BOOKS
The Legion of the Lost
BY KINGSLEY AMIS 0 NE of the prime indications of the sickness of mankind in the mid-twentieth century is that so much excited attention is paid to books about the sickness of man- kind in the mid-twentieth century. The latest of these books* is more readable than most; it is more compilation than original work, and the worst it can do is to make you feel a little over- whelmed at its author's erudition. Here they come—tramp, tramp, tramp—all those characters you thought were dis- credited, or had never read, or (if you are like me) had never heard of : Barbusse, Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse. Hemingway, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, George Fox, Blake, Sri Ramakrishna, George Gurdjieff, T. E. Hulme and a large number of bit-players. The Legion of the Lost, they call us, the Legion of the Lost are we, as the old song has it. Marching on to hell with the drum play- ing—pick up the step there!
With admirable clarity and unpretentiousness Mr. Colin Wilson shows that all his legionnaires, miscellaneous as they may seem, were animated by the same kind of distress and took up similar attitudes to it. The Outsider—their collective label—is the man who has awakened to the chaos of existence, to the unreality of what the literal-minded take to be reality. He does not accept the conditions of human life, and finds release from its prison only, in moments of terror or ecstasy. He tries to solve the problem of his identity, to discover which of his many 'I's is his true 'I,' but reason, logic, any kind of thought is no help here, or indeed anywhere. He is anti- humanist ('humanism,' Mr. Wilson tells us, 'is only another name for spiritual laziness,' anyway), but he is not, or prefer• ably not, a man of action. He wants to get out of his predica. ment, and mysticism of some sort is perhaps his only route: if he is lucky he may end up as a saint.
The most noticeable thing about such an inquiry as this is that it inevitably blurs or overrides distinctions of literary merit. All writers come alike to the ravening trend-hound, whose interest is either in biography or in what is left when artistic qualities have been boiled off. And so we constantly encounter paradoxes whereby men of the stature of Sartre 01 Camus rub shoulders with the Wells of Mind at the End of Its Tether; Blake and Nietzsche serve under the same flag as Nijinsky with his pitiful ravings, Granville-Barker with his pretentious 'idealistic' twaddle, and Arabian Lawrence, who, whatever his claims as a man, was surely a sonorous fake as a writer. Why, one wants to ask, was Mr. Charles Morgan's Sparkenbroke not called to the colours? Or the hero of Gallions Reach? Or Hitchcock in Mr. Ray Bradbury's `NO Particular Night or Morning,' who became an Outsider front scratch in a day and a half and jumped out of his spaceship?
There are obviously a great many Outsiders about. There are, I suspect, even more ex-Outsiders. Few people who can read and write could have failed to be wandering outlaws Of their own dark minds in their youth's summer, say about the age of sixteen. And it is a persona that many of us revert to in our more shamelessly adolescent moments. Boredom, de' pression, anxiety, dissatisfaction, even the state of the sexual omnivore in Barbusse's L'Enfer, even the feeling of regardill chaos—these are the monopoly of no ideological group. A lot of people get a bit fed up from time to time at not being able to meet in the real world the unsubstantial images their souls so constantly behold. But they do not on this account go round considering themselves as, or behaving like, Stephen Dedalus; at least they try not to, and rightly. At the risk of being written off as a spiritual wakey-wakey man, it is worth asserting that to to tear one's fascinated gaze away from the raree-show of one's own dilemmas, to value Mr. Pickwick higher than Raskolnik( )v, sai to try to be a bit pleasant occasionally, are aims worth making an effort for. iq Other characteristics than those listed by Mr. Wilson can he the added to the portrait of the regular lost legionnaire, the fa' wit time, long-service-engagement Outsider. To begin with, he j5 411, always a man. He will have a private income or a patron : the incidence of Outsiderism among builders' foremen or bookies runners must be low. He is likely to be unmarried and without family ties. He has no strong affections, and his lack of ordinal warmth makes him divide the human race into himself on one side, plus the odd hero-figure or two, and 'the mob' on the other. He tends to amorality, feeling that a spot of murder .01 child-rape may come in handy as a means of asserting his W111' escaping from the prison of thought, etc., and he is totally devoid of humour. Now it is quite conceivable that chaps hike that may really be 'society's spiritual dynamos,' but I judge it unlikely. Supposing it is true, then if society isn't sick aheady it soon will be. The Outsider's most untenable and annoying claim, wineI: Mr. Wilson is ready to make for him if he doesn't make i often enough for himself, is that of possessing a large share, if, not a monopoly, of depth and honesty and sensitivity an intensity and acuity and insight and courage and adulthood- especially that. The 'mob' are just mob and no more; they are the salauds, in M. Sartre's phrase, who are convinced that their existence is necessary; they are the bourgeois, who never * THE OUTSIDER. By Colin Wilson. (Gollancz, 21s.) r know that they are not free; they include the Victorians. with ,,v1lom 'we are in the position of adults condemning children'; 'QV none of them ever ask themselves the questions the Out- sider formulates. And these, of course, are real questions, the roost real questions. Are they? Admittedly, to ask oneself 'How 1111 I to live?' is to ask something real, though even here it could be argued that the continual taking of moral decisions, a fairly common activity, needs no encrustation of internal cate- chising to make it valid. But it would be hard to attach any sleaning, except as an expression of lunacy or amnesia, to `P is a word that plays a large part in the Outsider's vocabu- 5 larY• It is significant that his favoured literary vehicle is the Journal, the adolescent's confidant, the egotist's outlet, and, , incidentally, the lazy novelist's feather-bed. Hypertrophy of self and self-regard is the real sickness of the Outsider; Childe Harold is a miracle of humility beside him. The Romantic who Put in a lot of time seeing through shams boggled at taking ) teality as his pet sham. Curling the lip by numbers is a well- ) established exercise, but it is decent to restrict its target to society and let mankind as a whole get by. Even if this restraint Is impossible, there is no need to erect one's boredoms into a I system with oneself sitting in the middle. A, case could be made out for people shouldering the burdens of their own nastiness, enduring their boredom and depression, without finding it ) necessary to blame someone or something. t). must say I find Mr. Wilson's book a disturbing addition to better ePrevailing anti-rational mode, feeling as 1 do that one is 7tter off with too much reason than with none at all. I hate behaving idea of the kind of people who may already hanker after 'Otaving like Stephen Dedalus being persuaded that there is 4'sishionable anthority for. doing so. that they were right all themselves in attributing their folly and apathy to a source outside when and their control. And I hope Mr. Wilson is right Legion he says that those who have already volunteered for the ghion of the Lost would welcome demobilisation. How this is be achieved I know no more than he does, and I agree that '18aeourse of PT and cross-country running, or a good dose of „les) would not quite meet the case. Perhaps there are curative i°13erties in the notion that ordering up another bottle, attend- thg a jam session, or getting introduced to a young lady, while weY may solve no problems at all, are yet not necessarily all, aredignity, and while they may indicate no sensitivity at Lo are yet not irreconcilable with it. Right : Legion of the St • . . DIS-M/SS! r 'who am l?'
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