The outsider book by Colin Wilson

[RichardB]

The normally perceptive Mr Eagleton

He was certainly right about the nebulosity of Wilson's rounding up of a random bunch of suspects. And of course this is the result of his lack of political awareness. If he'd had that awareness he would have realised that actually most of us are outsiders in capitalist society, whether or not we are involved in artistic activity. The idea that there's something special about artists that allows them to relate differently to society from everyone else is surely a highly conservative and elitist idea. I'm put in mind of Steven Jay Gould's remark: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

[Ein Heldenleben]

What on earth does the paragraph about Mozart mean?

And even at the time of its publication (1964) there's no excuse for omitting to mention VW, Britten, Tippett and Holst in any list of Great British Composers who may measure up to Blake or Wordsworth or any other great poets......

Yes indeed Wilfrid Mellers in his book Vaughan Williams and the Vision Of Albion places RVW squarely in the English Visionary tradition of Blake and Bunyan. Colin Wilson didn’t know what he was talking about.

[ChandlersFord]

I have a copy of The Outsider, but have yet to read it.

It seems to have been very much a book of its time. Didn't Phillip Hope Wallace's (rave) review turn it into an ephemeral best-seller?

I have read Ritual In The Dark, which I enjoyed but found unsatisfying. I remember it particularly because it's one of the few books that I've actually 'lost' - I left it in a g/f's house after we'd split up and couldn't be bothered to go back and reclaim it. I've often wondered how she might've felt, discovering the rather garish Panther paperback cover amongst all her scholarly tomes about Second Wave Feminism.

I do remember the hero of RitD was a particular fan of Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony. Curious, and never having heard it at that point, I went out and bought the Karajan recording.

Wilson wrote a helluva lot - he had a vast ego ('You and I are the only authors of real significance to have emerged since WW2', he once informed (a not very flattered) John Fowles) and he liked to keep busy. But his obsession with murder led to a lot of rather pointless coffee table books and paperbacks whose principal market seems to be depraved teenage boys.

Props to him for admitting he despised Jane Austen, though - I can't stand her, either, and don't get what all the fuss is about.

His 1964 book on Rasputin (an obvious Wilson subject, if ever there was one) is rather good and worth reading, if you can find a copy (I nabbed one for about 10p a few weeks back).

[Serial_Apologist]

I have a copy of The Outsider, but have yet to read it.

It seems to have been very much a book of its time. Didn't Phillip Hope Wallace's (rave) review turn it into an ephemeral best-seller?

I have read Ritual In The Dark, which I enjoyed but found unsatisfying. I remember it particularly because it's one of the few books that I've actually 'lost' - I left it in a g/f's house after we'd split up and couldn't be bothered to go back and reclaim it. I've often wondered how she might've felt, discovering the rather garish Panther paperback cover amongst all her scholarly tomes about Second Wave Feminism.

I do remember the hero of RitD was a particular fan of Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony. Curious, and never having heard it at that point, I went out and bought the Karajan recording.

Wilson wrote a helluva lot - he had a vast ego ('You and I are the only authors of real significance to have emerged since WW2', he once informed (a not very flattered) John Fowles) and he liked to keep busy. But his obsession with murder led to a lot of rather pointless coffee table books and paperbacks whose principal market seems to be depraved teenage boys.

Props to him for admitting he despised Jane Austen, though - I can't stand her, either, and don't get what all the fuss is about.

His 1964 book on Rasputin (an obvious Wilson subject, if ever there was one) is rather good and worth reading, if you can find a copy (I nabbed one for about 10p a few weeks back).

I was undoubtedly one of the majority of depraved, sexually repressed and deprived teenagers to have been at least partially attracted to Colin Wilson by the lurid book covers - those were pre-feminist times too, remember - only to discover a kernel of interest I would not have otherwise have, namely philosophy - and particularly Existentialism, albeit in bowdlerised form. Dad threw the book back at me with the words, "Philosophy? That's for people with nothing better to think about. What on earth is the point of a lifetime spent wondering why we are here?"

[smittims]

What intrigued me about Mr Eagleton's response was its intensity, reading almost liek personal resentment. I wondered if Wilson's book had uncovered something within him that he didn't like being uncovered. It happens.

[Ein Heldenleben]

What intrigued me about Mr Eagleton's response was its intensity, reading almost liek personal resentment. I wondered if Wilson's book had uncovered something within him that he didn't like being uncovered. It happens.

Mr Eagleton is famous for his vividly expressed views. It has nothing to with anything “within” him except in so far as “everything “ is to do with something “within” us . Terry was (still is) a Marxist in a University where Marxists were about as rare as white rhinos. He knows what its like to really be an outsider.

[smittims]

Ah, thanks, Heldenleben. I genuinely didn't know who he was.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Ah, thanks, Heldenleben. I genuinely didn't know who he was.

He’s an English literary critic and for years was an Oxford Don at Wadham College which is (was? ) one of the leftier colleges with a higher proportion of state students. He must have taught thousands of undergrads over the years. He was one of the first academics to take up Literary theory at a time when it was pretty unfashionable esp at Oxford .His developing relationship with it would fill a library. There’s a typically iconoclastic quote from him in his rather good Wiki entry (wonder whether he had a hand in it ?)


“For the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.[23]”

[smittims]

I can see now that the pugnacious style was simply his way, rather than a spontaneous reaction. A bit like Hans Keller, though one wouldn't expect Keller to say that about football, for which he had an absorbing interest.

I wonder of Hans read 'the Outsider' and what he thought about it.

At any rate it's been interesting to see this old book generate so much discussion here.

[Mal]

"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” does not believe anyone is responsible for the nature of nature but he is nonetheless in revolt against it. He is a man who, having given up his belief in the existence of God, is still lacerating himself over the problem of evil, unaware that there is no problem of evil to a naturalist but only problems of evil, some remediable, some not; it is not usually possible to determine which is which until human beings pit their courage and intelligence against the obstacles in the struggle to solve them."

"For him the most fearful of all evils is death, although if he were consistent this is what he should really believe about birth. And since he is unable to accept the evidence that death is a natural event which like other events has its grandeur and misery and uses in life, he can see in death only a cosmic conspiracy against his ego. In the end he finds a haven either in a mystical religion or a political mystique which bleeds him of his frenzy at the price of his responsibility, or he goes to a lonely grave without understanding either the world or himself."

- Sidney Hook https://www.commentary.org/articles/...-colin-wilson/

"Mr. Wilson was neither a dramatist like Mr. Osborne nor a novelist like Mr. Amis. He did not like them personally or artistically, nor they him. (Mr. Amis once tried to push Mr. Wilson off a roof.)"

“My ambition was to develop the atomic bomb,” Mr. Wilson later said. “When this was done in 1945, I lost interest in science.”

"“The police called on me during their investigations into the Yorkshire Ripper murders,” Mr. Wilson said ... “I assumed they wanted my advice. In fact, I was a suspect.”

"“Sartre’s feeling was that life is meaningless, that everything is pure chance, that life is a useless passion,” Mr. Wilson told The Toronto Star in 1998. “My basic feeling has always been the opposite, that mankind is on the verge of an evolutionary leap to a higher stage.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/books/colin-wilson-author-of-the-outsider-dies-at-82.html

So what's this leap, then? Does the Nijinsky chapter tell us?

[smittims]

Many people believed that humanity was on the brink of a wonderful age before August 1914. 1998 is a long time ago in terms of what's happened since. 9/11 and its aftermath, the banking crisis, Brexit, Trump and Johnson and then the pandemic and the government response, have all got in the way of what might have been Wilson's evolutionary leap.

[Sir Velo]

Many people believed that humanity was on the brink of a wonderful age before August 1914.

Amazing how people can delude themselves isn't it? A quick trawl through the first decade of the 20th century reveals the following petty little squabbles; second Boer War; Boxer Rebellion; Russo-Japanese War; Ottoman disintegration; first Balkan war etc!

[smittims]

Oh quite so, and things were pretty tense in Britain too, with the Irish crisis. But for many in England (and remember they didn't have instant world-wide news as we do today) it really was a golden age. think of the Bloomsberries going to the Russian Ballet, etc. Sir Joseph Beecham's seasons of Russia Opera, with Chaliapin in the British pemiere of Prince Igor and Tommy conducting. Even prominent socialists such as Leonard Woolf beleived that the First World War stigfled a big step forward in civilisation.