The Essential Colin Wilson Read Free

girl he had just strangled and raped, Reginald Christie commented: 'Once again I experienced that quiet, peaceful thrill. I had no regrets.'
    The criminal is significant because he shows us what is wrong with all of us. His approach to the problems of existence is so crude and simplistic that the stupidest person has no difficulty seeing why it doesn't work. The criminal lacks subtlety; he lacks complexity; he lacks insight. But then, so do we all. Moreover, if we ask ourselves what went wrong with the lives of so many men of genius, we can see that the answer lies in that same 'criminal' tendency: a certain spoiltness, a certain childishness, a failure to control negative emotions. Dante's bitterness betrays a tendency to self-pity. Shakespeare's pessimism hints at a manic-depressive streak. His friend Ben Jonson was a braggart with more than a touch of paranoia. Balzac was a spendthrift and a show-off. Dostoevsky was a compulsive gambler. Proust was a sadist who enjoyed torturing rats. H. G. Wells was an incorrigible seducer. In their classic work, The Criminal Personality , Yochelson and Samenow describe the criminal as fundamentally weak, lazy, vain, self-pitying and capable of almost endless self-deception. There are very few human beings who do not answer to that description. Criminality is mankind's 'original sin'. Fortunately, man's astonishing 'creativity is its 'redemption'. A Criminal History of Mankind is my most comprehensive attempt to explore this insight. It is an attempt to demonstrate that both criminality and creativity can only be understood as a part of man's total evolutionary pattern. The book that follows is, in the last analysis, my own attempt to understand this pattern.

THE OUTSIDER, TWENTY YEARS ON
    Written for the Pan paperback edition of The Outsider in 1976

    Christmas Day, 1954, was an icy, grey day, and I spent it in my room in Brockley, South London. I recall that I had tinned tomatoes and fried bacon for Christmas dinner. I was alone in London; my girl-friend had gone back to her family for the holiday, and I didn't have the money to return to my home town, Leicester. Besides, relations with my family were rather strained; my father felt I'd wasted my opportunities to settle down in a good office job, and prophesied that I'd come to a bad end.
    For the past year I'd been living in London, and trying to write a novel called Ritual in the Dark , about a murderer based on Jack the Ripper. To save money during the summer, I'd slept out on Hampstead Heath in a waterproof sleeping bag, and spent my days writing in the Reading Room of the British Museum. It was there that I'd met the novelist Angus Wilson, a kindly and generous man who had offered to look at my novel and—if he liked it—recommend it to his own publisher. I'd finished typing out the first part of the book a few weeks before; he had promised to read it over Christmas. Now I felt at a loose end. So I sat on my bed, with an eiderdown over my feet, and wrote in my journal. It struck me that I was in the position of so many of my favourite characters in fiction: Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, Rilke's Make Laurids Brigge, the young writer in Hamsun's Hunger : alone in my room, feeling totally cut off from the rest of society. It was not a position I relished; I'd always been strongly attached to my home and family (I'm a typical Cancer), and missed being with them at Christmas. Yet an inner compulsion had forced me into this position of isolation. I began writing about it in my journal, trying to pin it down. And then, quite suddenly, I saw that I had the makings of a book. I turned to the back of my journal and wrote at the head of the page: 'Notes for a book "The Outsider in Literature".' (I have it in front of me now as I write.) On the next two pages, I worked out a fairly complete outline of the book as it eventually came to be written. I fell asleep that night with a feeling of deep inner satisfaction; it seemed one of the most