The following article appeared in the Western Daily Press (Bristol) on June 10, 2004, the official publication date of Dreaming to Some Purpose.
The outsider who won’t look back in anger
SOON after the publication of his famous first book The Outsider in 1956, Colin Wilson was approached by the Daily Express to contribute to a series called “Angry Young Men” and - together with playwright John Osborne - explain just what it was they were angry about.
But, in his immensely entertaining autobiography, Dreaming To Some Purpose, published today, Colin says: “I wasn't in the least angry, except about my years of struggle, and now that I was recognised, even this hardly applied.
“But the Express was paying well, so I agreed to write for them - and, of course, helped to establish the ‘angry young man’ myth. I had no idea how much I would come to hate this label.
“I was a hermit by nature, a recluse. Being the author of a best-seller was certainly better than working in a factory. But I felt just as uncomfortable, just as alienated. Instead of becoming more fulfilled, my life had turned into a kind of gossip column.”
Then an interview appeared in a new magazine called Books And Art, under the headline “Colin Wilson talks about: my genius”.
Colin admits: “This did me no good - and the silly interview added to the increasing groundswell of irritation that was now being directed at the ‘angry young men’.”
Ironically, having helped to “establish the myth”, Colin found that within a few weeks of The Outsider and Look Back In Anger - the play opened three weeks before the book came out - most of the press stories about him and Osborne were either satirical or hostile.
Others who suffered the “angry young man” label included Kingsley Amis, John Braine and Philip Larkin - even, incongruously, Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing.
These young writers had burst into a world of skiffle groups, the Suez crisis, teddy boys and coffee bars, and were a mismatching bunch; some were frequently at loggerheads, others never even met each other.
As a young man from a working class background in Leicester who, to save meagre funds, had slept rough on Hampstead Heath while researching his first novel at the British Library, Colin suddenly found himself in the heady atmosphere of the most celebrated literary and artistic cliques of the time.
Of that famous group of “angries”, only Colin and Doris, now 85, survive. But today, at 72, Colin is far from an “angry old man”.
He remains as intellectually challenging and purposeful as ever, optimistic, and certain that his works are gaining ever greater recognition. With 120 books to his name, he is one of Britain’s most prolific and controversial writers but, still planning new projects, he is not resting on his laurels.
The Outsider - a groundbreaking study of alienated genius, published when Colin was only 24 - propelled him to literary stardom but the critical backlash, and the associated media frenzy, led him to move from London to Gorran Haven in Cornwall, where he and his wife Joy still live today.
He defied the critics by continuing to be a best-selling author, his works embracing philosophy and criticism, biography and criminology, studies of the occult and the paranormal, investigations into UFOs, ancient civilisations and the Atlantis legend, and 20 novels including the Spider World series.
The Outsider went on to be translated into 20 languages and has proved to be an enduring landmark on the 20th century literary landscape, its latest edition appearing as recently as 2001. It is the cornerstone of Colin's practical, intuitive, philosophy for life, his “new existentialism”, which he has expounded in various books.
However, over the decades, he got used to the idea of remaining a literary “outsider”, and thought that if there was ever going to be a general understanding of his work it would probably be after his death.
“I regard my work as a kind of existential jigsaw puzzle in which apparently disparate parts lock together to make a whole,” he once remarked.
A central strand of Colin’s autobiography is an appraisal of issues raised in The Outsider by means of his own life story, about which he is remarkably candid, and the title is significant.
“When I started thinking about a title I realised that I’d already used the ideal one for another book, The Strength to Dream (1962). That’s what I wanted to get at. George Bernard Shaw said: ‘Every dream can become a reality in the womb of time for those who have the strength to dream’.
“It’s that business of actually being able to dream purposefully, so to speak. Here is the basis, I suppose, of my optimism.”
When The Outsider came out and it was a huge overnight success, Colin wasn’t at all surprised. “I'd always known it would happen,” he said. “But what I didn’t expect, of course, was the terrific backswing after it, the tremendous backlash, and the attacks on me which I found pretty hard going. I’d produce some book which I knew to be brilliant and I’d get lousy reviews.
“In America I was having an effect on college audiences a bit like an intellectual Elvis Presley. I’d get these groupies following me around. I thought, how was it possible that someone as brilliant as I am never seems to get anywhere, and I’m always broke?
“It’s only recently that I’ve realised the answer to that question. What I had to do was to push on because if I had become as successful as I thought I should have been it would have been terribly bad for me.
“Having put all this down in the autobiography, I feel in a way that it is the consequence of what I’ve been doing all my life. It is my life’s work. It is, in a way, my classic book, it’s what I was put in the world to write.
“There are still a lot of other things I want to write, but that’s our business as writers, we’re supposed to carry on, we’re not supposed to say ‘OK, I’ve done what I came into the world to write, now I can relax’.”
* WHAT was the origin of the term “angry young man”, used to describe that group of “dissenting” novelists and poets who came to prominence in the mid-1950s?
* The autobiography of the Irish writer Leslie Paul, a communist turned Christian apologist, was published in 1951 under the title Angry Young Man.
* George Fearson, PR man at the Royal Court Theatre, labelled John Osborne an “angry young man” a few weeks before the premiere of Look Back In Anger.
* Shortly after the advent of Look Back In Anger and The Outsider in May 1956, an article by J B Priestley in the New Statesman about Osborne and Wilson was headlined “Angry Young Men”. Then The Times and Daily Express also used the phrase to describe the pair.
* In 1958, Kenneth Allsop’s book The Angry Decade, examining the literature of the period, was published.