“Colin Wilson: The Persistence of Meaning”
From The Brussels Journal, May 7, 2009
Colin Wilson
Some literary names – Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, G. K. Chesterton, Oswald Spengler, T. S. Eliot, Raymond Aron, Eric Voegelin, William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, or Roger Scruton – have immediate resonance with conservative readers, as well they should. Some others the same readers might benefit from knowing although the occasion for familiarity, for a variety of reasons, has never offered itself. In every area of interest a small range of “core authors” tends to form the common reading and to serve for shared reference; it is as idiosyncratic readers that the like-minded are perhaps most useful to one another, as when they pass along bits of lore peculiar to their own cognizance, picked up by happenstance, that others, for entirely understandable reasons, have missed.
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Especially for people under the age of thirty the name Colin Wilson (born 1931) and the label “The New Existentialism” might not ring a bell. A few older people will remember Wilson, but will have retained no suspicion what the label designates; or they might vaguely recall the Icarus-flight of a young author in the late 1950s who soared up and, as far as most of the reading public could tell, either crashed down or flew off into the depths of space, not to be heard from again. At a literary conference at SUNY New Paltz three years ago, among people who I thought would be positively disposed to Wilson, my mentioning of his name resulted in any number of arched eyebrows and suavely disparaging remarks. Now this might itself be, not an affirmation of justified oblivion, as one could easily assume, but rather a kind of indirect evidence for intrinsic merit. I stress the academic character of the event and the self-assured oiliness of the dismissal. In context, the reference seemed to carry a distinctly un-PC valence so that the reaction to it, as I picture it in retrospect, resembled that of a patrician vampire to garlic.
That Wilson started like a meteor no one can gainsay. His first book, The Outsider (1956), vaulted him to literary stardom with a cover story in Life Magazine about a self-educated boy-genius. . . . More
