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Colin Wilson 4.Indd The Odyssey Of A Dogged Optimist Robert Meadley Robert Meadley read Colin Wilson’s autobiography, Dreaming To Some Purpose This is the result: The Odyssey Of A Dogged Optimist with an afterpiece called, ALMERIC WISTER , or THE BLIGHTERS BIT! Guest Appearances by JOHN AUBREY, GEORGE BORROW, the Poet VIRGIL, LUCY, and JOE ORTON; & the Long Arm of TESTICLES THE TAUTOLOGIST! Savoy Books Savoy Books 446 Wilmslow Road Withington Manchester M20 3BW offi[email protected] www.savoy.abel.co.uk First published in Great Britain 2004 by Savoy Books Text copyright © Robert Meadley 2004 This book copyright © Savoy 2004 Also by Robert Meadley in Savoy Books A Tea Dance at Savoy (2003) 1. The Serious Business I left the crowd to gape and stare at the white marble Death Chamber, and, crossing South Fifth Avenue, walked along the western side of that thoroughfare to Bleecker Street. Then I turned to the right and stopped before a dingy shop which bore the sign: Hawberk, Armorer Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow the mystery of naming I was walking the dogs in Gledhow woods the other day, along the track by the lake, when we met a guy with a skittish young bitch, the sort of light-boned hound they send after foxes in the Lake District. The bitch stopped to play with my dogs, both male, and both unneutered, though no longer young. I’d have liked to discuss the bitch’s ancestry, but the man—who I’ve never seen before, or since—seemed a bit harassed and in a hurry, and walked on, calling the bitch to follow him. He called the bitch ‘Rico’. I thought I’d misheard at first, but he had to repeat it several times before the bitch condescended to stop flirting and follow him. It was really an inconsequential moment, but it left me with this nagging question: why on earth would you call a bitch ‘Rico’? It doesn’t matter. I’d just like to know. Mind you, that’s nothing to this one: Back in the day, when I lived down in Liggertown, I lived for while in Clapham Old Town, and used to walk my dog on the Common. We were walking across to The Windmill. It was a hot summer day. Gangs of roustabouts, involved in the preparations for the Country Show, were taking their lunchtime ease, lounging on rolls of paling fence that had been strategically piled beside the principle paths. Down the main path to the bandstand came a squattish medium-sized dog; quite old and a bit unlovely, but— to judge by the way he held his head—fairly pleased with himself. He had a stiff-legged gait with just a hint of scuttle. And the genitals of an elephant. They swung as he strutted. They seemed to fill the space between his front and back legs. The ground clearance of his enormous scrotum was minimal. Even a fairly modest pebble could have been hazardous. Puffing along behind him with an ungainly trot, at a never- shrinking distance, was a flustered pink-faced man: balding, a bit overweight, at or about retirement age I would guess. The dog’s lead hung limply from his hand. If it was a race, it was no contest. He hadn’t even reached the Xeno’s Paradox stage of making ground in vain. “Cindy!” he called in an ineffectual voice. “Cindy!” Like some poor Ancient Greek, he was doomed to run this gauntlet of bored roustabouts, women with children, and assorted passers-by. No-one said anything. What needed to be said? We just grinned English smiles, and exchanged dancing eye-contact. “Cindy!” he was still calling as they dwindled towards Clapham Junction. “Cindy!” Even the heat haze quivered with amusement. [8] It’s a tricky business, this naming of things. It’s what did for Wittgenstein, as I remember. But he was too full of himself. He just wouldn’t be told. It’s slippery stuff, language. Different in everyone’s mouth. ecce homo A bow-shot from her bower-eaves, He rode between the barley-sheaves, The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves, And flamed upon the brazen greaves Of bold Sir Lancelot. Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott Another who has suffered from the mystery of misnaming is Colin Wilson. He was one of the two original Angry Young Men, but since he wasn’t angry he has always been somewhat bemused as to how he found himself there. Just happenstance really. There’s usually a reason of sorts. It begins, if I remember right, with an ambitious young journalist called Kenneth Allsop; an acolyte of Ken Tynan, the Kim Philby of British letters. The older among you may remember Allsop. He was employed by the BBC to represent the spirit of BBC2 for a while back in the black and white days. Ken A wanted to puff a protégé of Ken T called John Osborne, who had written a play called Look Back in Anger. And he wanted to proclaim this as a revolutionary moment in the culture. (Well, it didn’t take a genius to tell that the post-war claustrophobia was going to implode. We had Rock Around The Clock, for christ’s sake. There was the beginnings of choice: you could be a winklepicker or a brothelcreeper man. Girls were showing off their knickers when they danced. Something was going on. Even if no good would come of it.) Anyway, to do this he had to suggest there was some evidence [9] of more general intellectual movement in the same direction. He needed A.N. Other. Enter Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider. He had just achieved a sudden fame for producing at the age of twenty-five a serious critique of existentialism, after leaving school at sixteen, and researching and writing the book in the Reading Room of the British Museum (serious) while living on bread buns and sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath (romantic). He was good copy, even if his reputation did rest on a single book. Ken snapped him up, lumped him in with John Osborne, and produced a piece titled The Angry Young Men. It was more than a headline. It was a soundbite. It resonated in a culture that was irritated, stifled and bored. (When I describe the Fifties to our lads, they look at me as if I’m describing the Stone Age.) Things were going to change. We knew it. Even if we didn’t know how or where. For Ken’s purposes, Colin had three wonderful qualities. He was working class, which was fashionable, he was photogenic, which is always useful, and he already had a legend. Added to which he had written a book on existentialism, which was vaguely understood to be an exotic continental form of British suburban miserablism, so he kind of fitted in with John Osborne. The bedbugs of Bloomsbury had something to hop about. They took up Colin with enthusiasm. They wanted to be his friend. They wanted to help him belong. But he didn’t make it easy for them. Colin thought, and said so, that they had misunderstood his book. He thought this because—for although he was clever, he was still quite green—he assumed that when they talked about his book, they’d read it. And that if they’d read it, they must have thought about it. This just shows what an outsider his working class origins made him. A well-bred British writer knows that the first rule of survival is never read your friends’ books. (And how they wanted to befriend him!) It makes it much more difficult to praise them. What you do is pick up the gist from the bits they insist on reading to you, if you are careless enough to pass within reading distance of them. You [10] only read your enemies’ books, in order to savage them; and then you only skip-read to find the quotes you need—a technique learnt by most bright kids in the lower-sixth, or year 12 as it’s called under our new Pol-Pot system of education. Why, if a writer spent all his time reading, where would he find time to talk? Colin could do both effortlessly, like Landseer drawing simultaneously with both hands. But Landseer had the savvy to keep it as parlour trick. Colin did it all the time. It was intolerable. How could you patronise a man—and every great authority from Ruskin to Eliot agreed that the working class existed to be patronised—who not only knew he was cleverer than you, but kept demonstrating it? Colin was, and still seems to be, a romantic. He bounded with energy like one of those big dogs that keep jumping up at you. Clever though he was, and much though he had devoured, he had yet to learn that the cure for ignorance and stupidity is not education—though the ability to read and write is a powerful tool in the right hands—but muscular humility and grit, with a generous shot of low cunning to add wisdom. He knew these people were educated. And he thought he knew what that meant. He thought these people knew things. Real things. And that they wanted to know more. He thought they wanted solutions to the problems they whinged on about. He took them at face value. He did not know the rules in this boudoir of the Lady of Shalott, and would insist on opening the window. He did not fit in.
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