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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

The Outsider

page 346

The Outsider

Problems of religious adjustment narrated and analysed by some troubled spirit, are of perennial interest to the modern reader because an age awake with rumours of Armageddon prompts us to dig deep and search widely for the spiritual equivalent of a bomb-proof shelter. Yet Colin Wilson’s new book, despite its provocative title and the unusual accolade given by critics to its forerunner, The Outsider, is both unoriginal and unadventurous. This earnest young artist-to-be (he explains in an apologetic Introduction that he has in mind a series of novels and plays in which ‘the Outsider idea’ would be explored) presents his readers with a popularised ABC of existentialism and a guide-book to the work and lives of a number of artists and mystics, chosen to illustrate his central thesis – that man needs a religion, but no religion is really satisfactory. A writer who is capable of citing in one breath Van Gogh, T.E. Lawrence, Rimbaud, Gauguin, Bernard Shaw, George Fox, Jesus Christ, and Kierkegaard as existential heroes has not left behind him the level of the schoolboy essay. For all his analysis, his own concepts remain unanalysed –

The scientific progress that has brought us closer than ever before to conquering the problems of civilisation, has also robbed us of spiritual drive; and the Outsider is doubly a rebel: a rebel against the Established Church, a rebel against the unestablished church of materialism. Yet for all this, he is the real spiritual heir of the prophets, of Jesus and St Peter, of St Augustine and Peter Waldo. The purest religion of any age lies in the hands of its spiritual rebels. The twentieth-century is no exception.

This will never do! Mr Wilson plays with words as a child plays with blocks. He should re-read Albert Camus to find the terms even in which to express a passionate unbelief. We may then find the inclination to read his next book more than once.

1958 (174)