Colin Wilson: favourite books

Colin Stanley, bibliographer for the philosopher and author Colin Wilson and editor of the journal Colin Wilson Studies, sent me news of the forthcoming book of which he's editor: Around the Outsider: Essays Presented to Colin Wilson on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday (p/b 345pp, O Books, 1 May 2011, ISBN-10: 1846946689). I don't have a contents list, but it looks of interest:

In May 1956, aged just 24, Colin Wilson achieved success and overnight fame with his philosophical study of alienation and transcendence in modern literature and thought, The Outsider. Fifty-four years on, and never out of print in English, the book is still widely read and discussed, having been translated into over thirty languages. In a remarkably prolific career, Wilson, a true polymath, has since written over 170 titles: novels, plays and non-fiction on a variety of subjects.This volume brings together twenty essays by scholars of Colin Wilson’s work worldwide and is published in his honour to mark the author’s 80th birthday. Each contributor has provided an essay on their favourite Wilson book (or the one they consider to be the most significant). The result is a varied and stimulating assessment of Wilson’s writings on philosophy, psychology, literature, criminology and the occult with critical appraisals of four of his most thought-provoking novels.Altogether a fitting tribute to a writer and thinker who, as one contributor, George C. Poulos, predicts: “Looking back..., will be acknowledged as the philosopher to have most influenced events in the 21st century.”

My own nomination for a favourite Colin Wilson work would be his SF novel The Mind Parasites. It's very hard to characterise - perhaps a philosophical SF thriller with strong roots in HP Lovecraft (the story was suggested by August Derleth) and more than a little AE Van Vogt.  I regularly re-read it.

The setting is more or less now (it was near-future in 1967, when the book was written) and the intellectual protagonist is an archaeologist, Dr Gilbert Austin. The book begins with Austin hearing the news that an old friend, Karel Weissmann, has committed suicide. Shocked, he finds he has been named executor for dealing with Weissmann's papers, which are delivered to his flat - but then is rapidly sidetracked when he hears of a major breakthrough in dating basalt figurines from Turkey.

A few weeks later, not having got to attend to the papers, he goes with his friend and colleague Wolfgang Reich to supervise an archaeological study of Hittite remains in Karatepe, Turkey. Initially depressed by the news from Weissman's secretary, who has glanced at the papers and concluded Weissman to be paranoid - suffering from a belief that "they" were out to get him - he gets on well with the project and decides to stay the year in Turkey. The dig begins to produce peculiar and groundbreaking finds: radiometric dating shows an artefact to be over a million years old, and a geophysical scan finds a large block - inscribed to "Abhoth the Dark" - two miles underground.

Things go silly when the newspapers get hold of the news. A succession of accidents at the site, plus the observation that "Abhoth the Unclean" appears in the works of HP Lovecraft, leads to media hysteria about the dig, tabloid stories nicknaming the site "Kadath" after the city of the "Great Old Ones" in Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Exhausted and unwell, Austin returns his flat in Diyarbakir for a rest, and begins reading Weissmann's papers, particularly a testimony called "Historical Reflections".

"Historical Reflections" explain Weissman's theory that the human race has been afflicted for several centuries by a kind of 'psychic vampire' that drags down the human mind into evil and negativity. Argued closely, with detailed historical references, it convinces Austin - who finds the theory fits all the sensations he has experienced of something trying to stop him reading the papers. He tells Reich, who briefly suspects a hoax, then is equally convinced that there is a threat to humanity. They make it their project to learn more, and begin studying phenomenology via the works of Husserl, as a means to access deeper levels of their own minds. Soon, they begin to experience expanded mental capacity and powers of psychokinesis. After that, it's not difficult to initiate a group of other intellectuals - artists and scientists.

Disaster strikes when the group is collectively attacked by the parasites. Austin wakes up and finds he is unable to move. After enduring hours of increasing psychic oppression, he finds he can draw on a powerful 'life force' to defeat the attack. By that time it is morning, and he receives the news that twenty of the initiates have committed suicide in the night. A handful have survived - those who had their own strategies for lasting until Austin released the 'energy blast' (which evidently worked at some level of the collective consciousness, and saved geographically separated individuals). After making contact telepathically, they decide to go public.  Using the inexplicable mass suicide as evidence of the danger, they reveal the parasites to the world via the fiction that dark forces have indeed been raised by the excavation of "Kadath". They reinforce this story by levitating and destroying the Abhoth Block by psychokinesis during a press visit to the excavation.

At this point the USA takes an interest.  Austin and his colleagues are offered high-security facilities to train replacement adepts; meanwhile, it becomes clear that the parasites are fermenting a Europe-Africa war between racist factions.  One of Austin's new recruits has the intuition that the Moon is involved and that getting off-planet will precipitate some change. The group are launched into space in a NASA craft and, and after momentary agony, find they are free of the parasites (which turn out be a "psychic cancer" - a split-off segment of personality in each person - initiated by radiation from the Moon).

They return, now with immense mental superpowers: enough to fly the ship without engines, to stop the war by projecting a telepathic image of alien monsters (and thus unite Earth), and to turn the Moon's malign face away from Earth. Finally they leave Earth, evidently to join a "cosmic police" with similar intelligence.

That is the bare bones of the book, omitting the erudite - or often faux-erudite, since they treat a deal of Forteana as fact - digressions and conversations on philosophy and history. Yet these are not precisely digressions: they're the meat of the novel, which dramatises an existential look at a central problem of the human condition, the inability of most humans to utilise the powers of our own minds. As Wilson wrote in the introduction to another of his SF novels, The Philosopher's Stone:

... a couple of years later, an analogy thrown out in my Introduction to the New Existentialism became the seed of a science fiction parable about ‘original sin’ - man’s strange inability to get the best out of his consciousness. I cast it in the Lovecraft tradition, and it became The Mind Parasites, which was published in due course by August Derleth. Its reception by English critics was unexpectedly good; I suspect this is because I didn’t sound as if I was serious.

And in Existentially speaking: essays on the philosophy of literature:

It was an attempt to state symbolically what I felt to be wrong with human beings: that through art and mysticism, we obtain glimpses of a tremendous freedom which seems, in effect, to be beyond our reach.

A number of sources mention that the Lovecraftian elements arose because Derleth (who gets a cameo appearance in the novel) was offended by Wilson's negative summary of Lovecraft in his litcrit selection The Strength to Dream, and dared Wilson to write something in the canon. The degree of reported offense varies. Howard Dossor's Colin Wilson: The Man and his Mind says Derleth was "mildly offended", while The Necronomicon Files says he "voiced his outrage".

Whatever the novel's inspiration, Colin Stanley, in a conversation we had a while back, described it as one of the important books in Wilson's canon.  There's a good review by Bob Corbett - here - focusing on that side of the book; and Google Books has a preview of Arrows to the Farther Shore: The Mind Parasites and the Philosopher's Stone in Nicholas Tredell's 1982 The Novels of Colin Wilson.  The late William Burroughs liked the book too: see RealityStudio for a transcript of his review in the underground newspaper Rat.

Addendum: I just looked at the source code of the Colin Wilson World news page and found further details of Around the Outsider:

This landmark book of 345 pages, which collects 20 essays by academics, authors and other key commentators internationally, is edited by freelance writer Colin Stanley, Wilson's bibliographer and the managing editor of Paupers' Press who edits the series Colin Wilson Studies featuring extended essays on Wilson's work by scholars worldwide. Colin Stanley also provides the preface and two essays for Around the Outsider.

Contributors from the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand have written on their favourite Wilson book, or one which has special significance for them. The outcome is a diverse and indispensable assessment of Wilson’s writings on philosophy, psychology, literature, criminology, the occult and autobiography over more than 50 years, with critical appraisals of four of his most thought-provoking novels. Five of the contributors are musicians as well as writers.

The line-up includes three professors, Thomas Bertonneau (literature), Stephen Clark (philosophy) and Stanley Krippner (psychology), the author and critic Nicholas Tredell, the author and former editor of the literary magazine Abraxas, Paul Newman, the author Gary Lachman, a founding member of the rock group Blondie who was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, and the author Steve Taylor, a lecturer and researcher in transpersonal psychology.

Other contributing authors include Simon Brighton, Antoni Diller, Chris Nelson, David Power and journalist Geoff Ward, who established and runs the Colin Wilson World website.

The novelist Laura Del Rivo, a contemporary of Wilson, contributes an appendix, as does writer and poet Vaughan Robertson, and author Terry Welbourn with a personal appreciation of Wilson and T C Lethbridge, the archaeologist and psychic investigator. Murray Ewing, of the David Lindsay website at violetapple.org.uk, Philip Coulthard of colinwilsononline.com, and George Poulos complete the list.

I didn't see it initially as it appears invisible to browsers, probably due to the ghastly code produced by Microsoft Office Live.

- Ray

Vampires, lesbian and otherwise

In the previous post I mentioned Coleridge's Christabel. The story in brief: the virtuous Christobel goes into the woods to pray and encounters another young woman, Geraldine, who tells the rather implausible story of having been abducted by a band of rough men who brought her to the forest then ... went away. Taking pity on her, Christobel takes her to the castle of her dad, Sir Leoline. The dog, ominously, since dogs can detect evil, howls in its sleep. At bedtime, Geraldine goes all lesbian, then puts Christobel under a spell not to report that bit, only the abduction story. Next morning, Leoline arrives and is instantly besotted with Geraldine. His bard Bracy tells of a spooky dream he had of Christobel being in danger, but Leoline won't hear it, nor Christobel's warnings, which he takes as jealousy - and in any case Geraldine's spell zaps her into a trance that stops her explaining in detail. And there it ends.

I suspect whatever was going on with Coleridge was satisifed by writing the sexy bit, hence his failure to complete it. Tupper's Geraldine is bit ghastly, but provides a rationale in Geraldine being the daughter of an evil hag, Ryxa, and that she has it in for Christabel for stealing her boyfriend. A deal has been written about what Coleridge might have meant by Christabel (see Coleridge's "Christabel" and the Phantom Soul and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel: Vampires and Transsexualism) but it boils down to being the first lesbian vampire story. Geraldine may not drink blood, but she's certainly a psychic vampire of some sort. Christabel is widely credited as the inspiration for Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 Carmilla. Apart from in turn inspiring Bram Stoker's Dracula, Carmilla herself inspired a long line of largely naff lesbian vampire movies of which the 2009 comedy thriller Lesbian Vampire Killers is the latest (for others see Top 10 lesbian vampire movies at Den of Geek). Wikipedia's Lesbian vampire article cites Vampires & Violets: Lesbians in Film (Andrea Weiss, 1993) - see review - in viewing the trope as a coded means of handling the taboo theme of lesbianism outside the heavily censored realm of social realism. I don't know. That seems plausible for early cinema, but the persistence into the period of exploitation genre doesn't seem to be anything as subtle.

This is mainly an excuse to segue into a list of my personal favourites in the vampire movie genre. Emphatically not Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (I found the film a drag and the Anne Rice book even more so), nor Bram Stoker's Dracula (highly competent as an adaptation but suffering from Hollywood's perpetual obsession to add backstory and upbeat endings). I've no opinion of Twilight or the original Stephenie Meyer book, having seen neither; but I'm happy to accept the recommendation by Olivia (who works here, and is not stupid) who tells me the book is very good, a thoughtful novel using vampirism as a metaphor for teenage alienation. The list, then, is of movies that break away from the usual vampire-movie fare. All of them, except Mr Vampire, weren't box office successes on initial release, but have since acquired cult status.

• Mr Vampire (1985). A highly inventive comedy horror made in Hong Kong, merging martial arts, Chinese mythology and Western vampire tropes (for instance, sticky rice replaces garlic, and the vampires are hopping Jiang Shi). See trailer.
• Near Dark (1987). The vampire mythos transplanted to modern rural US Midwest, with vampires (never named as such) as a travelling group of outlaws into which a farmboy is initiated when he is "nipped". It's directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who wanted a Western that broke away from convention, and the strong cast is drawn from James Cameron regulars (Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein and Bill Paxton). Again, it's fresh and inventive: caught in a motel during a shootout, the band find themselves in deadly danger not from the police bullets but the shafts of sunlight let in by the bulletholes. See trailer.
• Shadow of the Vampire (2000). A lovely conceit retelling Murnau's filming of the classic Nosferatu, in which Max Schreck (playing Count Orlok) really is the vampire he portrays. Murnau keeps this from his cast and crew with the fiction that Schreck is an obsessive method actor. See trailer.
• The Hunger (1983). OK, a bisexual vampire is a central character, but that's incidental to this beautifully stylish, modern-set examination of the ennui of eternal life. It introduced me to Schubert's Trio in E flat, Opus 100, and I've yet to hear a better arrangement. See trailer.
• Lifeforce (1985). Much ridiculed for actress Mathilda May's permanent nudity as an alien vampire, it bears not too much resemblance to its source Colin Wilson's novel The Space Vampires (itself drawing more than a little on AE Van Vogt's Asylum). Nevertheless, Lifeforce is a taut Quatermass-style SF thriller about an apocalyptic contagion designed to funnel life energy from the whole of London to feed the occupants of an alien spacecraft. See trailer.

I guess the trailers mostly count as examples for my "lurid" list in their invariable focus on the action sequences. The Hunger particularly is far less energetic a film than you'd imagine from its trailer.

(This topic surfaced from the sludge in response to twin themes of vampires and squid raised in the fossil squid story. The umbrella-like section of the alien ship in Lifeforce is rather clearly based on the tentacle section of the Vampire Squid. Its name, Vampyroteuthis infernalis - "vampire squid from hell", not to be confused with HG Wells' Haploteuthis ferox - is rather undeserved; while it's a bit scary in appearance, it's a marvel in its multiple adaptations to live in dark, cold, and almost foodless and oxygenless waters. See videos from Planet Earth and National Geographic).
- Ray

Litcrit models and more on Colin Wilson

Further reading from yesterday's post that mentioned psychoanalytic literary criticism: Critical Approaches, a handy guide to a number of the approaches to analysis/critique of a text. One not mentioned, however, is existential criticism, which is the style of the author and philosopher Colin Wilson's The Strength to Dream (much of it online at Google Books). It's a very clear overview of the works of many authors of the late 1800s to early 1900s, loosely groupable together as "imaginative" 1. They're seen through the filter of existential criticism (as Wilson puts it, "the attempt to judge works of art by the contribution they make to the science of living, to judge them by standards of meaning as well as impact") as opposed to literary criticism, which Wilson characterises as concerning itself "with the general artistic 'satisfactoriness' of the work".

It's a pleasantly robust stance: commonsense without being in the least anti-intellectual, and not afraid to tackle stylistically iconic experimental works for their failure to engage the reader...

No matter what their rewards may be, Ulysses and A la Recherche du Temps Perdu are about as readable as a telephone directory

... his point being "not in disparagement of two great works" but to highlight the fallacy of assuming reader bafflement to be down to significant radical developments in the novel form. Some experiments, he argues, are "fishes gasping on the strand" that in hindsight failed to move the novel form onward.

The Strength to Dream, I didn't know because of its nominally different subject matter, is one of Wilson's seven books at the core of his "New Existentialism" philosophy: The Outsider (1956), Religion and the Rebel (1957), The Age of Defeat (aka The Stature of Man) (1959), The Strength to Dream: literature and the imagination (1962), Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963), Beyond the Outsider: the philosophy of the future (1965), and Introduction to the New Existentialism (aka The New Existentialism) (1966)

This comes from news Colin Stanley just sent us about the forthcoming release of his book Colin Wilson's Outsider Cycle: a guide for students (Pauper's Press, 2009, ISBN 9780946650965), which comprises essays, critical appraisal and bibliographies on these works (with an explanatory afterword by Colin Wilson himself). Stanley, as I've mentioned before - see Colin Wilson connections - is the bibliographer and probably the chief authority on Wilson's works, so this is likely to be an extremely astute analysis of works that need to be considered in relation to each other (Wilson has said that "These books are closely linked-so closely that it is impossible for any one of them to be understood without the others").

1. A diverse bunch including Lovecraft, Yeats, Wilde, Strindberg, Zola, Nathanael West, Faulkner, Waugh, Greene, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Andreyev, Beckett, Wells, Zamyatin, Lovecraft, Hoffman, Gogol, Le Fanu, MR James, Tolkien, De Sade, Maupassant, Wedekind, Artsybashev, DH Lawrence, Huxley, Kazantzakis, and Dürrenmatt.

Addendum (point just promoted from comments): in The Strength to Dream, I particularly like Wilson's identification of trends in fiction, such as its highlighting the sameness of format of many novels written in the early 20th century, a trend previously satirised as "Little Percy" novels by Aldous Huxley in chapter 3 of Crome Yellow:

"Prose?" Mr. Scogan pounced alarmingly on the word. "You've been writing prose?"

"Yes."

"Not a novel?"

"Yes."

"My poor Denis!" exclaimed Mr. Scogan. "What about?"

Denis felt rather uncomfortable. "Oh, about the usual things, you know."

"Of course," Mr. Scogan groaned. "I'll describe the plot for you. Little Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever. He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and comes to London, where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the luminous Future."

Denis blushed scarlet. Mr. Scogan had described the plan of his novel with an accuracy that was appalling. He made an effort to laugh. "You're entirely wrong," he said. "My novel is not in the least like that." It was a heroic lie. Luckily, he reflected, only two chapters were written. He would tear them up that very evening when he unpacked.

- a syndrome presumably arising from the typical career of the middle-class arts-educated men of a temperament likely to write novels.

- Ray

Colin Wilson connections

As towns go, Topsham doesn't have vast literary connections; the few I know of tend to be more by proxy, the most famous being that of the cousin and early sweetheart of Thomas Hardy, Tryphena Sparks, who in later life married a Topsham publican, and is buried here. Another such connection, coincidentally pub-related, is that Barry Stock, landlord of the Steam Packet here, is related by marriage to Colin Stanley, bibliographer of (and probably the chief authority on) the works of the philosopher and author Colin Wilson.

I first met Colin Stanley a few years back after he had achieved brief, and undeserved, minor notoriety for his self-published novel, First Novel. Personally I didn't much like it for the self-referential games (it was set in a town called Tapshed - unmistakably Topsham - and its hero was writing a novel about a fictional town called Topsham, which wasn't quite this Topsham as the street names were different ... and so on). It also had a flavour of an author using a novel for personal gripes about publishers, colleagues and so on. However, the local fuss concerned the sex scenes (in fact no more, nor more explicit, than many other modern novels) that got it banned from the Exeter WH Smith.

I first met Colin a while after this had long since blown over, found him quite unlike my expectations, and we've had a number of chats since. If you're interested in Colin Wilson's works, Stanley's Nottingham-based publishing house Pauper's Press has a large portfolio of works by and about Wilson, as well as links through to Abraxas, Paul Newman's interesting magazine of literature, philosophy and ideas, focusing on Colin Wilson.

These days, the impact of Colin Wilson's early works is largely forgotten. His The Outsider (I strongly suspect inspired from his own outsider status as a working-class intellectual) had a brief vogue, popularising existentialism, but since he has produced a huge output of variable quality: philosophy, litcrit, criminology, fiction and rather flakey New Age stuff. In later life, tongue-in-cheek self-revelations and hostile reviews from the highbrow papers - see 'Now they will realise that I am a genius' and I was a teenage nail biter in the Guardian - have fostered a current view of him as a hackwriting crank, which is highly undeserved in the light of his best works.

My particular favourites are The Strength to Dream and The Mind Parasites. The former is one of the best critiques I know on imaginative literature in the late 19th / early 20th century period that Wilson views as crucial (see the full view on Google Books). The latter is a philosophical SF/horror novel that uses, at the suggestion of August Derleth, a Lovecraftian concept of alien parasites and ancient evil to explore Wilson's central philosophies. The parasites, apparent aliens that live in the subsconscious and sap human energy, are a vehicle for an existential look at a central problem of the human condition, the inability of most of us to utilise the powers of our own minds. (Colin Stanley confirmed that it is one of the important books in Wilson's canon). See this review and the discussion of its themes in The Novels of Colin Wilson.

For more about Colin Wilson, see Colin Wilson World. The Fortean Times has an interview here that isn't a hatchet job.

-Ray