The Essential Colin Wilson by Colin Wilson Page B

a dairy at Chiswick. I continued writing the book well into the autumn. In early November the weather became so bad that I was finally driven indoors. I took a room at New Cross, and another job at Lyons. At this time I was seeing a great deal of another young writer, Stuart Holroyd, whom I had met the previous year. He talked vaguely of writing a critical book, and advised me to do the same; but I was too busy at the time, trying to finish the first part of my novel (it was to be in three short parts). I had heard a rumour that Angus Wilson intended leaving the Museum, and I wanted to be able to hand him the typewritten manuscript before he left. At Christmas that year I worked at the post office in St-Martin's-le-Grand, sorting Christmas mail; by doing overtime, I made enough money to buy a secondhand typewriter. Over Christmas, alone in London, I finally completed the first part of the novel, and immediately settled down to typing it. A week later, lack of money made it necessary to find another job. There were long queues in the labour exchange, and only a few unskilled labouring jobs available. I accepted the first one they offered me—as I usually do—and the next day started to work in a laundry in Deptford. The job was so peculiarly detestable, and the conditions so appalling, that I overcame my usual laziness and cycled into London every day, trying to find evening work in a coffee bar. The laundry became completely intolerable to me when one day my journal was stolen out of my pocket. It had contained the entries of over a year past, and its loss enraged me. But the day after this happened, I found a job in a newly opened coffee bar in the Haymarket; I was the washer-up.
    Compared with the laundry, conditions there were delightful. The kitchen was new and shiny and chromium-plated, and the food was unlimited and very good. I worked every evening from five-thirty till midnight, and had the day free to write. I finished typing the first part of the novel in a burst of energy, and handed it to Angus Wilson on the day he left the Museum. And then, suddenly, I felt a little lost. For many years, the novel had occupied my thoughts. Suddenly, it had gone out of my hands. If Angus found it bad, I would begin all over again. In the meantime, there was no point in going on with it. I began to wonder what I should do to occupy my days in the Reading Room.
    It was at this point that Stuart Holroyd showed me the opening chapters of his Emergence from Chaos . Suddenly, I made a decision. I too would write a critical book—a credo. I would dash it off quickly, and then get back to the novel. In half an hour, one morning, I sketched out the plan of a book, to be called The Outsider in Literature . It would be a study in various types of 'obsessed men'. I immediately jotted down a list of the type of men who would interest me. Some immediately came to mind: Van Gogh, T. E. Lawrence, George Fox, Boehme, Joyce, Nijinsky (I had written a long essay on Nijinsky several years before, which I had sent to Madame Nijinsky. She had replied kindly to a preliminary letter of mine, but never acknowledged the essay.) There were obviously many different types of Outsider. Some were men of action, some were the very reverse. So there would be a chapter on Oblomov and Hamlet and Hesse's Steppenwolf and the Great Gatsby. These would be classified together as 'weak Outsiders'. Then there would be a chapter on Goethe's Faust, Mann's Doctor Faustus, and Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, from whom Mann drew in his own scene between Leverkühn and the Devil. A great deal of the book would also be devoted to religious figures: Boehme, Law, Fox, Newman, Luther, Wycliffe—all rebels against their time. The Outsider shades off one way into the weakling—the Hamlet—and the other way into the Rebel. Then there were the French Existentialists, and Heidegger and Jaspers—and of course, Kierkegaard—and these pointed to a tie-up with Nietzsche, while the study