The Essential Colin Wilson

  UNCLE SAM

  From The World of Violence, 1963

  The World of Violence is a study in the contrast between the 'ivory tower' of an intellectual—in this case a mathematical prodigy—and the chaotic violence of actuality. The narrator is shaken out of his ivory tower when he sees a youth being beaten up by young hooligans. His sense of helplessness leads him to buy a gun, and to join the pistol club, merely to convince himself that intellectuals can also be men of action. The ivory tower theme is first sounded early in the book, in the narrator's story about his uncle Sam.

  I must mention now a circumstance that perhaps sounds absurd—or almost meaningless—but which has been of central importance to me since I was very small. It is this: I have never liked human beings. I do not mean that I felt a Swiftian hatred for them. This was something different; an obscure discomfort, as if mixing with people was like sitting in a dentist's chair having one's teeth drilled. As a small child, and well into my early twenties, I could not even go into a shop to buy a pencil without overcoming a certain revulsion. This was not shyness or a sense of inferiority, but a feeling that human relations are somehow absurd. I have never been able to watch two people talking about the weather without a deep feeling of wonderment; I watch them closely, expecting to see their faces crumble suddenly into horrible grief.

  I suppose this is partly because human relations offend my sense of economy. I learned to think mathematically at the age of six; when I had a spare moment, I worked at some problem, such as Fermat's question of a formula that will generate prime numbers. I therefore feel astonished at the amount of thought-energy that most human beings seem to waste as a matter of course. It is rather as if someone should say to a long-distance hiker: 'Well, I'm going to take my morning walk now', and then proceed to walk around in a three-foot circle, explaining that when he has done this five thousand times he has walked the equivalent of five miles.

  I certainly inherited this part of my temperament from my father's Uncle Sam, and I must write about Uncle Sam at thispoint.

  Uncle Sam abruptly retreated from the world one day, locked himself up in an attic room, and refused to see anyone for several months. This happened when I was four years of age, so I have no early memories of Uncle Sam. He was the richest member of our family—he owned a lumber business and had a great deal of money invested. My Aunt Bertha, his second wife, was a plump, cheerful woman who did not seem to be in the least worried by his eccentricities. When people asked her why Uncle Sam had retreated, she would say 'He doesn't like noise' as if this explained everything.

  But the oddest part of it was that Uncle Sam's attic room was dark; two workmen bricked up the window, under his instructions, and a carpenter made a new door, twice as thick as the old one, and with a sliding hatch near the bottom, through which he could take food. He stayed in his attic for twenty years, until his death, and refused to see any of the family. There was no talk of having him certified, for everyone in the family expected to benefit in his will. When he had been in the room a few months, he allowed Aunt Bertha in to tidy up, but never saw anyone else.

  As it happened, I was the first person to see Uncle Sam (except, of course, Aunt Bertha) after his 'retreat'. This happened about four years later—when I was nine. This was at the beginning of the war. I was in the habit of spending whole evenings with Aunt Bertha; she liked my company, let me listen to the radio, and made me cakes and tarts. One day there was a power-cut just as she was about to take Uncle Sam's supper upstairs, so I preceded her with a lighted candle. From behind the locked door, Uncle Sam called: 'Who's that with you?' Aunt Bertha told him, and he opened the door and invited me in. He stood there, blinking in the candlelight, wearing a long grey nightshirt. His hair and beard were astounding—he looked like an old biblical prophet. (In fact, he allowed Aunt Bertha to trim them every six months or so; but to me, it looked as if they had been uncut for years.) He peered at me, then said: 'Come in, boy'. I looked at Aunt Bertha; she seemed so pleased that I was reassured. 'Put the supper down there, Bertha. You can go'. 'What about the candle?' she protested. As if to answer her, the light at the bottom of the stairs came on, although the room itself remained in darkness. So she went and left me alone with him. I disliked the room, and had no reason to like Uncle Sam. He smelt of sweat and unwashed clothes; there was a full chamberpot under the bed. Since there was no window, there was no way for air to circulate, and every smell of the last four years seemed to have left its traces in the room, including all the meals he had eaten.

  I cannot remember how long I stayed, or what we talked about, except that he asked me a few questions about my mother and father. He sat at a table, eating his meal, and finally asked me to go down and fetch him a bottle of beer. I went, glad to escape. 'Take the candle', he said. He was still eating, and I asked him if he would not need it to see his food.

  He said briefly: 'No'. This puzzled me so much that I stopped at the door, and asked him: 'Why don't you get a light, uncle?'

  'Because I prefer to live in the dark'.

  'But why?'

  'Because boy, darkness is man's natural element'. I wanted to ask him what he meant by 'element', but he told me to hurry and send up his beer. So I went downstairs again, and Aunt Bertha took up the beer.

  Later, I asked Aunt Bertha about elements. Evidently Uncle Sam had said the same kind of thing to her, because she explained that water is the fish's element, and air is the bird's. This failed to satisfy me. I objected that a fish dies in the air, and a bird dies if it is held under water, but a man doesn't die when he's not in the dark. Aunt Bertha just said: 'You'd better ask him next time you see him'. I didn't, because I was not interested, although I saw Uncle Sam fairly frequently after that. I learned the truth ten years later, after his death. He left me money—as I shall tell—and a document, which is in front of me now. It consists of forty handwritten pages, and is headed: 'Letter to my Nephew Hugh'. I am going to quote the relevant pages, because they seem to me important enough to cite at length. The early pages tell the story of his first marriage, his years in India, and his first business successes. By the time he was forty, in 1925, he was a member of the boards of two large companies. He writes:

  'The ease with which I made my first ten thousand pounds convinced me that destiny was reserving for me some role of cardinal importance. One day, however, an incident occurred that changed my whole outlook . . .

  'I was on my way to a board meeting, and was confident that I could persuade the other directors to follow my advice and buy up Cardew's business before the news of his impending bankruptcy circulated in the trade. I remember feeling pleasurable anticipation as I travelled across London by tube—the congratulations, and the comments: "Dawson's done it again". It was a hot morning in spring, and the train was crowded, but I felt cheerful and full of optimism; I even decided to take Mildred to the Savoy for supper. I cannot now recall the train of thought that then occurred to me; but I remember pushing my way through the crowd on the platform, and suddenly being overwhelmed by a feeling that struck me as abruptly as a heart attack. It was a sudden and violent hatred for all my fellow human beings. As I stood there, surrounded by pressing bodies, loathing and contempt rose in me until I felt as if I were drowning. I looked at their faces, and they seemed alien monsters, beings of clay and corruption. It is true that I could have restrained this hatred; but it seemed to me that I had glimpsed some great truth, and I had no right to turn away. My body felt drained of strength; I got up to the street with difficulty, and wondered why fate had waited so many years to play this trick on me. It was really like a denouement in a play. As I walked through the streets, all the stupidity and pettiness of humankind were present to my mind. I recalled the saeva indignatio of Swift, but this seemed inadequate. I felt as if I had been transported into a city of gigantic and hairy spiders,who perspired rottenness. I began to think how sweet the earth would be if freed of all animal life, and realized that, if I were God, I would destroy all life on this plan
et. It has occurred to me since that my vision was a kind of religious revelation.

  'I attended my board meeting, but I found myself unable to utter a word. Loathing made me incapable of speech. But force of habit made me scrawl on a sheet of paper: "Cardew going bankrupt; suggest we move in quickly", and pass it to the chairman, then I hurried out of the room.

  'I expected that the feeling would slowly pass away, and as I went home I tried to look into myself and discover how it had come about. It was as sudden as the bursting of a boil; but how had I failed to notice the boil earner? I am still unable to explain this, except to say that I have always been unusually sensitive to the idea of violence. [My italics.]

  'I was mistaken; it did not pass. I had always been fairly fond of my wife, although I had ceased to respond to her on a physical level since she had put on weight. But when I arrived home I found that she had become wholly repulsive to me. All her faults seemed magnified; her voice threw me into a rage; the sight of her face made me feel sick; the thought of ever having embraced her convulsed me with nausea. I realized that I had to escape immediately. I pleaded that I felt ill, refused to go to bed, and hurried out of the house, saying that I was going to see a doctor. Instead, I took the first train to Scotland, and stupefied myself on the journey by drinking a bottle of gin—an unusual indulgence for me, for I have always been very nearly a teetotaller. I remembered a deserted cottage on the coast of Ayrshire that I had seen when shooting grouse . . . From there, I cabled Mildred that I had been called away on a business trip and would be back in a fortnight.

  The strange state of mind persisted, but I now suspected it was pathological. Instead of disappearing, my hatred seemed to increase. It vanished only when I could be alone and forget human beings. Even the local tradesman who delivered food seemed to me a kind of monstrous vegetable, a walking fungus, wholly alien. I felt as if I had been transported from some more civilized planet on to a strange world, full of creatures.

  '. . . When I returned to London, a month later, it was to discover that Mildred had left me and returned to Horatio [her previous husband]. I was not sorry. I allowed her to divorce me on the grounds of desertion.

  'It was some time before I was able to rationalize my strange malady. No doubt it had some physico-cerebral origin. But it was clear to me that I had stumbled upon an apocalyptic vision of human life that was totally useless to me as a living man. As a painter, I might have made use of it in depicting human beings as monsters. But as a family man, it was like a weight around my neck. There were times when I felt as if I had been branded by the Lord. (For although I have never regarded myself as a religious man, I have never been able to accept the ruthless economy of the atheist, and forgo the convenience of a universal scapegoat.)

  'My business losses in 1929 occupied my mind for the next three years. Although I now felt a stranger among human beings, I no longer experienced acute discomfort when in their presence. I had lost all real interest in money, but I treated business as a game, and played it with some success in the early thirties, accumulating enough money to insure against starvation in case another "attack" should make human society completely intolerable to me. In 1932, Bertha became my cook. She had escaped from two unfortunate marriages, and showed no tendency to ask questions or to try to impose her personality on me. I was so impressed by her independence of mind that I finally proposed marriage to her, and immediately settled half my fortune on her in case I should again feel the need to "retreat". I was even able to explain to her, in guarded terms, the nature of my occasional attacks; she said she understood perfectly, because her brother had suffered from jaundice. She has been an excellent wife, and as I write this I feel nothing but affection for her.

  'And yet I was never unaware of a basic uneasiness in these days, and in 1936 a certain moral exhaustion warned me that I would shortly pay the price of another collapse of vital force and motivation. Since my physical health was also delicate, I dreaded this event. I discovered that a smell of grass or privet had the power to soothe me, and Bertha made a habit of placing boxes filled with both in my bedroom. I believe that it was some association of childhood with the smell that helped to hold back the rising tide of sickness in me.

  'One morning in 1936 I accompanied Bertha to church. Dr McNab, the well-known Scottish nonconformist, was preaching. He was a widely travelled man and, aware, perhaps, of the number of business men in his congregation, took occasion to express harsh criticism of President Roosevelt's New Deal. All at once a strange excitement came over me, for I saw in a flash the origin of my troubles. The political new deals may or may not be effectual; but the new deal for which all men wait is an alteration in God's relations towards man. This idea so excited me that I stood up halfway through the sermon and hurried outside. It was a fine autumn morning, and I sat on a stone in the churchyard and pursued my revelation. Now for the first I understood my attacks of hatred for human beings. They are all more or less contented slaves. Certain malcontent intellectuals have taught the workers to feel dissatisfaction with their employers. But it seems to have struck no one that human beings are grossly exploited by God. We are expected to bear misfortune, to learn from experience (like obedient school-children), to offer thanksgiving for benefits received; our role is in every way that of the slave and the sycophant. We are entrapped in the body, which we carry around like a suit of armour weighing a ton, and we have to endure with patience its stupidities and enfeeblements. The days pass quickly, devoted to eating, defecating, reproducing, and combating the irony of fate. No Egyptian slave suffered more continuous indignity under the lash of his overseer than man suffers constantly under the mismanaged government of God. (You understand, Hugh, that I use the word "God" as a convenience to describe what the Ancients would have called Fate or The Gods, and what certain modern writers have preferred to call Life.)

  'Once this became clear to me, I trembled with excitement. I experienced the astonishment that has fallen upon all thinkers when their greatest ideas have occurred to them; I understood the feelings of Newton discovering the law of gravity, of Darwin recognizing natural selection, of Karl Marx apprehending the principle of class war. Perhaps the last parallel is closest to my own case. My excitement was so great that I could not bear to wait for my wife; instead, I made my way home alone. As I walked among the Sunday morning crowds, I now understood what had happened to me on that other morning ten years earlier, in the St Paul's underground station. These people were loathsome to me because they were slaves, and accepting them as fellows made me loathsome to myself. And yet, it seemed to me, other revolutionary thinkers had succeeded in changing the state of mankind. Was it not possible that my revelation was a sign that new changes were about to occur in man's relation to his destiny?

  'As the day wore on, however, my excitement vanished, for I recognized that my analogy was a false one. Marx depended on the physical discomfort of the workers to provide the explosive power of revolution; the only precondition was to direct the attention of the workers to the employers, and propagate the idea of underprivilege. But God had concealed himself so carefully that man's agony can discover no direction or object. I had frequently been struck by the absurd logic of criminals who claim that their crimes have been an attempt to get their revenge on "society".

  'In spite of my perplexity, two facts were clear to me. One, that I strongly objected to being an exploited human being, a slave of God or chance; two, that most people have no such objection. Besides, how could I call upon human beings to revolt against an entity that I myself recognized to be an abstraction?

  This much was clear. It then became apparent to me that I could do no more than make my individual protest, that all the higher powers within me pointed to this aim. If I could not call on the rest of the human race to protest with me, I could at least have a one-man strike.

  'The rest of the story you know. I moved into the attic and had the window bricked up. I preferred darkness, recognizing that it was important to keep my mind
concentrated on itsobject. Besides, I had no desire to bring my mind into contact with the stupidities and half-measures that make up the literature of the human race.

  'I had been in the room three days when it came to me that only one other man in human history had felt impelled to act in the same way, as an intercessor for all mankind. In that moment, I began to shiver uncontrollably with fear and joy.

  'At first, I had an idea that, if I concentrated hard enough on the grievances of mankind, the Great Employer might try negotiation with me, might deign to treat me as a spokesman of the human race and reveal himself to me. After a few months, I recognized that this was unlikely, and contented myself with recognizing that my protest was unique in the history of the human race and that, like Christ, I also had made an attempt to treat directly with God on behalf of my fellow human insects.