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Thursday, June 26, 2014

Born Today-Colin Wilson- wikipedia

Colin Wilson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Colin Wilson (disambiguation).
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson.jpg
Pictured in Cornwall, 1984
Born 26 June 1931[1]
Leicester, England, United Kingdom
Died 5 December 2013 (aged 82)[1]
Cornwall, England, United Kingdom
Occupation Author
Nationality English
Period 1956–2013
Genres
Literary movement Angry Young Men
Notable work(s)
www.colinwilsonworld.co.uk
Colin Henry Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013) was a prolific English writer who first came to prominence as a philosopher and novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal.[2] Wilson called his philosophy "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism",[3] and maintained his life work "that of a philosopher, and (his) purpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism.”[4]

Early life

Wilson was born on June 26, 1931 in Leicester, England—the first child of Arthur and Annetta Wilson. His father worked in a shoe factory.[5] At the age of eleven he attended Gateway Secondary Technical School, where his interest in science began to blossom. By the age of 14 he had compiled a multi-volume work of essays covering all aspects of science entitled A Manual of General Science. But by the time he left school at sixteen, his interests were already switching to literature. His discovery of George Bernard Shaw's work, particularly Man and Superman, was an important landmark. He started to write stories, plays, and essays in earnest - a long "sequel" to Man and Superman made him consider himself to be "Shaw's natural successor." After two unfulfilling jobs - one as a laboratory assistant at his old school - he drifted into the Civil Service, but found little to occupy his time. In the Autumn of 1949, he was drafted into the Royal Air Force but soon found himself clashing with authority, eventually feigning homosexuality in order to be dismissed. Upon leaving he took up a succession of menial jobs, spent some time wandering around Europe, and finally returned to Leicester in 1951. There he married his first wife, (Dorothy) Betty Troop, and moved to London, where a son was born. But the marriage rapidly disintegrated as he drifted in and out of several unrewarding jobs. During this traumatic period Colin Wilson was continually working and reworking the novel that was eventually published as Ritual in the Dark (1960).[6] He also met three young writers who became close friends - Bill Hopkins, Stuart Holroyd and Laura Del Rivo.[7] Another trip to Europe followed, and he spent some time in Paris attempting to sell magazine subscriptions. Returning to Leicester again, he met Joy Stewart - later to become his second wife and mother of their three children - who accompanied him to London. There he continued to work on Ritual in the Dark, receiving some advice from Angus Wilson (no relation) - then Deputy Superintendent of the British Museum's Reading Room - and famously slept rough (in a sleeping bag) on Hampstead Heath to save money.[8]
On Christmas Day, 1954, alone in his room, he sat down on his bed and began to write in his journal. He described his feelings as follows:
"It struck me that I was in the position of so many of my favourite characters in fiction: Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge, the young writer in Hamsun's Hunger: alone in my room, feeling totally cut off from the rest of society. It was not a position I relished...Yet an inner compulsion had forced me into this position of isolation. I began writing about it in my journal, trying to pin it down. And then, quite suddenly, I saw that I had the makings of a book. I turned to the back of my journal and wrote at the head of the page: 'Notes for a book The Outsider in Literature'..."

The Outsider

Main article: The Outsider (Colin Wilson)
Gollancz published the then 24-year-old Wilson's The Outsider in 1956. The work examines the role of the social "outsider" in seminal works by various key literary and cultural figures – such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James, T. E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent van Gogh – and discusses Wilson's perception of social alienation in their work. The book became a best-seller and helped popularise existentialism in Britain.[9] It has never been out-of-print since publication day and has been translated into over thirty languages (including Russian and Chinese).
The back cover of the 2001 paperback edition reads:
"[In The Outsider] Wilson rationalized the psychological dislocation so characteristic of Western creative thinking into a coherent theory of alienation, and defined those affected by it as a type: the Outsider. Through the works of various artists...Wilson explored the psyche of the Outsider, his effect on society and society's on him. Nothing has happened in the past four decades that has made The Outsider any less relevant..."

Life and works after The Outsider

Non-fiction writing

Wilson became associated with the "Angry Young Men" of British literature. He contributed to Declaration, an anthology of manifestos by writers associated with the movement, and was also anthologised in a popular paperback sampler, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men.[10][11] Some viewed Wilson and his friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd as a sub-group of the "Angries", more concerned with "religious values" than with liberal or socialist politics.[12] Critics on the left swiftly labeled them as fascist; commentator Kenneth Allsop called them "the law givers".[12][13]
After the initial success of Wilson's first work, critics universally panned Religion and the Rebel (1957). Time magazine published a review, headlined "Scrambled Egghead", that pilloried the book.[14]
Undaunted, Wilson continued to expound his positive 'new' existentialism in the six philosophical books known as 'The Outsider Cycle', all written within the first ten years of his literary career. These books were summarised by Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966). When the book was re-printed in 1980 as The New Existentialism Wilson wrote: "If I have contributed anything to existentialism - or, for that matter, to twentieth century thought in general, here it is. I am willing to stand or fall by it."
In The Age of Defeat (1959) - book 3 of 'The Outsider Cycle' - he bemoaned the loss of the hero in twentieth century life and literature; convinced that we were becoming embroiled in what he termed 'the fallacy of insignificance'. It was this theory that encouraged the celebrated American psychologist Abraham Maslow to contact him in 1963. The two corresponded regularly and met on several occasions before Maslow's death in 1970. A biography and assessment of his work, New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution, based on audiotapes that Maslow had provided, was written by Colin Wilson and published in 1972. Maslow's observation of 'peak experiences' in his students - those sudden moments of overwhelming happiness that we all experience from time to time - provided Colin Wilson with an important clue in his search for the mechanism that might control the Outsider's 'moments of vision'. Maslow, however, was convinced that 'peak experiences' could not be induced, Colin Wilson thought otherwise and, indeed, in later books like Access to Inner Worlds (1983) and Super Consciousness (2009), suggested how they could be induced at will.
Wilson was also renowned for what he termed ‘Existential Criticism’ which suggested that a work of art should not just be judged by the principles of literary criticism or theory alone but also by what it has to say, in particular about the meaning and purpose of existence. In his pioneering essay for The Chicago Review (Volume 13, no. 2, 1959, p. 152-181) he wrote:
“No art can be judged by purely aesthetic standards, although a painting or a piece of music may appear to give a purely aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic enjoyment is an intensification of the vital response, and this response forms the basis of all value judgements. The existentialist contends that all values are connected with the problems of human existence, the stature of man, the purpose of life. These values are inherent in all works of art, in addition to their aesthetic values, and are closely connected with them.”
He went on to write several more essays and books on the subject. Among the latter were The Strength to Dream (1962), Eagle and Earwig (1965), Poetry & Mysticism (1970) The Craft of the Novel (1975), The Bicameral Critic (1985) and The Books In My Life (1998). He also applied existential criticism to many of the hundreds of book reviews he wrote for such journals as Books & Bookmen, The Literary Review, The London Magazine, John O’London’s, The Spectator, The Aylesford Review, and others throughout his career. Some of these were gathered together in a book entitled Existential Criticism: selected book reviews, published in 2009.
By the late 1960s Wilson had become increasingly interested in metaphysical and occult themes. In 1971, he published The Occult: A History, featuring interpretations on Aleister Crowley, George Gurdjieff, Helena Blavatsky, Kabbalah, primitive magic, Franz Mesmer, Grigori Rasputin, Daniel Dunglas Home, and Paracelsus (among others). He also wrote a markedly unsympathetic biography of Crowley, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast, and has written biographies on other spiritual and psychological visionaries, including Gurdjieff, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, Rudolf Steiner, and P. D. Ouspensky.
Originally, Wilson focused on the cultivation of what he called "Faculty X", which he saw as leading to an increased sense of meaning, and on abilities such as telepathy and the awareness of other energies. In his later work he suggests the possibility of life after death and the existence of spirits, which he personally analyzes as an active member of the Ghost Club.
He has also written non-fiction books on crime, ranging from encyclopedias to studies of serial killing. He had an ongoing interest in the life and times of Jack the Ripper and in sex crime in general.

Fiction

Wilson explored his ideas on human potential and consciousness in fiction, mostly detective fiction or science fiction, including several Cthulhu Mythos pieces; often writing a non-fiction work and a novel concurrently - as a way of putting his ideas into action. He wrote:
"For me [fiction] is a manner of philosophizing....Philosophy may be only a shadow of the reality it tries to grasp, but the novel is altogether more satisfactory. I am almost tempted to say that no philosopher is qualified to do his job unless he is also a novelist....I would certainly exchange any of the works of Whitehead or Wittgenstein for the novels they ought to have written" Voyage to a Beginning (Cecil Woolf, 1968, p. 160-1)
Like some of his non-fiction work, many of Wilson's novels from Ritual in the Dark (1960) onwards have been concerned with the psychology of murder—especially that of serial killing. However, he has also written science fiction of a philosophical bent, including The Mind Parasites (1967), The Philosopher's Stone (1969), The Space Vampires (1976) and the four-volume Spider-World series: Spider World: The Tower (1987), Spider World: the Delta (1987), Spider World: The Magician (1992) and Spider World: Shadowland (2003); novels described by one critic as 'an artistic achievement of the highest order... destined to be regarded to be one of the central products of the twentieth century imagination.'[15]
In The Strength to Dream (1961) Wilson attacked H. P. Lovecraft as "sick" and as "a bad writer" who had "rejected reality"—but he grudgingly praised Lovecraft's story "The Shadow Out of Time" as capable science-fiction. August Derleth, incensed by Wilson's treatment of Lovecraft in The Strength to Dream, then dared Wilson to write what became The Mind Parasites—to expound his philosophical ideas in the guise of fiction.[16] In the preface to The Mind Parasites, Wilson concedes that Lovecraft, "[f]ar more than Hemingway or Faulkner, or even Kafka, is a symbol of the outsider-artist in the 20th century" and asks: "what would have happened if Lovecraft had possessed a private income—enough, say, to allow him to spend his winters in Italy and his summers in Greece or Switzerland?" answering that in his [Wilson's] opinion "[h]e would undoubtedly have produced less, but what he did produce would have been highly polished, without the pulp magazine cliches that disfigure so much of his work. And he would have given free rein to his love of curious and remote erudition, so that his work would have been, in some respect, closer to that of Anatole France or the contemporary Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges".[17] Wilson also discusses Lovecraft in Order of Assassins (1972) and in the prefatory note to The Philosopher's Stone (1969). His short novel The Return of the Lloigor (1969/1974) also has roots in the Cthulhu Mythos - its central character works on the real book the Voynich Manuscript, but discovers it to be a mediaeval Arabic version of the Necronomicon - as does his 2002 novel The Tomb of the Old Ones.

Adaptations

Tobe Hooper directed the film Lifeforce, based on Wilson's novel The Space Vampires.[18] After its release, Colin Wilson recalled that author John Fowles regarded the film adaptation of Fowles' own novel The Magus as the worst film adaptation of a novel ever. Wilson told Fowles there was now a worse one, the film adaptation of Lifeforce.[19]

Illness and death

After a major spinal operation in 2011,[20] Wilson suffered a stroke and lost his ability to speak.[21] He was admitted to the hospital in October 2013 for pneumonia. He died in December 2013.[1]

Reception

Howard F. Dossor writes: "Wilson constitutes one of the most significant challenges to twentieth-century critics. It seems most likely that critics analysing his work in the middle of the twenty-first century, will be puzzled that his contemporaries paid such inadequate attention to him. But it is not merely for their sake that he should be examined. Critics who turn to him will find themselves involved in the central questions of our age and will be in touch with a mind that has disclosed an extraordinary resilience in addressing them." [22]
Critic Nicolas Tredell writes: "The twenty-first century may look back on Colin Wilson as one of the novelists who foresaw the future of fiction, and something, perhaps, of the future of man."[23]
Science writer Martin Gardner has written Wilson was an intelligent writer but had been duped by paranormal claims "Colin brought it all. With unparalleled egotism and scientific ignorance he believed almost everything he read about the paranormal, no matter how outrageous." Gardner described Wilson's book The Geller Phenomenon as "the most gullible book ever written about the Israeli charlatan." Gardner concluded that Wilson had decayed into an "occult eccentric" writing books for the lunatic fringe.[24]
The psychologist Dorothy Rowe gave Wilson's book Men of Mystery a negative review and wrote it "does nothing to advance research into the paranormal".[25]
Benjamin Radford has written Wilson had a "bias toward mystery-mongering" and ignored scientific and skeptical arguments on some of the topics he wrote about. Radford wrote Wilson's book The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved is "riddled with errors and obfuscating omissions, betraying a bizarre disregard for accuracy".[26]

Bibliography

Fiction

  • "The Frenchman" (short story, Evening Standard 22 August 1957)
  • The Age of Defeat (US title The Stature of Man) (1959)
  • Ritual in the Dark (Victor Gollancz, 1960) (Reprinted, Ronin Publishing Visions Series, 1993)
  • Adrift in Soho (1961)
  • "Watching the Bird" (short story, Evening News 12 September 1961)
  • "Uncle Tom and the Police Constable" (short story, Evening News 23 October 1961)
  • "He Could not Fail" (short story, Evening News 29 December 1961)
  • "Uncle and the Lion" (short story, Evening News 28 September 1962)
  • "Hidden Bruise" (short story, Evening News 3 December 1962)
  • "The Wooden Cubes" (short story, Evening News 27 June 1963)
  • Necessary Doubt (1964)
  • The Glass Cage (1966)
  • The Mind Parasites (1967)
  • The Philosopher's Stone (1969) ISBN 978-0-213-17790-4
  • The Return of the Lloigor (first published 1969 in the anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos; revised separate edition, Village Press, London, 1974).
  • "The Return of the Lloigor" (short story in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by August Derleth, 1969; later revised and published as a separate book)
  • The God of the Labyrinth (US title The Hedonists) (1970)
  • The Killer (US title Lingard) (1970)
  • The Black Room (1971)
  • The Schoolgirl Murder Case (1974)
  • The Space Vampires (1976)
  • "Timeslip" (short story in Aries I, edited by John Grant, 1979)
  • Starseekers (1980)
  • "A Novelization of Events in the Life and Death of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin," in Tales of the Uncanny (Reader's Digest Association, 1983; an abbreviated version of the later The Magician from Siberia)
  • The Janus Murder Case (1984)
  • The Personality Surgeon (1985)
  • Spider World: The Tower (1987)
  • Spider World: The Delta (1987)
  • The Magician from Siberia (1988)
  • Spider World: The Magician (1992)
  • The Tomb of the Old Ones (novella published as half of a double volume alongside a novella by John Grant, 2002)
  • Spider World: Shadowlands (2002)

Non-fiction

  • The Outsider (1956)
  • Religion and the Rebel (1957)
  • Encyclopedia of Murder (with Patricia Pitman, 1961)
  • The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1962)
  • Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963)
  • The World of Violence (US title The Violent World of Hugh Greene) (1963)
  • Man Without a Shadow (US title The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme) (1963)
  • Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs (1964)
  • Brandy of the Damned (1964; later expanded and reprinted as Chords and Discords/Colin Wilson On Music)
  • Beyond the Outsider (1965)
  • Eagle and Earwig (1965)
  • Sex and the Intelligent Teenager (1966)
  • Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966)
  • Voyage to a Beginning (1969)
  • A Casebook of Murder (1969)
  • Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (1969)
  • Poetry and Mysticism (1969; subsequently significantly expanded in 1970)
  • L'amour: The Ways of Love (1970)
  • The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (with E. H. Visiak and J. B. Pick, 1970)
  • The Occult: A History (1971)
  • Order of Assassins: The Psychology of Murder (1972)
  • New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972)
  • Strange Powers (1973)
  • "Tree" by Tolkien (1973)
  • Hermann Hesse (1974)
  • Wilhelm Reich (1974)
  • Jorge Luis Borges (1974)
  • Hesse-Reich-Borges: Three Essays (1974)
  • Ken Russell: A Director in Search of a Hero (1974)
  • A Book of Booze (1974)
  • The Unexplained (1975)
  • Mysterious Powers (US title They Had Strange Powers) (1975)
  • The Craft of the Novel (1975)
  • Enigmas and Mysteries (1975)
  • The Geller Phenomenon (1975), ISBN 0-7172-8105-1
  • Colin Wilson's Men of Mystery (US title Dark Dimensions) (with various authors, 1977)
  • Mysteries (1978)
  • Mysteries of the Mind (with Stuart Holroyd, 1978)
  • The Haunted Man: The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (1979)
  • Science Fiction as Existentialism (1980)
  • Frankenstein's Castle: the Right Brain-Door to Wisdom (1980)
  • The Book of Time, edited by John Grant and Colin Wilson (1980)
  • The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff (1980)
  • The Directory of Possibilities, edited by Colin Wilson and John Grant (1981)
  • Poltergeist!: A Study in Destructive Haunting (1981)
  • Anti-Sartre, with an Essay on Camus (1981)
  • The Quest for Wilhelm Reich (1981)
  • The Goblin Universe (with Ted Holiday, 1982)
  • Access to Inner Worlds: The Story of Brad Absetz (1983)
  • Encyclopedia of Modern Murder, 1962-82 (1983)
  • The Psychic Detectives: The Story of Psychometry and Paranormal Crime Detection (1984)
  • A Criminal History of Mankind (1984), revised and updated (2005)
  • Lord of the Underworld: Jung and the Twentieth Century (1984)
  • The Bicameral Critic (1985)
  • The Essential Colin Wilson (1985)
  • Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision (1985)
  • Afterlife: An Investigation of the Evidence of Life After Death (1985)
  • An Encyclopedia of Scandal. Edited by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman (1986)
  • The Book of Great Mysteries. Edited by Colin Wilson and Dr. Christopher Evans (1986), ISBN 0948164263
  • An Essay on the 'New' Existentialism (1988)
  • The Laurel and Hardy Theory of Consciousness (1986)
  • Marx Refuted – The Verdict of History, edited by Colin Wilson (with contributions also) and Ronald Duncan, Bath, (UK), (1987), ISBN 0-906798-71-X
  • Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (1987)
  • The Musician as 'Outsider'. (1987)
  • The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (with Damon Wilson, 1987)
  • Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict (with Robin Odell, 1987)
  • Autobiographical Reflections (1988)
  • The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988)
  • Beyond the Occult (1988)
  • The Mammoth Book of True Crime (1988)
  • The Decline and Fall of Leftism (1989)
  • Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection (1989)
  • Existentially Speaking: Essays on the Philosophy of Literature (1989)
  • Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (1990)
  • Mozart's Journey to Prague (1992)
  • The Strange Life of P.D. Ouspensky (1993)
  • Unsolved Mysteries (with Damon Wilson, 1993)
  • Outline of the Female Outsider (1994)
  • A Plague of Murder (1995)
  • From Atlantis to the Sphinx (1996)
  • An Extraordinary Man in the Age of Pigmies: Colin Wilson on Henry Miller (1996)
  • The Unexplained Mysteries of the Universe (1997) ISBN 0-7513-5983-1
  • The Atlas of Sacred Places (1997)
  • Below the Iceberg: Anti-Sartre and Other Essays (reissue with essays on postmodernism, 1998)
  • The Corpse Garden (1998)
  • The Books in My Life (1998)
  • Alien Dawn (1999)
  • The Devil's Party (US title Rogue Messiahs) (2000)
  • The Atlantis Blueprint (with Rand Flem-Ath, 2000)
  • Illustrated True Crime: A Photographic History (2002)
  • Dreaming To Some Purpose (2004) - autobiography
  • World Famous UFOs (2005)
  • Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals (2006)
  • Crimes of Passion: The Thin Line Between Love and Hate (2006)
  • The Angry Years: The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men (2007)
  • Manhunters: Criminal Profilers & Their Search for the World's Most Wanted Serial Killers (2007)
  • Super Consciousness (2009)
  • Existential Criticism: selected book reviews (edited by Colin Stanley) (2009)
  • Comments on Boredom ' and 'Evolutionary Humanism and the New Psychology (2013)
  • Introduction to 'The Faces of Evil': an unpublished book (2013)

Plays

  • Strindberg (1970)
  • The Death of God' and other plays (edited by Colin Stanley) (2008)

Unpublished works

  • The Anatomy of Human Greatness (non-fiction, written 1964; Maurice Bassett plans to publish this work electronically)
  • Metamorphosis of the Vampire (fiction, written 1992-94)[27]
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