The outsider book by Colin Wilson

[JasonPalmer]

Someone recently mentioned this book on a post and I can't find it.

I read the outsider and other books by Colin Wilson after meeting him via a philosophy for all talk he gave.

Have you read the outsider ? Do you think your an outsider ?

[smittims]

I read 'The Outsider' itself long after I had read opinions of it, by among others, perhaps surprisingly, Ralph Vaughan Williams, who gamely tackled it when it was published. It generated quite a bit of controversy when it first appeared (Gollancz, 1956), though Wilson himself, perhaps a little disingenuously, claimed years later to be surprised, as all he had done was recast into readable form some ideas of 20th-century philosophy his readers hadn't read.

A good critique of it was written by Kingsley Amis, who brought his own trenchant common sense into the argument:

'It is a persona that many of us revert to in our more shamelessly adolescent moments. A lot of people get a bit fed up from time to time, but they do not go around behaving like Stephen Dedalus. To value Mr Pickwick higher than Raskolnikov, to try to be a bit pleasant occasionally, are aims worth making an effort for.' (republished in 'What became of Jane Austen, and other questions': Jonathan Cape, 1970, Panther , 1972)

While mentioning Wilson it's only fair to cite a later book by him which I much enjoyed : 'Brandy of the Damned' (a.k.a. 'Colin Wilson on Music') the fruit of his years of record-collecting. It contains many memorable ideas which have stimulated me over fifty years (whether or not one agrees with them ) :

'Mozart... had his difficulties; but he did not create any of them himself. He saw the dark spots onthe universe, but he was never tempted to take a paintbrush and add a few of his own. Our century would produce a healthier art if it took Mozart for its model instead of Beethoven.'

'We mght hope that one day there will be a really great English composer who will show in his music some of the England that Wordsworth and Blake show in their poettry. Until that time, Elgar is about the best we have to offer - and let us make no mistake about this, he is plenty to be grateful for.'

[JasonPalmer]

Oooo that sounds like a good book to read, have made a post it note to myself to keep in my pocket for next time I pop in the library so can request it.

[Serial_Apologist]

"Ritual in the Dark", written and published around the same time as "The Outsider", and which I bought based on the front cover + blurb to impress my horror genre-struck 15-year old school contemporaries, was I think his best novel. Touted by himself along with "The Outsider" as having been written while sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath, it told a story - which would not go down well with prospected publishers today - of the solitary central character, Gerard Sorme, getting picked up by a posh gay man at the factual Diaghilev exhibition in the London of (?) 1956, and introduced to the, er, more sophisticated end of boho Soho. Picture postwar London and that iconic image for Strand Cigarettes of the trilby hatted anti hero stereotype man in the gaslit rain-swept nocturnal back street lighting up if you weren't around till later. A series of sadistic "Ripper"-like murders are taking place at this time. The wealthy gay takes Sorme in in his swank Kensington flat, uninterested in a sexual relationship but increasingly revealing himself as a warped embodiment of the Wilson's Outsider philosophy - fine until it's spin on Nietzsche pretexts sadism and even murder as exemplifying Will to Power: an easy enough mistake to make - putting Sorme, who comes to like and to an extent identify with his host - to state the obvious - in an invidious position.

So - confession time - Colin Wilson was to be truthful an important bridge for me, and probably quite a few others at that time - between Existentialist philosophy (or rather CW's bowdlerised versions of it) and dialectics' broadening the possible perspectives waiting in the wings to be brought into the picture. I have his "Encyclopaedia of Murder"; also "Brandy of the Damned" under its original paperbook edition and title, in which he effectively (or not) projects his individualist "I shall overcome" philosophy onto modernist spiritual dyspepsia and post-Romantic pessimism in general, citing in this instance composers he saw exemplifying the decline and death of the Dream of Romanticism, but also English artistic and philosophical philistinism as a sub order sideshow. For the latter he would possibly go down well with some on this forum who overlook or downplay class and its cultural ramifications.

[jayne lee wilson]

I read 'The Outsider' itself long after I had read opinions of it, by among others, perhaps surprisingly, Ralph Vaughan Williams, who gamely tackled it when it was published. It generated quite a bit of controversy when it first appeared (Gollancz, 1956), though Wilson himself, perhaps a little disingenuously, claimed years later to be surprised, as all he had done was recast into readable form some ideas of 20th-century philosophy his readers hadn't read.

A good critique of it was written by Kingsley Amis, who brought his own trenchant common sense into the argument:

'It is a persona that many of us revert to in our more shamelessly adolescent moments. A lot of people get a bit fed up from time to time, but they do not go around behaving like Stephen Dedalus. To value Mr Pickwick higher than Raskolnikov, to try to be a bit pleasant occasionally, are aims worth making an effort for.' (republished in 'What became of Jane Austen, and other questions': Jonathan Cape, 1970, Panther , 1972)

While mentioning Wilson it's only fair to cite a later book by him which I much enjoyed : 'Brandy of the Damned' (a.k.a. 'Colin Wilson on Music') the fruit of his years of record-collecting. It contains many memorable ideas which have stimulated me over fifty years (whether or not one agrees with them ) :

'Mozart... had his difficulties; but he did not create any of them himself. He saw the dark spots onthe universe, but he was never tempted to take a paintbrush and add a few of his own. Our century would produce a healthier art if it took Mozart for its model instead of Beethoven.'

'We mght hope that one day there will be a really great English composer who will show in his music some of the England that Wordsworth and Blake show in their poettry. Until that time, Elgar is about the best we have to offer - and let us make no mistake about this, he is plenty to be grateful for.'

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......

[Serial_Apologist]

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......

Oh but he did - it's just that now so much of what CW wrote in the early 60s seems utterly cringeworthy and ill-thought through, Since reading your above post I've tried re-reading what CW wrote on the three figureheads you cite, and, believe me, you would not want me to bother reproducing any of them.

[RichardB]

'The Outsider' (...) Kingsley Amis

a plague on both their houses!

[Serial_Apologist]

a plague on both their houses!

Yesss indeed!

[smittims]

Hello, Jayne, to be fair to Wilson, I was quoting him out of context. If one reads the whole passage (too long to quote) I think it's clear.

He was contrasting Mozart with Beethoven, who he considered made too much of his own problems. And although he does examine other British composers, he claims that English music has a 'small beer' quality about it , i.e. limited in scope. As a postscript he praises Simpson and Stevenson for showing signs of the revival he looked for. And as for VW, he was much underrated in the early 1960s compared with now, as I well recall, so Wilson was in the mainstream there.

Of course one can disagree. I did at the time, especially his naming Wagner as a 'minor composer'. He made it clear that they were his own spontaneous opinions. I found it stimulating to read, perhaps for the first time , a writer who upset my established view of things (and one can be very established at sixteen!).

[Mal]

What on earth does the paragraph about Mozart mean?

Yes. Even the first sentence is questionable. Didn't Mozart create several difficulties for himself? For example, living above his means? Working too hard?

[Mal]

Someone recently mentioned this book on a post and I can't find it.

I read the outsider and other books by Colin Wilson after meeting him via a philosophy for all talk he gave.

Have you read the outsider ? Do you think your an outsider ?

"The Outsider is a ragbag of modish nihilism, ranging from Camus, Sartre, Hermann Hesse and TE Lawrence to Blake, Van Gogh, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. TS Eliot rubs shoulders with Vaslav Nijinsky, and Ernest Hemingway sits cheek by jowl with Franz Kafka. Most of the figures it deals with have absurdly little in common with one another. It is just that the pure Romantic cliche of its main argument – that some artists feel alienated from mainstream society – is nebulous enough to apply to almost anyone who lifts a paintbrush or a pen, including at a stretch the anonymous author of the Rupert Bear annual. It is the kind of book you might expect from a gloomy autodidact who had been locked for some months in a second-hand bookshop." - Terry Eagleton

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/04/book-changed-me-colin-wilson-outsider

[smittims]

Who's Terry Eagleton?

Seriously, I think Wilson would be amused to see that he'd got someone's back up as much as that. One can almost see Mr Eagleton dancing with rage. Why did he care so much? It's only a book.

[JasonPalmer]

Indeed, just a book. It sold well when first released and always been in print, people come to ideas from different seeds scattered amongst the wind. Have learnt a lot from reading philosophy now magazine. Recently stopped my subscription, may start it again later in the year. It all good.

[Serial_Apologist]

Who's Terry Eagleton?

Seriously, I think Wilson would be amused to see that he'd got someone's back up as much as that. One can almost see Mr Eagleton dancing with rage. Why did he care so much? It's only a book.

The normally perceptive Mr Eagleton was wrong to dismiss Wilson's "outsider" pitch on his chosen figureheads as pessimistic - quite the opposite, in fact: the emphasis was very much on critiquing defeatism and pessimism, of which there was a lot, apparently, among the British intelligentsia and arts of the 1950s. In their place Wilson, in line with Nietszche, adduces the power of ego as antidote; but this was not quite what Hesse, Sartre & co in their different perspectives on the common problem were considering: the isolated "soul" as indicative of how capitalism contextualises, shapes and reinforces modern-day consciousness. Wilson does not do this because he did not see capitalist relations (in their widest sense) as problematic - overcoming stagnation and defeatism was for him essentially a matter of individual choice, not political will or social power; to this end there was a malignant thread of male sexuality at its worst running through much of his work - women don't get much of a look-in other than as vehicles on "his" route to self realisation.

[JasonPalmer]

I enjoyed reading his book about the occult, one on ufos and the sphinx and Atlantis. Entertaining stuff.