Century £20 pp402
Now let’s be clear about it. I’m not the most unbiased person in the world when it comes to reviewing this book. Colin Wilson and I are feuding, albeit in slow motion. He took against my portrait of him in my book on the Angry Young Men (of whom he is the last surviving important specimen), and he dwells on this in a recent newspaper interview: “[Wilson] periodically throws out the word ‘f****r ’ with extraordinary venom,” writes the interviewer. “The f****r in question was Humphrey Carpenter, who had been to interview him and then betrayed him: ‘We got on terribly well, I thought [says Wilson], though I did notice that Humphrey fell asleep when I was explaining what I meant by non-pessimistic existentialism.’”
True, I did; but my arrival at Wilson’s Cornish home had been followed by a brisk walk, then a memorable supper (local oysters and smoked eel), washed down with superb wines. My snores were not intended as a comment on the Wilsonian Weltanschauung. Now here is his autobiography, and I feel I have been given a second chance. Stay awake at the back there Carpenter, or this time it’s the headmaster’s study.
Well, I’ll do my best, sir, and the autobiography is certainly a good read — I galloped through it without the slightest droop of an eyelid. But I can’t expect Wilson and his publisher to be content with that. (“It didn’t send me to sleep” — Humphrey Carpenter, The Sunday Times.) They want me to give a serious assessment of Wilson’s philosophical ideas. Well, let me try.
A self-educated working-class lad from Leicester, Wilson came to London just as the Angry Young Men craze was hotting up, and immediately made his name with The Outsider (1956), which gave thousands of readers their first taste of such authors as Rilke and Sartre. The first of Wilson’s vast number of books, it is more an anthology than an argument, but Wilson makes the case for existentialism without the pessimism that usually accompanies it.
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In this autobiography, Wilson takes that further, and argues the case for a life built around “peak experiences”, moments of intense joy that illuminate the world. He gives as an example of this the occasion, many years ago, when his toddler Sally went missing in the middle of an unfamiliar town, and his overwhelming relief and happiness when she was found.Fair enough — any parent will recognise that experience — but how do we build a life-philosophy out of it?
Wilson has partly taken his “peak experience” idea from the writings of the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, and he meets Maslow during the course of the autobiography. Interestingly, we have Maslow’s reactions to Wilson. In his journal, he describes Wilson as not interested in the experience of emotion, affection, or visual and aesthetic beauty. Wilson reports this quite cheerfully; but anyone familiar with Wilson’s life and work may feel that this analysis is devastatingly accurate. To this we add the fact that a considerable number of Wilson’s books are about murder, serial killers and suchlike; at which point one remembers that the ever-perceptive Kingsley Amis claimed to be frightened of Wilson and once (according to Wilson’s autobiography) came near to pushing him off a roof.
If dark materials lurk within Wilson, they remain mostly hidden. The personality that displays itself throughout this book is less of a Maslow than an Adrian Mole. “I was becoming something of a character in Leicester, at least among the young,” Wilson writes of his early days (you may recall that Mole comes from Leicester, too). “It was time I had something published.”
This naivety leads him, in later life, to introduce himself to Graham Greene and W H Auden, blithely unaware that he is not their equal — although on a purely journalistic level he writes about them well.
He will be furious when he reads that last sentence. He regards himself (and makes no secret of it) as one of the great figures in the history of literature, whose importance will eventually be recognised. Hence his irritation at creatures like me snapping at his heels. Perhaps he would prefer me to have stayed asleep after all.
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