RITUAL IN THE DARK
by
COLIN WILSON
With a new foreword by
COLIN STANLEY
VALANCOURT BOOKS
Ritual in the Dark by Colin Wilson
First published London: Gollancz, 1960
First Valancourt Books edition 2013
Copyright © 1960 by Colin Wilson
Introduction © 1993 by Colin Wilson
Foreword © 2013 by Colin Stanley
Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.
FOREWORD
Introductions to novels are often skipped by readers fearing they may contain ‘spoilers’ (references to the plot that might ‘spoil’ their enjoyment). I can assure the reader that he/she need harbour no such fears with the following essay.
The story of the writing of this extraordinary novel, described by the critic Nicolas Tredell as ‘an unsung achievement of postwar British fiction’ (Tredell (1), 3) is now legendary. It began life in 1949, when Wilson was just 18, as an unpublished short story: ‘Symphonic Variations’. After completion, he decided to turn it into a full-length novel. It was this that his friend, and fellow would-be novelist, Laura Del Rivo recalls seeing in manuscript in the Northumberland Avenue café where they first met in 1952, after Wilson had moved from his home town of Leicester, in the East Midlands region, to London:
Colin was 21 when he appeared in the Café. He was lanky, bespectacled, practical in maintenance skills, everyouth except that he was a genius. He rode a bicycle for which he wore trouser clips. Sometimes the ladder he used for speaking in Hyde Park was fastened to the crossbar. Although like Sorme he was the hero of his own intellectual bildungsroman, he was already a lecturer. He carried a leather satchel which contained spare food and a manuscript: literally handwritten: of his work in progress, the ‘Sorme-book’, Ritual in the Dark. (Del Rivo, 301)
‘Sorme-book’ was the title Wilson used when referring to Ritual at that time. This was almost certainly the manuscript that was with him in his sleeping-bag when he slept rough, to save money, on Hampstead Heath and which he took to the British Museum reading room each morning where he was spotted and encouraged by its Deputy Superintendent, Angus Wilson (no relation), himself an emerging novelist.
But this was far from being the final version. ‘Symphonic Variations’ was transformed into a novel with the somewhat unpromising title, Things Do Not Happen, which, upon Wilson’s discovery of The Egyptian Book of the Dead (which provided a structure for this version of the novel), became Ritual of the Dead. He wrote in his journal:
It seemed to me that the novel has not even begun. With his The Art of the Novel [Henry] James did for the novel what Newton did for physics with his Principia—and yet people go on writing the same old-fashioned, rule-of-thumb novels as if James had never existed. What I wanted to do was perhaps absurdly over-ambitious; I wanted to produce a Dostoyevskian novel, using the techniques made available by Joyce and James.
In January 1955, Angus offered Colin the use of his cottage in the countryside so that he could finish the book undisturbed. In his autobiography he wrote:
I worked hard, and managed to finish Ritual in two weeks, but I was dissatisfied with it. This was not the novel I had been trying to write for so many years. It lacked real narrative flow. . . . I had written and rewritten it all; some pages had been typed a dozen times. The final manuscript was barely seventy thousand words long, and yet I had probably written half a million words over five years. All this meant that I could not approach the task with a fresh outlook; I had lost my critical sense completely about some of the older passages. It was like trying to rebuild a house that you have pulled down twenty times, using a mixture of old and new bricks. (Wilson (1), 133)
It was this version of the manuscript that the clientele often saw stuffed under the counter of the coffee bar in which he worked, on London’s Haymarket, during 1955.
Despite this impasse, things were beginning to happen for the young Wilson: a few weeks earlier, on Christmas Day 1954, Wilson, alone in his room, sat writing in his journal:
It struck me that I was in the position of so many of my favourite characters in fiction: Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Rilke’s Malte 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 . . . 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’. . . (Wilson (2); 9-10)
Thus was his first, and still most famous, book The Outsider conceived—a book that has, to date, been translated into over thirty languages and never been out of print in England or the United States. He continued to work on it at a furious pace and:
One day I typed out the introduction, and a few pages from the middle, and sent them to Victor Gollancz with a letter giving a synopsis of the book. He replied within 2 days, saying he would be interested to see the book when completed . . . (Wilson (3); 117)
It was eventually published on Monday, May 28, 1956, to tremendous critical acclaim. He became a celebrity overnight, one of Britain’s ‘Angry Young Men’: a movement created by the media to fill the literary vacuum that then existed, and which they then destroyed soon afterwards. Further revision of Ritual was put on the back-burner until the sequels to The Outsider—Religion and the Rebel and The Age of Defeat—were completed. The break was obviously beneficial and enabled Wilson to look at his manuscript more objectively. He decided that he ‘had to treat it as a story, a narrative, and forget James Joyce and The Egyptian Book of the Dead. And since the novel was about a sadistic killer based on Jack the Ripper, it obviously had to be written as a kind of detective story’ (Wilson (1), 165). The three male protagonists—Gerard Sorme, Oliver Glasp and Austin Nunne—epitomised the three types of outsider enunciated in his first book: intellectual, emotional and physical; they were based on T. E. Lawrence, Vincent Van Gogh and Vaslav Nijinsky. ‘Nunne, Sorme and Glasp are the body, the heart and the intellect of the same man. . . . Their separation is a kind of legend of a fall,’ he wrote in an early notebook for Ritual. Dostoyevskian indeed: the Karamazov brothers spring to mind here. The lack of speech marks, throughout the finished novel, nods towards James Joyce, about whom Wilson wrote in 1998: ‘I have never ceased to be grateful to Joyce; Ulysses taught me more about writing than I learned from any other writer’ (Wilson (4), 133).
In 1954, there had been a remarkable Diaghilev exhibition, designed by Richard Buckle, at Forbes House, Hyde Park Corner, London, which Wilson had attended several times. His friend, and fellow ‘Angry Young Man’, Bill Hopkins (whose own novel The Divine and the Decay had just been published in 1957) suggested he start Ritual at this exhibition. The result is one of the most memorable opening chapters in post-war English literature. After refusing an earlier version, Victor Gollancz accepted this and it was eventually published in February 1960, over eleven years after its conception.
Soon after publication, Wilson worked on the screenplay with a young writer called Steven Geller (who ran a film company, Pequod Productions) and it seemed that shooting would go ahead. In a letter to the actress Renée Asherson dated December 6, 1967, Wilson wrote, ‘It looks as if the film will be made in
London in either March or April [1968].’ Asherson was to play Gertrude, and Jane Asher, Caroline. Michael O’Sullivan was lined up for the part of Austin Nunne. However, the promised financial backing was withdrawn and the film never realised.
‘In its final version,’ wrote Sidney Campion, ‘Ritual in the Dark has a technical mastery that is astonishing in a first novel. All the “experimental” aspects have been ironed out; the novel reads so easily and smoothly that the reader is unaware that it is a novel of ideas’ (Campion, 93). But a novel of ideas it most definitely is and it is this extra dimension that elevates it above and beyond a novel written purely for entertainment. ‘Wilson’s first novel,’ wrote Nicolas Tredell:
. . . is a powerful metaphysical thriller. It combines a number of modes: the realistic novel of the 1950s; the Bildungsroman; the murder story. It also contains elements of fantasy and myth. All these fuse into a rich totality. . . . It is fascinating to think about; but it is no less fascinating to read and re-read.(Tredell (2), 48)
Please feel free to now enjoy this unjustly neglected ‘classic’. . .
Colin Stanley
Nottingham
January 25, 2013
References:
Campion, Sidney. The Sound Barrier: A Study of the Ideas of Colin Wilson. Nottingham: Paupers’ Press, 2011.
Del Rivo, Laura. ‘Dawn—Young—Heaven’ in Stanley, Colin (ed.), Around the Outsider: Essays Presented to Colin Wilson on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday. Winchester: O-Books, 2011, pp. 301-304.
Tredell, Nicolas. ‘An Acceptance of Complexity: Ritual in the Dark, in Stanley, Colin (ed.), Around the Outsider: Essays Presented to Colin Wilson on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday. Winchester: O-Books, 2011, pp. 3-23.
——— (2). The Novels of Colin Wilson. London: Vision Press, 1982.
Wilson, Colin (1). Dreaming to Some Purpose. London: Century, 2004.
——— (2). ‘The Outsider, Twenty Years On’, included as an Introduction to the 1978 edition of The Outsider. London: Pan (Picador) Books.
——— (3). Voyage to a Beginning: A Preliminary Autobiography. London: Cecil & Amelia Woolf, 1969.
——— (4). The Books in My Life. Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc., 1998.
INTRODUCTION
to the 1993 edition
Shaw once remarked that he could not look back on his early novels without shuddering at how close he came to becoming a popular novelist—an enterprising publisher, he says, could have ruined him. I experience a similar feeling when I look in an old school notebook at the earliest version of Ritual in the Dark, started when I was seventeen. Stylistically speaking, it is a rather sophisticated performance; I had absorbed my Joyce, Hemingway and Faulkner, and I wrote with a kind of controlled frustration that looks remarkably like maturity. One perceptive publisher or magazine editor could have launched me on a career as a novelist—and committed me to the kind of fashionable nihilism that I later came to detest.
That early version was called Ritual of the Dead, and was the story of a man who strangles a prostitute with whom he is spending the night. Later, he begins to experience hallucinations, and is not sure whether he killed the girl, or only dreamed it. And finally, the author does his best to convince the reader that the difference between dream and reality is not crucial, since human existence is a tissue of illusions . . .
And why was I, a working-class teenager in robust physical health, writing such morbid stuff? Because, in my eighteenth year, I was also in a state of grim frustration. At the age of sixteen—when I left school—I had wanted to be a scientist, and accordingly accepted a job as a laboratory assistant at my old school. But the frustrations of adolescence made science seem less and less important, and by the time I was seventeen, I was tired of laboratories, and wanted only to be an ‘artist-philosopher’, in the tradition of Bernard Shaw or Thomas Mann. But my short stories were promptly returned by the magazines I submitted them to, as were a number of one-act plays that I sent to the BBC drama department. I hated my own stuff; when I re-read it, it seemed atrociously bad. And just as I was beginning to feel that I had nothing to say, I discovered Crime and Punishment, Ulysses and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, as well as the stories of Tchekov and Andreyev. These opened my eyes to the possibility of writing in a style that was not derived from Dickens and H. G. Wells, and I launched on a series of experimental stories and plays that now cause me to shudder as I recollect them. At this time, I had been dismissed from my job as a lab assistant—the exam results made it clear that I had lost interest in science—and, for want of anything better, had become a filing clerk at the Collector of Taxes, a job that I found even more revoltingly boring than clearing up after the chemistry master’s experiments. I became acquainted with a newly married woman who worked in the same office, and, inevitably, developed a sentimental attachment to her—or, to be more precise, an urgent desire to remove her clothes. Understandably, she had no sexual interest in a talkative and precocious seventeen year old, and our intimacy never went beyond an occasional kiss, although I frequently raped her in autoerotic daydreams. So it was probably inevitable that I should write a story about a man who murders a woman in the process of satisfying his sexual frustrations. I read the story to my ladylove, and she later admitted that it made her wonder whether I was on the verge of becoming a homicidal maniac. The idea would have flattered me, for at the time I felt as vague and ineffectual as any Aldous Huxley hero.
Still, it was obvious to me that I had at last succeeded in writing a powerful and effective piece of prose. It was equally obvious that, in its present form, it amounted to a kind of dead end; there was nowhere else to go. (Most nihilistic writers have this problem; once you told the reader that life is meaningless, it seems absurd to take a deep breath and say ‘And to continue . . .’) And since it seemed a pity to waste it, the next problem was how to extend it into something more substantial. Joyce, I felt, had provided the clue, with his ‘mythical method’. He had used the Odyssey as underpinning for a novel set in modern Dublin; but as far as I knew, no one had ever tried to follow his example. I decided to be the first. In the local library I had come upon the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which consists of a series of ritual texts taken from the walls of pyramids. I was excited to learn that an alternative title was Ritual of the Dead, which I had given to my novelette; the coincidence struck me as an auspicious sign.
The Book of the Dead consists of a series of prayers addressed to the gods of the underworld. During the night following his death, the soul of the dead man is supposed to pass through a whole series of perils, including vampire worms, poisonous snakes and dying a second time; the recitation of the appropriate prayer can avert these catastrophes. Finally, at daybreak the next day—assuming he has survived the perils—the soul emerges into Amentet, the Egyptian underworld. This scheme seemed ideal for my novel. The hero passes through a kind of dark night of the soul, and various symbolic perils, to finally emerge into the daylight. (The Egyptian title Pert Em Hru means Coming Forth By Day.) At about this time I came upon St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul, which provided me with even more symbolic episodes . . .
When I was eighteen I was called up into the RAF to do my National Service. I contemplated the idea with loathing; in the event, it was altogether less unpleasant than I had expected. Abundant food, hard exercise and route marches were good for me, and contact with a billet-full of fellow recruits made me aware that I was not as introverted and ineffectual as I had always assumed. I found that I had certain natural leadership qualities, and that people tended to like me. There was a suggestion that I should become an officer cadet, but when the C.O. learned how my father earned, the idea was abandoned. Then the training period was over, and I again found myself working in an office and typing official letters. Once again I was bored to distraction. Then, more or less by accident, I found how to ‘work my ticket’ by claiming to be homosexual (which I am not). And one spring day, a mere six or
seven months after becoming an Aircraftman Second Class, I found myself back in civilian life, feeling bewildered but nevertheless delighted. The old nihilism had evaporated; I could now see that it had been caused by a vicious circle of inactivity and boredom. I immediately made a vow never to return to the Collector of Taxes, and went and took a job on a farm. This was certainly better than working in an office; but it was still not what I wanted to do—which was to make a living by writing. That summer of 1950, I had a whole series of labouring jobs, including navvying (called in America ditch-digging), working as a builder’s labourer, and selling tickets on a gambling machine on a fairground. It was while selling tickets that a pretty fifteen-year-old girl asked me: ‘Do you want to sell yourself?’ I walked her home later that night—she lived in a slum area of my hometown, Leicester— and the next day took her on a bus-trip into the country. Within forty-eight hours I had lost my virginity—largely due to her initiative—and experienced a sudden marvellous sense that life had taken a turn for the better. It was not until she announced that it was time to get engaged that caution returned, and I began to realize that, for a writer, there might after all be advantages in loneliness and asceticism . . . I decided that, if I valued my freedom, I had better leave Leicester, a decision reinforced by my father’s decision to throw me out of the house. In the late summer of 1950 I filled a haversack with books and sandwiches, borrowed £5 from my mother, and took to the road.
My new-found optimism meant that I no longer had any desire to write a novel about a man who feels there is no clear distinction between dream and reality. For someone who was working on farms by day, and sleeping at night in empty barns, this would have seemed an absurdity. Besides, I became aware that the real theme of Ritual was not ‘dream and reality’ but dream versus reality—the fundamental human craving to find a purpose that can absorb the whole being. I had also come to realize that, for males at any rate, this quest is complicated by the craving for sexual experience. Women—as I had already discovered—seemed to have a basic craving to acquire a husband and settle down. It seemed clear that, in that case, my own desires were in total opposition to those of the opposite sex. Like every young man, my basic ambition was to seduce every girl in the world. I recognized the absurdity of the enterprise; but if some god had offered to supply me with two dozen new girls each day, I think I would have made a creditable attempt to satisfy them all.