The Outsider

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Inspired by Wilson's dramatic entrance into the literary world ("he walked into literature like a man walks into his own house" was the account in the New York Times Book Review), Daniel Farson, then a young freelance journalist and soon to be one of Britain's first TV stars, wrote a couple of articles for the Daily Mail, not only acclaiming the prodigy ("I have just met my first genius. His name is Colin Wilson") but also announcing that he was the leading light of a new postwar generation. Now, in my 60s, how do I explain it; what was it about The Outsider? Firstly, the naivety, earnestness and honesty of the young Colin Wilson appealed. I was pretty confused about life and I suppose a good deal of projection was involved; I took on the mantle of outsider as I felt I didn't 'fit in' - I suspect this was true of other fans. I've since read accounts of people regarding the book as somehow 'unhealthy' (almost demonic) - but perhaps this is because it encourages questioning accepted mores!

The Colin Wilson Collection at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom – This is Wilson's bibliographer Colin Stanley's collection of books, articles, manuscripts, letters, photographs and assorted ephemera now at the University of Nottingham. Regularly updated by Stanley. Now contains, by arrangement with the Colin Wilson Estate, about 80 original manuscripts. There was a time when to convict a thinker of absurdity was to place him under an inteltellectual obligation to rise to the argument or change his position. At the very least, it put him in the shadow of impropriety. Today he can escape the obligation and get out from under the shadow by calmly making a philosophy of his predicament. Existentialism as a philosophy of the absurd is the 20th century’s gift to literary men and critics who are terribly excited by ideas but resent the discipline ncessary to analyze them. Mr. Colin Wilson is caught up in this excitement about existentialist profundity. One can plead for him the extenuations of youth and a desultory philosophical education. What is truly astonishing is that he has infected with his enthusiasm for the dramatic and the murky some English critics from whom one had expected more intellectual sophistication. The Outsider is great. Much of the book are things that any serious reader will say the very not so serious comment of 'duh' to, and there is the sense of 'preaching to the converted' (although there is no preaching here), but that's ok with me since a good portion of my life has been being submersed in subcultures that preach to the converted believing that their words just might be able to transcend the actual audience to an audience that needs to hear the message (for the record I just thought this now at 11:22 AM on Sunday January 20th, 2008, and I wish I had thought it sometime ten years ago to counter a lukewarm review I had received from MRR for the eighth issue of my zine. A review that had accused me of preaching to the converted.). But anyway, this book could only have been produced by an 'outsider' himself. Someone standing on the edges of popular and academic writing, but not entrenched in either camp at all. The book was one of the first fruits of a genre of pop philosophy that has since produced some first-rate stuff. Yet it is not a form of writing I can think of without embarrassment. I was once browsing in an Oxford bookshop when I came across a display of books offering simplified accounts of various subjects: Physics Made Simple, Astronomy Made Simple and so on. I caught a glimpse of a friend of mine standing before the display, a distinguished Oxford philosopher, who was leafing idly through the Philosophy Made Simple volume. Seizing the chance of a jest, I crept up behind him and murmured in his ear "That's a bit difficult for you, isn't it?" He swung round in alarm, and my first thought was that he had had cosmetic surgery. But it was not my friend at all. It was a complete stranger. Muttering a few words of apology, I scampered out of the store. Wilson was also known for what he termed "Existential Criticism", which suggested that a work of art should not just be judged by the principles of literary criticism or theory alone but also by what it has to say, in particular about the meaning and purpose of existence. In his pioneering essay for Chicago Review (Volume 13, no. 2, 1959, pp.152–181) he wrote:Wilson, who never attended college but was an omnivorous reader, found himself drawn to the experience of certain key figures of the modern world: Vincent Van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and T. E. Lawrence. They are Outsiders, men whose lives of undisputed genius and often self-destructive violence set them apart from the ordinary. All stood for truth, but the sensitivity and awareness that enabled them to discover the truth also caused them great suffering. All had low “pain thresholds” (a term Wilson borrowed from William James) which prevented them from slipping into the spiritual sleepiness that pervaded their civilization.

Feldman, Gene and Gartneberg, Max (editors) (1958). Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men . New York: Citadel Press. {{ cite book}}: |author= has generic name ( help) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link)Spurgeon, Brad. Colin Wilson: philosopher of optimism, (2006), Manchester: Michael Butterworth ISBN 0-9552672-0-X

That autumn, I spent some time as a writer in residence at the extramural department of an American college in Majorca. I was living in Deya, the same village as the poet Robert Graves. When I asked Graves’s advice on writing a book on the occult, it came in one word: “Don’t.” Dossor, Howard F. The Philosophy of Colin Wilson: three perspectives (1996), Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 0-946650-58-6 Coulthard, Philip. The Lurker at the Indifference Threshold: Feral Phenomenology for the 21st Century (2019) Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 9780995597822Significantly, Wilson's most prominent enthusiasts were all "Mandarins" - bellettrists who were younger members or descendants of the Bloomsbury group, upper-middle-class and upper-middle-aged, high priests of high art who worshipped at the altar of modernism and all things sophisticated and French. Wilson dropped all the right names - foreign, highbrow, impressively daunting on both counts - and, with his vague proclamations about the spiritual crisis in modern society and the alienation of his genius Outsiders, pressed all the right buttons. Wilson's defects – enough to undo him as a thinker – were an imperfect analytical ability and a protective conceit that left him virtually impervious to the rational or intuitive arguments of others. Yet the literary establishment's handling of his first books remains one of the more memorable intellectual disgraces of our time. He said, "I would like my life to be a lesson in how to stand alone and to thrive on it." Wilson then engages in some detailed case studies of artists who failed in this task and try to understand their weakness – which is either intellectual, of the body or of the emotions. The final chapter is Wilson's attempt at a "great synthesis" in which he justifies his belief that western philosophy is afflicted with a needless pessimistic fallacy. As a child he was so introverted, so uninterested in other people, he might have been diagnosed today with Asperger's syndrome. 'I wouldn't be surprised. I wasn't cut off from other people, but, as I keep saying in The Outsider, other people were the trouble. They kept intruding into my world whether I wanted them to or not, because what they did was to drag me away from the world of ideas and abstractions I wanted to be in. When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books. I felt as Axel did in the Villiers de L'Isle-Adam play - 'As for living, our servants can do that for us.' But that all changed when I was 16 and discovered Rabelais. Suddenly I had that wonderful feeling - my God, life is good after all!'

I escaped to Cornwall with my girlfriend Joy, and in due course we started a family. But the intense hostility remained, and my books were often not even reviewed. It was obviously going to take a long time for all the silly publicityto be forgotten - it was still dogging me in the late 1960s. A review in the London Evening News was headlined "A major writer – and he's 24". Philip Toynbee, of the Observer, called it "exhaustive, luminously intelligent". Other critics followed suit. The book gave Wilson a celebrity and a status close to that of a prophet, even in tabloid newspapers. That was in 1956 – "how extraordinary my fame should coincide with Elvis Presley's," he noted. The Outsider sold more than 20,000 copies in its first two months. Life will always gall us, but we have to STAND TALL to make it to the finish line in One Piece - something we ALL pray for.Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller in the crush outside the Comedy Theatre for the first night of A View From A Bridge. Alas, as it turned out, Colin Wilson wasn't even a flash in the pan so much as an accident in the kitchen sink, and his preposterous rise and ludicrous fall served only to humiliate an already embattled literary establishment and further discredit their devotion to modernism and all things European. Stanley, Colin. The Nature of Freedom' and other essays (1990), Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 0-946650-17-9