The Essential Colin Wilson (2 page)

I had been on two lecture tours of America in the early 1960s, and the need to repeat my ideas over and over again had the effect of enabling me to see new perspectives. I made yet one more attempt to summarize all I had done so far in a small volume called
The New Existentialism
. I argued that the philosophy we call existentialism is actually 'Romanticism Mark Two'. The Romantics felt that the human spirit is engaged in a hopeless battle with a hostile world, and that the end is bound to be defeat and despair. The existentialists—Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Camus—started from the sane position, but arrived at a slightly less gloomy conclusion: man is free, he has a certain power of choice, even if life is totally meaningless. Hemingway summarized it in the phrase 'A man can be destroyed but not defeated'. My own feeling was that I had no wish to be either defeated or destroyed: there
had
to be another answer. Hence my attempt to create a more optimistic form of existentialism—a kind of 'Romanticism Mark Three'. This, I would say, is still a fairly good summary of my basic aim. The present book includes the central chapter of
The New Existentialism
.

At this point I found myself exploring the problem in a new direction. I was asked by an American publisher to write a book about 'the occult'. Ever since childhood I had been interested in the paranormal, and had explored it in books like
Rasputin
and
The Man Without a Shadow
. But I had never felt that it had any bearing on this question of 'absurd good news'. Now I began a systematic study of 'psychic powers' and I saw I had been mistaken. In the past ten thousand years or so, man has deliberately
narrowed
his consciousness in an effort to achieve the efficiency necessary to survive. One of the powers he has suppressed is the faculty we call 'second sight', and the example of Peter Hurkos—who regained the power when he fell off a ladder and smashed his skull—struck me as specially significant. In narrowing his faculties, man has also suppressed those states of 'cosmic consciousness', heightened awareness, experienced by mystics like Boehme and Blake. These faculties can, to some extent, be regained by means of drugs such as mescalin and LSD: but they merely put back the clock of human evolution to an earlier stage. It was clear to me that we can regain these powers by another method: by the deliberate intensification of consciousness by intellectual and spiritual disciplines. Many people have achieved accidental glimpses of such states—Proust, for example, experienced such a state when he tasted a cake dipped in herb tea. This heightened power of perception I called 'Faculty X', and the concept is explored in the first chapter of
The Occult
, included herein.

Many readers of the earlier books must have felt that this preoccupation with 'the occult' was a change of direction. I knew differently: that it was a breakthrough into a new field of exploration. There is a direct connection between psychic powers, mystical awareness, and the control over heightened states of awareness achieved by Gurdjieff. I made this connection clear in the introductory chapter of
Mysteries
, before launching into a more general study of 'cosmic forces' and man's ability to 'tune in' to them.

I was writing the last section of
Mysteries
when I came upon
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
by Julian Jaynes, and for the first time grasped the full significance of split-brain research. I had always been aware that one of the basic problems of consciousness is that man has two selves inside his head and that, as I put it in 'The Strange Story of Modern Philosophy', 'the left side of the mind doesn't know what the right side is doing'. But I had not realized that my intuition was so literally true—that we literally have another 'self' living in the right hemisphere of the brain, and that the person I call 'me' lives in the left hemisphere. There was no space in
Mysteries
to explore this insight to the full; yet I could see that it provided the unifying principle I had always been looking for. The existence of the two halves of the brain explained poetic inspiration and 'psychic powers'. I explored the implications of split-brain physiology for the first time in a little book called
Frankenstein's Castle
, written for a friend, Robin Campbell, who was just launching his own publishing firm. Not long after this I encountered in Finland a man who seemed to have achieved a remarkable breakthrough in learning to make active use of his right brain; the result was
Access to Inner Worlds, The Story of Brad Absetz
. In both these books I feel that I have come close to a definitive solution of the problem I first propounded in
The Outsider
. Lack of space decided me against printing all but a brief extract from
Frankenstein's Castle
in the present volume, but their basic ideas are summarized in the piece on 'The Laurel and Hardy Theory of Consciousness', as well as in the Schumacher Lecture 'Peak Experience'.

The Outsider
was a by-product of my first novel,
Ritual in the Dark
. Ever since then I have continued to write fiction as well as non-fiction. At the age of fourteen I was impressed by Shaw's assertion that the artists of the future would have to be artist-philosophers. In many cases there is a specific link between my novels and works of non-fiction—as between
Ritual in the Dark
and
The Outsider
, or
The Man Without a Shadow
and
Origins of the Sexual Impulse
. I have written novels for two reasons: because I enjoy writing them and because I feel that there are certain things that can be expressed in a novel that cannot be expressed in non-fiction. But the connection remains close; the germ of two novels—
The Mind Parasites
and
The Black Room—
can be found in The New Existentialism, while the preoccupation with brain physiology in
The Philosopher's Stone
anticipates my discovery of split-brain research by ten years. I would have liked to include many more extracts from the novels in this book; but it was a question of choosing between fiction and non-fiction, and the non-fiction undoubtedly expresses my main ideas with greater economy. (After all, economy is not the main concern of the novelist; an 'economical' version of
War and Peace
would be a bore, while Somerset Maugham's attempt to cut
The Brothers Karamazov
to economic proportions was a disaster.) But I am glad to reprint central sections of
The Black Room
and
The Mind Parasites,
while I have always had a sneaking fondness for the Uncle Sam section of
The World of Violence
, which expresses the essentially self-destructive nature of romanticism.

All this left very little space for one section of my output to which I attach considerable importance—the studies in criminology. I have always seen crime as one of the more interesting forms of romantic revolt, rather lower on the scale than Uncle Sam's determination to have nothing more to do with the world, yet allied to it in spirit. In many cases it can be seen as a crude attempt to achieve a kind of mystical self-fulfilment; looking at the corpse of a girl he had just strangled and raped, Reginald Christie commented: 'Once again I experienced that quiet, peaceful thrill. I had no regrets.'

The criminal is significant because he shows us what is wrong with all of us. His approach to the problems of existence is so crude and simplistic that the stupidest person has no difficulty seeing why it doesn't work. The criminal lacks subtlety; he lacks complexity; he lacks insight. But then, so do we all. Moreover, if we ask ourselves what went wrong with the lives of so many men of genius, we can see that the answer lies in that same 'criminal' tendency: a certain spoiltness, a certain childishness, a failure to control negative emotions. Dante's bitterness betrays a tendency to self-pity. Shakespeare's pessimism hints at a manic-depressive streak. His friend Ben Jonson was a braggart with more than a touch of paranoia. Balzac was a spendthrift and a show-off. Dostoevsky was a compulsive gambler. Proust was a sadist who enjoyed torturing rats. H. G. Wells was an incorrigible seducer. In their classic work,
The Criminal Personality
, Yochelson and Samenow describe the criminal as fundamentally weak, lazy, vain, self-pitying and capable of almost endless self-deception. There are very few human beings who do not answer to that description. Criminality is mankind's 'original sin'. Fortunately, man's astonishing 'creativity is its 'redemption'.
A Criminal History of Mankind
is my most comprehensive attempt to explore this insight. It is an attempt to demonstrate that both criminality and creativity can only be understood as a part of man's total evolutionary pattern. The book that follows is, in the last analysis, my own attempt to understand this pattern.

Written for the Pan paperback edition of
The Outsider
in 1976

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 girl-friend 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 the First World War. 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 had 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.