Authors: Colin Wilson
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 is 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.
When it came to the actual writing, there was a certain amount of material that had to be scrapped. I had, for example, intended to write a chapter about the Faust figure, from Marlowe to Mann
’
s Dr. Faustus—Mann
’
s feeling about the un-attainableness of the ideal was obviously close to my own. There was a chapter on criminal outsiders that was abandoned after a few pages—the fragment was later reprinted in
An Encyclopedia of Murder.
And there was an interesting outline of a chapter on
‘
the weak outsider
’
—characters like Oblomov, the great Gatsby, Hamlet, the poets of the 1890s like Dowson and Johnson and Verlaine... I was particularly fascinated by Gatsby because the essence he craved was the essence of
’
success
’
. I was convinced that this, like all the other essences, is a fraud. Yet my romanticism found this hard to accept...
A year and a half after writing the first page of
The Outsider,
I had a chance to find out for myself. I had written most of the book by the middle of 1955. (The most difficult parts, I found, were the links between the various sections; it cost me two weeks
’
hard work to write the link between Wells and Sartre in the first chapter; it finally came in a flash of inspiration as I was hitch-hiking on the back of a lorry near Oxford.) I tried sending a few pages, together with an outline, to the publisher Victor Gollancz. To my surprise, he replied almost immediately, saying that he liked the outline and would like to see the rest. At this time, I was working during the evenings in a coffee bar in the Haymarket, so that I could spend my days writing in the British Museum. In the Autumn I sent him the completed manuscript and he accepted it. That Winter, I gave up work for a few weeks—for the first time since I
’
d left school at 16—and lived on the £75 advance that Gollancz gave me. Somehow, I had no doubt that the book would be a success. I think I had too little doubt about the importance of what I had to say to feel misgivings. Gollancz, understandably, had no such confidence; he finally decided to take the risk of printing five thousand copies.
Publication day was set for Monday, May 26, 1956. Even before this, I was beginning to smell the breath of fame, and finding it exciting. Edith Sitwell, the poetess who had
‘
discovered
’
Dylan Thomas, had read the book in proof, and told Gollancz she thought I was going to be
‘
a truly great writer
’
. A journalist on one of the London evening newspapers asked to interview me; I spent an evening at his flat talking into his tape recorder—which struck me as a fabulous device—and listening to a record of the latest hit show,
My Fair Lady.
Gollancz told me he had been promised a review in the
Evening News
on the Saturday before publication. My girlfriend, Joy, was spending the weekend with me—I was now living in a room in Notting Hill Gate—and we bought the paper as soon as it appeared; but there seemed to be no review. I went to bed that night oddly depressed—my bicycle had been stolen a few hours before, and it seemed a bad omen. The next morning, we woke up early a
nd rushed to the corner of West
bourne Grove to buy the two
‘
posh
’
Sunday papers. Both of them had devoted their lead review to
The Outsider,
and both were full of praise. When we got back to my room, someone told us that there
had
been
a review in the previous evening
’
s newspaper; we looked again, and found a headline:
‘
He
’
s a major writer—and he
’
s only 24
’
.
Before that day was out, I had no doubt that I was famous, whatever that meant. I had no telephone—naturally—but our neighbours in the basement had one, and it began to ring at about nine o
’
clock that morning—my editor ringing me up to congratulate me, and to ask my permission to give the telephone number to the press. Within a couple of hours I had agreed to be interviewed by half a dozen newspapers, and to appear on radio and television. Moreover, a playwright named John Osborne had achieved success on the same day; his play
Look Back in Anger
had been produced at the Royal Court a few days earlier, and reviews by Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson launched him to fame as the first
‘
Angry Young Man\ (The actual phrase was invented by J. B. Priestley, who wrote an article about the two of us under that title in
The New Statesman
the following week.) In fact, Osborne and I had only one thing in common—that both of us had been turned into
‘
outsiders
’
by our working-class backgrounds, and the suspicion that we would spend the rest of our lives stuck in dreary obscurity. But the fact that we appeared on the literary scene at the same time somehow doubled the furore.
It was a strange experience. On the 24th of May, 1956, I had been totally unknown. I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that
‘
the world
’
would decline to recognize them. The
‘
famous
’
seemed to be a small and very exclusive club, and the chances of getting into it were about equal to those of winning the football pools. And then, suddenly, on the 25th, I had apparently been elected without opposition, and the pundits of the Sunday newspapers were assuring the public that I was at least as important as Sartre and Camus, a real British home-grown existentialist. And when the press got hold of the story about sleeping on Hampstead Heath, I became notorious as well as famous ...
The enormous publicity was partly due to the fact that I was one of a group, a
‘
new group
’
, not just of writers, but of all kinds of personalities who were always worth a paragraph in a gossip column. It included Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot and Arthur Miller and Sandy Wilson and Pietro Annigoni (who had painted the Queen) and Francis Bacon and Stirling Moss and Mort Sahl, and a couple of dozen more assorted celebrities who somehow seemed typical of the mid-fifties. And it included a large-ish crop of young writers—Amis, Wain, Iris Murdoch, Brendan Behan, Franfoise Sagan, Michael Hastings (who was eighteen), Jane Gaskell (who was fourteen), and even a
n
ine-year-old French poetess called Minou Drouet. I have a feeling that the newspapers had an unconscious urge to manufacture an
‘
epoch
’
—like the 1890s or 1920s. And, for better or worse, I was in the middle of it, cast as the
‘
boy genius
’
. Somehow, Osborne and I were supposed to prove that England was full of brilliantly talented young men who couldn
’
t make any headway in the System, and were being forced to go it alone. We were supposed to be the representative voices of this vast army of outsiders and angry young men who were rising up to overthrow the establishment.
Oddly enough, it was not particularly interesting or exciting to be involved in all this ferment. To begin with, the newspaper publicity was on such a moronic level (as it is more or less bound to be) that it seemed a travesty of what we were trying to do as individuals. It invited derision—and, of course, received it. I was delighted to know that I would never have to return to a factory or office. But otherwise, fame seemed to have no great advantages. It didn
’
t bring any
startling new freedom. I ate good food and drank wine, but since food and drink had never interested me much, this was unimportant. I wasn
’
t fond of travel. If I hadn
’
t been settled with Joy, the greatest bonus would probably have been the sexual possibilities; but since I had no intention of getting rid of her, I had to put that temptation behind me. I admit that this was my keenest regret.
What the newspapers really wanted from this new generation was scandal. Early in 1957,1 inadvertently provided it, when Joy
’
s parents turned up at the room we now shared in Notting Hill Gate, determined to drag her away from this life of sin; her father had even brought a horsewhip. Joy and I were giving supper to a villainous old queer named Gerald Hamilton, the original of Christopher Isherwood
’
s Mr. Norris. As Joy
’
s family tried to drag her off down the stairs, Gerald rushed to the nearest telephone and rang every gossip columnist he knew (and his acquaintance was wide). Ten minutes after I
’
d persuaded her family to leave (with some help from the police), the reporters and photographers started to arrive on the doorstep. After seeing the first ones, we sneaked out of the back door, spent the night with a friend, and then fled to Devon, to take refuge with the writer Negley Farson. The press caught up with us there after a few days, and then pursued us across to Wales and Ireland. The story occupied the front pages and gossip columns for about two weeks, until we returned to London. Victor Gollancz told me that my reputation as a serious writer was ruined, and that if I
didn
’
t get out of London, I
’
d never write another book. The man who lived in the room below us offered to rent us a cottage near Mevagissey, in Cornwall. We took Gollancz
’
s advice, moved from London, and have been here ever since.
On the whole, Gollancz was right. The silly publicity made it impossible for Britain
’
s intellectual establishment to take me seriously, and they showed their displeasure when my next book appeared. I had, it seemed, achieved
‘
recognition
’
, and then lost it just as suddenly. I never had any great difficulty in finding publishers—my notoriety at least had that advantage—but the critics made sure that I had no more best sellers. Books like
Religion and the Rebel, The Age of Defeat
and
The Strength to Dream
were received with the kind of review that began:
‘
More pretentious rubbish from this intellectually confused and thoroughly overrated young man ...
’
Ritual in the Dark
achieved a certain success when it finally appeared in 1960, but critics who had decided that I was a flash in the pan had no intention of reconsidering me as a novelist.
The Outsider
had made me about £20,000 in its first year— a considerable sum in 1956. Subsequent books seldom made more than £ 1,000. We were never poverty stricken, but invariably overdrawn at the bank. In the 1960s, I made several lecture tours of America to try and stabilize my finances. I usually returned to England with just enough money to pay all the outstanding bills, and start again from square one ...