The death of Colin Wilson, encyclopaedic outsider and cultural portal

I was saddened to learn last week of the death at the age of 82 of one of my earliest intellectual heroes  - though some would sniff “pseudo-intellectual”. Colin Wilson was a man curiously both slightly behind and slightly ahead of his time. He was an autodidact with an almost nineteenth century concern for self-improvement, a man with highbrow tastes seemingly unimpressed with modern popular culture, and someone driven by an urge for knowledge and experience who battled with his own information explosion long before the internet made that phenomenon a commonplace for every active, thinking, culturally engaged person.

The basic facts of Colin’s life are well known, including the hype - the early instinct for adopting a mediagenic persona (polo neck sweaters, sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath, the horsewhip episode) – and the unwise declarations of genius which were soon to backfire on him with such long lasting and devastating effect, revenge from the stuffier, less imaginative parts of the English establishment with whom he had not been to school or university.

My first awareness of him, in my mid-teens, a decade after his first (and possibly best) book “The Outsider”, was when he co-authored a rather juicy encyclopaedia of murder which provided a factual background for furtive explorations of dubious locales that I made with a friend, seedy sites that included Hilldrop Crescent, Rillington Place and Hanbury Street. It was evident to me from the start that Colin was a tad pervy, exactly in what way subsequently  revealed with embarrassing detail in his later autobiography, “Dreaming to Some Purpose”. Too much information, Colin.

And that was always it: too much information. As the years passed he became a one man encyclopaedia not just of crime but of … everything, or so it seemed. Eventually almost a self-caricature.

Over the years I gradually caught up on his back catalogue and bought each new book that he brought out. I was never very keen on his novels, but I devoured his non-fiction avidly and was intrigued by his concepts of, for instance, Faculty X and the St Neot margin. His writings acted for me like a portal to the works of philosophers, psychologists and others who otherwise would have remained unknown to me, at least for a long time; his writings provided a gateway and a short cut into areas that I was unfamiliar with, having had primarily a scientific education. Probably the most important thinker he “turned me on to” was Abraham Maslow, with his now-famous hierarchy of needs culminating in self-actualisation and his accounts of peak experiences. I could relate to that kind of thing, and to many other descriptions of essentially subjective experiences that were rarely discussed elsewhere, even in textbooks of psychology. Especially in textbooks of psychology. Colin wrote about things, as it were, from the inside. But he was obviously not quite respectable, for he was too omnivorous, not discriminating enough, with too evidently a taste for intellectually dodgy characters, would-be supermen and deviants of all kinds; there were far too many references to sadism and to what he always spelled as “fetichism” (which made it sound even kinkier than it was) - yet that degree of self-revelation was part of his attraction. Emerging into public life in the same year as Elvis, he built up quite a fan base around the world.

Subjective experiences like involuntary memory, peak experiences and déjà vu – things which, though unusual and disturbing, I thought everyone had - were fascinating to me, and Colin Wilson’s output furthered my interest in what I would call “normal” subjectivity. When he published “The Occult” I was briefly enthralled, but within a few years I began to feel that he had been “taken in” by many aspects of parapsychology and mysticism, which is not to say that even now I necessarily dismiss all such claims. Indeed, Colin was right at the leading edge of the 1970s popular infatuation with all things that became dubbed New Age. I remember going to Claude Gill’s bookshop in Oxford Street sometime in the mid-seventies; Uri Geller was there bending keys, on (I believe) his first visit to Britain, and he kept talking about Colin Wilson, asking if anyone knew him, and he said he was meeting him the following day. I don’t know if Geller is genuine - no one does - but from where I was standing I was convinced – perhaps fooled. Even so, my interest in parapsychology soon declined, and my scepticism grew. I felt that Colin may have been gullible in some respects; I was happier with “normal” subjectivity than with the supposed “paranormal” variety.

For me, Colin was an inspiration not only for what I read, but an encouragement to try writing myself. In more recent years I’ve read anything by or about him that came my way, rather more critically than formerly, while becoming increasingly irritated by his predictable lazy repetition and recycling of earlier themes. But there are other interesting aspects of the “flavour” of the man that enhance his appeal – for instance his association with Soho in the Fifties and Notting Hill in the Sixties, moody periods and places in our recent cultural past – the Angry Young Men, “Absolute Beginners”. And there is the parable of the provincial lad growing up in a town of – as he described it “cow like people” – feeling the draw of the metropolis as a place where he might meet like minded souls and achieve the success he craved; this is such a frequent and popular trope in modern British cultural life.

Colin was someone I could relate to. As a young adult, unsuccessful, provincial, often lonely, working in uncongenial surroundings but interested in ideas, in creativity and psychological phenomena, it was easy for me to identify (pretentiously, perhaps) with the “outsider” condition that he described – but then, unfortunately, so do the Anders Breiviks and Mark Chapmans of this world. The five percent of the population who fall into this bracket, according to Colin, include some very unpleasant people indeed, as well as your average misfit, not to mention your average person who perhaps thinks a bit differently from others and has different interests and concerns from the majority (me on a good day), plus the occasional oddball genius (Bowie fits the mould perfectly and, indeed, once cited “Col” as an influence). Outsiders are motivated by, driven by or tormented by their awareness of mortality, of the limited time available to try and make sense of “it all”, the few years in which to try and leave something behind that will survive a short while and establish that “they were here”. They struggle with the basic existential conundrums long after many people abandon them as impossible, and seek to make the best use of the talents they have been given, and of their allotted time here. It may be, of course, that “the outsider personality” is an overblown concept, and that we all sit somewhere on a spectrum of relative outsiderness.

Where Colin’s work particularly strikes home to me is his urge to devour information. In “The World as Information” (published by Intellect in 1999, immediately before the internet became such a central aspect of our lives), I described in some detail his huge appetite to consume and digest knowledge. In various publications he has given figures for the number of books and recordings he possessed, which were gradually taking over his Cornish bungalow, along with outbuildings constructed specially to house them. For instance, in “Dreaming to Some Purpose”, published in 2004, he wrote: “In July 1961 I note that I had 5,000 books and 1,500 records in the house. By 1963, I had 10,000 books and 4,000 records. Today I have about 25,000 books and the same number of records. This probably goes a long way towards explaining why we never had any money”. In the era we are now entering, when increasingly we are encouraged not to collect but to freely download from the internet, one wonders how he would have reacted and coped.

Being an outsider offers plenty of scope for pathology, but charitably one may say that Colin’s collecting instincts were part and parcel of his larger than life personality, the central motivation that drove his career as an author, and a feature that made him – to the distant reader – so human, so likeable, so easy to identify with. The outsider, whether it’s an exaggeration or not, is a personality type that increasingly we will encounter and will need to understand, to accommodate and to enable to succeed. Whatever the potential dangers, it is so often outsiders who drive things forwards, rather than those who are at ease with themselves, psychologically comfortable - with or without the infamous pram in the hall.

Arguably, Colin’s best output was early on. He once said that he had to write in the same way that a dog with fleas has to scratch; surely, he wrote too much, but quite apart from the dog that had to be scratched there was also the wolf that had to be kept from the door. With his passing, a serious re-evaluation of the life and works of Colin Wilson, especially one in the context of relevance to present day concerns, would be timely.

Colin Wilson was born in Leicester on 26th June 1931 and died in Cornwall on 5th December 2013.

Making it up as you go along

It was amusing to see the Fat Controller on the news this week, launching the microminimally speeded up East Midlandzzz Trainzzz services to London, with four whole minutes shaved off some journey times between Derby and London, and an entire minute saved between Leicester and the capital. He failed to mention that, in the new timetable, some of the services from Nottingham by this most unattractive of train operators are actually taking longer.

When asked whether this thrilling, paradigm-shifting, quantum-leaping acceleration that so underwhelmed interviewed potential passengers didn’t obviate the need for HS2, he countered that more freight was travelling by rail, that we needed more capacity and that, er, more people were travelling. So, three absolutely compelling reasons then. Or maybe two (but what’s mere numbers to politicians, eh ? It’s always being right that counts). Travelling into Birmingham last weekend I couldn’t but help notice the cleared site adjacent to the Curzon Street relic that will form the projected HS2 terminus in the Second City, and I also observed how far it was from New Street and from most of the city centre.

Birmingham, as both a major city and a national transport hub, needs a radical improvement to its rail services, but neither HS2 nor the current redevelopment of New Street Station are the answer. Something with twice (or some multiple, I’m sure the experts would know) the capacity of New Street, incorporating HS2, is needed; perhaps, somehow, a New Street “deep” station, to use the terminology of the Berlin Haupbahnhof. It would cost a vast amount of money and cause huge disruption, but other countries – the Netherlands, for instance – are tackling similar problems in an imaginative way. If only the inspiration lying behind the splendid new Library of Birmingham could be redirected towards relieving the desperate congestion of the existing rail facilities.

More positively, I’ve now completed my promised painting, and though it hasn’t photographed very well, here it is.

It’s a composite, located in a semi-fictional setting in the vicinity of Westbourne Park and Kensal Town in west London, between the Paddington Canal and the Western Region main line, and it has the provisional title, with obvious debts to Algernon Newton and Edward Hopper, of “Terrace by the canal”. Hope you like it.

 © R. Abbott 2013

Hideous buildings for hideous people

This last week has revealed new depths of the quality of UK financial institutions, namely the revelations about the Co-op Bank and its fatuous chairman. This news is hardly a surprise. When I was at school nobody of any intelligence wanted a career in finance, and the only person I knew who became a banker obtained one ‘O’-level at the second attempt, and that was in woodwork. He was, as far as I know, basically honest, though, merely not very bright. We keep hearing how important it is that our bankers don’t run off to Frankfurt or Hong Kong or somewhere, but really, who needs them?

What is surprising, though, at least to someone of a sensitive aesthetic disposition, is the way that the City of London has been allowed to erupt with massive, bulky, bizarrely shaped excrescences of no recognisable geometry, containers for financiers, placed so as to cause maximum visual offence, as per the illustration above. Who has permitted this? Has Boris fallen down on the job (as it were)?

Where’s the Luftwaffe just when you need them? Frankfurt and HK have hideous skylines already; let the bankers go there and let us have our City back, free from shards and spikes, gherkins and gonads, cheesegraters and mutant mushrooms.

On other points – “Tourist In Your Own Town” is delayed while I try to understand US tax requirements (useless financial bureaucracy again), and the painting of Kensal Town, referred to in the previous posting, is nearing completion, and will be featured very soon.

Essay on Algernon Newton and other diversions

One can so easily disengage from the unnatural habit of blogging, and so it has been these last few weeks. Apologies to anyone who has missed my rantings; sadly, HS2 hasn’t been abandoned – yet. Travel has been one excuse for my inactivity, lack of inspiration the most honest one, a slow stage in the production of “Tourist In Your Own Town” another. However, things are on the move again.

Since the creative urge will out anyway, in the absence of significant activity on “Tourist” I’ve been letting the muse follow her own channels. She’s been trickling out in several media (that’s enough purple pompous pretentiousness, thank you.-  Ed). Sorry. Musically, I’ve been attending to The Catford Tendency, playing around with some explosive little tunes which, in their raw state, are enjoying the working title of “The Dysfunctionals”. Tunes inspired by some people I know quite well. Anger, despair, other negative emotions. No, you don’t know who you are, do you, you don’t read blogs.

And I’m painting again. Though I’ve never consciously copied anyone, given my appetite for visions of urban grot and aesthetic shabbiness (I’m watching you – Ed), comparisons with the pet themes of Edward Hopper and Algernon Newton are probably inevitable. Especially as I like oblique sunlight and deserted city scenes, early morning stillness and such. Hopper of course is regular fare for calendar producers and TV psychologists steeped in the imagery of metropolitan alienation; Newton is much less well known, probably because he’s British but without the need to boast or to shock as an alternative to  possessing talent. To be honest, much of Newton’s output is naff, it’s flat and lifeless, amateurish and mediocre, and with some of his later works one is left wondering “why ?” Nevertheless, at his best - and that isn’t often - he’s gorgeous.

Relatively little has been written about Algernon Newton, and therefore I decided to indulge myself by writing a little essay about him, a brief biography, and some highly subjective comments on some of his paintings. Anyone who would like a free copy of the essay is welcome, although the accompanying illustrations are not copyright cleared. But it will give you a potted account and some weblinks, if you’re interested.

Rather like Hopper and comments about alienation and loneliness in the big city, Newton routinely attracts remarks about his works portraying menace and ominous foreboding, sometimes regarded as psychological portents of World War Two, or as delayed side effects of his First World War experiences. There’s quite a consensus, apparently, but I’m not sure about this; it seems to me that city scenes can be empty, quiet and still, without necessarily portraying anything sinister. That would be the case as regards my own paintings. Thundery skies can just be thundery skies. Visual or topographical pleasure may need no further analysis.

The quiet city in question is (mostly) London between the wars. Newton became known as the “Regent’s Canaletto”, a neat pun acknowledging his admiration of the Italian maestro plus his frequent choice of the Regent’s Canal for subject matter – mostly in shabby locations in Paddington and Camden Town. Those sort of places are among my favourites too. His very best painting, however,  one that fills me with unfulfillable yearnings, is of Camberwell, an idyllic canal scene now long since obliterated by the banalities of Burgess Park, a location dead and buried along with the age and the values it represented.

Thus stimulated by my brief study of Algernon Newton I have returned to one of my favourite artistic locations, the area of west London close to Trellick Tower, the former Great Western main line and the Grand Union Canal known formally as Kensal Town, a broken off outpost of humanity that at one time might have declared allegiance to Paddington or North Kensington. From the early sixties onwards this area was seen to good and proper by planners, social engineers, architects, you know the sort, the same ilk as the begetters of Burgess Park, all hygiene and fresh air. The best recollection of its ambience remains in the photographs of Roger Mayne, taken in and around Southam Street in the heart of this district. There isn’t much of it left now, hardly anything. The sky looks more or less the same. So all I can paint is an idea, an atmosphere, a might have been, a could have been but never was. Perhaps next time I’ll have something to show you, and more news on “Tourist”, which also includes an account of the district I’m referring to.

One paradox. In the TV series “’Allo ‘Allo’, the character Edith, wife of café owner René, bears a strong facial resemblance to Jo Hopper, the artist’s wife who modelled in many of his paintings. The radio code name Edith and René use for communicating with England is “Nighthawk”. “Nighthawks” is of course one of Hopper’s most famous works. Strange.

“Tourist In Your Own Town” progress report

Progress with “Tourist In Your Own Town” is going well, and proofing is now at an advanced stage. The cover, featuring a stereotyped tourist in a well-known London location, looks great. The first attempt at printing has been undertaken. This has demonstrated that the preferred typeface, Garamond, doesn’t come out too well, with the crossbars on the e’s and the H’s, in particular, tending to vanish. Current thinking is to go for a bolder and denser font for the main text, probably Baskerville Old, and at a larger point size. This will mean a fatter book, currently estimated at around 488 pages. Everything always takes longer than expected!

Allowing for other commitments, publication of “Tourist” is at present projected for early October. For anyone interested in the subjective aspects of geography, the psychology of places, how we experience travel, and what has become known as psychogeography, “Tourist In Your Own Town” will be an essential book to purchase.

This is the age

Of the ironic way. Le chemin de fer, el ferrocarril, die Eisenbahn. Damn it, we invented it and gave it to the world. I alluded in my last posting to the Thomas the Tank Engine character, can’t quite remember his name (no, not Ringo), whose repetitive strain as regards HS2 is that he’s right and everyone else has got it wrong. Recently he’s been televised, uttering his habitual spiel, on Nottingham station, while it was closed for 5 weeks for infrastructural improvements.  It’s a location highly appropriate, symbolic even, for Thomas the Tank, for this precise spot illustrates so well the historical failures of railway planning.

Right at the start of the Age of Steam, Nottingham decided that it didn’t want anything to do with the new-fangled railway, so Derby got it instead, with good connections and lots of railway-related employment that have lasted down the years and done that city proud. Having missed the – er – train, Nottingham’s wise elders belatedly allowed their city to be connected via a spur to the Midland Railway, which in turn became part of the London Midland division of British Railways, and was subsequently branded the Midland Mainline – all three affiliations commanding respect, loyalty, and a degree of affection. Latterly this route has been operated by East Midlands Trains.

Post-Beeching, Nottingham abandoned its larger and centrally located station, Victoria - a vast cathedral-like, cavernous place, on the former Great Central line - in favour of the Midland, draughtily inconvenient on the dodgy southern periphery of the central area and permanently infused with the ambient whiff of decomposing mailbags (perhaps the 5 week closure has allowed them to be located). Of course it’s true that Derby, Crewe and Birmingham would have been awkward to reach from Victoria, and that the glories of dear old St Pancras itself may have been imperilled by such a loss of traffic if Nottingham Midland had closed. Victoria, however, had the potential for fast services to Sheffield and Leeds, and to Leicester and London. That is, to the centres of those cities, not to “hubs” quite near them. In short, and not to put too fine a point on it, the obvious route for HS2’s proposed north easterly extensions was there, built, ready, waiting for someone with some imagination.

The old Great Central out of Marylebone, the last UK main line to be built before the Eurostar link, was well engineered for high speeds and smooth running. It traversed the centres of Leicester and Nottingham via magnificent viaducts and tunnels. Since the line closed in the Sixties much of this infrastructure has been done away with, vandalised, and the right of way built over.

In Nottingham, lines 2 and 3 of the NET tram network are currently under construction, part of the route being along the old Great Central axis. Other than those who stand to benefit financially, directly, most local people appear lukewarm about these developments in a city already blessed with good bus services that could be improved still further at relatively little extra cost. At present, the construction work is causing considerable road traffic disruption. Naturally, there was a business case for the tram project, with suitably impressive figures – investment, jobs – dreamed up accordingly. The benefits to public transport were apparently incidental, an irrelevance, as were the environmental objections. It was very obviously all about money and politics. Ah yes, a business case. Sound familiar?

Thus it was especially amusing to see Thomas the Tank on the telly, puffing away “I know I’m right, I know I’m right” upon a dreary platform at Nottingham station, a platform which was spanned by a sturdy girder bridge until it was thoughtfully demolished a few years ago. This was the bridge that carried the Great Central from London into Nottingham Victoria and beyond. It’s now being rebuilt as the Karlsruhe Friendship Bridge, since Nottingham is twinned with Karlsruhe (along with Minsk and Harare, both exemplar cities for the democratic process). The KFB will take the unasked-for tram extension, the very system that so effectively helps to block the sensible route for HS2 up to Sheffield and Leeds. I’m glad that Thomas, or whatever his real name is, came to see it. I’m not sure exactly what the bridge is made of, but in certain lights it looks kind of irony.

Unbuilt HS2

Last night I watched the repeat of the third and last programme of Dr. Olivia Horsfall Turner’s highly intelligent, well researched, superbly presented and thoroughly excellent BBC TV series on “Unbuilt Britain”. The previous two programmes included an examination of Paxton’s “Great Victorian Way” intended to circle inner London, proposals for impossibly massive canals across central Scotland to improve naval defence, and pioneering visions for a fixed crossing of the English Channel.

This week’s programme focused on unrealised plans for London and Glasgow. It was an absolute treat. First of all it compared the merits of the Wren, Evelyn and Hooke proposals for rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666. Thanks to commercial imperatives and the urgent requirement to rehouse the displaced citizens, none of these schemes came to fruition, except - in modified form - Wren’s masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral, and his other City churches built after the Fire. The second half of the programme was devoted to two postwar plans for the redevelopment of Glasgow, a city that had suffered greatly from the attentions of the Luftwaffe, and which long before WW2 had been a by-word for tenement living, slums, congestion, violence, and other assorted deprivations.

The two competing schemes were by Patrick Abercrombie, who advocated decanting the overcrowded inner districts to exurban New Towns (e.g. Cumbernauld and East Kilbride), and Robert Bruce, who devised a ruthlessly modernistic plan heavily influenced by Le Corbusier. Bruce’s proposal would have erased the existing city, with its wealth of varied and inspired architecture, along with its close-knit communities, and replaced it with a gridiron of concrete and glass monoliths, making the most extreme excesses of East Berlin or Novosibirsk look warm and cuddly in comparison. This monstrous idea came terrifyingly close to implementation, but by the end of the 1940s had been abandoned.

What Glasgow was left with were the New Towns, some sporadic outcrops of high rise, an urban fabric largely untouched and – once decades of grime had been blasted away – magnificent to the eye. In due course it would become the fashionable and lovely city we know today, a treasure trove of architectural gems, but last night’s programme suggested that it had had a narrow scrape. On Clydeside  in those early postwar years the crude forces of politics and finance were seemingly allowed to operate with little to check them, and scant concern was shown for the softer factors crucial to satisfactory urban life. I find it rather disturbing that Bruce’s plan, in particular, was taken so seriously, and that he wasn’t taken away by men in white coats.

Interestingly, though, it was intuited early on that both of these proposals needed some assistance if they were to have a chance of success; their victims – sorry - beneficiaries, had first to be persuaded, softened up. Thus a film was shown at local cinemas, a work of naked propaganda  said to be highly convincing as regards the merits of the Bruce plan, right up until the final few moments, when the jaw-dropping horrible reality of this abysmal scheme, illustrated by a tacky, clunky model, became all too obviously apparent. The propaganda became self-defeating at that instant, and the audience must have filed out in shock and disbelief at what was going to be done to them, to their lives, their memories, their places, their city. Meanwhile,  Patrick Abercrombie – who famously had designs upon London as well, most of them unrealised, thankfully – also made a film, a ghastly Cholmondeley-Warnerish production in which the weirdly monocled protagonist loftily assumed that the vast upheaval and experiment in social engineering that his scheme implied was unquestionably good for Glasgow and Glaswegians, and would be welcomed. Again, he was rumbled, and again – perhaps with hindsight aided by the creations of Harry Enfield – one is amazed that the whole performance wasn’t dismissed as a spoof.

However, it wasn’t. The line between good intentions and overweening arrogance is sometimes hard to discern, but perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on what were the standards of the time, not long after the end of a war during which the population had become inured to receiving condescending and irritating instructions on how they ought to behave. Experts and authorities were respected in those days. Sometimes. Wonder how they lost it.

In Glasgow in the 1940s – still regarded as the second city of the Empire - the likely subjective, aesthetic, social and environmental consequences of what was being suggested were ignored; only the vested interests of political power and commercial gain were deemed to be relevant to the discussion. The poor sods who would have to up sticks and go and live in filing cabinets in the sky or out in the middle of nowhere weren’t  of any real interest in the grand scheme of things. The proposals could be rationalised with vaguely socialist smarm about how cosy it would be if everyone lived equally – equally, that is (architects and planners excepted), in habitations of equal awfulness, all part of the preppy postwar zeitgeist, the weary hope for a new and better world, the adoration of all things white and cuboid and soulless, the infatuation with meaningless grassy “lungs”, all carefully, neatly, psychotically arranged - in low density angst, hygienic resentment, and fully functional right angled seething, with the added inducements of an inside loo and a 23rd storey balcony to jump off.

Of course it isn’t like this now, is it. Is it? ‘Course not. We know better now, don’t we. We know that there has to be more to a city than this, even if Cumbernauld New Town does occasionally make it into the catalogues of crap Britain. All about money and power? What? Was it ever? Don’t be ridiculous.

In my “Tourist In Your Own Town”, currently being prepared for publication, I examine the kinds of subjective factors that feature in the appreciation of cities, factors which would have been so cruelly denied in Bruce’s Glasgow, Le Corbusier’s Paris, or Robert Moses’ Manhattan, had any of these atrocities been allowed to proceed. Atro Cities, now, there’s an apt descriptor. No, the core requirement is for a sense of place, and “Tourist” delves into that topic in detail, together with much more - in what should be a rattling good read. Watch this space.

Yes, it would be nice to think we have come a long way in our planning activities  since those flickering monochrome days of postwar austerity. Maybe we have. Certainly we have access to more convoluted wool-pulling techniques, to fancier statistical obfuscation algorithms, we are quite at home with snazzy computer simulations and dodgy data mashups, we simply lurve virtual realities and visualisations; we’re always hugely impressed by the latest software package (yes, it has to be a package, we don’t want anything that might be easy to get into). Etc, etc.

OK, I’m starting to get stroppy. Let’s turn to high speed rail. In principle, a Good Thing. Currently in the UK we have a kind of demented Thomas the Tank Engine character who keeps puffing “I know I’m right, I know I’m right”, every time more voices join the opposition to HS2 and whenever the ludicrously expensive and comprehensively daft project is shown up for what it is. The greater the opposition, the louder he chuffs. So far, he’s getting away with it. I wonder who he is?

“Is your name not Bruce, then ?” “No, it’s Patrick”. “That’s going to cause a little confusion”.