Young fascist, 1950's style, remembered

I think I have one book by Colin Wilson on my shelf - a pretty readable one from perhaps the 1980's about the paranormal, which was a topic that he spent a fair bit of time on in his later career.

I had read that he had hit fame early for writing an angsty British quasi-existential book as a young man - The Outsider.   But I never really looked much into how controversial some of his views were (or had become).   

I see from this essay in Aeon that his controversial status was well deserved.  Here's some background:

Why was The Outsider such a critical hit? In the late 1950s, Britain’s intelligentsia was worried about cultural decline and the lack of postwar movements to rival modernism, or homegrown ideas to rival French existentialism. Here was a 24-year-old working-class autodidact bringing news of the New Thing. And the New Thing turned out to be… recycled modernism. This was reassuring for modernist mandarins in charge of book reviews. His fame was helped by being grouped together with other provincial and working-class writers such as Kingsley Amis and John Osborne, who were dubbed the Angry Young Men. As with existentialism and punk, having a group of people doing more or less the same thing made it easier to write about. Wilson, though a one-off, was part of the zeitgeist.

In addition, Wilson was catnip for the popular press. He told one newspaper he’d written The Outsider while sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath, and obligingly recreated the scene for their photographer. He helped to model the image of the young bohemian, in his polo neck and horn-rimmed glasses.

And then, just as suddenly, the London intelligentsia decided the provincial outsider should stay outside, that his fame was a bubble, that he was a ridiculous and even dangerous figure. His constant declarations of his own genius didn’t help – he was ‘the most important writer of the 20th century’, he said, a ‘turning point in culture’. Nor did his denigration of more established writers – he said Shakespeare was ‘a thoroughly second-rate mind’.

And his worst views:

It’s true that Wilson was a big fan of Friedrich Nietzsche. He believed that humans could ascend the evolutionary ladder and become supermen through sheer will. In practice, only a tiny minority could do this – the ‘dominant 5 per cent’ – and of them, only 0.05 per cent actually would. Like Nietzsche, he had little time for everyone else. Human beings, he wrote in his journal, ‘are pretty trivial insects … No wonder most of them are so mediocre.’

Growing up surrounded by ‘morons’, Wilson felt different and better: ‘I would sit on a bus with the Bhagavad Gita on my lap, and look at the other people, and think: my life is totally different from yours … I know that man can become a superman or God if he makes a hard enough effort.’ He wrote a short story when he was 18, in which Jesus decides ‘these miserable idiots were really not worth dying for, and it had been a mistake to be taken in by pity when they needed a good kicking.’ Like Nietzsche, Wilson thought it would really be a mercy if some of these lesser humans didn’t exist. He wrote in his journal in 1961:

‘the little people’ have sunk so deep into pettiness that it would be an agony for them to cure themselves; like invalids crouching over a fire, the outside world makes them cringe. Without knowing it, they want to die.

This sort of Nietzschean supercilious elitism is typical of modernism, one can find similar passages in H G Wells, George Bernard Shaw, W B Yeats or D H Lawrence. The difference is, Wilson was coming out with it after the Second World War, in 1950s Britain, when spirituality was out of fashion and the cult of the Nietzschean superman even more so.

Wilson’s friend Hopkins, with whom he lived in Notting Hill Gate in the late 1950s, confirmed critics’ fears that the Wilson clique embodied what Allsop called ‘a new mystical absolutism of the extreme Right wing’. Hopkins’s first novel, The Divine and the Decay (1957), was about a fascist leader who murders an opponent. It was clear that Hopkins admired his hero, and in 1958 he started his own far-Right political movement called the Spartacans. They had only one meeting, according to Holroyd, at which Wilson gave a speech insisting that ‘effective political power ought to be in the hands of the 5 per cent minority who were equipped to use it.’

To make matters worse, the British fascist and Nazi apologist Oswald Mosley, seeking to rehabilitate his reputation after the war, wooed the Wilson group, and wrote a glowing 15-page review of The Outsider in his magazine, The European. Flattered, Wilson called him ‘far and away the most intelligent politician I have ever met’ (he was the only politician he had ever met). When Mosley attended the opening night of Holroyd’s first play at the Royal Court, Left-wing critics stormed out, and Wilson was involved in a fracas with them in the pub next door.

It's funny, but I don't recall detecting any problematic politics or philosophy in the book I read.    But yeah, he was, generally speaking, a much more unreliable guide to life than I knew.