Photo: Colin Wilson.
Outside the box: Jonathan Wooding rediscovers the writing of Colin Wilson
‘George Fox is on Wilson’s mind throughout.’
Here’s a young man, just in his twenties, in 1950s’ London, reading of all things George Fox’s Journal. In 1954, there was plenty for this earnest, self-taught, independent-minded man to process: the testing of a hydrogen bomb, war-time rationing at an end, the publication of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the founding of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Alan Turing’s suicide, William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ included on the Last Night of the Proms, and a new film starring Peter Cushing – George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. History hurts and inspires; culture is challenging, sometimes demeaning; life is ultimately precarious… What does it all mean? Who am I? Where do I belong?
Our young man is Colin Wilson (1931-2013), a reject from the Royal Air Force, a drifter, rough-sleeper, and shortly to publish a book which became a bestseller. This book has never been out of print, and prominently features that other Leicestershire-born drifter, George Fox. I read it in my early twenties, at a time when embracing counter-culture godlessness. Back then, rejecting scientism and the monetisation of everyday life was on every young radical’s puzzling agenda. I’m now re-reading Wilson’s exploration of alienation, a book we know as The Outsider: An inquiry into the nature of the sickness of mankind in the mid-twentieth century (1956).
I’m finding references to several exciting writers long cherished by Quakers: Thomas Traherne, Jakob Boehme, Eckhart von Hocheim, Blaise Pascal, William Blake, Leo Tolstoy, T S Eliot. Wilson’s reading of George Fox, however, comes late on in the book, the penultimate chapter. But it’s clear that Fox is on Wilson’s mind throughout, not least because William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is Wilson’s rather obvious precursor, and we know that Fox’s experience is central to William James’s work (see the Friend, 27 April 2023, ‘Vagabond Journey’).
Wilson first mentions Fox, in fact, in chapter four, where he’s exploring the life of the painter Van Gogh: ‘In many ways [Van Gogh] reminds us of the young George Fox, with his tormented feeling of having a purpose, yet not being conscious of it.’ Yes, Van Gogh is an outsider, and the young George Fox is one, too. And being an outsider is problematic: ‘the Outsider’s chief desire is to cease to be an Outsider’, and ‘He cannot cease to be an Outsider simply to become an ordinary bourgeois’. Quite a conundrum, though while Wilson is a great bibliophile and curator of texts, I now find myself unconvinced that Wilson himself wanted to cease to be an outsider. Indeed, I’m disappointed that he included nothing from those outsiders who were alienated not by their own aloof or superior sensibility, but simply because of who they were.
For instance, Wilson’s mentor in the 1950s seems to have been the deputy superintendent of the British Museum Reading Room, Angus Wilson (1913-1991), (no relation). Angus Wilson was a gay man who may have known a thing or two about being an outsider (who is nevertheless on the inside), or an insider having to conceal his sense of being an outsider. Colin Wilson doesn’t explore this explicitly, though The Outsider is dedicated to Angus. More depressing, we should note that, like T S Eliot, Wilson fails deplorably in this cultural analysis to do more than briefly refer to the barbarous ‘murder-camps and race-extermination’, deployed as a vile ‘solution’ to ‘the problem’ of perceived outsiders, whose fate was just then being memorialised at Yad Vashem.
Nevertheless, here is Colin Wilson’s hyperbolic assessment of George Fox: ‘Fox is one of the greatest religious teachers England has produced; compared with him, Bunyan was weak, Wesley neurotic and Wycliffe bigoted.’ It’s worth noting that Wilson is no less complimentary of the Irish playwright and contrarian George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), whose play John Bull’s Other Island (1904) provides The Outsider’s epigraph. Wilson places Shaw near to ‘Pascal and St Augustine as religious thinkers’. Indeed, Shaw, like Fox, is a ‘major religious thinker’. Well, perhaps Wilson didn’t know this, but it turns out that Shaw, too, had a lifelong preoccupation with George Fox. Warren Smith, in his essay ‘Bernard Shaw and the Quakers’, (Autumn 1956) refers to Shaw’s ‘classification of himself as “a Quaker of sorts”’, and shows how, in the great play Saint Joan (1923), Shaw ‘saw Joan of Arc as a kind of Quaker’.
‘Wilson is finally unconvinced by Fox’s Journal.’
Shaw didn’t become a Quaker, however, and neither does Colin Wilson. No, Wilson wants the glamour of being a voice crying in the wilderness, like another of his heroes, critic and poet T E Hulme (1883-1917): ‘When T. E. Hulme was killed in France in 1917, he left the elements of an immense task behind him… re-defining religion.’ We need to go beyond mere humanism: ‘Humanism is only another name for spiritual laziness.’ Very bold for a young man to say so – no wonder Wilson was grouped with the other Angry Young (and Old) Men of his time.
Wilson is not about to settle for any organised religion, however, let alone the Religious Society of Friends. No, ‘the final salvation of the Outsider’ is not to be found in spiritual friendship and the silent Meeting for Worship, but in William Blake’s visionary poetry – Blake ‘has solved the Outsider’s problems’, he says – and (this is most important) in Ramakrishna (1836-1886) and his ‘blazing of all the senses’ (the ‘complete opposite’ of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist ‘nausea’). At this stage in Wilson’s life, it seems, writing, study and meditation are to be sufficient – the way of ‘Ramakrishna’s favourite disciple’, Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), ‘who made his master’s name known throughout England and America’. Transcendence, then, rather than shared silence and solidarity with those in a wilderness not of their choosing.
In the course of his research Wilson, again disappointingly, becomes grudging and uncomprehending in equal measure as he assesses Fox’s solution to our spiritual dilemma, and to the crisis of religious authority since the sixteenth century. Fox practised a kind of ‘spiritual anarchism’ which ‘was not unsuccessful’. Not unsuccessful! Wilson is finally unconvinced by Fox’s Journal, and turns to ‘the magnificent Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. It is impossible to overpraise this great religious biography,’ he writes, ‘it is the only complete, exhaustive record we possess of the day-to-day utterances of a God-intoxicated saint’. Fox, as I see it, offers God-intoxication for all, albeit of a more sober nature.
George can’t compete with such a saint. Wilson consigns us to the past: ‘The Quaker movement, admittedly, was a fine and valuable thing. But is that all?’ he writes, inexplicably, perhaps lazily. To settle for a religious society is just too bourgeois! And yet, outsiders of all types, in times of discrimination and persecution, continue to take comfort from Fox’s gospel of sober inclusivity and spiritual courage – however mesmerising the achievements of creative genius may be for an angry young man.
