I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. I was sent to a public school, I wasted two years doing my national service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be.
I had long before made the discovery that I lacked the parents and ancestors I needed. My father was, through being the right age at the right time rather than through any great professional talent, a briga-dier; and my mother was the very model of a would-be major-general's wife. That is, she never argued with him and always behaved as if he were listening in the next room, even when he was thousands of miles away. I saw very little of my father during the war, and in his long absences I used to build up a more or less immaculate conception of him, which he generally - a bad but appropriate pun - shattered within the first forty-eight hours of his leave.
Like all men not really up to their job, he was a stickler for externals and petty quotidian things; and in lieu of an intellect he had accumulated an armoury of capitalized key-words like Discipline and Tradition and Responsibility. If I ever dared - I seldom did - to argue with him, he would produce one of these totem words and cosh me with it, as no doubt in similar circumstances he quelled his subalterns. If one still refused to lie down and die, he lost, or loosed, his temper. His temper was like a red dog, and he always had it close to hand.
writing and writers
The Truth About the World /
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
What a novel. Unlike anything I have ever read.
What can we learn from Colin Wilson, 24-year-old author of "The Outsider", which popularized existentialism in Britain? /
The Outsider is not sure who he is.
He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”. His main business is to find his way back to himself.
Wilson never doubted his abilities as a writer.
He kept a journal: from its pages sprung the outline of “The Outsider,” his first book, which was a critical and commercial success.
As a teenager, he worked in a coffee shop at night so that he could write in the British Museum during the day, that is, he oriented his life around his passion, not the other way around. And he kept his financial needs to the bare minimum in order to be able to devote as much time as possible to writing, rather than working.
He was incredibly well read and had, at a very young age, the self-confidence to speak authoritatively and critically on the works of well-established authors (like Camus, Steinbeck, and Hemingway.)