The latest issue of Fortean Times (FT310) has an excellent and lengthy (two full pages) obit by Gary Lachman which puts most of the attempts in the nationals to shame. Reading Wilson, Lachman concludes, “makes our inner gears a little bit stronger.” The letters page has a brilliant cartoon of CW from VIZ cartoonist Davey Jones who says that “I’m not the only person whose teenage ennui was eased by reading The Mind Parasites.”
Gossip also tells me that none other than Dame Edna Everage herself – well, Barry Humphries, anyway – is an admirer of Wilson. Perhaps we should guessed from this Edna quote – “There is, perhaps, no more dangerous man in the world than the man with the sensibilities of an artist but without creative talent. With luck such men make wonderful theatrical impresarios and interior decorators, or else they become mass murderers or critics.”

The work goes on.

Colin Wilson’s
Existential Literary Criticism:
a guide for students
by
Colin Stanley

For nearly sixty years, throughout his career, Colin Wilson has championed existential criticism, asserting that a book should not just be judged by the tenets of literary criticism or theory alone but also on what it has to say, in particular about the meaning and purpose of existence.
​In this study, a companion to his students’ guides to Colin Wilson’s ‘Outsider Cycle’ (Paupers’ Press, 2009) and ‘Occult Trilogy’ (Axis Mundi, 2013), Colin Stanley provides assessments of nine of his subject’s essential book-length studies on existential criticism and bibliographical details for the hundreds of essays and reviews he has written during the course of his long career.
​Appended to this is Wilson’s groundbreaking essay ‘Existential Criticism’ first published in The Chicago Review in 1959.
Due January 6th, 2014
201 pages. Paperback. £12.95.
I.S.B.N. 9780956866349
(Colin Wilson Studies #23)

Pre-publication offer: £11.95 (including postage/packing to UK addresses and delivery before Christmas)
Pay by PayPal to: stan2727uk@aol.com
or cheque, payable to Colin Stanley, from:
Paupers’ Press, 37 Quayside Close, Trent Bridge, Nottingham NG2 3BP.

Footnote: After generally disappointing run of the mill obituaries, Colin Stanley has written a rather more considered tribute. These two assertions stand out –
Those critics who have failed to see and appreciate [Wilson’s] talent are invariably those who have been intimidated by such a vast body of work and unable to distinguish between his ephemeral and essential books.
And –
When all is said and done, it is in [the] field of Consciousness Studies, that his true legacy lies.

By Vaughan Rapatahana

Given that Colin was himself rather prone to sweeping generalizations, indeed could on occasion be accused of hyperbolic rushes, I do not think that it is an exaggeration for me to state quite simply that Wilson was one of the more important writers and thinkers of his generation and as such that he will remain of considerable significance for many generations to come. Surely his huge oeuvre will be of even more exponentially increasing import as time headlongs itself forward, as readers and critics increasingly untrove the massive arsenal that is his written work, from libraries, second-hand bookstores and on the web.

The key to this rather prolix statement above is that Wilson was both a very good writer and a very good thinker – two polar opposites for the vast majority of writers and thinkers per se, who did not have his bicameral gift. In other words, not only could he write clearly, cogently and enthusiastically about a wide vista of – to him, always interrelated topics – but he would write about them existentially, always existentially, for everything he wrote, down to his lesser fictive excursions and his rants on subjects such as gardening – always had some ontological and epistemological grounding in this, his overall Existentialist Weltanshauung.

It is this, his quasi-obsession drive to relate everything to and from his own profound inner nuclear warhead, his mystic overview of how things ‘really should be’, that impelled him to write, transcribe, read, rave and produce prodigiously for a healthy number of years and indeed for well into two distinct centuries.

This impellation was, of course, to translate and codify his prime philosophic truth: that man is greater than he/she thinks he/she is and that – damn it – he/she bloody well should be doing something about evolving a lot faster, transmogrifying into the true mighty Being they inherently all are.

It is this, Colin Wilson’s DNA of preaching and teaching our evolution into something natural yet supernatural, for which we will remember him, I think and not at all for the rampant bullshit written about him, nor for any foibles that he may or may not have had as a man, as an author.

In the end then, as I write a tribute according to the parameters of Wilson’s very own Existential Literary Criticism, I can unhesitatingly say that he is a taonga (as we Māori say) – a veritable vibrant treasure to be shared for years and years to come.

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.

I’m sad to post that Colin passed away last night (5th of December) at 11:45pm, after a lengthy illness. I will post a full appreciation very soon.