, The Stranger (translated by Stuart Gilbert); Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, “The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend” (translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter).
Little, Brown & Company: Harley Granville-Barker, The Secret Life.
Longmans, Green & Company, Inc.: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Permission to reprint granted by Paul R. Reynolds & Son, 599 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.
The Macmillan Company: William Butler Yeats, Collected Poems, The Trembling of the Veil, A Vision, Shadowy Waters; Fiodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (translated by Constance Garnett) and The Brothers Karamazov (translated by Constance Garnett); H. A. Reyburn, Nietzsche; Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom, Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Ecce Homo.
New Directions: Jean-Paul Sartre, The Diary of Antoine Roquentin (Nausea).
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: R. M. Rilke, Duino Elegies (translated by Leishman and Spender) and Malte Laurids Brigge (translated by J. B. Leishman).
Oxford University Press, Inc.: F. L. Woodward, Sayings of the Buddha; William Blake, Complete Works; Aylmer Maude, Life of Tolstoy.
Penguin Books, Inc.: Fiodor Dostoevsky, The Devils (translated by D. Magarshack), published in the Penguin Classics by Penguin Books, Inc., Baltimore, Md.
Philosophical Library, Inc.: Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism.
Princeton University Press: A Kierkegaard Anthology edited by R. Bretal.
Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center: The Gospel of Shri Ramak-rishna (translated by Swami Nikhilananda) 1942.
Charles Scribner’s Sons: Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, “Soldier’s Home,” “In Another Country,” “The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio,” “A Natural History of the Dead” (first chapter of Death in the Afternoon); Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle.
Sheed & Ward: From Dostoevsky by Nicholas Berdyaev, published by Sheed & Ward, New York.
Simon and Schuster, Inc.: Reprinted from The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky edited by Romola Nijinsky, by permission of Simon and Schuster, Inc. © 1936 by Simon and Schuster, Inc.
The Public Trustee and The Society of Authors: George Bernard Shaw, The Works of George Bernard Shaw.
Vanguard Press: A Treasury of Russian Literature (translated by B. G. Guerney).
Vedanta Press: Anonymous, Life of Shri Ramakrishna (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1948).
The Viking Press, Inc.: James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
For
ANGUS WILSON
With Gratitude
FOREWORD
The OUTSIDER, first published in 1956 when Colin Wilson was only twenty-four, is a prophetic book as well as a literary tour de force. By tracing, analyzing and giving a context to the disaffection and struggle of creative thinkers from William Blake to Ernest Hemingway, Wilson anticipated many developments of the 1960s and 1970s. The trajectory of Outsider consciousness led naturally to the rising interest in Eastern philosophy, the human potential movement, and the proliferation of techniques designed to help individuals transcend a sense of alienation from self and society. Wilson summarizes the problems of that alienation:
The Outsider wants to cease to be an Outsider.
He wants to be integrated as a human being, achieving a fusion between mind and heart.
He seeks vivid sense perception.
He wants to understand the soul and its workings.
He wants to get beyond the trivial.
He wants to express himself so he can better understand himself. He sees a way out via intensity, extremes of experience.
Surveys and polls in the United States reveal Outsider values in a significant and rapidly growing minority of the population. The “inner-directed” are the fastest-growing consumer group. Increasingly people say that meaning is a more important consideration in their work than economic incentives. Self-fulfillment and self-expression are high on the list of goals.
The atmosphere of conformity that made the Outsiders feel different from their peers is now under attack from the mainstream. Social norms are changing rapidly in the direction of greater personal freedom.
Those seeking the experiential, the spiritual, and the numinous are no longer a handful. Millions have recognized that they are harboring within themselves another dimension of consciousness and that many old social structures are deadly to this other self. The phenomenon Blake called “twofold consciousness” has become an increasingly common experience.
To an observer the way of the Outsider may appear excessive, difficult, even reckless. Wilson shows us, by example after example, why the Outsider cannot accept society as it is, why he “sees too much and too deep.”
Outsiders seek to heal divisions: between conscious and unconscious, intellect and intuition, mind and body, self and society, spirit and sensuality. “The Outsider’s chief desire is to be unified. He is selfish as a man with a lifelong raging toothache would be selfish.”
Refusing to resolve life’s difficulties by withdrawal or denial, Outsiders seek transcendence through headlong involvement. They believe with Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf that “the way to innocence leads ... ever deeper into human life. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have at the last to take the whole world into your soul, cost what it may.”
The Outsider’s intensity is expressed in Goethe’s poem, “The Holy Longing,” with its image of the butterfly drawn to, and transformed by, the flame:
And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so
O grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
Most of us accommodate to the cultural trance, but Outsiders continue to be appalled at inauthenticity and mechanicalness. They see through their own act and that of others. “The problem of the Outsiders is the unreality of their lives. They suddenly realize they are in a cinema. They ask: Who are we? What are we doing here? ... They are confronted with a terrifying freedom.”
Because they have glimpsed another, deeper dimension to life, they are not satisfied to be automatons. They are driven to self-discovery, even self-inquisition. They put themselves to tests of imagination and action that awe more ‘sensible’ people. “I doubt whether such pain improves us,” Nietzsche said, “but I know it deepens us.” And Rilke wrote, “May I, emerging at last from this terrible insight, burst into jubilant praise .”
The Outsider, Wilson points out, does not wish to accept life merely because fate is treating him well at the moment but because it is his Will to accept. He wants to control his responses through understanding, to build affirmation into his vision. Freedom of response is the only authentic freedom. This search is essentially spiritual, but “religious truth cannot exist apart from intellectual rigor.” The Outsider’s stubborn intellect seeks to understand the whispers of his intuition.
For a hundred years or more, Wilson said, Outsiders have been slowly creating new values by implication. “The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or by men who love living.”
A thoughtful reading of The Outsider gives us a profound sense of our collective modern struggle: how to restore the timeless and visionary in a culture that has prided itself on divorcing reason from feeling. Understanding the historic roots of this struggle gives us a deeper understanding of the Outsider in ourselves.
—Marilyn Ferguson
Los Angeles, 1981
INTRODUCTION
THE OUTSIDER, TWENTY YEARS ON
Christmas DAY, 1954, was an icy, grey day, and I spent it in my room in Brockley, south London. I recall that I had tinned tomatoes and fried bacon for Christmas dinner. I was alone in London; my girlfriend had gone back to her family for the holiday, and I didn’t have the money to return to my home town, Leicester. Besides, relations with my family were rather strained; my father felt I’d wasted my opportunities to settle down in a good office job, and prophesied that I’d come to a bad end.
For the past year I’d been living in London, and trying to write a novel called Ritual in the Dark, about a murderer based on Jack the Ripper. To save money during the summer, I’d slept out on Hampstead Heath in a waterproof sleeping bag, and spent my days writing in the Reading Room of the British Museum. It was there that I’d met the novelist Angus Wilson, a kindly and generous man who had offered to look at my novel and—if he liked it-recommend it to his own publisher. I’d finished typing out the first part of the book a few weeks before; he had promised to read it over Christmas. Now I felt at a loose end. So I sat on my bed, with an eiderdown over my feet, and wrote in my journal. It struck me that I was in the position of so many of my favourite characters in fiction: Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Rilke’s Make Laurids Brigge, the young writer in Hamsun’s Hunger: alone in my room, feeling totally cut off from the rest of society. It was not a position I relished; I’d always been strongly attached to my home and family (I’m a typical Cancer), and missed being with them at Christmas. Yet an inner compulsion had forced me into this position of isolation. I began writing about it in my journal, trying to pin it down. And then, quite suddenly, I saw that I had the makings of a book. I turned to the back of my journal and wrote at the head of the page: ‘Notes for a book “The Outsider in Literature”.’ (I have it in front of me now as I write.) On the next two pages, I worked out a fairly complete outline of the book as it eventually came to be written. I fell asleep that night with a feeling of deep inner satisfaction; it seemed one of the most satisfying Christmas Days I’d ever spent.
Two days later, as soon as the British Museum re-opened, I cycled there at nine o’clock in the morning, determined to start writing immediately. On the way there, I recalled a novel I had once read about, in which a man had spent his days peering through a hole in the wall of his hotel room, at the life that comes and goes next door. It was, I recollected, the first major success of Henri Barbusse, the novelist who had later become world famous for Le Feu, the novel of World War One. When I arrived at the Museum, I found the book in the catalogue. I spent the next few hours reading it from cover to cover. Then I wrote down a quotation from it at the head of a sheet of paper: ‘In the air, on top of a tram, a girl is sitting. Her dress, lifted a little, blows out. But a block in the traffic separates us ...’ During the remainder of that afternoon, I wrote the opening four pages of The Outsider.
It now strikes me as interesting that I chose this opening, with the man hoping to see up a girl’s skirt, and being frustrated by passing traffic. For although I say very little about sex in the book, it was undoubtedly one of the major forces behind its conception. I understood precisely what Barbusse’s hero means when he describes going to bed with a prostitute, then going through the banal ritual of copulation, and feeling as if he has fallen from a height. This had been one of the central obsessions of my teens: the fact that a glimpse up a woman’s skirt can make her seem infinitely desirable, worth pursuing to the ends of the earth; yet the act of sex cannot provide full satisfaction of this desire. When he actually gets the girl into bed, all the perspectives have changed... This had been the main theme of my novel Ritual in the Dark. Like Barbusse’s hero, my own Gerard Sorme finds himself continually surrounded by objects of sexual stimulation; the advertisements showing girls in their underwear on the London underground cause violent frustration, like a match tossed against a petrol-soaked rag.’ And in the course of the novel he seduces a middle aged Jehovah’s Witness (partly for the piquancy of overcoming her religious scruples) and her teenage niece; yet the basic sexual desire remains unsatisfied. One scene in the book had particularly deep meaning for me. Sorme has spent the afternoon in bed with Caroline—the niece—and made love to her six or seven times. He feels physically satiated, as if the sexual delusion has finally lost its hold over him. Then he goes out to the doorstep—it is a basement room—to collect the milk, and catches a glimpse up a girl’s skirt as she walks past the railings. Instantly, he feels the stirrings of an erection
I was not concerned simply with the intensity of male sexual desire—although I felt that it is far more powerful than most men are willing to admit. It was this element of ‘un-achievableness.’ It reminded me of the feeling I used to get as a child if I was on a day-trip to the seaside, and the coach went over a river or past a lake: a curious, deep longing for the water that would certainly not be satisfied by drinking it or swimming in it. In the same way, C. S. Lewis has spoken of how he used to be convulsed with desire by the idea of Autumn—the brown leaves and the smell of smoke from garden bonfires, and that strange wet smell about the grass ... Sorme has the same suspicion about sex: that it is ultimately unattainable: that what happens in bed is a kind of confidence trick. For this reason, he experiences a certain abstract sympathy with his new acquaintance, Austin Nunne, when he begins to suspect that Nunne is the East End sex murderer. It seems to him that this could be a valid way to achieve the essence of sex: to grab a girl in the moment she arouses violent desire and rip off her clothes. Oddly enough, it never strikes him that this is unlikely to be Nunne’s motive; he knows Nunne to be a homosexual, yet his own sexual obsession blinds him to its implications.
The theme is repeated in the first pages of The Outsider. Barbusse’s hero watches a girl undressing in the next room; but when he tries to re-create the scene in imagination, it is only a poor carbon copy. These words are all dead. They leave untouched ... the intensity of what was.’ Again, he i
s present at the dining table when someone describes the sex murder of a little girl. Everyone at the table is morbidly interested—even a young mother with her child; but they all try to pretend to be indifferent. The irony, of course, is that Barbusse cannot speak his meanings clearly. If, in fact, he watched a girl undressing in the next room, he would probably masturbate; as it is, he tries to convince the reader that it was an experience of spiritual beauty. For all his talk about truth, the narrator cannot be honest.
In Ritual in the Dark, this inability to grasp the essence of sexuality becomes the symbol of our inability to grasp the essence of anything important—of Autumn, of water ... This, it seemed to me, is the basic difference between human beings. Some are perfectly satisfied with what they have; they eat, drink, impregnate their wives, and take life as it comes. Others can never forget that they are being cheated; that life tempts them to struggle by offering them the essence of sex, of beauty, of success; and that she always seems to pay in counterfeit money. In the novel, Nunne—the purely physical type—pursues his will o’ the wisp with a despairing ruthlessness. The painter, Oliver Glasp, is obsessed by a ten-year-old female model, but horrified at the idea of any physical lovemaking; he sublimates his desire in decadent romantic pictures. Sorme, the intellectual outsider, also pursues his desires with a touch of ruthlessness, but a fundamentally kindly nature makes him incapable of causing pain ...
Sometime shortly before that Christmas of 1954,1 was walking along the Thames Embankment with my closest—and oldest-friend, Bill Hopkins, explaining to him the ideas of the novel. I explained that Sorme is an intellectual outsider; he has discipline of the intellect, but not of the body or emotions. Glasp, like Van Gogh, is the emotional outsider; he has discipline of the emotions, but not of the body or the intellect. Nunne, like the dancer Nijinsky, is a physical outsider; he has discipline of the body, but not of the emotions or the intellect. All three are lop sided’. And all three are capable of becoming insane. I went on to point out that Dostoevsky had used the same categories in the three Karamazov brothers. This, I believe, was the actual seed of The Outsider. In due course, the chapter contrasting the three types of outsider (‘The Attempt to Gain Control’) became the core of the book.