Wilson - The Outsider

Diversion Books
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Copyright 1956 by Colin Wison

Introduction Copyright 1978 by Colin Wilson

Foreward Copyright 1982 by Marilyn Ferguson

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

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First Diversion Books edition September 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-382-3

I thank the following for giving permission to quote extracts:

Cambridge University Press: George Sampson, Concise Cambridge History of English Literature; George Fox, Journals.

Dodd, Mead & Company: Rupert Brooke, Collected Poems; Alexei Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilytch.

Doubleday & Company, Inc.: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence. Copyright, 1925, 1936, by Doubleday & Company, Inc.

E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.: A Buddhist Bible edited by Dwight Goddard. Copyright, 1938, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.; The Everymans Library Edition of The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by E. M. Martin); The Everymans Library Edition of Letters from the Underworld by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by C. J. Hogarth); The Everymans Library Edition of Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (translated by John Rodker).

Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.: In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky. Copyright, 1949, by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.; Speculations by T. E. Hulme; All and Everything. Copyright, 1950, by G. Gurdjieff; Collected Poems 19091935 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright, 1936, by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.; Selected Essays 19171932 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright, 1932, by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. The above quotations are reprinted with the permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.

Heritage Press: Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (translated by L. and A. Maude). Copyright, 1938, by The Limited Editions Club.

Henry Holt & Company, Inc.: Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf; Magister Ludi.

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: Albert Camus, The Stranger (translated by Stuart Gilbert); Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend (translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter).

Little, Brown & Company: Harley Granville-Barker, The Secret Life.

Longmans, Green & Company, Inc.: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Permission to reprint granted by Paul R. Reynolds & Son, 599 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.

The Macmillan Company: William Butler Yeats, Collected Poems, The Trembling of the Veil, A Vision, Shadowy Waters; Fiodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (translated by Constance Garnett) and The Brothers Karamazov (translated by Constance Garnett); H. A. Reyburn, Nietzsche; Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom, Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Ecce Homo.

New Directions: Jean-Paul Sartre, The Diary of Antoine Roquentin (Nausea).

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: R. M. Rilke, Duino Elegies (translated by Leishman and Spender) and Malte Laurids Brigge (translated by J. B. Leishman).

Oxford University Press, Inc.: F. L. Woodward, Sayings of the Buddha; William Blake, Complete Works; Aylmer Maude, Life of Tolstoy.

Penguin Books, Inc.: Fiodor Dostoevsky, The Devils (translated by D. Magarshack), published in the Penguin Classics by Penguin Books, Inc., Baltimore, Md.

Philosophical Library, Inc.: Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism.

Princeton University Press: A Kierkegaard Anthology edited by R. Bretal.

Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center: The Gospel of Shri Ramakrishna (translated by Swami Nikhilananda) 1942.

Charles Scribners Sons: Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Soldiers Home, In Another Country, The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio, A Natural History of the Dead (first chapter of Death in the Afternoon); Edmund Wilson, Axels Castle.

Sheed & Ward: From Dostoevsky by Nicholas Berdyaev, published by Sheed & Ward, New York.

Simon and Schuster, Inc.: Reprinted from The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky edited by Romola Nijinsky, by permission of Simon and Schuster, Inc. 1936 by Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The Public Trustee and The Society of Authors: George Bernard Shaw, The Works of George Bernard Shaw.

Vanguard Press: A Treasury of Russian Literature (translated by B. G. Guerney).

Vedanta Press: Anonymous, Life of Shri Ramakrishna (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1948).

The Viking Press, Inc.: James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

FOR

ANGUS WILSON

WITH GRATITUDE

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 girlfriend had gone back to her family for the holiday, and I didnt have the money to return to my home town, Leicester. Besides, relations with my family were rather strained; my father felt Id wasted my opportunities to settle down in a good office job, and prophesied that Id come to a bad end.

For the past year Id 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, Id 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 Id met the novelist Angus Wilson, a kindly and generous man who had offered to look at my novel andif he liked itrecommend it to his own publisher. Id 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: Dostoevskys Raskolnikov, Rilkes Malte Laurids Brigge, the young writer in Hamsuns Hunger: alone in my room, feeling totally cut off from the rest of society. It was not a position I relished; Id always been strongly attached to my home and family (Im 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 satisfying Christmas Days Id ever spent.

Two days later, as soon as the British Museum re-opened, I cycled there at nine oclock 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 World War One. 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