He changed my life. No irony, he really did. And I’d like to show my gratitude.
When I read that Colin Wilson told Iris Murdoch that he wanted to live until he was 300, I seriously imagined that he would. Every year, a CW book or two (or more) would appear without fail, usually in the same minimalist paperback cover from Grafton. There was also his vast back catalogue to find. Far too much for my teenage purse to obtain, yet I found it all, eventually. There was also an impossible yet complete necessity to read everything he discussed – yes, all of it, because everything he described sounded completely amazing. I’m still working in that one. Now it feels very strange to know that the only writings I’ll be reading by him will be posthumous. The obvious fact that a serious illness left him unable to write for the past year has still not prepared me for this feeling. Neither has the appearance of several “lost” essays and articles, some decades old, instead of any brand new CW product.
Not only is it hard to comprehend to that Colin isn’t with us any more, it’s disappointing to me that I’ll never know his opinion on say, a contemporary criminal case, no longer wonder at some obscure theory or author he’s distributing.
Without Wilson’s conversational discussions of literary theory, I’d otherwise have been seriously intimidated tackling the modernist heavyweights such as Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time and The Man without Qualities; yet he made these – and many others – accessible and exciting. To make Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Crisis of the European Sciences equally accessible is an even more striking achievement. And the list of my discoveries via Wilson goes on and on, from the ivory tower to the gutter. That for me was one of his best aspects originally, enabling complete access to recondite knowledge. In pre-internet days this was very liberating for a council estate kid such as myself. Class, of course, was perhaps one reason why Wilson wasn’t appreciated by academia during his life; who needs a middleman when you can have easy access to the source, from one plain speaking autodidact to another? Another extraordinary aspect was his tone. It was as direct and enthralling as the Rock n’ Roll I loved, and as intrinsically meaningful as the ‘high culture’ which I was told I couldn’t understand. With a pellucid prose style ringing out as loud as Faust’s Easter bells – it was never “prairie flat”- narrating life affirming patter like a phenomenological cab driver, well, this obliterated my adolescent angst and confusion. And not a moment too soon. Without his honest guidance I’d be much less happy and intellectually frustrated. And I’m very satisfied that I made the difficult journey to Gorran Haven to tell him this. Not once, but twice. I wish there had been more.
So far, so good. Just the above reasons would be enough for me to celebrate CW. But twenty five years later, I’m still finding amazing angles in his work that escaped me the first few times around.
Philip K. Dick, by his own admission, a “fictionalising philosopher” rather than a mere SF hack, was critically ignored for most of his life. Scratching out a meagre existence, like Lovecraft before him, by writing pulp for pennies. Yet PKD’s ‘pre-cog’ oeuvre so accurately describes the world we live in now, you could call it a documentary. Several decades too early, but still uncannily accurate. His time has come, however belatedly. Colin once said with regard to the perception of his own work that “the times are out of joint”- quoting The Bard (and unconsciously paraphrasing PKD himself). This is true, but Wilson never really worked in that much of vacuum despite the ups and downs of the mainstream critical response (mostly in his homeland). He has a large fanbase and a cottage industry devoted to analysing his work and keeping obscurities in print. That alone is enough to keep his work alive and there’s no doubt that this will slowly pave the way for Wilson to eventually be fully analysed by academia in the coming century.; it’s inevitable as academia (in the humanities) do not generate their own content. Will they be able resist (from a safe posthumous distance) a huge and controversial body of work which anticipated several genres (true crime and Lovecraft as philosophy for two) with so many tendrils of the Wilson narrative entwined with post war and late twentieth century culture? I doubt it. But this isn’t really what Wilson’s life-work was about. His work was about each of us developing own own intentional consciousness, understanding the creativity of consciousness far away from the pessimism and relativism if his era. For his astounding impact on my education and his deep influence on my own civscuousbess, I’m forever grateful. Thank you Colin Wilson.