From Scotland on Sunday June 20, 2004
Wilson looks back without anger at the fading of his angry man star
DREAMING TO SOME PURPOSE Colin Wilson Century, £20
by ANDREW CRUMEY
THIS is the autobiography of a literary superstar. In 1956, at the age of 24, Colin Wilson published his first book, The Outsider. A series of essays on outsider figures in art and literature, it did not have the obvious makings of a bestseller - but that is what it instantly became. Critics were soon hailing Wilson as Britain’s answer to Jean-Paul Sartre.
John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger was premiered at the same time, and Wilson became pigeonholed with Osborne as an ‘angry young man’. His fame was such that when Groucho Marx’s UK publisher asked the comedian who should receive copies of his memoirs, Groucho said, "Winston Churchill, Somerset Maugham and Colin Wilson".
As Wilson admits, all of this lasted roughly six months. He was caught up in a domestic scandal that the popular press lapped up (the Express cartoonist Osbert Lancaster depicted the parents of Wilson’s lover arriving to beat him with a horsewhip), and the critics grew weary of the hype they themselves had encouraged. Having started at the top, the only way was down. His second book was panned, and his later ones were increasingly ignored.
This autobiography is, by my reckoning, his 70th book, Wilson having doggedly published one or two every year since his debut.
An early interest in sexual deviancy and violent crime has given way to works on Atlantis and flying saucers, by way of pot-boiling thrillers and a science fiction novel that was filmed by Hollywood as Lifeforce, which flopped. Even as he reaches the final lines of this memoir, Wilson describes the arrival in the post of the page proofs of yet another book.
How did it feel to be Britain’s greatest writer one moment, and a has-been the next? Frustratingly, Dreaming To Some Purpose fails to shed much light on the matter, for the simple reason that Wilson emerges from it as someone blessed both with eternal optimism and with an unshakeable faith in his own genius. The Outsider merely marked a time when the critics appreciated his true worth.
Lucky him - though the absence of self doubt, or of any periods in rehab that most other ex-celebs would consider compulsory, makes for a frankly duller read than one would wish. Instead, Wilson expounds his psychological theories - involving ‘Faculty X’ and a hierarchy of mental states including "level four and a half", all of which he uses to show that we can do anything if only we try hard enough.
Yet in amongst all this there is what makes this book really worth reading - his memories of the many literary figures he met. Iris Murdoch, Robert Graves, WH Auden, Albert Camus - they all come and go as Wilson tours the literary circuit of the 1950s and 60s. He meets the man who inspired Noel Coward’s ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’, and finds himself at a party, telling an anecdote about Sonia Orwell to an unknown woman who turns out to be Sonia Orwell.
Some of the writers are vividly portrayed - the bluff John Braine, for example; or Anthony Burgess, a "pompous know-all". Most flit past in a pleasant whirl - which is perhaps how it seemed to Wilson at the time.
Andrew Crumey is Scotland on Sunday’s literary editor