The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  Not the height, but the drop, is terrible. That precipice in which the glance falls down while the hand gropes up....

  My Will clings to man; with chains I bind myself to man, because I am drawn upwards towards the Superman; thither tends my other Will.32

  For Nietzsche had taken the next great step; he had escaped from Evan Strowde’s world without motive; he had grasped with both hands his destiny as a prophet. He grasped it, even though it meant standing completely alone. At first he believed it was a ‘will to truth at all costs’ that drove him. Later he plumbed his purpose to its depths; not simply a will to truth— that is not enough—but a will to life, to consciousness, to infusion of spirit into dead matter.

  That was not the end of the problem. It might have been, if our civilization were two thousand years younger. What Nietzsche wanted to do was to start a new religion. Like Rilke’s Malte, he felt that he was the only man who realized the necessity, and consequently that he alone should begin the tremendous work. But he wasn’t sure how to begin. He had been trained as a philologist. He might have been better off if he had been trained as a priest or a novelist. Newman, for instance, was fundamentally very like Nietzsche, and he was lucky enough to find his way into an existing institution; that was the sensible thing to do, since retiring into the wilderness is not a practical expedient for a modern European. At the same time, we must admit that Nietzsche’s influence has been far greater than Newman’s, simply because Newman did choose to express himself inside the Church. Nietzsche’s heroism is relatively greater; his suffering was greater; his tragedy affects us as Newman’s obscurer tragedy does not.

  Yet the really terrible element in Nietzsche’s life is the waste. Under the right circumstances, Nietzsche would have had the strength to bring about a spiritual revival; instead he died insane, like a big gun with some trifling mechanical fault that explodes and kills all the crew. With all the power in his hands, with a psychological insight into himself that makes even Lawrence seem by comparison an amateur in introspection, Nietzsche cracked up. Why did he crack up? How could he have avoided it? Something was wrong. The new religion was never born. Nietzsche was misunderstood, more by the neurotics who claimed to be Nietzscheans than by his enemies. It is an immense problem. Since Nietzsche’s death, two major prophets of Nietzschean rank have attacked it again: Shaw and Gurdjieff (I shall glance briefly at their contributions to the Outsider’s solution, in the last chapter of this book). Neither can be said to have solved it, although both have taken it on to new ground, and achieved some intellectually exciting results. Mr. Eliot has solved it for himself by his ‘back to tradition’ doctrine. This is also an aspect that will be easier to approach when we speak of T. E. Hulme in the last chapter.

  At this point, we can summarize Nietzsche’s contribution. He has solved the body-emotions-intellect equation, and arrived at the same conclusion we arrived at in Chapter IV. He has shown that he feels the Outsider to be a prophet in disguise-disguised even from himself—whose salvation lies in discovering his deepest purpose, and then throwing himself into it. He has no tendency towards a Sartre doctrine of commitment —that any purpose will do provided it is altruistic. If we tried to express the prophet’s purpose in its simplest graspable form, we could say that it was a desire to shout ‘Wake up!’ in everybody’s ear. But wake up to what? Wake up from what? Are all men asleep then?

  Obviously, what we lack now is a penetrating psychological estimate of the human situation. All this has only a limited meaning until we can say: This is what man is, this is what he is intended to do.

  In this chapter, I have not tried to survey the full extent of Nietzsche’s attempted answer to these questions; I have not even quoted the books in which he deals most seriously with Outsider problems (Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, The Will to Power). To a certain extent, the next two chapters will make this superfluous. Besides, it is not a philosopher’s problem; Nietzsche himself discovered: Intellect is not enough. Yet he remained a philosopher who continued to attack the problems with a philosopher’s tools: the language of criticism, the ordering of thoughts into paragraphs and chapters. But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is towards the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world’s literature; the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists. One of the few nations that have produced great men who combined the two faculties is Russia; and it is to Russia’s two greatest novelists that we must turn now for further treatment of the Outsider.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY

  The outsider is not sure who he is. ‘He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”.’ His main business is to find his way back to himself.

  This is not so easy. In fact, strictly speaking, we have not touched on the problem yet. We have only analysed the Outsider’s ‘lostness’. Even ‘the attempt to gain control’ was a failure that only provided more insight into the Outsider’s complicated clockwork. To find a way back to himself: that is how we have provisionally defined his aim. But it is not a simple affair, as certain successful modern novelists have made it appear in their fictionalized treatment of Outsiders (‘bestsellers’ about the life of Van Gogh, Gauguin, etc.). It calls for detailed psychological analysis; for an exactitude of language for which there is no precedent in modern literature (if we except the poetry of Mr. Eliot, especially the Tour Quartets’, and certain passages in Joyce’s Ulysses). It is a subject which is full of pitfalls for the understanding. And writing about it drives home the fact that our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.

  Now language is the natural medium for self-analysis; the idea of ‘a way back to himself cannot be expressed in any other medium. But it cannot have escaped the reader’s attention that all our analysis so far has aimed at defining what the Outsider means by ‘himself, and that we have barely touched on the question of ‘the way To a certain degree, of course, one question follows another, but the point I wish to make here is the fact that the ‘way’ is not a matter for words, but a matter for action. At a certain point, the Outsider asks Bunyan’s question, ‘What must I do to be saved?’ If his answer is Evan Strowde’s: ‘Nothing is worth doing’, then there is no help for it, he had better cut his throat or commit mind-suicide. Fortunately, Strowde’s answer is not a logical bottleneck; we can still attack the question from another angle and ask: saved from what? And this reduces the problem to a more graspable form; in fact to our Ultimate Yes or Ultimate No. For ‘saved from what’ immediately involves the further question: What is the worst you can be saved from? in short, what is the worst form of Ultimate No? We have mentioned some appalling examples: Hiroshima, the Armenian Massacre—and there are pages in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom that are terrible enough to put a sensitive person off his dinner. But after all, they are not ultimate forms of evil; they are old stuff, quite familiar in history. You can read several examples in the Assyrian Room at the British Museum: how Assur Nasir Pal II ‘burned their young men and maidens in a fire’ and committed other cruelties that are too revolting to quote, but that, after all, can quite easily be paralleled by Belsen and Buchenwald after another three thousand years of civilization have elapsed. No, these evils are oppressive, but they do not hang over us with a sense of being inescapable.

  It is when we consider the ‘vastations’ of the Jameses, father and son, that we come closer to the problem of real evil. This evil comes nearer home; it attacks the mind, not the body. Assur Nasir Pal and the men he tortured to death could alike be reduced to ‘a quivering mass of fear’ by it. Hitler would be as defenceless against it as the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. In such an appalling light, men are no longer real beings; they are reduced to a common level of unreality:

  Think of us, not as lost, violent souls

  But only as the hollow men, the stuffed men,

  If the h
our should strike for me as it struck for him,

  nothing I possess could save me....

  This is a terrible conclusion to accept. As human beings, we cannot accept it. We must repeat the question: Is there no way out?

  ***

  Our method in approaching this problem must be the same as usual: to take concrete examples. Again, we might look to William James for a direction. Religious cases are ‘out’; this narrows the choice of ‘sick souls’. But among other cases, James quotes Tolstoy’s Confession, and this seems to be an excellent starting-point, for Tolstoy at least began as a free-thinker, after the fashion of the 30’s of the last century. Moreover, Tolstoy resembles Nietzsche and Kierkegaard in that he reached religious conclusions while finding it impossible to support the orthodox Church—another feature common to Outsiders.

  A Confession tells how, in his fiftieth year, Tolstoy (by that time the famous author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina) began to be troubled by the questions: ‘What is life? Why should I live ? Why should I do anything? Is there any meaning in life that can overcome inevitable death?’

  It is interesting to note that Tolstoy says, and evidently believes, that these questions had never seriously troubled him before; in spite of which, fifteen years earlier, we have him putting into the mouth of Peter Bezhukov in War and Peace the words: ‘What is bad? What is good?... What does one live for? What am I ? What is life and What is death?’, etc.1 There are obviously degrees of awareness of Outsider problems, and the force of the later occasion made Tolstoy dismiss the earlier. But we must also note the fact that, the harder the problems strike, the more they disable the man. Tolstoy is an example of the phenomenon I mentioned in Chapter IV, partial solution of the problems and partial remaining in the old, once-born state. Again, in War and Peace, in the firing-squad scene, Peter observes that the soldiers are not aware of the nature of what they are doing.2 The problem of death, and of meaning in life, is completely dissociated from human cruelty and ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. Assur Nasir Pal and Hitler hardly enter into it. It is the observation of Walter Pater’s Florian [Child in the House] that all living creatures are involved in ‘a vast web of cruelty’, no matter how gentle and humane they may be. Evil is Outside.

  Tolstoy’s experiences began like Roquentin’s: ‘Five years ago something very strange began to happen to me. At first I experienced moments of perplexity and arrest of life, as though I did not know how to five or what to do.... Then these moments of perplexity recurred oftener and oftener…’3

  Finally, attacks of ‘the nausea’. ‘I felt that what I had been standing on had broken down, and that I had nothing left under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and I had nothing left to live on.’4

  ‘There’s no adventure’: there is no need to press the parallel. Tolstoy has found a parable that brings home to the full the Outsider’s attitude to other men: he cites an Eastern fable of a man who clings to a shrub on the side of a pit to escape an enraged beast at the top and a dragon at the bottom. Two mice gnaw at the roots of his shrub. Yet while hanging, waiting for death, he notices some drops of honey on the leaves of the shrub, and reaches out and licks them.6 This is man, suspended between the possibilities of violent accidental death and inevitable natural death, diseases accelerating them, yet still eating, drinking, laughing at Fernandel in the cinema. This is the man who calls the Outsider morbid because he lacks appetite for the honey!

  At this point, we can turn from Tolstoy’s Confession to a fictional account he wrote of the crisis in the short story, ‘Memoirs of a Madman’. This will make the case even clearer. The hero of this short story explains that he has just been examined by a board to be certified insane. He was not certified, but only because he restrained himself and did not give himself away. He goes on to tell how he went ‘mad’. As a child, he had once had an ‘attack’ when he heard the story of the Crucifixion: the cruelty made a deep impression: ‘I sobbed and sobbed and began knocking my head against the wall.’

  There follows on account of his growing-up, his teens and ‘sexual impurities’ (the later Tolstoy had an obsession about sexual impurity that Kierkegaard or Nietzsche would have found funny). Then the Civil Service, marriage and managing his estates; finally, he becomes a Justice of the Peace. He is now entering middle age.

  Then the first attack comes. He is on a journey to buy a far-distant estate when he wakes up in the carriage ‘with a feeling that there was something terrifying’. It is like Henry James Sr.’s attack, striking into the middle of contentment and health. Its effect is rather like Roquentin’s nausea; it fixes itself on certain objects, a wart on the cheek of an innkeeper, the corners of a whitewashed room.

  In the night, the terror comes again, and he thinks: ‘Why have I come here ? Where am I taking myself? ... I am running away from something dreadful and cannot escape it. I am always with myself and it is I who am my tormentor…Neither the Penza or any other property will add anything or take anything from me: and it is myself I am weary of and find intolerable and a torment. I want to fall asleep and forget myself and cannot. I cannot get away from myself.’6 [Italics mine.]

  Here, in one passage, we can hear echoes of T. E. Lawrence (‘...I did not like the ‘‘myself5’ I could see and hear’), Roquentin, Nijinsky, William James (‘nothing I possess can save me ...’).

  The story details several of these attacks. The idea of death troubles him, and the meaninglessness of life.

  What is life for? To die? To kill myself at once? No, I am afraid. To wait for death till it comes? I fear that even more. Then I must live. But what for? In order to die? And I could not escape from that circle. I took up the book, read, and forgot myself for a moment, but then again, the same question and the same horror. I lay down and closed my eyes. It was worse still.7

  He tries prayer, prayer in the doubting sense, as in ‘Ash Wednesday’. ‘If Thou dost exist, reveal to me why and what I am.’ No result.

  The ending of the story is rather disconcerting. On a hunting expedition he gets lost in the forest, and is again attacked by ‘the horror’. But he is closer to an intuitive understanding of the way out. At home again, he begins to pray for forgiveness of his sins. A few days later, when a nearby estate is for sale on terms that would give great advantage to the landlord and none to the peasants, he realizes that ‘all men are sons of the same father’ and decides not to buy it. Later, at the church door he gives away all his money to beggars, and walks home with the peasants, talking of religion. (Again the curious parallel with Nijinsky.)

  After this, we assume, his relatives try to have him certified.

  Now up to a point we can follow what happens to the ‘madman’ because we have seen it happening to other Outsiders. But all this praying, studying the Old Testament ? The story was written when Tolstoy was seventy, but its conclusion does not seem a great advance on Peter Bezukhov’s solution, written when he was half that age, of becoming a Freemason and adopting actively the doctrine of the brotherhood of all men. Yet Tolstoy was no fool. There must be something valid in the conclusion, something that follows from the Outsider’s premises.

  Before we press the question, there is another treatment by Tolstoy of the same theme that will give us more to go on. At the beginning of A Confession, he speaks of the increasing frequency of the attacks:

  ‘There occurred that which happens to everyone sickening with a mortal internal disease. At first trivial signs of indisposition occur... then these signs reappear more and more often and merge into one uninterupted period of suffering.... The suffering increases, and before the sick man can look round ... it is death.’8

  Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilytch follows this plan. It shows the once-born petty official, Ivan Ilytch, as he advances to become a Justice of the Peace (‘judge not that ye be not judged’ was one of Tolstoy’s favourite sermon texts), with home, children, admiring colleagues, a club, etc. Then, the first ‘slight indisposition’. The cancer begins to eat into his being,
and as the realization that he is going to die breaks upon him, he begins to ask himself: ‘What if my whole life has really been wrong?’ A realization, foreshadowing that of Roquentin, of the meaningless of his life, of all other people’s, dawns on him. But how should he have lived? he asks himself. There he can find no answer. There were moments, but they were just flashes, impulses he suppressed or forgot. And his wife and children, they don’t care for him really, and if they did it wouldn’t matter. All his life he has lived with other people; now he is dying alone. But a sudden impulse of charity towards his wife—he has come to hate her insincerity and shallowness—suddenly illumines the darkness, and gives him a glimpse of selflessness. And in a flash, the fear of death has gone:

  In place of death there was light...

  ‘It is finished’ somebody said near him.

  He heard the words and repeated them in his soul.

  ‘Death is finished.’9

  The words that released him from his wretchedness were: ‘Forgive me.’

  We now have four versions of religious awakening from Tolstoy. All of them begin by the person’s becoming an Outsider. They are to be divided into two types: Peter Bezukhov, the ‘madman’ and Tolstoy himself all suffered from ‘attacks’, like Roquentin. Ivan Ilytch lived an ‘unreal life’ and only realized its unreality when facing death, like Meursault. In all four cases, the main symptom was self-hatred, a desire to escape oneself. In all four cases, the escape is achieved by seizing on the essence of Christianity as selflessness. The aim is to escape oneself. Other people are a means to this end: but the end is still to escape oneself. If the end became to love other people and practical charity, its result could easily be a new form of self-love.