by Greg Johnson
By Wilson’s own account, he met with Mosley on “two or three occasions,”321 and according to one report I read, they continued a friendly correspondence until Mosley’s death, over twenty years later. Mosley even penned a very insightful and laudatory review of The Outsider under a pseudonym (“European”) in his journal, The European, shortly after the former’s publication.322 Wilson, for his part, never disavowed his friendship with Mosley, although he did disavow fascism and wrote, in a combined review of Colin Cross’ The Fascists in Britain and Mosley’s own Mosley, Right or Wrong? which he published in 1961,323 that he considered Mosley to be a great man in spite of his error in embracing fascism. He further wrote that he was repulsed by the crudeness and vulgar racism of the sort of people who became Mosley’s followers, and criticized Mosley thus:
Mosley’s mistake lay in not realizing that his best hope of election lay in keeping his newspaper as stolid and respectable as The Times, and his election methods as dull and dignified as Lord Hailsham’s . . . It is possible to try much too hard. I was once a member of a ‘Writer’s Circle’, whose members made ‘market studies’ of stories of stories in Woman’s Own, and then tried to construct stories that would be sure-fire successes. When I complained that they weren’t idealistic enough, they would reply ‘Plenty of time for idealism later, when we can sell anything we write’. But they were wrong, and I have never heard of any of them since. And when I read Action [the Union Movement’s newspaper], which tries so hard to ‘appeal’ to the mentality of potential converts, I feel the presence of the same error.324
This is a point whose relevance to the sort of work that Counter-Currents engages in today should be obvious. But in spite of these protestations, nonetheless this relationship was one that was to dog Wilson for the remainder of his career, and more than one journalist has attempted to brand him with the “fascist” label, citing this connection as proof. Colin refuted one such accusation by writing, “I positively deny any ‘Messiah-complex’ or desire to dabble in politics . . . I would rather be a Henry James than a Mazzini any day.”325
In spite of this, Colin was averse to taking overly simplistic views of most matters, and he was not completely unfavorable to Mosley’s politics. He stated that “when [Mosley] was standing as a parliamentary candidate for North Kensington in 1959, all that he said to me about his policies towards blacks struck me as reasonable, some of it echoing what Enoch Powell was to say in later years. There was not the slightest suggestion of racialism as such.”326 Colin also pointed out that Mosley’s post-war advocacy of the formation of a Europe-wide political bloc pre-dated the European Economic Community, but that “[w]hen the common market became an actuality, nobody gave credit to Mosley for being the first man to suggest the idea.” After Mosley’s death, Colin assessed his career by writing that “Mosley was a genuinely reasonable man who could never quite understand why reason never seems to succeed in politics,”327 and confessed that he had hoped that “if he would give it up, and devote himself instead to literature and philosophy, he would create himself a new reputation and gradually leave behind the old misunderstandings.”328
Colin was also to write laudatory reviews of Jeffrey Hamm’s books Action Replay and The Evil Good Men Do, accounts of the latter’s time in the British Union of Fascists, which he joined, Colin wrote, “like many decent and intelligent people—because he saw that Mosley provided a real alternative to the bumbling and incompetence of politicians such as Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain—the incompetence that led us into the Second World War.”329
It is worth mentioning in relation to this that Colin Wilson was also personally acquainted with the novelist Henry Williamson, who had been a member of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) and later contributed to The European. Colin also occasionally worked with Father Brocard Sewell, a Carmelite friar who was very active in literary circles as a publisher and editor. Something of a small-t traditionalist Catholic (except on the issue of contraception, which led to a notorious public dispute between Sewell and the Church during the 1960s), Sewell had also been a member of Mosley’s BUF and was likewise personally acquainted with Williamson. It should be noted, however, that there is no indication that there was anything political in Wilson’s interactions with either man, which were rather based on purely literary matters. Colin did describe the fact that he and Williamson had felt a “bond of sympathy” over their mutual admiration for Mosley upon their first meeting in 1957, and described how on that occasion Williamson had read aloud a text defending his attitude towards fascism and his participation in Mosley’s movement.330
In 1974, Colin aroused some controversy for commenting on Richard Harwood’s Did Six Million Really Die?,331 a work of Holocaust revisionism, in a review of two Hitler biographies.332 The controversy arose not because Colin defended Harwood’s thesis, since he remained intrigued yet noncommittal about it, but simply because he wrote that the evidence presented was compelling and was worthy of being taken seriously. He stated that the accepted narrative of the Holocaust should be subjected to the same scrutiny as that of any other historical event, wondering if it might not be “another sign of the emotional historical distortions that makes nearly all the books on Hitler so far almost worthless . . .” Among those who entered the subsequent fray against him was no less a personage than Simon Wiesenthal. Colin felt compelled to publish a letter in self-defense in which he wrote, “Now although I am certainly anti-Nazi, and in no sense anti-Jewish, I am, with all my instincts, deeply pro ‘objectivity’.” Given the problems he had encountered earlier because of his connection to Mosley, this new controversy certainly did nothing to put them to rest, and has continued up to the present day to be cited by many of his detractors as alleged proof of his fascist sympathies.
Apart from the discussion of Harwood’s book, this series of articles remains interesting for Colin’s discussion of Hitler himself as well. While making it clear that he does not sympathize with Hitler’s aims, he nevertheless insisted on seeing him as a sort of outsider and artist, citing the account of Hitler’s boyhood friend, August Kubizek. Referring to Hitler’s obsession with both aesthetic and political matters, Colin wrote, “Hitler’s temperament combined the artistic and the practical—a rare, but by no means unique mixture.”333 He also insisted that those who saw Hitler as nothing more than a reflection of the desires of the masses were incorrect, and that in fact he had been a man of his own will all along:
All this means that, in a perfectly detached and abstract way, the question ‘Was Hitler a great man?’ must be answered in the affirmative. That is to say, he was one of those human beings who, from an early stage, feels called upon to obey certain inner-laws that conflict with a pleasant social existence. He was, in the most exact sense, an ‘outsider’ . . . It is my view, then, that a really honest biography of Hitler will not be afraid to acknowledge that he was, in this sense, a ‘great man’, a man who lived according to his own inner laws rather than according to expediency.334
Although Colin went on to explain that being an outsider does not necessarily “make him necessarily great in the fully human sense.”335
Something Colin wrote at the end of this review struck me and stuck in my memory when I first read it, years ago. He pointed out that Hitler’s power derived from his ability to create a myth that inspired and motivated the German people to achieve incredible feats, although he took the National Socialists to task for, as he put it, believing that the ends justifies the means. In conclusion he wrote, in reference to the Holocaust controversy, “If we really reject Nazism as violently as we like to claim, would it not be better to be prepared to face the whole truth, no matter how unpleasant? It would at least prove that the world that replaced Hitler has its own kind of heroic vision.” This is a crucial point, in my view: if the post-war civilization created by the powers that defeated Hitler is actually to demonstrate that it is better than his was, then it needs to create heroic myths of its own rather than embrace nihilism
and absolute egalitarianism. It hasn’t, of course, but has only sought to tear down any notion of heroism that dares to rear its head; and I think this aptly sums up the primary difference between the heroic, Faustian worldview that has exemplified the West from the outset and the petty one proffered by neo-liberalism.
During the 1970s, which saw a proliferation of books about Hitler, Colin, always a prodigious book reviewer, penned reviews of several of them. He took many of them to task for depicting Hitler as either crazed or vulgar, pointing out that they “leave you wondering how this rather contemptible demagogue succeeded in achieving so much power.”336 He further pointed out that “[t]the ‘Hitler revival’ indicates that many people are once again dreaming about a visionary leader. Doesn’t this prove it is time for a new and completely honest look at the whole subject?”337
These reviews included a 1978 assessment of David Irving’s two books on Hitler, Hitler’s War and The War Path, which were to establish Irving’s reputation as a “Holocaust revisionist.” Evidently undaunted by earlier criticism, Colin praised the works, countering those who accused Irving of being a Hitler worshipper by writing, “All that Irving has tried to do is to present a historically objective portrait of Hitler.”338 He concluded his evaluation by stating, “I personally find Irving’s thesis fascinating and convincing; his Hitler is certainly a great deal more believable than the paranoid monster of historians like John Toland or William Shirer. Whether it is factually correct is, of course, open to rational argument.”339
By the 1980s, Colin had taken a decisive turn toward Toryism. In 1986, he made a contribution to an anthology on nuclear war,340 predicting that Communism in Europe would collapse within a few years. This was further underscored by what seems to have been his sole book-length venture into the world of contemporary politics: a volume he co-edited in 1987 entitled Marx Refuted: The Verdict of History.341 It is an anthology of essays opposing Marxism which includes one by no less a person than Margaret Thatcher, as well as contributions from Arthur Koestler, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, A. L. Rowse, and Milton Friedman, as well as from Colin himself. Colin’s bibliographer, Colin Stanley, has told me that the book came about because Wilson had promised Ronald Duncan, its original editor, that he would see it into print when the latter had learned he was dying, thus explaining this strange aberration in Wilson’s corpus. Nevertheless, it is an interesting footnote to his otherwise near-total disinterest in politics.
In 1989, Colin also published a small pamphlet entitled The Decline and Fall of Leftism,342 that had originally been a series of articles, in which he further attacked (not very convincingly, in my view) the idea of socialism by examining Shaw, Jack London, and B. Traven’s relationship to it. He concluded in it that socialism was born out of the nineteenth-century Romantic belief that man was a god-like creature who was only limited as a result of political oppression (“man is born free but is everywhere in chains,” as Rousseau would have it); Colin writes that, throughout his work, he has always rejected the notion that a new political order alone would be sufficient to awaken men from their mental slumber, and believed that socialism amounted to little more than a utopian religion rather than an effective means of advancing human development. But he does concede that socialism “can still tug at my sympathies.”
Colin’s flirtation with Thatcherite Toryism in the 1980s was not unequivocal, however, as evinced by the fact that in 1990 he published an open letter to Thatcher in an anthology entitled Dear (Next) Prime Minister,343 in which, prophetically, he urged her to resign and make way for a leader who would “gain popular support as saviour of the Tory Party and, no doubt . . . will be Prime Minister until the mid 1990s.”
Nevertheless, in spite of such misgivings, when I spoke to Colin’s son Rowan in the summer of 2016 and asked him about his father’s politics, he said that Colin had quite clearly been a Tory in his later years, and claimed that if Colin had lived to see Brexit, he was certain that his father would have enthusiastically supported it.
Looking beyond the United Kingdom, something that is not very well-known about Colin is that his books are extremely popular in the Middle East, and many of them have been translated into Arabic and Farsi (although he once mentioned to me that he profited little from this popularity, as most of the books were pirated editions given that the Arab world had no copyright convention with Europe at the time). In 1973, he was invited to Beirut at the behest of the Arab Writers’ Associations of Lebanon and Syria, where he was met at the airport by the mayor of the city on a red carpet. On the same trip he was welcomed by some Palestinian guerrillas on a visit to one of their camps. The experience made him very sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and he wrote an essay in favor of them at the time.344 He also related to me that on this same trip, he went to Damascus, where he was met by the then War Minister, General Tlas, who regaled him with a story from when he and his comrades had been revolutionaries imprisoned by the previous regime. They had read Colin’s novel Ritual in the Dark by tearing the pages out of a copy and passing them from one to the other as they went through it. As a token of thanks, he presented Colin and Joy with traditional Arab robes and a bronze plaque. Colin was also invited to Iran at the behest of the government in the late 1970s, but in private correspondence he told me that the plan fell through after the Shah was overthrown.
The most interesting connection, however, is between Colin and Colonel Gaddafi. Gaddafi made frequent complimentary references both to Colin and The Outsider throughout his reign. (I remember seeing a BBC transcript of a speech he had given in the 1990s in which he chided the Clinton White House for inviting Salman Rushdie to visit, but not Colin Wilson.) Colin told me that he had once been asked by the Libyan embassy in London to make a visit to the country at the government’s behest, but that he had declined out of concern that such a trip would have made it seem as though he were endorsing Gaddafi’s politics.
To sum up Colin’s minor flirtations with the world of politics, he could not be called a radical Rightist or a Traditionalist in any sense. To do such a thing would be to read something into his work that simply isn’t there. At most we can say that, in his later life, he was a conventional British conservative. At the same time, however, one can detect in his work a definite pro-Western bias and not a hint of political correctness. His view of human nature is also generally consistent with what could be termed the conservative viewpoint: he believed that human nature was essentially irrational and that big government couldn’t be used to reform it.
It is also the case that Colin always remained an unabashed elitist, from start to finish. He often reiterated his aforementioned view that it is only five percent of humanity that could comprise a potential elite, and that the majority of men, as he once put it, ought not to have bothered to be born at all. As such, his work is entirely consistent with a hierarchical view of life and civilization based on a sense of genuine principles and meaning.
REFLECTIONS
I no longer view Colin Wilson as the demigod that I saw him as when I was in my mid-20s, when I took his word as gospel and believed that he had the answer to life, the universe, and everything. (Julius Evola and René Guénon, whom I discovered shortly thereafter, soon knocked him off of that pedestal . . . although I’ve since moved on from there as well.) His critics are at least partially correct when they say that Colin sometimes overstretched himself, and was perhaps guilty of too much generalization and unfounded speculation on occasion. And I certainly would not recommend that any but the most diehard fan should attempt to read through his entire corpus—anyone who has read many of Colin’s books will attest that only a third of them, perhaps, are truly great. The rest of them contain a lot of repetition, and some were obviously only written for money (such as many of his shorter occult and true crime books, entertaining and informative as they often are). But that top third is genuine gold, and I believe is worthy of being read by anyone who is looking for worthy alternatives to the prevailing way of thinking about the nature
, potential, and destiny of humanity in modern times.
And I have to say that, although I eventually left Colin’s ideas behind after my initial obsession with them, when I finally returned to his work after more than a decade, I was surprised to find that it remained fresh and exciting, and offered possible answers to new questions that had arisen in my mind during the interim. In talking with other longtime Wilsonians, this seems to be a common experience. Like all great authors, then, Colin’s work rewards repeated engagement over the course of one’s lifetime.
Colin Wilson occupies a unique place in late twentieth-century thought. In an era of extreme specialization, he dared to range across the entire gamut of human endeavor in pursuit of understanding our untapped potential. In an age when the culture and figures of the West are frequently derided, Colin based his work unapologetically on the best minds of our civilization. In an era when equality, conformity, and consumerism are valued over genuine achievement and self-development, Colin offered a vision of heroism which affirmed that not only can an individual rise above the monotonous, cynical, worms’-eye, bourgeois reality of our times, but that, for the outsider, it is an absolute must. And in a time when absolute materialism is the accepted norm, he insisted that the most compelling evidence for our greatness lies in the intangible elements of the human experience, in our minds and in the evidence for as yet unexplained phenomena.
His vision will remain a compelling one long after his death, and it is to be hoped that others will return to his work and continue along the course that he charted.
HIS CHIEF WORKS
For those interested in delving into Colin’s work, I can offer a few suggestions. Many of Colin’s older books are long out-of-print, but it’s usually not difficult to find used copies.