The Essential Colin Wilson Read Free Page B

homosexual, yet his own sexual obsession blinds him to its implications.
    The theme is repeated in the first pages of The Outsider . Barbusse's hero watches a girl undressing in the next room; but when he tries to recreate the scene in imagination, it is only a poor carbon copy. 'These words are all dead. They leave untouched . . . the intensity of what was.' Again, he is present at the dining table when someone describes the sex murder of a little girl. Everyone at the table is morbidly interested—even a young mother with her child; but they all try to pretend to be indifferent. The irony, of course, is that Barbusse cannot speak his meanings clearly. If, in fact, he watched a girl undressing in the next room, he would probably masturbate; as it is, he tries to convince the reader that it was an experience of spiritual beauty. For all his talk about truth, the narrator cannot be honest.
    In Ritual in the Dark , this inability to grasp the essence of sexuality becomes the symbol of our inability to grasp the essence of anything important—of autumn, of water . . . This, it seemed to me, is the basic difference between human beings. Some are perfectly satisfied with what they have; they eat, drink, impregnate their wives, and take life as it comes. Others can never forget that they are being cheated; that life tempts them to struggle by offering them the essence of sex, of beauty, of success; and that she always seems to pay in counterfeit money. In the novel, Nunne—the purely physical type—pursues his will o' the wisp with a despairing ruthlessness. The painter, Oliver Glasp, is obsessed by a ten-year-old female model, but horrified at the idea of any physical lovemaking; he sublimates his desire in decadent romantic pictures. Sorme, the intellectual outsider, also pursues his desires with a touch of ruthlessness, but a fundamentally kindly nature makes him incapable of causing pain . . .
    Sometime shortly before that Christmas of 1954, I was walking along the Thames Embankment with my closest—and oldest—friend, Bill Hopkins, explaining to him the ideas of the novel. I explained that Sorme is an intellectual outsider; he has discipline of the intellect, but not of the body or emotions.
    Glasp, like Van Gogh, is the emotional outsider; he has discipline of the emotions, but not of the body or the intellect. Nunne, like the dancer Nijinsky, is a physical outsider; he has discipline of the body, but not of the emotions or the intellect. All three are 'lopsided'. And all three are capable of becoming insane. I went on to point out that Dostoevsky had used the same categories in the three Karamazov brothers. This, I believe, was the actual seed of The Outsider . In due course, the chapter contrasting the three types of outsider ('The Attempt to Gain Control') became the core of the book.

    When it came to the actual writing, there was a certain amount of material that had to be scrapped. I had, for example, intended to write a chapter about the Faust figure, from Marlowe to Mann's Dr Faustus—Mann's feeling about the un-attainableness of the ideal was obviously close to my own. There was a chapter on criminal outsiders that was abandoned after a few pages—the fragment was later reprinted in An Encyclopedia of Murder . And there was an interesting outline of a chapter on 'the weak outsider'—characters like Oblomov, the great Gatsby, Hamlet, the poets of the 1890s like Dowson and Johnson and Verlaine . . . I was particularly fascinated by Gatsby because the essence he craved was the essence of 'success'. I was convinced that this, like all the other essences, is a fraud. Yet my romanticism found this hard to accept . . .
    A year and a half after writing the first page of The Outsider, I had a chance to find out for myself. I had written most of the book by the middle of 1955. (The most difficult parts, I found, were the links between the various sections; it cost me two weeks' hard work to write the link between Wells