Intellectual Thriller

The self-taught son of a boot-and-shoe-machine operator is causing a run on critical superlatives in highbrow London's literary marketplace. "One of the most remarkable first books I have read," wrote Critic Cyril Connolly in the Sunday Times when Colin Wilson's The Outsider was published a month ago. Said Philip Toynbee, writing in the Observer: "The Outsider is an exhaustive and luminously intelligent study of a representative theme of our time . . . truly astounding." Part of the critical hubbub rose from the fact that Author Wilson, just turned 25, shows a staggeringly erudite grasp of the works and lives of Bernard Shaw, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, William Blake, George Fox, H. G. Wells, Henri Barbusse, Hermann Hesse, Van Gogh, T. E. Lawrence, Nijinsky, Sartre, Camus, Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Gurdjieff and Sri Ramakrishna, not to mention many lesser figures. But what makes The Outsider a compelling intellectual thriller is that Author Wilson uses bits and pieces of these men and their literary progeny as pigments for his portrait of a kind of invisible man, an invisible man who has shaped and may reshape the image that 20th century man has of himself and his crucial dilemmas. It is a pity of sorts that U.S. readers, short of ordering the book from England, will not be able to meet The Outsider until it is published in the U.S. next winter.

Life Is Death. Wilson's invisible man, the Outsider, may be described as a blend of existentialist hero, religious man without God, and prophet or saint-in-embryo. His dilemma might be described as that of a man living under the conviction of sin who cannot accept traditional Christianity. In the lines of Eliot's Ash Wednesday:

Will the veiled sister between the slender

Yew trees pray for those who offend her

And are terrified and cannot surrender

Indeed, The Outsider is a logically untenable book unless it is read in the light of Author Wilson's conviction that modern man "needs a new religion." But granting that controversial premise, Wilson's development of the nature and problems of the Outsider is consistently fascinating.

Superficially, says Wilson, the Outsider is just a social misfit, a "hole-in-corner man." In novels he sits in his room by the hour, spends days observing other men's lives. In real life an Outsider type like Van Gogh lived 29 of his 36 years before he knew himself to be a painter. In a sense, the Outsider is a man waiting for his authentic vocation. But why does he turn in disgust from the "practical" house, wife-and children-minded world of his "bourgeois" (no Marxist connotations) fellow man? For Wilson, Nijinsky summed it up in his diary when he wrote: "The whole life of my wife and of all mankind is death." To Nijinsky and his fellow Outsiders, the average man is drifting on a tide of trivia, self-deception, automatic, day-to-day actions that never reach any significant "level of intensity." Preoccupied with his seemingly orderly daily round, the average man loses touch with the supreme reality of death, according to Wilson, and with the sense of chaos that Santayana says is "perhaps at the bottom of everything."

Returning God's Ticket. Facing death and chaos head on, the Outsider is heaven-bent, one might say, on finding a transcending meaning and purpose for human existence. In varying ways, he is driven to ask the questions Tolstoy put to himself in his soth year in A Confession: "What is life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there any meaning in life that can overcome inevitable death?" As he tries to cope with these questions, the Outsider's horizon clouds over with the problem of evil. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, reduced it to its classic essence, the tortured cry of a single innocent child. If the order of the universe depends on that cry, argues Ivan with his brother Alyosha, "I don't accept God's world," and "I most respectfully return him the entrance ticket." Neither Dostoevsky nor other Outsiders, according to Wilson, are rebels without a cause; they want desperately to find a "way of salvation" that will allow them to accept God's world and man's fate.

Not Horror but Joy. For .most Outsiders, such moments of acceptance and reconciliation come, if at all, in fragments of visionary and mystical experience. Such a moment came to T. E. Lawrence in the desert among the Bedouins, when he visualized God as "pure mind." It came to George Fox, who tried to institutionalize it in the Quaker movement, whose members were to be guided by an "inner light." It came to Nijinsky as he made the final entry in his diary: "My little girl is singing: 'Ah ah ah ah.' I do not understand its meaning, but I feel what she wants to say. She wants to say that everything . . . is not horror, but joy." This brings Wilson close, as he acknowledges, to Nietzsche's Superman, the man who can say: I accept everything. As for Nietzsche, Wilson likens him to "a big gun with some trifling mechanical fault that explodes and kills all the crew." (Nietzsche's judgment of himself: "I am one of those machines that sometimes explode.")

Top god--the god of hope--in Wilson's personal pantheon is George Bernard Shaw. Shaw, he finds, recognized that despite poverty, horror, sickness, injustice and death, life pronounces its ultimate comment and blessing on life by indefatigably and irresistibly re-creating itself. While this is a philosophical "happy ending," it sounds suspiciously like a chaos of fecundity, something that scarcely bothered Shaw (or Wilson either, apparently) since the sage of Ayot St. Lawrence had a bumptious faith that the Life Force, as he called it, was busily breeding a race of pure, disembodied intellects or super-Shaws.

The Wilsonian Way. Colin Wilson has a trace of the original Shavian bumptiousness himself. Within two weeks after The Outsider appeared, he announced, in turning down a bid to join the Shaw Society: "I shall leave a clause in my will ordering instant extermination of anyone who dares to set up Wilson Societies." Any prospective Wilsonians will find their hero a proper Outsider. He lives in a two-room London slum flat overlooking a garden of weeds, feeds on sausages, beer and chocolate biscuits, and sleeps on an inflatable green rubber mattress. Wilson is tall and thin, favors black-and-white turtleneck sweaters, beaver-colored corduroy pants and brown leather sandals. His pale blue eyes stare through hornrimmed glasses at neat rows of worn, secondhand books and a door covered with hieroglyphics and an Einstein formula. Chemistry, atomic physics and the theory of relativity were his first loves. When he was 14, he wrote 50,000 words in "an attempt to summarize all the scientific knowledge of humanity."

In a Sleeping-Bag. Leaving school with the bare equivalent of a U.S. high school diploma, Wilson went to work variously as a laborer, mortuary attendant, cafe waiter and junior tax collector. Like Shaw and Marx, he found his real university in the British Museum. An outdoor-loving Outsider, he bedded down in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath for nearly a year, biked daily to the museum to read and write. He dashed off The Outsider in four months, interrupting a projected three-part novel about Jack the Ripper ("who is really a sort of equivalent to Nijinsky"). Also in prospect: a sequel to The Outsider, "into which I shall weave my ideas about a new religion."

The Outsider is scheduled for U.S. publication by Houghton Mifflin. Even if it does not arouse quite the excitement that it has in London (four printings sold out in three weeks), it must be recognized as a brilliant and unusual analysis of the pessimistic tradition in civilized thought. The youthful flaw in the book is its implicit rejection of some classic non-Outsider modes of coming to grips with the meaning of life and the universe--purgation, through pity and terror in Greek tragedy; reconciliation, through the restoration of social and moral order in Shakespearean drama; redemption, through grace in Christian faith.

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