The Essential Colin Wilson

  I left for Strasbourg, where I had a pen friend with whom I had corresponded since I was fourteen. But my luck was no better there. Since I had last seen him, he had joined the Communist Party. In England, three years before, he had struck me as a fool. In three years, his Marxism had become an impregnable armour, and my own religious attitude had developed correspondingly. At first there was some talk of my staying in Strasbourg and working for his father—a rag merchant—but as our discussions became more heated and less friendly, this idea was dropped. Within a fortnight we could barely tolerate one another. One day, after a particularly sharp clash of our views, I went to the British consulate and borrowed enough money to return to England. Late the next day, I was back in Leicester. It was a few weeks before Christmas.

  My three months' wandering, considered in retrospect, had given me a pleasant sensation of liberty, but I realized that none of my problems had been solved, and that I would never discover freedom by becoming a tramp. During the previous summer, when I had worked on farms, I had thought of certain poems of Synge, or certain pages in Hemingway—the El Sordo episode, for instance—and had been possessed by an imaginative vision of freedom—a feeling that I could escape the prison of my own personality in the impersonality of other places, in the 'otherness' of the world. It was a romantic vision—it owed something to those last pages of Ulysses, where Mrs Bloom suddenly becomes the earth spinning around the sun, and speaks of the 'flowers on her breast' crushed by her lovers. And it was hardly to be realized by crossing to France without money. But at least I had learnt that freedom could be discovered in retrospect, by 'recollecting in tranquillity' the episodes which had seemed so uninspiring at the time—such as reading the Phaedo while sitting at the roadside near Vitry-le-François, waiting for a lift. For a few weeks, I felt like a visitor in Leicester, and the place no longer oppressed me.

  But not for long. I needed a job, and my father gave me a long lecture about wasting my time on manual labour; in his eyes, my resignation from the Civil Service was the most foolish act of my life. In deference to him, I again took an office job—this time in a large engineering works in Leicester. The pay was miserable, and after a few days, I began to hate the job as I have always hated work. Being in Leicester, working in a regular job, made me feel aimless, and robbed me of my sense of purpose. I have no doubt that I would have drifted back into my affair with the girl I had known previously, but while I was abroad she had thrown me over, and I was disgusted to find how much it hurt. However, I began to flirt with the works nurse, a slim, shy girl, ten years my senior, and I felt pleased at the way in which I appeared to have mastered my emotions.

  The job followed the familiar pattern. The first few days there—the days I dreaded most—passed unexpectedly easily. Everything was new, and the office staff were pleasant. Part of my job involved walking around the works—they covered an enormous area—and delivering invoices to various departments. I liked to watch the red-hot metal being pounded by the steam hammer, or see long bars of it being cut into chunks. I especially liked watching it after dusk, when the great doors of the shop stood open, and the red glow made the half-naked men seem beautiful. In the shop where the white-hot metal was poured into moulds, it was necessary to stand near the doors, in case the splashes burnt holes in my clothes. At the time, I was reading a great deal of Blake—I had only discovered him six months before, through reading Joyce Gary's The Horse's Mouth—and the atmosphere of the Prophetic Books was well suited to that of the engineering works, for they were also full of talk of molten metal and hammers ringing on iron. I carried a copy of Blake with me all the time, and repeated it to myself as I walked around the works:

  For every Space larger than a red Globule of Man's blood

  Is visionary, and is created by the Hammer of Los:

  And every Space smaller than a Globule of Man's blood opens

  Into Eternity of which this vegetable Earth is but a shadow.

  It snowed a lot that December. Some evenings, walking around the works, picking my way over girders covered with powdered snow, moving towards the white glow that came from the welding shops, the world would suddenly seem altogether good, no longer alien, and my feeling of self-contempt would vanish.

  All the same, I began to hate the job. As soon as I grew used to it, I began to work automatically. I fought hard against this process. I would spend the evening reading poetry, or writing, and would determine that with sufficient mental effort I could stop myself from growing bored and indifferent at work the next day. But the moment I stepped through the office door in the morning, the familiar smell and appearance would switch on the automatic pilot which controlled my actions. The longer I stayed in the job the more impossible it became. Moments of insight became less frequent than ever. Repetition makes one into a machine, and all responses become automatic. But the important part of man—the creative part—is the part that is spontaneous. To escape the feeling of being a machine—to try to jar my being out of its automatic responses—I tried all kinds of exercise: getting up an hour earlier in the morning, and going for long runs in running shorts and tennis shoes; sleeping on the floor rather than in bed; sitting up in my bedroom half the night, cross-legged, trying to concentrate until I had broken the feeling of being merely another 'social animal'; staying out until three o'clock in the morning and running all the way home. But the longer I stayed in the job, the harder it became to escape the intolerable sense of being what society wished to make me, merely another human being in the human anthill.

  Yet this problem of automatism is the problem of life itself. In childhood we respond freshly to everything, and nothing is automatic, but as we get older, life becomes more complex, and a part of our activities has to be handed over to the 'automatic pilot'. At first, new experiences stimulate us; after a while, no experience is new; it is intercepted by the automatic pilot. I am convinced that people die because they cease to want to live; what purpose is there in living when nothing challenges or stimulates us any longer, when everything is done by the automatic pilot? In my early teens, I had a terrible suspicion that wisdom meant becoming old and losing the desire to live; that the only way to live for a long time was to be so foolish that all sorts of trivial issues continued to excite one into old age, as an imbecile is excited by a child's playthings. It was not until I was eighteen, and read the Bhagavad-Gita, that this suspicion finally loosened its hold on me, and I recognized that the visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.

  At all events, the office job beat me. No amount of discipline could prevent me from feeling abysmally depressed within a minute of entering the office. Even my affair with the nurse did not compensate for it; nor did the novel that I had begun to write, situated in Strasbourg and heavily indebted to Hemingway, nor the play inspired by Granville-Barker's The Secret Life, nor the half-dozen other literary projects I had started work on at this time. I stuck the job until shortly after Christmas and then gave in my notice. I visited the Leicester Corporation offices and got myself another navvying job, which involved travelling miles to work every morning, and then working knee-deep in mud, digging trenches. I had hoped the hardship would stimulate me, but within a day or two I disliked navvying as much as I had disliked the office. It was free time that I wanted. One day I suddenly conceived the idea of asking the Leicester Corporation whether they would object if I worked for only three days a week. It seemed a brilliant idea to me; it would have meant foregoing pocket money, but the amount of free time I should create for myself would more than compensate. At first, the Corporation agreed; then they changed their minds, pointing out that the other men would object. In fury and disgust, I gave the job up and took another in a chemical factory.

  I had got into the habit of reciting poetry as I worked. I liked the poetry of Synge, and that poem of Gogarty's that begins:

  I will live in Ringsend

  With a red-headed whore . . .

  It
expressed my new anti-intellectual attitude. I liked also to repeat the war poems of Wilfred Owen, especially Exposure and Futility. The active physical torment in the poems was a relief to my feeling of being stifled in trivialities. For the same reason, I looked at the painting of Van Gogh and read all I could find on his life, and read Nijinsky's Diary continually. The concept of the Outsider first began to form in my mind, and I started to use the word in my journals. I had to concentrate on the idea of torment and horror to obtain release from my sense of futility and pettiness.

  But soon fresh complications were to alter my life completely. It now becomes impossible to tell the story fully, for it ceases to be my story alone, and becomes that of myself and my wife—I married in the June of that year. My marriage—to the nurse—brought no answer to the problems; in fact, only intensified them, since I was now forced to support a wife—and later a son—as well as myself. There would be no point in telling of this marriage in detail. For eighteen months I worked in factories in London, and we moved from home to home with dismal regularity. The new feeling of security, of having a wife and a home, stimulated me to write, and I spent all my free time writing a novel about two Outsiders, one based on Nietzsche, and the other on Jack the Ripper. At the end of eighteen months, we separated 'temporarily' while I looked for another home for us; but the separation lengthened, while I spent more time writing my novel and a play than looking for rooms. I was working at this time as a porter in a hospital in Fulham. Finally, I got sick of the portering job—which involved, mostly, wheeling live patients to the wards and dead ones to the mortuary—and went to Paris again. But the problem of working for a living was not solved until the following year, when I had returned to London. In a few months I went through a series of jobs rapidly—a laundry, two office jobs (both firms sacked me), a plastic factory and a Lyons Corner House. Then, one day, the idea came to me that I was earning far more money than I strictly needed to keep alive. I earned £5 or £6 a week. Of this, 30s. was spent in rent, £2 or so on food, and the rest was sent to my wife, or spent on books and bus fares. I reasoned that of these, food is the only absolute necessity. One can buy a tent for 30s., and provide a roof over one's head. And a bicycle can make bus fares unnecessary. The tent idea excited me. It seemed a perfect solution—for summer, at all events. So I gave up my rooms (or rather, my landlady threw me out after a disagreement) and bought a tent. I did not give up work immediately: I was making a great deal of money by working overtime in a plastic factory in Whetstone. But I saved rent by setting up my tent at nights on a golf links opposite the factory. After a while, I realized that to put up a tent and take it down every day was an unnecessary labour. A waterproof sleeping bag would serve as well. So I bought one, together with an eiderdown sleeping bag, an immense army frame rucksack for my belongings, and a bicycle with a carrier on the back. In a few weeks, I had saved enough money to leave work with a certainty of not having to return for a few months provided my expenditure did not exceed £2 a week. I moved my quarters from the golf links to Hampstead Heath, and cycled down to the British Museum every day, to work from nine till five. I was making a determined effort to reduce some of the immense manuscript of my Jack the Ripper novel to publishable form. Mr Angus Wilson, who at that time was an official in the Reading Room, noticed me writing furiously, and offered to read the manuscript when it was completed, and, if he liked it, to submit it to his publisher.

  But sleeping out was a nerve-racking business. I did not dare to go onto the Heath until after midnight; there were too many young lovers about. The police patrolled the Heath, but they stuck to the paths and only occasionally flashed a powerful torch around. I sometimes slept till ten (the Heath is a surprisingly quiet place on weekday mornings), and was often wakened by someone's dog sniffing at my face, or voices in the distance. Usually, I had breakfast at a busman's café at the bottom of Haverstock Hill: they did a remarkably cheap slice of bread and dripping and an enormous mug of tea for 2½d. The day in the Museum usually went by too quickly; but the evenings were the difficult time. After eight o'clock all the libraries were closed; there was nowhere where one could spend a few hours in warmth and quiet until midnight. A girl whom I had met in Leicester the previous Christmas was also in London at the time. She kept all my books for me, and sometimes entertained me in the evening; but it was too much to expect her to have to put up with me every evening. Her help and sympathy were invaluable; but all the same, I always felt exhausted and ill at ease as I cycled around London with my sleeping bags rolled up on the back; it was a strange sensation, having nowhere to go, nowhere to retire to at nights, nowhere to spend the evening reading. Besides, the girl's landladies objected if I turned up too often; they left her little notes telling her not to let me use the bathroom, and that I had to be out by ten o'clock.

  Occasionally during that summer I ran out of cash. Then I had to take a job for a few weeks: one in Lyons, one in a dairy at Chiswick. I continued writing the book well into the autumn. In early November the weather became so bad that I was finally driven indoors. I took a room at New Cross, and another job at Lyons. At this time I was seeing a great deal of another young writer, Stuart Holroyd, whom I had met the previous year. He talked vaguely of writing a critical book, and advised me to do the same; but I was too busy at the time, trying to finish the first part of my novel (it was to be in three short parts). I had heard a rumour that Angus Wilson intended leaving the Museum, and I wanted to be able to hand him the typewritten manuscript before he left. At Christmas that year I worked at the post office in St-Martin's-le-Grand, sorting Christmas mail; by doing overtime, I made enough money to buy a secondhand typewriter. Over Christmas, alone in London, I finally completed the first part of the novel, and immediately settled down to typing it. A week later, lack of money made it necessary to find another job. There were long queues in the labour exchange, and only a few unskilled labouring jobs available. I accepted the first one they offered me—as I usually do—and the next day started to work in a laundry in Deptford. The job was so peculiarly detestable, and the conditions so appalling, that I overcame my usual laziness and cycled into London every day, trying to find evening work in a coffee bar. The laundry became completely intolerable to me when one day my journal was stolen out of my pocket. It had contained the entries of over a year past, and its loss enraged me. But the day after this happened, I found a job in a newly opened coffee bar in the Haymarket; I was the washer-up.

  Compared with the laundry, conditions there were delightful. The kitchen was new and shiny and chromium-plated, and the food was unlimited and very good. I worked every evening from five-thirty till midnight, and had the day free to write. I finished typing the first part of the novel in a burst of energy, and handed it to Angus Wilson on the day he left the Museum. And then, suddenly, I felt a little lost. For many years, the novel had occupied my thoughts. Suddenly, it had gone out of my hands. If Angus found it bad, I would begin all over again. In the meantime, there was no point in going on with it. I began to wonder what I should do to occupy my days in the Reading Room.

  It was at this point that Stuart Holroyd showed me the opening chapters of his Emergence from Chaos. Suddenly, I made a decision. I too would write a critical book—a credo. I would dash it off quickly, and then get back to the novel. In half an hour, one morning, I sketched out the plan of a book, to be called The Outsider in Literature. It would be a study in various types of 'obsessed men'. I immediately jotted down a list of the type of men who would interest me. Some immediately came to mind: Van Gogh, T. E. Lawrence, George Fox, Boehme, Joyce, Nijinsky (I had written a long essay on Nijinsky several years before, which I had sent to Madame Nijinsky. She had replied kindly to a preliminary letter of mine, but never acknowledged the essay.) There were obviously many different types of Outsider. Some were men of action, some were the very reverse. So there would be a chapter on Oblomov and Hamlet and Hesse's Steppenwolf and the Great Gatsby. These would be classified together as 'weak Outsiders'. Then
there would be a chapter on Goethe's Faust, Mann's Doctor Faustus, and Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, from whom Mann drew in his own scene between Leverkühn and the Devil. A great deal of the book would also be devoted to religious figures: Boehme, Law, Fox, Newman, Luther, Wycliffe—all rebels against their time. The Outsider shades off one way into the weakling—the Hamlet—and the other way into the Rebel. Then there were the French Existentialists, and Heidegger and Jaspers—and of course, Kierkegaard—and these pointed to a tie-up with Nietzsche, while the study of pessimism would link up with Schopenhauer and Spengler. As I jotted down names, and pushed them around to try to find some logical order for them all, I realized with growing despair that there was no order that would embrace all of them—or at least, if there were, the book would be so vast that it would involve ten years' work. There was no point in being overwhelmed by it and trying to see it as a whole before I began it. I had been doing that with the novel for years, and here, with over half a million words written, had only a hundred pages in their final form. I decided to begin the book that afternoon in the Museum. On my way down there, I remembered a volume which I had read about years before in the Everyman edition of Le Feu—Barbusse's L'Enfer. That would make a perfect starting point: the man who looks at life through a hole in his wall. In the Museum, I got the book and settled down to read it. In two hours I had finished it. It was within half an hour of closing time. Hastily, I looked up a striking sentence which I had noticed and copied it on to a sheet of paper: 'In the air, on top of a tram, a girl is sitting . . . ' I copied on hastily until the bell rang for closing time. The next morning, I wrote on to the end of my analysis of Barbusse, and without hesitation, plunged into H. G. Wells's Mind at the End of la Tether (of which I had had a copy since I was sixteen).