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This weeks feature
| Last of the Angry Young Men
It was a week that marked the boundary between the black and white austerity of the Fifties and the technicolour classlessness of the Sixties cultural revolution. On Monday May 21, 1956, John Osborne's play 'Look Back in Anger' opened at the Royal Court and, four days later, 25-year-old Colin Wilson published his first book, a mixture of existentialism, mysticism and literary criticism he called, after Camus, 'The Outsider'. |
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'Why is existence so dull?'
Both were working-class lads made good and seemed, superficially at least, to share a hatred of class-riddled, stuffy British society. The media gave them the catch-all title 'Angry Young Men' and an artistic and social 'movement' was born.
In truth, though he briefly flirted with anarchism, Wilson was much too preoccupied with such questions as 'Why is existence so dull?' to worry about the class struggle. Unwittingly or not, however, Wilson and Osborne nudged open the doors for a generation of working-class directors, playwrights and writers who transformed British cultural life over the next ten years.
Though 'The Outsider' sold in excess of 20,000 copies - and gave Wilson financial independence - fame couldn't, and didn't, last. Reviews for his next book, 'Religion and the Rebel' (actually more focused than 'The Outsider') were scathing, and critics who had dubbed Wilson a 'boy' genius back-pedalled furiously. Wilson and his wife retreated to Cornwall, where they've lived ever since.
Over the years Wilson has produced in excess of 100 books - from science fiction to crime, poetry, wine and music. In 1968 he enjoyed a second success with 'The Occult', an exhaustive study of the paranormal, a subject that still fascinates him.
One critic described him as 'the master of cut and paste writing' and there's some truth to that. All manner of sources serve Wilson's big idea - that mankind, through stupidity or habit, constantly fails to realise its true potential. Forever the optimist, Wilson believes we could all be Gods if we but knew it.
An unflattering portrait of Wilson was painted in Humphrey Carpenter's recent book on the Angry Young Men, but Wilson's response to such slights is to keep writing. A new sci-fi novel, 'Shadowland', is just out, the latest in his 'Spider World' series, and he's working on annotations for a Chinese edition of 'The Outsider'. More controversially, he assisted Moors Murderer Ian Brady with a book on criminology, something he now says he regrets. Clearly this Outsider has no intention of coming in from the cold just yet. |
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