Strange Powers Read Free

romanticism of Yeats—or even earlier, of Shelley and Blake. The success of The Outsider was followed by an almost immediate back swing. The father figure of English logical positivism, A. J. Ayer, led the attack; in a review of The Outsider , while Arthur Koestler dismissed the book as 'bubble of the year' (and has since reprinted this opinion in a volume of essays, by way of reaffirming it). The word 'woolly' turned up increasingly in reviews, particularly of Religion and the Rebel , the sequel to The Outsider . Then there was another group of objectors on political grounds. Most of my contemporaries in literature were left-wing—Osborne, Amis, Braine, Doris Lessing, Christopher Logue, Kenneth Tynan, Wesker et al. , and they advocated the importance of 'commitment', marching to Aldermaston, signing petitions against repressive regimes, and so on. I had no positive objections; I would have been entirely in favor of banning the H-bomb or allowing Russia's Jews to go to Israel. It was just a question of priorities. I was interested in my own inner needs, and in the inner needs of men in general. That was my concept of an Outsider: a man driven by a powerful inner compulsion to freedom, which might lead him to act in opposition to the demands of society, to his own desire for comfort and acceptance by his fellows. In the nineteenth century, it had driven many of the major artists to an early grave; and most of the romantics accepted this as part of their basic philosophy: if you experience this strange urge for 'dim hills and far horizons', expect an early death; this busy human world has no place for you. I wrote The Outsider because I couldn't accept this notion. I could see no a priori reason why Shelley and Keats had to die young, why Hölderlin and Nietzsche had to go insane, why Beddoes and Van Gogh had to commit suicide. Or, for that matter, why Wordsworth and Swinburne had to drift into a mediocre old age. To me, it seemed, quite simply, that most of them were too passive . Even Nietzsche, that advocate of war and ruthlessness, spent his life quietly drifting from pension to pension . I believed that if 'the Outsider' could learn to know himself, and make a determined effort to control his life instead of drifting, he might end as a leader of civilization instead of one of its rejects. But the answer was not to join the peace corps or march in protest rallies. And because I held this indifferent attitude to current politics, I found myself, to my astonishment, labeled a fascist. I didn't see the logic of this, and still don't. I assume they thought that individualism always leads to fascism—unaware that fascism is a form of socialism that exalts the state above the individual. At all events, I had to get used to a feeling of working alone that was rather like being sent to Coventry. I continued to write books. The success of The Outsider meant that I was able to find publishers. But reviews were dismissive, and in a few cases (such as Introduction to the New Existentialism ) there were no reviews at all.
    Lack of money made life difficult; but otherwise, I didn't mind too much. After all, I was arguing that the romantic Outsiders had been destroyed because they lacked the strength to stand alone. To allow myself to be depressed by the neglect would have been illogical. Anyway, I was too busy just keeping alive. So I completely failed to notice that something strange was happening. The tide of a century and a half was turning. I knew, of course, that there was increasingly strong movement towards anti-reductionism in science. Since 1959 I had been in correspondence with the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who believed that Freud had 'sold human nature short', and that the idealistic and creative part of man's nature is as fundamental as his sexual or aggressive drives. I knew Michael Polanyi's important book Personal Knowledge (1958), arguing that the scientist's creative processes are as inspirational and