The impressive church in Piccadilly was a perfect location for a celebration of the life and works of Colin Wilson. For not only had Colin spoke there previously – on Superconsciousness – not only had it served as a memorial location for Robert Graves, St. James was also the scene of William Blake’s christening several centuries ago. As I gazed at the font which perhaps once held the infant who would later write about the cleansing of the doors of perception – lines read this afternoon by a very young relative of Colin’s – I ruminated on his theories regarding synchronicity and time perception. Thoughts that would clarify as the day wore on.
At 3pm, pianist Michael Servent plays Trois Mouvements Perpetuals by Francis Poulenc, after which the Revd. Lindsay Meader welcomes us all – Colin’s family, friends and scholars – with prayers. Master of Ceremonies Colin Stanley then went on to introduce several speakers, each representing a different facet of Wilson’s ‘Existential Jigsaw Puzzle’.
Gary Lachman was first up, delivering a compacted miniature of Wilsonian phenomenology. As Gary spoke about Wilson’s development of Husserl’s epoche, he demonstrated a move which Wilson himself performed at his own lectures – clenching his hand in front of his forehead to illustrate the tactility of perception. Hearing Wilson riffs such as Heidegger’s ‘forgetfulness of existence’ from the pulpit reminded me not to forget these insights, and therein lies the simple conundrum of Colin’s work. Gary will be publishing a full study of Wilson “in 2016” which is of course the sixtieth anniversary of the appearance of The Outsider (an international Colin Wilson conference will be held at Nottingham University to celebrate the anniversary).
Laura del Rivo spoke next, painting a vivid portrait of Soho in the Fifties with some amusing anecdotes, such as Colin “showing three Finnish nurses around London.” Looking at the photograph on the memorial card also brought this era to life. The youthful philosopher cycles through a virtually empty London street – there’s one (?) pedestrian, possibly a ‘motor car’ and a milk float piled with crates. This is the environment in which you could find yourself a hostel before signing on at the labour exchange, and instantly get some manual labour while you worked on your novels. This world, unfortunately, has vanished forever.
A highlight of the service was undoubtedly the violin playing of Kerenza Peacock. Her rendition of Shostakovich’s Romance of the Gadfly, and later, Massenet’s Meditations from Thais, both with composer Howard Blake on piano, were emotionally charged reminders of Wilson’s lifelong love of “the brandy of the damned.”
Donald Rumbelow, criminologist and former policeman, led us through the backstreets of “Ripperology” – a term Wilson coined – and celebrated the intellectual angle of books such as Written in Blood, acknowledging the serious importance of the Encyclopaedia of Murder in the development of true crime writing. Later, Geraldine Beskin of The Atlantis Bookshop would inform us that her great-grandfather was arrested as a suspect in the hunt for Jack the Ripper. It was a day of meaningful coincidences, as Colin would have wanted.
A powerful reading from Ritual in the Dark was performed by Nicolas Tredell. Hearing Wilson’s words reverberate through a building with connections to Blake was a reminder of the necessity to clean our doors of perception. Afterwards, a small girl reads those very lines. You could imagine Blake beaming with delight.
Author of The Flying Cow and other Fortean classics, Guy Lyon Playfair, told us that The Occult was the most expensive book he’d ever bought – the postage to Brazil was enormous. Yet it remained his bedtime book and a classic companion to those who would walk with the Gods. It was pleasing to hear him speak about Poltergeist!, which is sometimes neglected when celebrating the paranormal corner of the oeuvre. As with Donald Rumbelow, the philosophical aspect of Wilson’s enquires into these apparently contradictory subjects was stressed.
It’s a testament to Wilson’s far-reaching capabilities that it should take several speakers and musicians to do his legacy justice. For although everyone who spoke (and most in the audience, in fact) knew Colin personally, it was up to one of his sons to sum up (after Colin’s Stanley’s speech about Wilson’s importance as a writer) his father’s life with the personal touch.
A recurring motif through the proceedings had been an image – a question mark. This was the signifier replacing a portrait of the mysterious Jack the Ripper in The Fifty Most Amazing Crimes of the Past Fifty Years. Colin Wilson would devour this sensational volume as an eight year old, despite being forbidden to do so, and the book would be mentioned several times throughout the memorial. When Colin’s son – and co-author – Damon gave his moving speech, pausing to be heard over the roadworks outside (drilling had interrupted Robert Graves memorial here too) this book would reappear in a typically spooky manner. Damon had spent all day clearing out Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road, and as the endless stock solely disappeared into his van, the room slowly became bare. His task eventually completed, Damon looked at the empty room only to spy the famous volume with the question mark portrait propping the door open.
Listening to one of Colin’s sons describe his fathers’ everyday work and life was illuminating. Some books made money, some didn’t, some were commented on, many were ignored, and the Wilson household was often overdrawn. But it didn’t seem to matter; Damon noted how much his father loved to write, loved his family and enjoyed the company of like minded individuals. He was a generous man, and most of us gathered at this memorial were lucky enough to enjoy some time with him, myself included.
After the Rev. Meader leads prayers and blessing, Michael Servent closes with Debussy’s Claire de Lune. The memorial over, we file downstairs for refreshments. And I, like most other attendees, promise myself to hold Wilson’s philosophy tight in my consciousness and never let go.

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of The Outsider, Nottingham University will be hosting a Colin Wilson Conference with four speakers (to be confirmed) plus an exhibition of Wilson materials from their Manuscripts and Special Collections Department. Full details on how delegates can attend and who will be speaking will follow later but places are strictly limited to just 50. The cost per delegate will be £27.50 plus VAT. Free car parking, refreshments and lunch will be provided. Those who think they might like to attend should contact Colin Stanley although no final decision or money will be required from them until January 2016. This will be an important event and places are likely to go well before the anniversary date!

From Colin’s bibliographer and friend, Colin Stanley –

There is to be a Memorial Service for Colin at St James’s Church, 197 Piccadilly, London W1J 9LL at 3pm on Tuesday October 14, 2014.

Everyone is welcome and I look forward to meeting up with those of you who are able to attend.

There’s an excellent (2007) interview with Colin Wilson at New Dawn magazine, available here. Choice quote – “As a thinker I place Edmund Husserl and his phenomenology at the centre of my approach, and I point out that it was because of certain simple logical errors that Sartre, Camus and Heidegger end as pessimists. When Husserl’s programme is carried out correctly, the outcome is positive, not negative. Derrida is a more recent example of a ‘Husserlian’ who failed to understand Husserl.”
There’s also a fine CW tribute by Frank DeMarco, and other interesting articles – well worth just over three quid!!

Colin Wilson’s Existential Literary Criticism [Colin Wilson Studies # 23] By Colin Stanley (Paupers’ Press, 2014)

The third in the ‘guide for students’ series on Colin Wilson’s work and the 23rd instalment in the Colin Wilson Studies series sees Wilson’s bibliographer turning his attention to one of Wilson’s best inventions – Existential Literary Criticism.
Existential Literary Criticism (ELC) is described by Wilson himself as a “different approach” to literature. After he published a tentative demonstration of ELC on the work of Aldous Huxley in a periodical in 1958, a reader complained to say that the only difference between criticism of the Existential and ordinary kind was the former’s pretentiousness. You proud Anglo philistines crack me up! Misunderstandings never change, it seems. So one year later Wilson wrote his important essay Existential Criticism which is now handily reproduced as an appendix to this volume.
It used to be annoying reading the opening sentence of that essay. Frustrating, because when I first read it, Deconstruction was the trendiest thing on the catwalk. Now that Derrida’s Politically Correct relativism is consigned to the landfill, like so much of last season’s high street fashion, it’s interesting to read it – “It is my hope that, within the next two decades, the techniques of existential thinking will become a commonplace in England and America. They would undoubtably provide a solution to many problems…” Needless to say, that hasn’t happened – the academy will always take the easy route. But ELC as a technique is a definite solution to still ongoing problems. “The disease of our time is the diffidence, the sense of personal insignificance, that feels the need to disguise itself as academic objectivity when it attempts to philosophise.” Fifty five years later and it’s still true. The garments have changed several times down the decades, but the deceit is still there. Contemporary writer/philosophers like Thomas Ligotti and Ray Brassier are still at it, like Japanese soldiers who don’t realise World War Two is over. Nihilism salesmen are an extreme example, and they do at least advertise their prejudices loudly enough to safely ignore them. Although their bland acceptance is of no actual use in studies of intentional consciousness, it does serve as an historical illustration of how much resistance – or rather, ignorance – there has been to Wilson’s bounty of ideas. The past fifty odd years of posh culture have generally ignored Wilson’s usefulness and have been mostly treading the same puddle in different togs.
So what does ELC have to do with this problem of ‘the fallacy of insignificance’? It mercilessly tracks a spotlight on any indulgence, any weak spot that confuses personal prejudices with objective perception. It is fundamentally a phenomenological technique, and it is relentless. There is no detail – however excruciating – spared when Wilson is in full flight (see, for instance, his The Misfits, 1988). ELC is not interested in style over content; David Lindsay is higher in the Wilson canon than many other technically proficient writers. It isn’t interested in reinforcing illusions of handed-down greatness; James Joyce is dissected as a self obsessive foghorn. It is only interested in meaning and values. In a much more dramatic and direct way, Wilson investigated criminals and murderers who would narcissistically lay their deceptive minds and life rejection on the autopsy slab for all it see. ELC is of course dealing with something more subtle and useful – literature – but Wilson’s method is essentially the same; to draw attention to the negative prejudices in documents that claim to be objective (in literature, his prime target is the I-am-a-camera type of novel).
For the rest of his career Wilson used this technique as a tool to extract intentions and meanings from an extraordinary number of texts, without any specific need to draw attention to the apparent difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture – that obsession with ‘difference’ is slowly rotting academia away from the inside like a septic tooth. Jane Austen or Juan Butler, H.P. Lovecraft or Heidegger – they were all trying to say something. And that something is far more important that the styles they clothed it in. That is merely outward appearance, not the hardcore rigour of phenomenological analysis.
The inclusion of the (quite scarce) 1959 Wilson essay in this volume is the best place to start. Elsewhere, Colin Stanley gives the neophyte the meat of the ELC books, and for the obsessive, a list of even more books, pamphlets and articles to hunt out, all drawn from from his immense CW bibliography.
The books discussed in the main trunk of the text are some of Wilson’s most focused. The Strength to Dream, Eagle and Earwig, Poetry & Mysticism, The Craft of the Novel, The Bicameral Critic, Existentially Speaking, The Books In My Life, The Angry Years and Existential Criticism: selected book reviews are separated by quite large gaps of time and, after the first two, hidden in between large thickets of occult esoterica and criminal texts, amongst other things. Most are all still in fairly easy to find, save Eagle and Earwig (some of it’s content is in Existential Criticism, 2009) so the summary here is welcome. Colin Stanley has himself noted a dilemma in that, when writing about such a clear voice as Wilson’s, there is a danger in obscuring his essentially simple message. Wilson was aware of this when thinking about his own vast catalogue. What makes this book valuable to those not familiar with his work – apart from the summaries of the texts – are the quotations that are on nearly every page. For instance:
“…the novel – and to a lesser extent, the play – represented a new dimension in human freedom…it seemed there were no limits to the human imagination; using this vehicle of the novel, it could explore all time and space.” (Quoted from The Craft of the Novel).
Colin Stanley’s guide series is an extremely useful map for those daunted by the size of Wilson’s catalogue – which is still large when the best books have been cherry picked. Like Howard Dosser’s 1990 study Colin Wilson, the Man and his Mind, it is a necessary to understanding a big and fascinating territory. This particular volume brings notice to an often overlooked part of Wilson’s thought and for that alone it is welcomed.

Colin Wilson’s Existential Literary Criticism is available at Amazon or direct from the publishers.

Here is a tribute to Colin by Eric Nicholson. See how many Wilson references you can spot!

Book title autobiographical sketch with special reference to the titles and themes of

Colin Wilson.

Looking backward, how much of my life was

a ritual in the dark?

I cultivated the strength to dream but

neglected my deeper self. . .

First I lived as a semi-steppenwolf and sang

a song of stone; light and

death were my companions.

I remember midnight

on the desert ( of time and stars)

in those desolate years. (The outsider archetype,

plagued by traumas and fears.)

With my backpack bulging I set off in search

of the miraculous, convinced I was more than

a ghost in a machine.

So, I was dreaming to some purpose, fighting

the war against sleep. For many years

I toiled along the mountain path. The dark night

of the soul part of the scene.

I decided too early that the way

ahead was in doing nothing. Yet even the masters

say their lives consisted of one mistake

after another! Light goes with darkness as

the steps in walking. Walk on!

The lifeforce is impersonal and is all

and everything; a flickering flame dancing​

through the aeons. (See a billion bipeds scurrying like bugs:

that’s you and me as well as sages and thugs.)

The trembling flame flickers through

a billion flickering life-forms and seems –

ceaseless and eternal. A thousand names

for joy!​

(This is the universe’s purpose; to become

conscious of itself. . .)

I am not who I thought I was. . .

I talk of dreams but practice the power

of now; no longer fear

and trembling quite as much.

Colin Stanley has an essay on Adrift in Soho at the London Fictions website. “Despite the ‘swinging sixties’, Wilson maintained this stance, against the use of drugs to induce higher states of consciousness, preferring more intellectually-based methods.”