The Essential Colin Wilson Read Free Page A

satisfying Christmas Days I'd ever spent.
    Two days later, as soon as the British Museum re-opened, I cycled there at nine o'clock in the morning, determined to start writing immediately. On the way there, I recalled a novel I had once read about, in which a man had spent his days peering through a hole in the wall of his hotel room, at the life that comes and goes next door. It was, I recollected, the first major success of Henri Barbusse, the novelist who had later become world famous for Le Feu , the novel of the First World War. When I arrived at the Museum, I found the book in the catalogue. I spent the next few hours reading it from cover to cover. Then I wrote down a quotation from it at the head of a sheet of paper: 'In the air, on top of a tram, a girl is sitting. Her dress, lifted a little, blows out. But a block in the traffic separates us . . .' During the remainder of that afternoon, I wrote the opening four pages of The Outsider .

    It now strikes me as interesting that I chose this opening, with the man hoping to see up a girl's skirt, and being frustrated by passing traffic. For although I say very little about sex in the book, it was undoubtedly one of the major forces behind its conception. I understood precisely what Barbusse's hero means when he describes going to bed with a prostitute, then going through the banal ritual of copulation, and feeling as if he has fallen from a height. This had been one of the central obsessions of my teens: the fact that a glimpse up a woman's skirt can make her seem infinitely desirable, worth pursuing to the ends of the earth; yet the act of sex cannot provide full satisfaction of this desire . When he actually gets the girl into bed, all the perspectives have changed . . .
    This had been the main theme of my novel Ritual in the Dark . Like Barbusse's hero, my own Gerard Sorme finds himself continually surrounded by objects of sexual stimulation; the advertisements showing girls in their underwear on the London underground cause violent frustration, 'like a match tossed against a petrol-soaked rag'. And in the course of the novel he seduces a middle-aged Jehovah's Witness (partly for the piquancy of overcoming her religious scruples) and her teenage niece; yet the basic sexual desire remains unsatisfied. One scene in the book had particularly deep meaning for me. Sorme had spent the afternoon in bed with Caroline—the niece—and made love to her six or seven times. He feels physically satiated, as if the sexual delusion has finally lost its hold over him. Then he goes out to the doorstep—it is a basement room—to collect the milk, and catches a glimpse up a girl's skirt as she walks past the railings. Instantly, he feels the stirrings of an erection . . .
    I was not concerned simply with the intensity of male sexual desire—although I felt that it is far more powerful than most men are willing to admit. It was this element of 'un-achievableness'. It reminded me of the feeling I used to get as a child if I was on a day-trip to the seaside, and the coach went over a river or past a lake: a curious, deep longing for the water that would certainly not be satisfied by drinking it or swimming in it. In the same way, C. S. Lewis has spoken of how he used to be convulsed with desire by the idea of autumn— the brown leaves and the smell of smoke from garden bonfires, and that strange wet smell about the grass . . . Sorme has the same suspicion about sex: that it is ultimately unattainable: that what happens in bed is a kind of confidence trick. For this reason, he experiences a certain abstract sympathy with his new acquaintance, Austin Nunne, when he begins to suspect that Nunne is the East End sex murderer. It seems to him that this could be a valid way to achieve the essence of sex: to grab a girl in the moment she arouses violent desire and rip off her clothes. Oddly enough, it never strikes him that this is unlikely to be Nunne's motive; he knows Nunne to be a