The Essential Colin Wilson

  Once I actually started, I wrote quickly. I had written as far as the Lawrence chapter before I stopped for breath. I then reread my manuscript, and decided that it began too abruptly and proceeded too fast. I wrote an introduction, which began by quoting T. E. Hulme's prophecy of the decay of humanism, and stating that this book was to be an attack on humanism and an attempt to base the religious attitude on reasonable foundations. Hulme had promised to write a defence of his religious attitude, but had been killed in the war. I stated my intention of attempting to write the book that Hulme had never written; my method would not be philosophical, but psychological; not an attempt to prove the existence of God, but a search for meaning in human life.

  At about this time I was offered a daytime job that involved no more than sitting at a desk and answering a telephone if it rang. It seldom rang more than twice a day; and I sat there for four hours a day, writing furiously and being paid 3s. an hour for writing. In this early stage, the book was called The Pain Threshold. One day, I installed my typewriter in the office and typed the three chapters that I had written. When I had typed the Introduction (which did not appear in the published version) I sent it to a publisher. To my delight, he replied within twenty-four hours, expressing interest. I sent him the three chapters as soon as they were typed. This time, he took longer but finally wrote to say that he would definitely publish the book. I was delighted, but it was no time to give way to the pleasure of having been 'accepted'. I suspected that I could not finish the book as well as I had begun it, and that the publisher would change his mind when he read it as a whole. Now I had started typing the book, I became too lazy to write it first and type later, and began to use a typewriter all the time. Three months later it was finished. The advance which I received enabled me, for the first time in my life, to give up work and do nothing but write.

  By this time Angus Wilson had returned the novel, with the comment: 'I like it. Go on and finish it.' But I found creative work appallingly difficult after the easy writing of the critical book. The writing of The Pain Threshold had not made the novel any easier; every section seemed to need a dozen rewrites. I struggled on slowly, and managed to finish it in six months. But having finished it, I could hardly bear to reread it, and decided to start from the beginning again. The Pain Threshold was due out in a month, and I had tentatively suggested calling it The Outsider (tentatively, because I knew of two other books with the same title—Camus's and Richard Wright's). Reading the proofs of The Outsider had made me terribly dissatisfied with it: I hadn't managed to put in half as many things as I wanted, or to pursue half as many lines of thought. It needed, I realized, the same care and patience as the novel. Besides, I had begun to read Arnold Toynbee's Study of History and a great deal more of Whitehead, and I saw that the argument could be developed much further. The success of the book winded me, and made me more certain than ever that it should have been twice as long and far more carefully planned. I had believed passionately in the book, and had never doubted its importance as I wrote it. But it was intended as essentially a preliminary step towards a far bigger statement. After the delight of the first good reviews, and the knowledge that new impressions were being called for, I became aware of what had happened to the book itself. I was congratulated by critics on having started a craze, on inventing a new parlour game to replace Nancy Mitford's 'U and Non-U', called 'Outsider or Insider?' The whirl and publicity went on for months, and soon I realized that I had become a stranger to my own book. The people in it, who for years had seemed to live with me, had suddenly become alien; a painting by Van Gogh no longer moved me; Nijinsky's Diary stayed on my shelf unread. It was interesting to hear people discussing me—as when a child falls into a doze at a party, and hears the grownups talking about him—but only because it was like seeing myself in distorting mirrors. Besides, after a while, people began attacking the book, and declaring that it had all been a mistake, and that I was not a 'promising young writer' after all.

  No doubt they were right. Although I have always used writing as a medium to clarify my thoughts, I have never thought of myself as primarily a writer. Writing is an instrument of my main purpose, and that purpose is my own business and no one else's. I am convinced, like my 'Outsider', that all men who have ever lived have been failures. As a child, I thought of every adult I met: I shan't waste my life like that. This problem is the impetus that drives my living, and my writing is merely one discipline for solving it. The answer seems to lie in achieving a certain state of mind called 'vision'; and above all other things I prefer to study the evidence that men have left of their moments of vision: Nietzsche's glimpse on the hilltop, Van Gogh's Green Cornfield, Pascal's Memorial, Boehme's 'pewter dish', the moment of great insight in which the purpose of all life is seen. Ultimately, this is the only thing worth achieving. Yeats called life 'a vast preparation for something that never happens', and yet one minute of such vision could turn all preparation into achievement.

  These visions and the men who saw them occupy all my time and attention. To facilitate my own study of them, I wrote about them more or less consecutively in The Outsider (as I have been writing about them haphazardly for years in my journals). For myself, The Outsider and the present book are a sort of extension of my journals, a part of my working notes. I am grateful that their publication has made me enough money to allow me to continue to work on for a few more years; but their publication was not an essential part of my purpose. I am not necessarily a writer. The moment writing ceases to be a convenient discipline for subduing my stupidity and laziness, I shall give it up and turn to some more practical form. I wish this to be understood because I find that being regarded as a 'promising young writer', or attacked as a charlatan or a woolly-minded freak, tends to destroy my certainty of purpose. The prospect of spending my life trying to make myself worthy of a few pages in The Cambridge History of English Literature seems to me a particularly dreary kind of treadmill. I see now that I must try to escape the subtle falsifications of my aims that the success of The Outsider caused. I must retrace my steps to the period before it was published, and begin working again from there. In those days, I had a plan for drafting a vast critical credo that should define the area of my interest, to be followed by a series of novels and plays in which the Outsider idea would be explored in all its existentialist implications. But the idea of writing books merely because I am now known as a 'writer' is repellent to me. Temperamentally, my sympathy is still with Novalis and Jean Paul and other deniers of the daylight, and to know that anything is expected and demanded of me is enough to make me detest it.

  PERSONAL NOTES ON MASLOW

  From New Pathways in Psychology, 1972

  Some time in 1959, I received a letter from an American professor of psychology, Abraham H. Maslow, enclosing some of his papers. He said he had read my book The Stature of Man,[1] and liked my idea that much of the gloom and defeat of 20th century literature is due to what I called 'the fallacy of insignificance'. Maslow said this resembled an idea of his own, which he called 'the Jonah complex'. One day, he had asked his students: 'Which of you expects to achieve greatness in your chosen field?' The class looked at him blankly. After a long silence, Maslow said: 'If not you—who then?' And they began to see his point. This is the fallacy of insignificance, the certainty that you are unlucky and unimportant, the Jonah complex.

  The papers he enclosed looked highly technical; their titles contained words like 'metamotivation', 'synergy', 'eupsychian'. I glanced at them and pushed them aside. Some months later I came across them again: this time, my eye was caught by the term 'peak experience' in one of the titles, and I started to read. It was immediately clear that I'd stumbled upon something important. Maslow explained that, some time in the late thirties, he had been struck by the thought that modern psychology is based on the study of sick people. But since there are more healthy people around than sick people, how can this psychology give a fair idea of the workings of the human mind? It struck him that it m
ight be worthwhile to devote some time to the study of healthy people.

  'When I started to explore the psychology of health, I picked out the finest, healthiest people, the best specimens of mankind I could find, and studied them to see what they were like. They were very different, in some ways startlingly different from the average . . .

  'I learned many lessons from these people. But one in particular is our concern now. I found that these individuals tended to report having had something like mystic experiences, moments of great awe, moments of the most intense happiness, or even rapture, ecstasy or bliss . . .

  'These moments were of pure, positive happiness, when all doubts, all fears, all inhibitions, all tensions, all weaknesses, were left behind. Now self-consciousness was lost. All separateness and distance from the world disappeared as they felt one with the world, fused with it, really belonging to it, instead of being outside, looking in. (One subject said, for instance, "I felt like a member of a family, not like an orphan".)

  'Perhaps most important of all, however, was the report in these experiences of the feeling that they had really seen the ultimate truth, the essence of things, the secret of life, as if veils had been pulled aside. Alan Watts has described this feeling as "This is it!", as if you had finally got there, as if ordinary life was a striving and a straining to get some place and this was the arrival, this was Being There! . . . Everyone knows how it feels to want something and not know what. These mystic experiences feel like the ultimate satisfaction of vague, unsatisfied yearnings . . .

  'But here I had already learned something new. The little that I had ever read about mystic experiences tied them in with religion, with visions of the supernatural. And, like most scientists, I had sniffed at them in disbelief and considered it all nonsense, maybe hallucinations, maybe hysteria-almost surely pathological.

  'But the people telling me . . . about these experiences were not such people—they were the healthiest people! . . . And I may add that it taught me something about the limitations of the small . . . orthodox scientist who won't recognise as knowledge, or as reality, any information that doesn't fit into the already existent science.'[1]

  These experiences are not 'religious' in the ordinary sense. They are natural, and can be studied naturally. They are not 'ineffable' in the sense of incommunicable by language. Maslow also came to believe that they are far commoner than one might expect, that many people tend to suppress them, to ignore them, and certain people seem actually afraid of them, as if they were somehow feminine, illogical, dangerous. 'One sees such attitudes more often in engineers, in mathematicians, in analytic philosophers, in book-keepers and accountants, and generally in obsessional people.'

  The peak experience tends to be a kind of bubbling-over of sheer delight, a moment of pure happiness. 'For instance, a young mother scurrying around her kitchen and getting breakfast for her husband and young children. The sun was streaming in, the children, clean and nicely dressed, were chattering as they ate. The husband was casually playing with the children: but as she looked at them she was suddenly so overwhelmed with their beauty and her great love for them, and her feeling of good fortune, that she went into a peak experience . . .

  'A young man working his way through medical school by drumming in a jazz band reported many years later, that in all his drumming he had three peaks when he suddenly felt like a great drummer and his performance was perfect.

  'A hostess after a dinner party where everything had gone perfectly and it had been a fine evening, said goodbye to her last guest, sat down in a chair, looked around at the mess, and went into a peak of great happiness and exhilaration.'

  Maslow described another typical peak experience to me later, when I met him at his home in Waltham, Mass. A marine had been stationed in the Pacific and had not seen a woman for a couple of years. When he came back to the base camp, he saw a nurse, and it suddenly struck him with a kind of shock that women are different to men. The marine had told Maslow: 'We take them for granted, as if they were another kind of man. But they're quite different, with their soft curves and gentle natures . . . ' He was suddenly flooded with the peak experience. Observe that in most peak experiences (Maslow abbreviates it to P.E's, and I shall follow him), the person becomes suddenly aware of something that he had known about previously, but been inclined to take for granted, to discount. And this matter had always been one of my own central preoccupations. My Religion and the Rebel (1957) had been largely a study in the experiences of mystics, and in its autobiographical preface, I had written about a boring office 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 . . . ' I was clearly aware that the problem was automatism. And in a paper I later wrote for a symposium of existential psychology,[1] I elaborated this theory of the automatic pilot, speaking of it as 'the robot'. I wrote: 'I am writing this on an electric typewriter. When I learned to type, I had to do it painfully and with much nervous wear and tear. But at a certain stage, a miracle occurred, and this complicated operation was 'learned' by a useful robot whom I conceal in my subconscious mind. Now I only have to think about what I want to say: my robot secretary does the typing. He is really very useful. He also drives the car for me, speaks French (not very well), and occasionally gives lectures in American universities. 'He has one enormous disadvantage. If I discover a new symphony that moves me deeply, or a poem or a painting, this bloody robot promptly insists on getting in on the act. And when I listen to the symphony for the third time, he begins to anticipate every note. He begins to listen to it automatically, and I lose all the pleasure. He is most annoying when I am tired, because then he tends to take over most of my functions without even asking me. I have even caught him making love to my wife.

  'My dog doesn't have this trouble. Admittedly, he can't learn languages or how to type, but if I take him for a walk on the cliffs, he obviously experiences every time just as if it is the first. I can tell this by the ecstatic way he bounds about. Descartes was all wrong about animals. It isn't the animals who are robots; it's us.'

  Heaven lies about us in our infancy, as Wordsworth pointed out, because the robot hasn't yet taken over. So a child experiences delightful things as more delightful, and horrid things as more horrid. Time goes slower, and mechanical tasks drag, because there is no robot to take over. When I asked my daughter if she meant to be a writer when she grew up, she said with horror that she got fed up before she'd written half a page of school-work, and couldn't even imagine the tedium of writing a whole book.

  The robot is necessary. Without him, the wear and tear of everyday life would exhaust us within minutes. But he also acts as a filter that cuts out the freshness, the newness, of everyday life. If we are to remain psychologically healthy, we must have streams of 'newness' flowing into the mind—what J. B. Priestley calls 'delight or 'magic'. In developing the robot, we have solved one enormous problem—and created another. But there is, after all, no reason why we should not solve that too: modify the robot until he admits the necessary amount of 'newness', while still taking over the menial tasks.

  Now I was much struck by Maslow's comment on the possibility of creating peak experiences at will. Because his feeling was that it cannot be done. 'No! Or almost entirely no! In general, we are "Surprised by Joy", to use the title of C. S. Lewis's book on just this question. Peaks come unexpectedly . . . You can't count on them. And hunting them is like hunting happiness. It's best not done directly. It comes as a by-product, an epiphenomenon, for instance, of doing a fine job at a worthy task you can identify with.'

  It seemed to me that this is only partly true. I will try to explain this briefly.

  Novelists h
ave to be psychologists. I think of myself as belonging to the school known as the phenomenological movement. The philosopher Edmund Husserl noted that all psychological acts are 'intentional'. Note what happens when you are about to tickle a child. The child begins to squirm and laugh before your hands have actually reached him. On the other hand, why doesn't it tickle when you tickle yourself? Obviously, because you know it's you. The tickling is not something physical that happens when your hands encounter flesh and make tickling motions. It seems to be 99% psychological. When the child screams with laughter, he is tickling himself, just as he might frighten himself by imagining ghosts in the dark. The paradoxical truth is that when someone tickles you, you tickle yourself. And when you tickle yourself, you don't tickle yourself, which is why it doesn't tickle.

  Being tickled is a 'mental act', an 'intention'. So are all perceptions. I look at something, as I might fire a gun at it. If I glance at my watch while I am in conversation, I see the time, yet I don't notice what time it is. As well as merely 'seeing' I have to make a mental act of grasping.

  Now the world is full of all kinds of things that I cannot afford to 'grasp' or notice. If I am absorbed in a book, I 'grasp' its content; my mind explores it as though my thoughts were fine, thin tentacles reaching every corner of the book. But when I put the book back on the shelf, it is standing among dozens of other books, which I have also explored at some time in the past. As I look at all these books, I cannot simultaneously grasp all of them. From being intimate friends, they have become mere nodding acquaintances. Perhaps one or two, of which I am very fond, mean more to me than the others. But of necessity, it has to be very few.

  Consider Maslow's young mother getting the breakfast. She loves her husband and children, but all the same, she is directing her 'beam of interest' at making the coffee, buttering the toast, watching the eggs in the frying pan. She is treating her husband and children as if they were a row of books on a shelf. Still, her energies are high; she is looking forward to an interesting day. Then something triggers a new level of response. Perhaps it is the beam of sunlight streaming through the window, which seems to shake her arm and say: 'Look—isn't it all wonderful?' She suddenly looks at her husband and children as she would look at the clock to find out the time. She becomes self-conscious of the situation, using her beam of interest to 'scan' it, instead of to watch the coffee. And having put twice as much energy into her 'scanning', she experiences 'newness'. The mental act of looking at her family, and thinking: 'I am lucky', is like an athlete gathering himself for a long jump, concentrating his energies.