On Monday May 28th, the day that the young lady set foot on England’s shore for the first time, the 24 year old Colin Wilson woke up to find himself famous. Had she seen the Sunday papers, as she waited on the ship, she might have noticed gushing reviews, “A MAJOR WRITER AND HE IS ONLY TWENTY-FOUR” ran one headline. He was described by the influential editor and literary critic Cyril Connolly as “a young man of twenty-four who has produced one of the most remarkable books I have read in a long time.” Wilson’s rise, coming at the same moment as the play Look Back in Anger by John Osborne had gained critical acclaim, offered the press a new generation of post-war writers after the fallow war years. Both Wilson and Osborne were shunted into a new literary grouping, that seemed to embrace anyone young (or youngish, John Braine, author of Room at the Top, was 35 when he found fame). Labelled The Angry Young Men they were supposed to be working or lower-middle class individuals (almost all were men) and be disillusioned with the class system, social norms and those in authority. Not that Wilson, who did come from a working class background, had much in common with Osborne, whose background was affluent enough to allow him a private school education (until he was expelled). Wilson had little time for the play, which he saw as defeatist, “an outpouring of self-pity and bad temper” is how he describes it in his second autobiography. Indeed most of these Angries had little in common with each other in the work they produced, particularly in terms of literary techniques. It was no literary movement as such, but it was a catchy label to apply. Colin Wilson working class background mattered in a society where class consciousness was still strong. It was an attraction to the leftist critics that dominated. Here was a boy genius, self-educated, producing a philosophical work on, according to the critic Philip Toynbee, “a representative theme of our time”. Born in Leicester, his father worked in a shoe factory, Wilson describes the world of his youth in this way, “Looking back on a working-class childhood, what strikes me most is that everyone we knew seemed to accept the situation fate had thrown them into. No one dreamed of escape, because no one thought there was any escape. Instead they contented themselves with the pub, and the football matches on Saturday afternoon, and dreamed of winning the football pools.”1 But Wilson had higher ambitions, along with living to be 300 (later in life he modified his views and aimed to live as long as his hero Bernard Shaw, who lived until 94)2 he wanted (like Shaw) to become the leading writer of his age. By the time The Outsider was published Wilson was flitting from job to job, from manual labour to serving in a coffee bar, and at one point sleeping on Hampstead Heath to save money while working on his first novel in the Reading Room of the British Museum. He was also married to an older woman, a nurse he had met in Leicester, while he was working in an engineering factory, and they had a child, but they had broken up at the time of the books launch; Wilson cites difficulties in getting family accommodation in London as the principle reason, which must have been a major problem for immigrant families too, and he had a new girlfriend Joy, who he would later marry and settle down with. Joy was responsible for a key part of the Fifties Wilson legend, the horsewhipping episode. Joy’s sister had found one of Wilson’s journals and mistaken the plot of his later Jack the Ripper influenced novel Ritual in the Dark for actual journal entries about Wilson’s life. This led to Joy’s father arriving at their lodgings with a horsewhip and shouting, “the games up Wilson!” and “did you know he is a homosexual and has five mistresses?” The press, who swiftly found out, had a field day. Wilson was impressively self-educated, his book The Outsider uses a string of figures as examples of the books central theme of alienation (to which could be added in a godless world); they are figures cut-off from the society around them, unable to integrate they feel they have no way out, their lives often ending in tragedy. This alienation is a feeling common in the young and was an attraction for teenagers and young adults. The title of the book, The Outsider, was the same as Albert Camus English edition of the novella L’Étranger, and Wilson had another thing in common with Camus, he called himself an existentialist. A homegrown self-taught philosopher preaching this philosophy in a period where existentialism was the vogue philosophical catchword was another attraction for the critics, even if at least one would later claim not to have actually read the book he praised. Wilson even had a uniform, he always sported a polo-neck sweater, making him instantly recognisable. But he soon faced a backlash and he eventually escaped the constant press attention, which he had originally set out to court, by moving away from London to Cornwall with Joy, bringing up a family there. By then the reaction had firmly set in and the very critics who had praised The Outsider so highly took a hatchet to his next book Religion and the Rebel. So much so that Wilson could not bring himself to read it for years afterwards. As time went on Wilson became increasingly ignored by mainstream critics, and his writing came to embrace the occult, New Age and pseudohistory. He also developed his own idiosyncratic brand of existentialism. His early work is however particularly worth reading and his book The Outsider survives him. He has a loyal fan base who keep his memory alive and he is more read today than most of the Fifties literary establishment that turned on him. The Outsider survived the critical backlash because its content and themes, centrally a romantic alienation, resonated with a new fifties phenomenon, the teenager, to whom it still appeals.
In a later post we will examine Colin Wilson’s relationship with Oswald Mosley, the Fascist, who attempted a political comeback in the Fifties by using race and fear of black immigration from the colonies, as part of his propaganda.