by Colin Wilson
In the days when the novel was young, its authors were unsophisticated enough to feel that the story was the main thing. Homer did not ask whether Ulysses would experience a sense of anti-climax when he settled back in Ithaca; the author of the Book of Job evidently felt that ‘He lived happily ever after’ was a perfectly satisfactory ending. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that authors began to recognize that the end of the voyage, after all, is less important than the scenery on the way. Many of the earliest novels of the eighteenth century were told in letters; this meant that they had very little ‘scenery’, and were read entirely for the sake of the story. When Flaubert recognized that the goal is not so important as what happens on the way, the novel underwent a certain purification. Instead of getting the story told anyhow—with letters, journals, etc.—it was felt that the novel must try for a kind of inner-unity, and that far more attention must be lavished on the reality of individual scenes. If the novel is going to ‘take you out of yourself’, then it is up to the novelist to make his world as convincing as possible.
But even Flaubert and Turgenev were ‘impure’, and wrote books that were not remarkable for architecture. It is Henry James who represents the ‘means before ends’ school at its purest; his books are ritual dances, minuets of events. James seemed to imply: ‘There is one way of telling every story that is the right way, the only perfect way; and if the story is studied hard enough—like a mathematical problem—the “right way” will finally dawn on the author.’ His prefaces are delightful because, like an enthusiastic mathematician, he enjoys telling you in detail how he approached the problem.
These comments are not intended to imply criticism of James. It is too easy to say that what his novels gain in form they lose in content, that so much mathematical perfection is lifeless. It is not vitality that they lack; The Ambassadors is at least as alive as Barchester Towers. It is real intellectual perception, real moral judgement. Their fault is that they are not intellectual enough. James was ingenious in solving the problems he set himself; but he never asked if they were worth solving. There was an interesting exchange of letters between Shaw and James about the latter’s dramatization of his Owen Wingrave. Owen Wingrave is a ghost story about a young pacifist who defies the ghost of a militant ancestor, proving his moral courage, but dying in the process. Shaw wrote: ‘What the play wants is a third act by your father.’ (Henry James senior was the creator of a most interesting religious system.) He went on to insist that Owen Wingrave must win and live; the present ending was cowardice. He ended: ‘People don’t want works of art from you; they want help.’ Shaw was right, and James’s reply—an impassioned defence of the absolute value of art—missed the point. James’s artistic aims, as far as they went, were excellent. We have only to read his Notebooks to see that his stories always came to him as sudden insights, as visions, with a unique vitality of their own, as difficult to preserve as a rare perfume; the task he set himself was to create a jar that would hold every drop of the perfume and not allow it to evaporate. He does this superbly well. But having had the ‘vision’ for the story, he forgets all other ends but the immediate one of how to tell it perfectly. The result is that his work is suffused with the defeatism of his age (he himself recognized that much of his defeatism was romantic self-indulgence).
Shaw was striking at the heresy that underlies the whole theory of the novel. Because the story usually gets nowhere, this is no reason for making it a basic principle that the story should not try to get anywhere. And yet this was the theory that had been tacitly accepted by the novelists of the late nineteenth century. Tolstoy was right when he declared that his ‘moral writings’ were as important as his novels. The theory of ‘absolute art’ gave its followers an excuse for ceasing to develop as human beings. When examined closely, most of the followers of Flaubert and Zola prove to be moral adolescents, like their masters. Flaubert’s immature world-rejection reappears in the arrested romanticism of Gissing, Moore, Bennett, Maupassant, Huysmans, Joyce and Oscar Wilde. All escape the burden of moral responsibility by pretending it is none of the artist’s business.
Joyce may be taken as the representative symbol of this attitude. Art, he declared, should be static. Beauty is a stasis. Art that ‘gets anywhere’ is impure. Nevertheless, his doctrine was not completely negative, for, like James, he considered that it is the task of the artist to somehow bottle the ‘essence’ of reality. This movement of art for art’s sake was partly a revolt against the shallowness of pure intellect and the rationalism of the eighteenth century. Intellect, they felt, was powerless to deal with the essence of life. The novel may be a lowlier form than the scientific treatise, and yet it can bottle the essence with an efficiency that is beyond the reach of the intellect. This is true enough; it is the next step of the argument that is doubtful: that therefore the novel has no concern with ‘ends’ in the sense that they are understood by the intellect. It is not surprising that critics thought that Ulysses represented the end of the novel. For it is true that, in certain respects, Ulysses is superior to anything that has preceded it. It is realler. There is a chapter that parodies the styles of earlier writers, from Malory to George Eliot, and Joyce’s purpose seems to be to show that he is, in a certain sense, superior to them all. And he is. But the critics could only observe that, in gaining this superior degree of reality, he had left behind everything that constituted the novel. This tendency had already been apparent—in Bennett, for example, whose best work is impressive because it is so like ‘everyday life’, with its detail and its boredom. Ulysses seemed to imply that the evolution of the novel—towards increasing ‘reality’—had led to a fastidious distaste for storytelling. Finnegans Wake showed this process taken a stage further; in his desire to ignore the novelist’s meaningless procession of cause and effect, Joyce tried to turn the novel into the pure essence of reality; it could be described as ‘history from a God’s eye view’. And it certainly indicated that, if the novel strives for ‘reality’ instead of the futility of events, it must halt in a cul de sac.
But this view need only be accepted if we accept the Jamesian supposition. If, instead, we accept Shaw’s point of view, there is an alternative. Joyce assumed that there are only two paths for the novel to take: into the futility of a story that can never have a real ending (because life goes on), or into a kind of mystical search for ‘reality’ that regards the story as an irrelevance on a lower plane. The second is the more difficult alternative, and it is to Joyce’s credit that he took it. But there is a third possibility, more difficult than either of the others. This consists in trying to tell a story, but to raise the story to the level of reality. One might say that the ideal story for this type of novel would be the life story of a saint who finally achieves ‘transcendent reality’. If the novelist could describe this reality in such a way that the reader was transported into it, this would be the ideally great novel, for it would move on the level of a story, yet end by bringing the reader to ‘reality’. Melville, Hesse and Dostoevsky have all attempted this kind of novel (which E. M. Forster calls ‘prophetic’). No one has yet written one that was even a partial success in transporting the reader towards ‘reality’.
Of necessity, these prophetic novels are, to some extent, novels of ideas, for one of their aims is to change their readers’ ideas. The novel of ideas had, of course, been known to the nineteenth century—Rousseau, Peacock—even Landor moves in this direction. But this was a rather dilettantish flirting with ideas, not an attempt to get closer to ‘reality’. Dostoevsky was the first of this new class of novelists of ideas: the type of man who wants to get closer to reality, and is willing to make use of argument for part of the time. There are few others. The finest—and most underestimated—novelist of this class was H. G. Wells. His early books have a facile pessimism. He can write about the end of the world—in The Time Machine—or the cruelty of nature—in The Island of Dr Moreau—with the indifference of a Maupassa
nt. This period lasted about ten years, but by 1906 he was well out of it, and had written his indictment of human stupidity The Food of the Gods, and his vision of a transformed humanity in Days of the Comet. In Tono Bungay (1909) he already shows the characteristic that distinguished all his later work: a desire to write with urgency about real problems—the problems he felt at the time of writing—as well as telling a story. Sometimes, the result was superb, as in Mr Polly. Sometimes it was indifferent, as in Marriage. In The Undying Fire, he rises to an intensity that compares with Dostoevsky. In The World of William Clissold he tries to make the novel as big as life, and fails. And yet every one of his novels of ideas is as readable today as when it was published. And this is not because of their ‘ideas’ (ideas date quickly), but because of the furious sincerity of Wells’s mind trying to probe the question of whether life is meaningless. Even when he writes indifferently, as in Secret Places of the Heart and Star Begotten, he writes with a passion that compels the reader’s respect. In my own opinion, Wells’s work after Tono Bungay is in every way more interesting than the early science fiction (in spite of its excellence and pace), and remains so to the very end.
It seems to me that the controversy between Wells and James over Wells’s book Boon is another example of those tragic misunderstandings that are so frequent in the history of art. James is the more excusable of the two. He was prevented from understanding Wells’s originality because of the cloud of controversy in which Wells always moved. Besides, Wells was popular, rich and influential; James, living in a country of philistines, never gained the recognition he deserved; he would have been inhuman not to feel a certain envy of Wells. But Wells had no reason for envy; he was simply pig-headed. And yet, together with Shaw and D. H. Lawrence, he was the most vital and revolutionary spirit of his generation.
As a novelist, Wells lacked what James possessed—the desire to give his books reality, even if it took a thousand fine brush strokes. He can write well only about his own life and experiences, but not about other people’s. Still, what he wanted to do to the novel was in no way as old-fashioned as the followers of Joyce and Eliot pretended. Where William Clissold is good, it is good in exactly the same way as The Waste Land or the Night Town scene of Ulysses—electric with feeling, with personal intensity. As an experimental novel, Clissold is as bold as Ulysses and, in its own way, as successful. And, like Ulysses, it shows that the old forms of the novel are inadequate. Page for page, it contains about as many dull pages as Ulysses—except that Ulysses is dull with arid experimentation and naturalistic description, and Clissold with arid chunks of politics or sociology. Both have a vitality that can overcome this.
In this preface, I am concerned with the problems and cul de sacs of Clissold rather than those of Ulysses, because it is plain to me that the problems of this present novel are of the same nature as Wells’s.
What I would like to do—what I feel it will be one day possible to do—is to write a white dwarf of a book, a book that is so dense that it can be read fifty times.[1] Not a book of ideas, in the sense that my Outsider is a book of ideas, but a book that deals with life with the same directness that we are compelled to live it. Naturally, such a book could not be a ‘good novel’ under our present definitions, although it might succeed in having a certain internal unity, and in telling a story. The simplest objection to the novel of ideas (in the Peacock sense) is that ideas are dead, while a good book should somehow be a living organism, with many levels of significance, like a picture that can be looked at in a dozen different ways. But are there not ideas that have this vitality? After all, Faust and Man and Superman could be called plays of ideas; this does not stop them from being artistic masterpieces in the fullest sense.
[1] A white dwarf is a star whose molecules have collapsed, so that a piece the size of a pea may weigh many tons.
I approached this problem in Ritual in the Dark, to which this present novel is a sequel. There I failed, and contented myself with a compromise—a novel that ‘told a story’, and got in the ideas wherever it could, provided they never held up the action, as in Clissold.
In the present book, I have side-stepped all the problems. By casting the book in the form of a diary, I have turned back to the form of novel that Flaubert abandoned as impure. By making its central subject sex, I have helped myself to an unfair advantage. From either point of view—that of Defoe or Joyce—it cannot be called a novel. But I am less concerned with what to call it than with trying to guess what ultimate form is implied by its internal laws. For while writing it, I have been aware that saying things in this way is a necessity. There ought to be a type of book that makes a frontal assault on ‘reality’ as the novelist knows it, that is not realism or fantasy or the novel of ideas, that uses ideas because battering at ‘reality’ demands that the problems should be to some extent verbalized, and yet which is less a book than an armour-plated bullet trying to rip its way through the surface of futility to an underlying meaning.
Writing about sex raises another set of problems that have been discussed almost as exhaustively as the problem of the novel. Reading about most things excites us emotionally or intellectually; reading about sex may excite us physically too. But writing is aimed at the intellect and emotions. There is, of course, an analogous problem in painting; an obscene photograph is agreed to have a quite different intention from a painting on the rape of Lucrece, although in fact the two overlap to a considerable extent. The problems arise in the area of the overlap. D. H. Lawrence had an exhibition of his paintings closed down. I have seen the paintings; they are erotic, but only in the sense that Women in Love is erotic. I wanted to write an existential novel about sex. If I were writing for a race of intelligent Martians who could not possibly be sexually excited by it, there would be no problem; ideas and sex would blend perfectly. There are two obvious alternatives: to ignore the possibility that some readers may skip the idea and look for the ‘sexy bits’, or to proceed by hints and rows of leader dots. . . . I have been inclined, as will appear, to the former alternative, although realizing that it makes an impure novel still more impure from the Jamesian viewpoint.
And yet I repeat my question: is it not time that we created a new type of novel, the kind of novel that I could dimly envisage as I wrote this one? The old novel of the nineteenth century was like a ship out at sea, sailing on its way without much relevance to the problems of its readers; it merely took them on a voyage. The Joyce novel aimed at pure writing as Cézanne aimed at pure painting—observation of reality where the subject counts for very little—a stovepipe will do as well as a mountain—and the manner everything. But when I think of the kind of novel written by Dostoevsky and Wells, I think of a hatchet biting into a tree and making the chips fly, not an evasion of reality or a description of it, but an attack on it. As I describe it here, it sounds vaguely like the ‘social realism’ prescribed by the Soviet ideology; but mere social realism never bites deep enough. What is needed is an existential realism. Like social realism, its attitude to reality is not passive or pessimistic. In a qualified sense, it might be called practical; it wishes to change things. What it wishes to change I prefer to leave unstated; it can be inferred from this book.
Colin Wilson
gorran haven, 1963
NOTE BY GERARD SORME
In the late December of 1956, at the time of the ‘Cunningham scandal’, a reporter managed to bribe his way into a flat that I had recently occupied in Spitalfields, and walked away with five volumes of my journals concealed in his pockets. These journals were then quoted, without my permission, in certain articles on Caradoc Cunningham that appeared in a daily newspaper. They were described as my ‘Sex Diaries’ and ‘Black Magic journals’. I was even mis-quoted as having written that I wished that I had committed the Whitechapel murders.
Although I was advised that I could sue the newspaper for libel, violation of copyright and illegally obtaining posses
sion of my journals, I preferred to allow another newspaper to print long extracts from these journals, so that the various quotations that had already been made could appear in context. I assumed that this would be the end of the matter, although I was aware at the time that both newspapers had photostated the journals. Over the next two years, I heard periodic rumours that the ‘sex diary’ (i.e. the second notebook, as printed here) was being circulated in typewritten copies, and that these copies could be obtained, on payment of a large deposit, from certain dubious bookshops in the area of the Charing Cross Road. I made inquiries, but was never able to verify these rumours.
A fortnight ago, however, I had definite information that an admirer of my work in New York had paid $2,000 for a photostated copy of the ‘sex diary’. Its source could not be traced, but I gather that there is now a fairly brisk trade in these photostated copies in the United States.