THE INTELLECTUAL HERO
An Inquiry into the Theme of Colin Wilson's Novels
Ritual in the Dark and The World of Violence
By Dag H. Christensen
A Thesis Presented to
the English Department
The University of Oslo
Spring Term 1969
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Contents
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1: Ritual in the Dark
Chapter 2: The World of Violence
Chapter 3: Towards a New Existentialism
I. The Critical Approach
II. The Intellectual 'Outsider'
III. New Directions
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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INTRODUCTION
Although this thesis aims at examining Colin Wilson's achievement as a novelist, his reputation is so closely bound up with his critical book The Outsider, and this book is so closely related to his novels, that a few introductory remarks on the reception of The Outsider would hardly be out of place.
Colin Wilson made his name with The Outsider in 1956, at the age of 24. The book achieved a success which, according to Wilson himself, made one critic write: "Not since Lord Byron woke up one morning and found himself famous has an English writer met with such spontaneous and universal acclaim". The book sold 40,000 copies in its hard-cover edition in Britain alone (the same number as John Braine's best-selling novel Room at the Top) - a remarkable figure for a serious philosophical study of this kind.
Thirteen years have passed since then, and Colin Wilson has published twenty books, including seven novels, an autobiography of ideas, seven or eight volumes of philosophy, an encyclopaedia of murder,a collection of essays on music and a study of Rasputin. Also he has written four plays and seven dozen articles,essays and reviews. Even so, critics still find it hard to dissociate his name from that one highly controversial volume that appeared in 1956, although few could maintain that it is his best book. A good portion of English critics still tend to regard him as that 'angry young man' (Wilson has from the very start disclaimed this title) who startled even the foremost critics into believing that here at long last was the literary Messiah - a young man of genius who would redeem English literature from its dilapidating state of post-war boredom and despondency.
The unexpected and somewhat unreasonable success of the book proved to be the undoing of Wilson's chances of being taken seriously for a very long time to come. The serious papers, in their eagerness to glorify this golden discovery of new artistic talent, shot far beyond the mark and endowed the book with virtues which its author apparently had never dreamed of putting in. Colin Wilson became daily news, not least in the popular Press, over a period of weeks and months, and Wilson himself has put it this way: "The highbrow critics tend to turn very peevish if their enthusiasms are take out of their hands and accepted by the popular Press". The result was a tremendous backsliding when he published his second book, Religion and the Rebel, eighteen months later. This book, similar to the previous volume both in its form and content, was originally intended to be incorporated in The Outsider, but Wilson had been dissuaded from this plan by his publisher on account of the sheer size. Some of the very people who had hoisted Wilson up a year and a half before now had few qualms about tearing him down. For instance, Philip Toynbee in the Observer had hailed the first book as an exhaustive and luminously intelligent study...what makes the book truly astounding is that its alarmingly well-read author is only twenty-four years old ...this remarkable book...a real contribution to an understanding of our deepest predicament" etc. Now, with the sequel in his hands, and Wilson's declining reputation in his mind, he decided to retract a vital chunk of his praise of the first book, and called Religion and the Rebel "a deplorable piece of work" and even worse names, although, according to Allsop, he did insist that he was still spiritually on Wilson's side. The Times Literary Supplement, about the only publication which still considered Wilson with an air of academic seriousness, devoted a full page to a discussion of the two books, none the less concluding that "the saddest thing about this new book is that it so much resembles The Outsider". The somewhat churlish tone of many of the serious critics was followed up by a regular massacre in the popular Press, and the anti-Wilson craze spread quickly to America.
Twelve years later (1969), one finds that some critics, though notably fewer, still have a propensity to treating Wilson's latest book with a certain tone of ridicule, thus presumably camouflaging their uncertainty as to whether Wilson ought to be considered seriously or not. As Marghanita Laski wrote in the Times Literary Supplement one week after the publication of Religion and the Rebel: "Some of the reviewers seem to be using Mr. Wilson as a scapegoat for their own shame at having been so profoundly impressed by his first book". She writes, too, that 'Surely literary history can show no other example of such a major effort to destroy a very bad book..." With regard to the latter remark, Miss Laski later admitted to Wilson that she had, at the time, not read Religion and the Rebel.
And now we might well ask: was the second book, indeed, such a folie de grandeur as these critics would contend? Kenneth Allsop writes:
it is nonsense to claim, as many reviewers did, that The Outsider was all right and Religion and the Rebel all wrong. As is, I think, quite obvious, Religion and the Rebel is a continuation of The Outsider - they are the halves of one book...To pretend that virtues belong to one half and vices to the other is dishonest: what faults and virtues are present are implicit within the entire framework of the two books.
(Allsop, p. 178)
Moreover, Sir Herbert Read, writing to the Times Literary Supplement, had this to say of the second book:
It has all the virtues the recanting reviewers found in The Outsider and fewer of the faults. It is far from being a perfect book (as Mr. Wilson would be the first to admit); but those readers who were impressed by The Outsider should not be too ready to accept the opinions of those reviewers who feel they have to make public amend for the brash enthusiasm of seventeen months ago.
And T. S. Eliot, in a letter to Colin Wilson after the publication of The Outsider, seemed to have anticipated what was coming when he wrote:
It seems to me that the right way is first to become known to a small group of people who can recognise what is good when they see it; next, to become known to a slightly larger group who will take the word of the others on what is good; and finally, to reach the wider public. To do it the other way round could be disastrous.
(cf.(Campion, p. 169)
So the task of evaluating Colin Wilson as a serious writer of fiction has so far been much hampered and discouraged in Britain by the wholly embarrassing hullabaloo around his first two books. As Sidney Campion points out: "The reviewing of Religion and the Rebel established a certain precedent in treating Colin Wilson's books with no attempt at understanding' (Campion, p. 168). The repercussions were still clearly felt in 1960, when his first novel, Ritual in the Dark, hit the literary headlines, and have continued well into the sixties, although, naturally enough, the violenceof the attacks has subsided.
The main purpose of this thesis will therefore be to clear the ground, so speak, for a more just evaluation of Colin Wilson as a novelist - rather than provide a final 'verdict' in itself. My aim, first of all, is to interpret two of his novels, Ritual in the Dark and The World of Violence, from a point of view which I think is far more representative of the author's own intentions than any of the critical treatments available till now. Secondly, I shall consider one or two of the more adverse reviews of Ritual in the Dark, thus revealing, I assume, a few of the basic fallacies of the reviewers' approach. And finally, I shall try to point out some of the fundamental similarities of theme between the novels and Wilson's theoretical works. By so doing I hope to indicate at least partly the original cause of the success of The Outsider; for obviously it was not so much the form or the 'artistic quality' of the book that electrified the critics as the book's content - its basic theme; and this theme is repeated and further evolved in all Wilson's subsequent books, not least in his novels.
Colin Wilson's philosophical development is embodied in the six volumes of his 'Outsider Cycle' (1956-1965). Apart from the two books already mentioned, these comprise the following titles: The Age of Defeat, which is a treatise on the 'insignificant hero' of twentieth century literature; The Strength to Dream, subtitled "Literature and the Imagination", in which the author propounds his theories of 'existential criticism' (which I intend to deal with in the final chapter); Origins of the Sexual Impulse, a study of sex and the creative imagination from the point of view of existential psychology; and finally, Beyond the Outsider, in which the same basic ideas as those of the previous books are carried forward to a new stage and discussed in the light of recent trends in biology and psychology. However, the clearest outline of Wilson's ideas are to be found in a single volume which appeared in 1966, Introduction to the New Existentialism, which is in fact largely a summary of the ideas in the preceding books. My discussion in the latter part of Chapter Three will to a large extent be based on the ideas as they are presented in this volume.
To my knowledge, no serious criticism of Colin Wilson's literary works has yet been published. Kenneth Allsop, in his book The Angry Decade (1958), is mostly concerned with Wilson's relation to the other so-called 'angry young men', and the social aspects of his fame and notoriety. Besides, the book was written before Wilson's first novel appeared. And Sidney Campion, in The World of Colin Wilson (1963), is primarily concerned with Wilson's personality and his biographical background, and has evidently not aimed at any interpretation of the novels beyond that which Wilson has openly imparted himself. As regards Wilson's own comments, he has, in his numerous critical works, said remarkably little about his novels, apparently leaving it to his readers to infer the meaning for themselves: a good book.', writes Wilson, "should somehow be a living organism, with many levels of significance, like a picture that can be looked at in a dozen different ways" MWS p. 14). My acknowledgements to other critics, therefore, are few and far between, and will, in the course of my exposition, emerge by way of parenthetical remarks.
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Chapter 1
RITUAL IN THE DARK
Ritual in the Dark tells the story of eleven days in the life of Gerard Some, a young writer who lives alone in a room in London, with a small private allowance which enables him to spend the greater part of his time reading, writing and listening to music on the gramophone. When we first meet him he has been living in this state of leisure for five years, ever since the afternoon when he made up his mind to walk out of the office for the last time, filled with a sense of "overwhelming hatred for cities and offices and people and everything that calls itself civilisation" (p. 374). Evidently it is the idea of the worthlessness of his life as an office clerk that has made him turn his back on society - a sudden reaction of contempt for the futility of "people who possessed no motive beyond the working day, no deep certainties to counterbalance the confusion" (p. 213). In his mind all the petty problems and short-lived desires of the thousands of people around him have their origin in the monotony and basic boredom of their lives. Even the greatness of London and the glory of our civilisation are hardly more than "footprints on a sandy beach" (p. 345) which time will wash away. Our cities and our lives are tied to the present, and man in his mortal confines, hustling every day through the streets with the millions of other men, cannot perceive the beauty and the timeless movement of the universe beyond his ephemeral self.
Sorme has had a vision:
It happened once when I was on Hampstead Heath, looking down on London. I was thinking about all the lives and all the problems --- and then suddenly I felt real. I saw other people's illusions, and my own illusions disappeared ...I stopped wondering whether the world's ultimately good or evil. I felt that the world didn't matter a damn. What mattered was me, whether I saw it as good or evil. I suddenly felt as if I'd turned into a giant. I felt absurdly happy ----. (p. 326)
"I saw other people's illusions, and my own illusions disappeared..." This, as we shall see, represents a kind of leit-motif in Ritual in the Dark. Campion characterises this novel as essentially a 'Bildungsroman': "What is emphasised...is the importance of the idea of maturity, of education in the process of living" (Campion, p. 186). The hero achieves a greater degree of spiritual maturity through his experience of new events and by examining, each in turn, the life values of the people he meets. Colin Wilson himself has referred to this novel as an 'Odyssey' through a world of false values.
As a point of departure we might turn to an incident which took place some two months before Sorme's meeting with Austin Nunne. One night, in bed with a girl he has picked up in a cafe, he feels a sudden and unaccountable lack of desire to make love to her. It is as if the whole question of sexual intercourse with this girl is absurd - based on some fundamental mistake. He realises that the sole reason for the girl's wish to go to bed with him is that she is utterly bored with life. She is completely spoilt, neurotic, and chain-smokes for the same reason that she desires sex. The hero suddenly becomes acutely aware of the fact that the lives and activities of millions of people in this same city are based on a similar need to escape from boredom or mediocrity. They all need distractions of some sort to endure life at all. The businessman may believe that the purpose of life is to get him a bigger car". The politician may endure life by "identifying his purpose with that of his party. The religious man...by accepting the guidance of the Church or his Bible" (p. 91). But to Sorme's mind all these purposes are little more than falsifying patterns, guiding-poles or rituals which people need to guide them through the dark. Without these patterns, life would appear meaningless to millions of people. And without her sex ritual and her cigarettes, the girl from the cafe would probably sink into a condition that might lead to suicide. Then, suddenly aware of the full impact of illusion on the girl's life, the hero has a sense of being freed from the bonds of his own illusion:
suddenly I felt a tremendous excitement. It was so strong that I felt I'd never want to sleep again...I thought: I am lying here in the middle of London, with a population of three million people asleep around me, and a past that extends back to the time when the Romans built the city on a fever swamp...It was a sense of participation in everything. I wanted to live a million times more than anybody has ever lived. (pp. 66-7)
Sorme's break with the office, then, is hardly negative. His longing for the freedom to work and do as he likes does not imply any kind of romantic desire to escape to a quiet place in the country, away from the hustle and bustle of civilisation. On the contrary, he wants to stay in the city, where he can observe life. His break represents nothing less than a need to cast off the chains of illusion and seek a new and more permanent foundation on which to build his future life.
Sorme spends five years in his room, reading Plato and Plotinus, and listening to the music of Mozart and Prokoviev, in his attempt to regain the insight. But the vision fails him - or, at least, it appears only half a dozen times in the course of the five years, and only as glimpses too ephemeral and fragile to provide the foundation on which he wants to build his life. He tries to write a novel based on his insights, but the inspiration fails him. He can find no solution to the problem of creating a bridge between the ideals of his mind and the monotonous ritual of physical existence. Sorme's life of freedom to read and write and "listen to those symphonies at ten in the morning" (p. 175) gradually and inevitably leads him into a state of boredom and self-contempt, into the very life of illusion from which he has been seeking to escape. After five years of this kind of 'freedom' he finds that he has reached no further than the stage of living like an animal - just eating, sleeping and roaming about the streets with no purpose:
I felt completely lost. I didn't like leaving my room because the street made me feel as if I didn't exist. London made me feel like an insect, and when I got back to my own room and tried to write I still felt like an insect. (p. 326)