An Essay on his book ‘The Age of Defeat’ (1959)

By Colin Wilson

(found at http://www.stormloader.com/users/abrax7/ )

 

It is an odd sensation to read a book you wrote more than forty years ago, and haven’t looked at since. At first I found The Age of Defeat hard to read, and had doubts whether I could finish the proof sent to me by Colin Stanley. Then I became increasingly absorbed and fascinated as I recognised that this is, in fact, one of my key books. The sense of alienation comes from looking back at a younger self over a gulf of more than forty years.

The book was not originally intended to be published as a separate volume, but as one third of a kind of symposium that would feature Bill Hopkins, Stuart Holroyd and myself.

This came about because the three of us were thoroughly dissatisfied with a book called Declaration, which had appeared in 1957, and in which the three of us had also featured. It was edited by a friend named Tom Maschler, and was intended to be a series of 'statements of belief' by a number of so-called 'Angry Young Men', including John Osborne, Kenneth Tynan, John Wain, Lindsay Anderson and (incongruously) Doris Lessing.

Declaration had aroused a lot of hostilty. Ever since Osborne's play Look Back in Anger and my first book The Outsider had appeared in the same week in May, 1956, critics had been getting increasingly sick of endless press coverage of 'angry young men' and what they were supposed to be angry about. So they took this opportunity of catching us all together to say some extremely rude things about us, the politest of which was that we were brash young publicity seekers.

But three of us - myself, Bill and Stuart - came in for particularly vitriolic attacks. We were supposed to represent the 'right wing' of the Angry Young Men, as distinguished from leftists like Osborne, Tynan and Anderson. And several of these leftist contributors seized the opportunity to attack us in the book itself.

What did they mean by labelling us 'rightists'? The term is almost meaningless, considering that none of us was conservative, let alone fascist. We were simply not deeply interested in politics, either of the right or left.

I had met Stuart in 1953, when he was a follower of a Hungarian liberal guru named Alfred Reynolds, who had fled to England from the Communists and the Nazis before the war. Although I liked Alfred, I found his atheistic liberalism naive and shallow, and soon became unwelcome at the weekly meetings at his home in Dollis Hill because I raised too many objections. Alfred regarded religion as another name for superstition, and sometimes referred to priests as 'crows in black'. He felt that all society needed to create a heaven-on-earth was more tolerance. I felt that religion sprang out of a deep human urge to self-transcendence, a craving to evolve, and that tolerance, while certainly desirable, would not bring the human race closer to an evolutionary leap. I pointed out to Alfred that even Sartre, who declared himself an atheist, spoke in Les Chemins de la Liberte of the hero's need for 'salvation'.

To my surprise Stuart, who had been a devoted follower of Reynolds, came eventually to agree with me, and began writing a book called Emergence from Chaos, a study of poets such as Eliot, Rilke and Dylan Thomas, whom he felt to be driven by a fundamentally religious impulse.

Bill Hopkins was totally uninterested in religion. His basic feeling that most men are weaklings, cowards and fools. He once said to me: 'When you meet somebody who's weak and miserable, kick him downstairs'. Typically, his contribution to Declaration was called 'Ways Without a Precedent', which began: 'The literature of the past ten years has been conspicuous for its total lack of direction, purpose and power' - thus dismissing Samuel Beckett, Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis and John Osborne. (Amis had refused to contribute to Declaration on the grounds that he had nothing to say.) His next sentence makes his meaning clearer:

'It has opened no new roads of imagination, created no monumental characters, and contributed nothing whatever to the vitality of the written word.'

What Bill had in mind was someone more like Goethe, Hugo or Balzac. (Balzac once said: 'I shall be greater than Napoleon. He failed to conquer the world, but I shall conquer it with my pen'.) Bill also knew Alfred Reynolds, and felt that his kind of well-meaning but muddled liberalism was contributing to this bankrupcy of imagination.

Bill's own novel The Divine and the Decay (1957) was about a politician, the leader of a right wing minority party, who takes a holiday on the Channel Island of Sark, to give himself an alibi while his main political ally is killed in an 'accident'. And although the English have a tradition of treating first novels with kindness, this one was slaughtered by the critics. The attitude of Bill's hero was a little too close to that of Adolf Hitler not to arouse fury and resentment.

Stuart's Emergence from Chaos had also been received with considerable hostility, largely because our publisher, Victor Gollancz, had been rash enough to state on the jacket blurb that those who found The Outsider exciting would find this book equally interesting. But the absurd furore about 'Angry Young Men' had by now created such hostility among serous critics that by that time I was practically unmentionable, with the result that my second book, Religion and the Rebel (1957) had also been hatcheted by the critics. ('Scrambled Egghead' crowed Time magazine.)

And so at the beginning of 1958, Stuart, Bill and I were licking our wounds. We all felt as if we had been mugged by the critics. It was then we conceived the idea of a book of our own, which would explain precisely what we stood for. Its basic theme would be the 'vanishing hero' - that inabilty of modern writers to create what Bill called 'monumental characters'. I would treat the subject from the literary point of view, Stuart from the religious point of view, Bill from the political point of view.

The problem was that Bill and Stuart were slower writers than I was. I had learned fluency from keeping a journal since I was sixteen. In any case, I had always been fascinated by romanticism, and recognised that this was the root of the problem. As soon as man begins to feel 'the eternal longing', he also begins to find it hard to cope with the demands of everyday life.

So I wrote my part of the 'vanishing hero' book in the first half of 1958, and sent it to my publisher. Gollancz immediately suggested that he should publish it on its own. Bill and Stuart were obviously relieved to be let off the hook, for neither of them had even started their contributioms. Which is how The Age of Defeat came to appear in the spring of 1959.

My original starting point - as I state in the Introduction that follows - had been an essay I wrote in the London Magazine on Aldous Huxley. I had been introduced to his work in my teens by a woman friend who admired him more than any living author - particularly Point Counterpoint and Eyeless in Gaza. When I tried to read these books, I could not understand why she rated them so highly. It seemed to me they were about irritating, neurotic fools, and reading them filled me with a mixture of irritation and disgust. (It was not until I went into the RAF to do my National Service, and read Antic Hay and Crome Yellow, that I began to enjoy and admire Huxley.)

The first version of The Age of Defeat borrowed a phrase from Gumbril, the hero of Antic Hay, for its title: 'I glory in the name of earwig'. In fact, this early version was later published in a volume of essays which I called Eagles and Earwigs (and which, to my irritation, the publisher insisted on changing to Eagle and Earwig.)

To me, the basic problem with Huxley was his assumption that you either had to be sensitive and weak, or stupid and strong. I later came upon the same assumption in the work of Thomas Mann. It never seemed to strike either of them that some people are sensitive and strong - an obvious example being Beethoven.

When I went to see Waiting for Godot in 1957, I laughed a great deal during the first act, then became increasingly bored and irritable. Beckett seemed to be on the same wavelength as Huxley and Mann: life is meaningless, we are all weak and doomed...

What infuriated me so much was that it seemed practically impossible to attack this attitude. There was no crevice to get your crowbar into. People who think that life is meaningless and pointless are in an impregnable position. They have an answer to everything. You criticise them for intellectual laziness, for failing to use their brains, and they shrug and say: 'What would be the point?' When Kenneth Tynan went to see Beckett's Endgame, which he obviously hated, he was unable to write the kind of witty attack everyone expected, and had to content himself with a review that simply parodied the play.

This was my chief difficulty when I came to write The Age of Defeat. The 'unheroic premise' of most modern plays and novels seemed plain enough. But how could you explain your objection to someone who did not share your feeling? One of my friends, Jack Emery (a drama director) thought Beckett was one of the greatest of modern writers, and often performed a one-man show of his work. When I said that I thought Beckett was an overrated nonentity with minimal talent, he merely shrugged pityingly. The day after watching Jack do his one-man show at Exeter University, I again picked up my copy of Beckett's three Molloy novels, to see if it as really as brilliant and funny as Jack insisted it was. Was I being as blind and insensitive as art critics who thought Van Gogh and Cezanne had no talent? But half an hour struggling with Beckett left me thoroughly depressed, and more certain than ever that this was a case of the emperor's clothes.

So how could I go about writing a book explaining why I found the 'fallacy of insignificance' so infuriating? Jack would simply reply: 'There's no disputing about taste'.

At this point, my friend Negley Farson drew my attention to a book called The Lonely Crowd by the sociologist David Riesman, which seemed to offer a starting point. Riesman's basic argument was that the old pioneering virtues had gone out of America. The men who opened the West had been 'inner-directed', while their

descendants of post World War 2 are 'other directed', looking to other people to provide their sense of values. Whyte's The Organisation Man and Packard's The Hidden Persuaders made the same point. So did Priestley in the volume entitled Thoughts in the Wilderness, to which I had been introduced by John Braine, another writer who was instinctively opposed to 'the wet hero' of most modern novels.

Yet Negley Farson himself was a symbol of the problem of the 'age of defeat'. I had met him through his son Dan, who was (in those days in 1956) a journalist. Negley's autobiography The Way of a Transgressor had been one of the great bestsellers of the 1930s, describing his eventful life as a foreign correspondent - he had been present in the Red Square the day the Russian Revolution broke out. Negley had had an eventful and adventurous life, and had now retired, in his late sixties, to a beautiful house on a cliff top in Devon. He should have been a happy man. But he was not - he was an alcoholic. For most of the time, he never drank at all. But as soon as he drank even a glass of wine, he experienced a compulsion to go on drinking until he collapsed in a coma and woke up several days later.

Negley struck everybody who met him as a man of tremendous vitality, somehow larger than life. I introduced my father to him, and for the rest of his life, dad (who was a strong character himself) spoke of Negley with a warm admiration which he withheld from most of my literary friends.

Now whenever Joy (who was not then my wife) and I went to stay with Negley and Eve, Negley obviously enjoyed it tremendously because it gave him the opportunity to talk. He was a formidable (and sometimes an exhausting) talker, and loved to tell stories about his travels and the people he had known. As he talked about the famous foreign correspondents of the 1920s, he seemed to light up. He liked to tell the story of how he had seen Dillinger's naked body in the morgue just after the gangster had been shot down by Hoover's G-Men, and how the morgue attendant pulled back the cover and commented: 'Well hung, ain't he?' Negley also described how he called on Scott Fitgerald late one afternoon, and found him writing as he stood at a tall desk. Negley asked why he wrote standing, and Fitzgerald said: 'Because if I sit down I do that...', pointing to a bottle of gin on the floor beside the settee. Then Fitzgerald said: 'Come one, let's sit down'.

I could see what was happening with Negley. As soon as he began to talk, he went 'into gear', and experienced a sense of being alive. But on an average day, when there was no one to talk to, and nothing to do but struggle on with another autobiographical book (called The Tides of Barney Gatt) which went forward with painful slowness, he felt stranded, becalmed. And this was the problem of the romantics, from Goethe onwards.

I should emphasise that you did not need to be a poet or an intellectual to feel it. Negley was an intelligent man - I still have his copy of McNeill Dixon's The Human Situation, full of underlinings and annotations on every other page - but he was not an intellectual. And the same was true of my father. He was a strong, hardworking character who had spent his whole life slaving away in boot and shoe factories, and was an admirable provider for his family. But he spent all his free time at the pub. At home he tended to be rather surly and bad tempered, and we (my brother and myself) stayed out of his way. He came into his own after his second pint of beer, playing darts or dominoes with his cronies. If we caught a glimpse of him among his pub friends, we were amazed to see what a cheerful and charming person he became.

His problem was that the modern world offered him very little chance of living the kind of life he would have preferred - days rambling around the countryside looking for mushrooms or trapping rabbits, or simply standing beside a river with a rod and line. He was certainly better off than his great grandfather, working for starvation wages in some Victorian factory, just as my mother was better off than her great grandmother. Yet although they had more security, and a regular wage packet, it was a dreary existence.

Later in his life, things became less dreary. When The Outsider was published, my father was only 45. From then on, he began taking long holidays in Cornwall - he had seldom been out of Leicester - and even came to live with us in Cornwall for a while. But his life away from Leicester proved that his capacity for freedom had been ruined forever; instead of enjoying the freedom to ramble and go fishing, he spent most of his days in the pub, until my mother - afraid that he would drink himself to death - insisted on returning to the Midlands. And although dad had become bored with his freedom in Cornwall, he hated returning to a factory, and soon developed the cancer that killed him at 64.

Negley survived a little longer, but his tremendous bouts of alcoholism took their toll, and he died of heart failure in his early 70s.

It can be seen why this problem of 'the vanishing hero' is not simply an intellectual or literary problem. For better or worse, it is one of the consequences of this Western society that offers most of us a decent standard of living and a level of security that few human beings have experienced in the past ten thousand years.

The heroes of Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann are, after all, fairly well off; they have no real cause to complain. Yet they feel trapped and stifled.

In The Age of Defeat I feel I succeeded fairly well in expressing the problem. But then, I had the advantage of writing about literature and ideas, which offered me plenty of material. I can see why Bill and Stuart never even began their contributions to the book. Anything Bill said about the inadequacies of modern party politics would be bound to sound like neo-Fascism. As to Stuart, he had already stated in 'A Sense of Crisis', his own contribution to Declaration: 'Our present need is not so much to come back to religion as to re-discover and re-create it'. What could he have done except try to square the circle, and do his best to sound convincing on the subject of a rebirth of religion in a secular age? In fact, a decade later, there was a kind of religious revival - born-again Christians and followers of Hari-Krishna and other sects. None of them have made the slightest contribution to solving the problems expressed in Declaration.

Let me return to an earlier question. I said that the problem of the romantics was that they felt stranded, becalmed. Why should that be so? The answer dawned on me a quarter of a century after I had written The Age of Defeat, when I as writing a book called A Criminal History of Mankind. In the year 1740, a printer named Samuel Richardson wrote the first novel - in our modern sense of the word - Pamela, about a pretty maidservant whose boss is determined to get her into bed. This was followed quickly by the novels of Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, as well as by the first p....graphic novel, Cleland's Fanny Hill. And suddenly, England became 'a nation of readers'. Bored housewives - and their husbands and children - could now 'escape' from life by diving into a novel like someone jumping into bed and pulling the covers over his head. Rousseau's Julie, or The New Heloise and Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther completed the revolution, and lending libraries and cheap books made the new drug available to everybody who could read.

Now this 'alternative world' had not been open to the contemporaries of Shakespeare, for the Elizabethan novelists were crude amateur storytellers, and the stage required a high degree of imagination to transform its bare boards into Agincourt or Bartholomew Fair.

It was this universal 'escapism' that was the first major slide towards 'the age of defeat'. And it is important to recognise that this new 'unhappy hero' prefigured in Werther is unhappy because he is intelligent enough to think about his problems.

But this was largely because Proust was too close to the romanticism of the 19th century to escape its prevalent air of melancholy and defeat. In fact, the Recherche is a ground-breaking work because it does not treat the 'moments of delight' as illusions as (let us say) Hoffmann did, but insists that they are realler and truer than 'everyday life'.

The same is true of Senancour's Obermann, a kind of journal of a failure, one of the major influences on the later romantics. It is Obermann who complains: 'The rain makes me sad, yet the sunlight strikes me as meaningless'. Life had become 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought' (for it has to be acknowledged that Shakespeare, with his intuitive genius, foresaw the problems of romanticism.)

In other words, the problem is a problem of thought, of ideas.

Although I would not count The Age of Defeat as one of my most successful books from the point of view of its sales, it brought me at least one important contact: an American professor of psychology called Abraham Maslow. It was Maslow who, after reading the American edition (which had been re-titled The Stature of Man) wrote me a letter in which he told me that he had been preoccupied with the same problem for a long time. He told me how he had said to his students: 'Which of you expects to be great?' And when they looked at him blankly, he said: 'If not you, who then?'

What excited me most about Maslow was a concept I found in one of the papers he sent me: the peak experience, or PE. This is that sudden rush of pure happiness that we all experience in moments of 'delight' (or what J.B.Priestley called 'magic'). For me, the real revelation was that Maslow had discovered that all healthy

people have 'peak experiences' with a fair degree of frequency. Shelley was wrong when he wrote: 'Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of delight'. 'Peakers' experience it every day.

The importance of this insight cannot be overestimated. It meant that much of the unhappiness of the Werthers and Obermanns was due to a kind of laziness. These 'outsiders' implied that their unhappiness arose from their intelligence - or, as the hero of Barbusse's L'Enfer put it: 'I see too deep and too much'. Maslow was calling their bluff. It was true that many of Maslow's 'peakers' were ordinary people, like the hostess who looked around the room after a party, and in spite of the wine stains on the carpet, exclaimed 'That was a terrific party!', and went into the peak experience. But there was no good reason why romantic poets and professors of philosophy should not also have the same kind of peak experience.

In short, the peak experience is based on a mental attitude.

This struck me overwhelmingly when I read Maslow's comment that when his students began to discuss peak experiences among themselves, and discuss their own PEs, they began having peak experiences all the time. It was merely a matter of achieving the right 'mind set'.

Now from my earliest days, I had been aware that one of the fundamental problems of human beings is what I called 'close-upness'. When we are happy, it is as if we are on a mountain top, seeing into the distance. When we are bored or listless, it is as if someone has put a paper bag over our heads, so we can see virtually nothing. Happiness is essentially a feeling of seeing beyond the present. It is a 'bird's eye view', as opposed to the 'worm's eye view' of our everyday lives.

Sartre called this 'paper bag effect' nausea. This is an extreme of life-failure. What most of us actually suffer from is less traumatic: a kind of tunnel vision, which simply prevents us from seeing anything but that which is directly ahead of us. I once called it 'the bullfighter effect'. The bullfighter keeps the bull blinded by his cape. No matter how it twists and turns, he keeps the cape right in front of its nose. And most human being seemed condemned to spend their lives blinded by the cape of a bullfighter they never see.

Of course, this is not inevitable. We all get sudden glimpses of the view from the mountain top. Our problem is that we fail to remember them. The next day, when we have to get up and go to work, the bird's eye view is only a dim memory. If we could find some way of holding tight to these glimpses, of refusing to let them escape, the problem would be solved, and we would all learn to be 'peakers'.

In the past century, the most determined attempt to capture the meaning-content of the moments of vision was made by Proust in his enormous novel. In Proust's Way, the French scholar Roger Shattuck lists a dozen of these 'moments bienheureux' - what Proust also liked to call 'resurrections', from the famous Madeleine dipped in tea to the party at the house of the Prince de Guermantes, and I recently spent a few days renewing my acquaintance with each of them in turn. What then struck me was that Proust had retreated to his 'cork lined room' to write the book in 1914, when he was forty three; eight years later, he was dead. In short, this immense meditation on 'moments bienheureux' seems to have ruined Proust's health and left him prostrated.

Now Maslow also acknowledged that we cannot have peak experiences at will. But he insisted that we can at least create the conditions for them. They depend on a fundamental optimism, on the feeling that the effort is worth making. Huysmans' Des Esseintes, that who lived in his own equivalent of the cork-lined room, at one point sets out to go to London, because he is charmed by a sudden memory of hansom cabs and beef steaks washed down with porter; but he only gets as far as the English tavern in the Gare du Nord, where he decides that he has already tasted the esssence of England, and that the rest would be an anticlimax. In this case, it is plain that the problem is merely a lack of the kind of energy and determination required to get from place to place. Des Esseintes has simply allowed his energy to sink too low. Maslow's hostess, looking around the room after the party, did not make that mistake.

This is one of the first things I had to learn in the process of becoming a writer. I spent most of my early teens in a state of decadent melancholy, dreaming of Yeats's land of heart's desire and Morris's horns of elfland. My discovery of the Bhagavad Gita, and of the importance of self-discipline, taught me that the answer lies in trying to maintain a high level of optimism and vitality. I stopped reading Dowson and Yeats and read Synge and Rabelais instead. I set out deliberately to cultivate optimism and endurance.

Life took me at my word, and plunged me into an obstacle course of down-to-earth problems, beginning with my first marriage and the need to support a family. For a while I felt as though I'd been thrown into a swimming pool from the high diving board. The marriage broke up when I was 21; I met Joy, moved back to London, and for most of 1954 lived outdoors, sleeping in a sleeping bag in the open air (to save money), and spending my days writing my first novel in the Reading Room of the British Museum.

But at least the effect of this obstacle course was to make me clearly aware of the dangers of romantic inaction. I had not only thrown off the longing for the 'horns of elfland', but even the need to sleep in a comfortable bed. I can still recall leaving Alfred Reynolds's house in Dollis Hill (where I was still welcome in spite of our disagreements) after a long evening of music and philosophical discussion, to find my way to the park at the end of his road, there to unroll my sleeping bag. I no longer even felt envious of the people who slept in warm beds - I had become so accustomed to sleeping outdoors that when I went home to Leicester to visit my parents, I slept under the apple tree in the garden. And as I wrote The Outsider in the British Museum, and prepared to spend an evening in a cheap Soho cafe before making my way to Hampstead Heath for the night, I could see very clearly that the basic solution to the Outsider's problem lies in realism, not in daydreaming.

It had been a hard road since those early days in Leicester when I spent all my spare time in my bedroom reading poetry. But at least I could feel that I had solved the Outsider problem in the real world as well as in the world of literary theory. And when I came to write - for example - about the tragedy of Scott Fitzgerald, it was perfectly clear to me that his problem was that he had never achieved any sort of realism. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, had been a glittering romantic daydream, and with its success, he went on to try and live that daydream with the equally unrealistic Zelda. Inevitably, their chief problem was money, and he was forced to churn out stories for glossy magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. And his finest novels, The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, he failed to understand why they failed to achieve the success of This Side of Paradise. It never seems to have occurred to him that his readers did not want to read about a hero who is murdered by a jealous husband, or a doctor who ends as a failure. They wanted to be told that 'you can win'.

Oddly enough, the career of my friend John Braine, whose healthy instincts led him to reject 'the wet hero', followed a pattern similar to Fitzgerald's. In Life at the Top, he showed Joe leaving his wife after finding her in flagrante with a lover and drinking too much - an echo of John's own life - and then simply reconciling with her, with no true resolution of the situation. A series of novels about middle class businesmen who commit adultery in suburbia showed that he had failed to find a solution to the problem of creating a hero who was not 'wet' and defeated. Like Fitzgerald, he was inclined to seek the answer to personal problems in the bottle, and when, in Japan, I heard about his death from a burst ulcer, it seemed to me that he was as much a tragedy of the 1950s as Fitzgerald had been of the 1920s.

In fact, Maslow had stumbled on to the only satisfactory solution of this problem. It springs out of that fact that when his students began to talk to one another about their peak experiences, they began having peak experiences all the time.

Consider the significance of this. The essence of the 'bird's eye view' is that it is, in certain important respects, truer than the worm's eye view. An aerial archaeologist makes use of this recognition by flying above the site he intends to excavate to photograph it. And his bird's eye view enables him to see ancient earthworks or mediaeval fields that are quite invisible from the ground. He now knows exactly where to start digging.

For the philosopher, the problem is not quite so simple. His difficulty is that he has no camera to photograph his own bird's eye views. All he can do is try to remember them. In other words, he is in the same position as romantics like Goethe and Shelley and Hoffmann, who experienced marvellous flashes of visionary consciousness, but found it hard to translate them back into terms of 'close-upness'.

Yet all these romantics were overwhelmed with a sense of the authenticity of their 'bird's eye views', even when they had to admit defeat in translating them back into terms of everyday life. This was the cause of that romantic despair that led to so many premature deaths.

Yet the essence of that romantic insight is a sense of immense optimism - what G.K.Chesterton called 'absurd good news'. 

It was this sense of 'good news' that caused Maslow's students to experience an enormous sense of optimism.

And what is the essence of this insight? This is a question we can all answer, having all had peak experiences at some time or other. It is a sense of trust, and that the force behind life is good, not evil, or even indifferent.

And why did Maslow's students find that talking about peak experiences induced more peak experiences? Again, every one of us can answer this. It is because, once we recognise that the peak experience is an objective recognition, we also know that all we have to do to regain it is to 'tune in' to the same recognition. It is, so to speak, there permanently, like a gramophone record that can be put on at any time.

Proust had that same experience when he tasted the madeleine dipped in tea. But Proust had a certain disadvantage. Like many oversensitive people, he was prone to pessimism and self-doubt. So although he came close to making the same discovery as Maslow's students, he continually returned to his natural pessimism and self-pity. In spite of which, A la recherche du temps perdu is probably the greatest novel of the 20th century because its central theme is what Proust called 'resurrections'.

It was, in fact, the archetypal 'romantic' theme, the theme we hear again and again, from Rousseau's Julie and Goethe's Werther to the poems of Ernest Dowson and Yeats. Proust's novel is one of its last - and perhaps its greatest - expressions.

We can also see why Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and Braine's Room at the Top were so successful. Both are bubbling with the peak experience - with a marvellous sense of anticipation about the hero's life and expectations.

This is what I am talking about in The Age of Defeat. Not a 'new hero', but an optimistic hero.

This also explains why Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was voted in 1999 the best of 'the hundred best novels' of the century. It is not because Frodo Baggins, as a hero, is so remarkable - on the contrary, Tolkien enjoys emphasising his 'ordinariness'. It is because The Lord of the Rings bubbles with the peak experience, and because Frodo's quest to destroy the ring arouses in the reader a vision of optimism - of a world in which the Dark Lord has been defeated, and everyone can return to the delights of normality. We all used to feel the same during the war, when we thought what it would be like after Hitler's defeat.

It is because the vision of optimism that we find in the early romantics - Goethe, Jean Paul, Hoffmann - gradually gave way to gloom and pessimism that literature plunged into the 'age of defeat'.

The solution, I would therefore suggest, lies in a consideration of the implications of the work of Maslow, as well as of Husserl, Whitehead, Howard Miller,. I would also like to introduce readers who have not yet come across him to the work of the contemporary psychologist George Pransky.

I have discussed Husserl's significance elsewhere (for example, in Beyond the Outsider and The New Existentialism), but will here briefly summarise my central points. The philosopher David Hume argued that our minds are simply a conglomeration of impressions and feelings, and that we have no 'central identity'. Husserl objected that this is untrue.

Consciousness is 'intentional'. When you look at something, your attention is like an arrow fired at an object, and the archer - although he is not visible to normal introspection - is the 'real you', or what Husserl called 'the transcendental ego'.

Whitehead also objected to Hume and to the 'mechanistic' psychology that sprang from his work. His great contribution consisted in recognising that Hume was wrong to suggest we have only one mode of perception - 'presentational immediacy', (the 'worm's eye view). We also, he argued, have a faculty for grasping things 'as a whole', for grasping meanings. What I experience when listening to a symphony or looking at a sunset cannot be explained in terms of purely subjective emotion. It is a perception of 'meaning', which transcends our fragmentary perceptions. Although Whitehead never spoke of a 'transcendental ego', a 'real you', this is clearly implied in his work, (for example, in his phrase 'life implies a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment'). 

My point is that without this sense of a 'real you', and of meaning as an objective reality, we are bound to plunge into pessimism, a sense of the pettiness and meaningless of human life. This is what really underlies the 'age of defeat'.

Howard Miller, an American psychologist and physician, also insisted on the existence of the 'real you', which he called 'the unit of pure thought'. Imagine, he said, that you are lying on a beach on a sunny day - you can feel the warm breeze and wriggle your toes in the sand. Now change the picture. Imagine you are on a snowy hillside on a winter day, and the wind causes your cheeks to glow...

What is it, Miller asks, that triggered that change from sunny beach to winter hillside? If you were watching a slide of a sunny beach projected on a screen, and you changed it for a slide of a winter hillside, you could explain how you brought about the change. So what changed that internal mental slide? The answer, Miller suggests, is a 'real you', an invisible self which is nevertheless capable of acts of free will. When we fail to recognise the existence of this 'essential you', we fall into the error of a mechanistic psychology, and into what I labelled 'the fallacy of insignificance'.

So human beings are in an absurd position. Because of our highly developed powers of habit, we are usually unaware that we are free. So on an ordinary day, you may sit in your armchair, healthy and normal in every possible way, yet totally passive, with your mind asleep. But if the postman then delivers a book which you have always wanted to read, and finally obtained with great difficulty, you virtually devour it, and quickly become aware of a sense of feeling more alive. You feel 'free'. Yet you were free ten minutes earlier, before the book arrived.

It would seem that human beings need to somehow 'warm up the engine' before they can experience this sense of being fully alive. We need, so to speak, to raise our inner temperature before we can actually feel free. Concern and anxiety are as good a way as any to achieve this state - as Dr Johnson says, 'When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully'. When that happens, you suddenly become conscious of the 'real you'.

If you compare your body and brain to a motor car, then the 'real you' is the driver. The odd thing is that he is invisible. But he makes all the difference in the world. If you let yourself fall into a mood of boredom and futility, your vital batteries run down, and you begin to experience a sense of 'life failure', of what Sartre calls 'contingency'. (It was Sartre's failure to understand the ideas of his master Husserl that was responsible for the negative tone of his own philosophy.)

Of course, what I have just said is what Gilbert Ryle has dismissed (in The Concept of Mind) as the fallacy of 'the ghost in the machine'. He declares that the division of man into body and soul is a mistake born of muddled thinking. In other words, man is his body. My own view is that he is simply and disastrously wrong.

There is one more modern psychologist who seems to me as important as James, Maslow and Howard Miller.

Two years ago, an email correspondent asked me if I knew the work of George Pransky, and when I said I had never heard of him, was kind enough to send me Pransky's book The Renaissance of Psychology. It had on me the same effect as my first reading of Maslow's essay on peak experiences. Pransky and his colleague Roger Mills have labelled their body of ideas 'the psychology of mind'.

In 'How it all began', Pransky describes how, in 1976, at a time when he was feelin depressed and dissatisfied, he received a phone call from a close friend and colleague, asking him to make a trip to an island off the coast of Vancouver, to hear a man called Sydney Banks. Banks was not a professional psychologist or doctor, but a layman. But two years earlier, he had received a kind of revelation that had transformed him.

What had happened (Pransky told me later on the phone) was that Banks was commenting to a friend that he felt unhappy, and the friend had said: 'You're not really unhappy, Syd, you just think you are'. This commonplace remark had an electrifying effect on Banks. He stared at his friend and said: 'Do you realise what you've just said?'

And what had his friend just said?

What broke in on Banks, like a revelation, was that our mental states are totally dependent on our thoughts. 

That sounds absurd. If I am feeling low because I am suffering from a headache, or a flu virus, or a stomach upset, is that dependent my thoughts?

Before you answer no, consider what happens when you are feeling ill - perhaps having eaten too much dinner - and trying hard not to be sick. We all know that it is possible to stop feeling sick if you can get your thoughts on the right track. In my Adrift in Soho, the hero is sitting in a churchyard, afraid he is about to vomit, when he hears a pattering noise. It takes him a second or two to realise that this is the sound of raindrops on the leaves.

In such moments we recognise the importance of thought. If you are feeling sick, is is easy make yourself sicker by brooding on it. Think of something totally different, something that interests you, and the sickness promptly vanishes.

I have described elsewhere one of the major experiences that revealed to me the power of thought. When our daughter Sally was about three years old, we managed to lose her in Cheltenham. I was in a second hand bookshop with her; Joy was outside rearranging the boot of the car. Sally got restless and asked: 'Where's mummy?', and I took her outside and showed her. Sally trotted off and I went back to my books. Five minutes later, Joy came in alone, and I asked casually 'Where's Sally?' Joy said: 'I don't know - she was with you'. There was instant panic. We both rushed out into the street, which was jammed with rush-hour traffic and pedestrians.

Joy went one way, I went the other. Five minutes later we met again outside the bookshop, having failed to find her. I was desperate, unable to believe that disaster could have descended on us so suddenly. We went our separate ways again, and Joy finally found Sally a quarter of a mile away on the other side of the block.

My relief was immense. And as we drove on, I found myself in an almost visionary state of delight and optimism. I found myself thinking: 'Aren't buses beautiful objects?', and 'Isn't exhaust smoke a nice smell?' The buses did look beautiful. And I realised that I had simply flung my mind wide open in sheer relief.

On our driving to Cheltenham, I had been feeling rather tired and dull because I had been out to the pub lunchtime with my father, and drunk several pints. But I can now see that I had been augmenting the effect of the beer by thinking: 'O dear, now I feel sleepy. I really shouldn't drink at lunchtime - it always makes me feel terrible...' etc. So I was increasing the sense of tiredness. If, in fact, I had received some marvellous good news before I set out - that Hollywood had offered a vast sum for one of my books - I would have felt so delighted that I would not have even noticed the effect of the beer. And now we had found Sally, it was even more marvellous news than a film contract, and my thoughts proceeded to fill me with bubbling optimism.

But it was only when I thought about it later that I realised that I owed this 'epiphany' to my thoughts. If I had merely sighed with relief when we found Sally, and switched on the car radio, I would have missed the whole point.

Again, years later, when I began to suffer a series of panic attacks due to overwork, I had a chance to observe how negative thoughts can drain us of all vital energy and bring us to the brink of nervous breakdown. (I have described this at the beginning of Mysteries.)

Syd Banks's insight into the power of thought apparently transformed him as a person, filling him with such energy and optimism that people who knew him previously scarcely recognised him. And he went on the deliver lectures about his insights, to audiences that included doctors, lawyers and professors of psychology. Pransky encountered many of these at the seminar off the coast of Vancouver, and commented: 'They were particularly emotionally stable in that they didn't seem to get upset or bothered as often as people to whom I was accustomed. In retrospect, these people exhibited all of the characteristics that I now associated with living in a high state of well-being'.

In effect, Pransky was mixing with a group of Maslow's 'peakers', people with a high degree of mental health. The interesting thing is that they had become peakers by listening to Syd Banks and understanding what he was saying to them.

I have written elsewhere of a man called Dan MacDougald, who discovered a similar method of curing 'hard core psychopaths' in the Georgia State Penitentiary by similar methods. But MacDougald's technques involved a religious element, and since this involved persuading people to 'swallow' basic Christian precepts, I was dubious about it. What Pransky has done - with the help of Syd Banks - is to create a method that produces the same effects as MacDougald, but without any need for 'religious brainwashing' - i.e. which makes its appeal to pure intelligence.

And now it should be possible to see what I consider to be the solution to the problem I have outlined in this book. It is not a question of creating a 'new kind of hero', but of bringing a new insight to bear on the problem. It is a hard insight to grasp - many of Pransky's patients and colleagues could simply not see what he was driving at - but when grasped, has the effect of a revelation.

I have told elsewhere the story of a girl I knew in America, who was married to a professor who was being unfaithful to her. She decided to leave him, and her brother suggested that she should keep house for him in Ohio, where he had found a university post. At the same time, her husband begged her not to leave him, telling her he intended to take a teaching job in Oregon. She told me she felt tormented, asking herself again and again: 'Oregon or Ohio, Oregon or Ohio?' And then, quite suddenly, it burst upon her: I don't have to move to Oregon or Ohio - I'm free. She said it was like a revelation, and it filled her with energy and optimism, so even her tennis improved.

In fact, what Syd Banks has recognised is simply a different version of Husserl's 'intentionality' - that our state of being is determined by our thoughts. We are free. This means, in effect, that if I wished to restore that dazzling recognition that came to me in Cheltenham when Joy found Sally, I could do so merely by re-telling myself the story of what happened. In fact, I actually did this once, when standing near a beach in Cornwall and describing my 'Cheltenham insight' to my literary agent, who happened to be staying with us. In the process of describing it, I suddenly re-lived it, and as I stared at a cliff-face, was overwhelmed by the feeling of 'absurd good news'.

This, then, is 'the secret' which can produce a completely new state of being. Whenever I grasp this insight, I experience a mixture of delight and astonishment - astonishment that the 'secret' should be so close, and delight that it should be so simple. And when I reflect that this problem has been tormenting the human race for about two hundred and fifty years, from Rousseau to Beckett, I feel slightly incredulous, overawed by the recognition that this 'age of defeat' is at last showing every sign of drawing to a close.

Yet I have no doubt whatsoever that it is.

 

 

 

Colin Wilson (~2002?)