THE INTELLECTUAL HERO

An Inquiry into the Theme of Colin Wilson's Novels

Ritual in the Dark and The World of Violence

By Dag H. Christensen 

A Thesis Presented to 

the English Department 

The University of Oslo

Spring Term 1969

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Contents

INTRODUCTION 

Chapter 1: Ritual in the Dark 

Chapter 2: The World of Violence 

Chapter 3: Towards a New Existentialism 

          I. The Critical Approach 

         II. The Intellectual 'Outsider' 

         III. New Directions 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INTRODUCTION

   Although this thesis aims at examining Colin Wilson's achievement as a novelist, his reputation is so closely bound up with his critical book The Outsider, and this book is so closely related to his novels, that a few introductory remarks on the reception of The Outsider would hardly be out of place.

   Colin Wilson made his name with The Outsider in 1956, at the age of 24. The book achieved a success which, according to Wilson himself, made one critic write: "Not since Lord Byron woke up one morning and found himself famous has an English writer met with such spontaneous and universal acclaim". The book sold 40,000 copies in its hard-cover edition in Britain alone (the same number as John Braine's best-selling novel Room at the Top) - a remarkable figure for a serious philosophical study of this kind.

   Thirteen years have passed since then, and Colin Wilson has published twenty books, including seven novels, an autobiography of ideas, seven or eight volumes of philosophy, an encyclopaedia of murder,a collection of essays on music and a study of Rasputin. Also he has written four plays and seven dozen articles,essays and reviews. Even so, critics still find it hard to dissociate his name from that one highly controversial volume that appeared in 1956, although few could maintain that it is his best book. A good portion of English critics still tend to regard him as that 'angry young man' (Wilson has from the very start disclaimed this title) who startled even the foremost critics into believing that here at long last was the literary Messiah - a young man of genius who would redeem English literature from its dilapidating state of post-war boredom and despondency.

   The unexpected and somewhat unreasonable success of the book proved to be the undoing of Wilson's chances of being taken seriously for a very long time to come. The serious papers, in their eagerness to glorify this golden discovery of new artistic talent, shot far beyond the mark and endowed the book with virtues which its author apparently had never dreamed of putting in. Colin Wilson became daily news, not least in the popular Press, over a period of weeks and months, and Wilson himself has put it this way: "The highbrow critics tend to turn very peevish if their enthusiasms are take out of their hands and accepted by the popular Press". The result was a tremendous backsliding when he published his second book, Religion and the Rebel, eighteen months later. This book, similar to the previous volume both in its form and content, was originally intended to be incorporated in The Outsider, but Wilson had been dissuaded from this plan by his publisher on account of the sheer size. Some of the very people who had hoisted Wilson up a year and a half before now had few qualms about tearing him down. For instance, Philip Toynbee in the Observer had hailed the first book as an exhaustive and luminously intelligent study...what makes the book truly astounding is that its alarmingly well-read author is only twenty-four years old ...this remarkable book...a real contribution to an understanding of our deepest predicament" etc. Now, with the sequel in his hands, and Wilson's declining reputation in his mind, he decided to retract a vital chunk of his praise of the first book, and called Religion and the Rebel "a deplorable piece of work" and even worse names, although, according to Allsop, he did insist that he was still spiritually on Wilson's side. The Times Literary Supplement, about the only publication which still considered Wilson with an air of academic seriousness, devoted a full page to a discussion of the two books, none the less concluding that "the saddest thing about this new book is that it so much resembles The Outsider". The somewhat churlish tone of many of the serious critics was followed up by a regular massacre in the popular Press, and the anti-Wilson craze spread quickly to America.

   Twelve years later (1969), one finds that some critics, though notably fewer, still have a propensity to treating Wilson's latest book with a certain tone of ridicule, thus presumably camouflaging their uncert­ainty as to whether Wilson ought to be considered seriously or not. As Marghanita Laski wrote in the Times Literary Supplement one week after the public­ation of Religion and the Rebel: "Some of the reviewers seem to be using Mr. Wilson as a scapegoat for their own shame at having been so profoundly impressed by his first book". She writes, too, that 'Surely literary history can show no other example of such a major effort to destroy a very bad book..." With regard to the latter remark, Miss Laski later admitted to Wilson that she had, at the time, not read Religion and the Rebel.

And now we might well ask: was the second book, indeed, such a folie de grandeur as these critics would contend? Kenneth Allsop writes:

it is nonsense to claim, as many reviewers did, that The Outsider was all right and Religion and the Rebel all wrong. As is, I think, quite obvious, Religion and the Rebel is a continuation of The Outsider - they are the halves of one book...To pretend that virtues belong to one half and vices to the other is dishonest: what faults and virtues are present are implicit within the entire framework of the two books.

(Allsop, p. 178)

   Moreover, Sir Herbert Read, writing to the Times Literary Supplement, had this to say of the second book:

It has all the virtues the recanting reviewers found in The Outsider and fewer of the faults. It is far from being a perfect book (as Mr. Wilson would be the first to admit); but those readers who were impressed by The Outsider should not be too ready to accept the opinions of those reviewers who feel they have to make public amend for the brash enthusiasm of seventeen months ago.

And T. S. Eliot, in a letter to Colin Wilson after the publication of The Outsider, seemed to have anticipated what was coming when he wrote:

It seems to me that the right way is first to become known to a small group of people who can recognise what is good when they see it; next, to become known to a slightly larger group who will take the word of the others on what is good; and finally, to reach the wider public. To do it the other way round could be disastrous.

(cf.(Campion, p. 169)

   So the task of evaluating Colin Wilson as a serious writer of fiction has so far been much hampered and discouraged in Britain by the wholly embarrassing hullabaloo around his first two books. As Sidney Campion points out: "The reviewing of Religion and the Rebel established a certain precedent in treating Colin Wilson's books with no attempt at understanding' (Campion, p. 168). The repercussions were still clearly felt in 1960, when his first novel, Ritual in the Dark, hit the literary headlines, and have continued well into the sixties, although, naturally enough, the violenceof the attacks has subsided.

   The main purpose of this thesis will therefore be to clear the ground, so speak, for a more just evaluat­ion of Colin Wilson as a novelist - rather than provide a final 'verdict' in itself. My aim, first of all, is to interpret two of his novels, Ritual in the Dark and The World of Violence, from a point of view which I think is far more representative of the author's own intentions than any of the critical treatments available till now. Secondly, I shall consider one or two of the more adverse reviews of Ritual in the Dark, thus revealing, I assume, a few of the basic fallacies of the reviewers' approach. And finally, I shall try to point out some of the fund­amental similarities of theme between the novels and Wilson's theoretical works. By so doing I hope to indicate at least partly the original cause of the success of The Outsider; for obviously it was not so much the form or the 'artistic quality' of the book that electrified the critics as the book's content - its basic theme; and this theme is repeated and further evolved in all Wilson's subsequent books, not least in his novels.

   Colin Wilson's philosophical development is embodied in the six volumes of his 'Outsider Cycle' (1956-1965). Apart from the two books already mentioned, these comprise the following titles: The Age of Defeat, which is a treatise on the 'insignificant hero' of twentieth century literature; The Strength to Dream, subtitled "Literature and the Imagination", in which the author propounds his theories of 'existential criticism' (which I intend to deal with in the final chapter); Origins of the Sexual Impulse, a study of sex and the creative imagination from the point of view of existential psychology; and finally, Beyond the Outsider, in which the same basic ideas as those of the previous books are carried forward to a new stage and discussed in the light of recent trends in biology and psychology. However, the clearest outline of Wilson's ideas are to be found in a single volume which appeared in 1966, Introduction to the New Existentialism, which is in fact largely a summary of the ideas in the preceding books. My discussion in the latter part of Chapter Three will to a large extent be based on the ideas as they are presented in this volume. 

   To my knowledge, no serious criticism of Colin Wilson's literary works has yet been published. Kenneth Allsop, in his book The Angry Decade (1958), is mostly concerned with Wilson's relation to the other so-called 'angry young men', and the social aspects of his fame and notoriety. Besides, the book was written before Wilson's first novel appeared. And Sidney Campion, in The World of Colin Wilson (1963), is primarily concerned with Wilson's personality and his biographical background, and has evidently not aimed at any interpretation of the novels beyond that which Wilson has openly imparted himself. As regards Wilson's own comments, he has, in his numerous critical works, said remarkably little about his novels, apparently leaving it to his readers to infer the meaning for themselves: a good book.', writes Wilson, "should somehow be a living organism, with many levels of significance, like a picture that can be looked at in a dozen different ways" MWS p. 14). My acknowledgements to other critics, therefore, are few and far between, and will, in the course of my exposition, emerge by way of parenthetical remarks. 

***

 Chapter 1 

RITUAL IN THE DARK

   Ritual in the Dark tells the story of eleven days in the life of Gerard Some, a young writer who lives alone in a room in London, with a small private allowance which enables him to spend the greater part of his time reading, writing and listening to music on the gram­ophone. When we first meet him he has been living in this state of leisure for five years, ever since the afternoon when he made up his mind to walk out of the office for the last time, filled with a sense of "overwhelming hatred for cities and offices and people and everything that calls itself civilisation" (p. 374). Evidently it is the idea of the worthlessness of his life as an office clerk that has made him turn his back on society - a sudden reaction of contempt for the futility of "people who possessed no motive beyond the working day, no deep certainties to counterbalance the confusion" (p. 213). In his mind all the petty problems and short-lived desires of the thousands of people around him have their origin in the monotony and basic boredom of their lives. Even the greatness of London and the glory of our civilisation are hardly more than "footprints on a sandy beach" (p. 345) which time will wash away. Our cities and our lives are tied to the present, and man in his mortal confines, hustling every day through the streets with the millions of other men, cannot perceive the beauty and the timeless movement of the universe beyond his ephemeral self.

Sorme has had a vision: 

It happened once when I was on Hampstead Heath, looking down on London. I was thinking about all the lives and all the problems --- and then suddenly I felt real. I saw other people's illusions, and my own illusions disappeared ...I stopped wondering whether the world's ultimately good or evil. I felt that the world didn't matter a damn. What mattered was me, whether I saw it as good or evil. I suddenly felt as if I'd turned into a giant. I felt absurdly happy ----. (p. 326)

"I saw other people's illusions, and my own illusions disappeared..." This, as we shall see, represents a kind of leit-motif in Ritual in the Dark. Campion characterises this novel as essentially a 'Bildungsroman': "What is emphasised...is the importance of the idea of maturity, of education in the process of living" (Campion, p. 186). The hero achieves a greater degree of spiritual maturity through his experience of new events and by examining, each in turn, the life values of the people he meets. Colin Wilson himself has referred to this novel as an 'Odyssey' through a world of false values.

   As a point of departure we might turn to an incident which took place some two months before Sorme's meeting with Austin Nunne. One night, in bed with a girl he has picked up in a cafe, he feels a sudden and unaccountable lack of desire to make love to her. It is as if the whole question of sexual intercourse with this girl is absurd - based on some fundamental mistake. He realises that the sole reason for the girl's wish to go to bed with him is that she is utterly bored with life. She is completely spoilt, neurotic, and chain-smokes for the same reason that she desires sex. The hero suddenly becomes acutely aware of the fact that the lives and activities of millions of people in this same city are based on a similar need to escape from boredom or mediocrity. They all need distractions of some sort to endure life at all. The businessman may believe that the purpose of life is to get him a bigger car". The politician may endure life by "identifying his purpose with that of his party. The religious man...by accepting the guidance of the Church or his Bible" (p. 91). But to Sorme's mind all these purposes are little more than falsifying patterns, guiding-poles or rituals which people need to guide them through the dark. Without these patterns, life would appear meaningless to millions of people. And without her sex ritual and her cigarettes, the girl from the cafe would probably sink into a condition that might lead to suicide. Then, suddenly aware of the full impact of illusion on the girl's life, the hero has a sense of being freed from the bonds of his own illusion:

suddenly I felt a tremendous excitement. It was so strong that I felt I'd never want to sleep again...I thought: I am lying here in the middle of London, with a population of three million people asleep around me, and a past that extends back to the time when the Romans built the city on a fever swamp...It was a sense of participation in everything. I wanted to live a million times more than anybody has ever lived. (pp. 66-7)

   Sorme's break with the office, then, is hardly negative. His longing for the freedom to work and do as he likes does not imply any kind of romantic desire to escape to a quiet place in the country, away from the hustle and bustle of civilisation. On the contrary, he wants to stay in the city, where he can observe life. His break repres­ents nothing less than a need to cast off the chains of illusion and seek a new and more permanent foundation on which to build his future life.

   Sorme spends five years in his room, reading Plato and Plotinus, and listening to the music of Mozart and Prokoviev, in his attempt to regain the insight. But the vision fails him - or, at least, it appears only half a dozen times in the course of the five years, and only as glimpses too ephemeral and fragile to provide the found­ation on which he wants to build his life. He tries to write a novel based on his insights, but the inspiration fails him. He can find no solution to the problem of creating a bridge between the ideals of his mind and the monotonous ritual of physical existence. Sorme's life of freedom to read and write and "listen to those symphonies at ten in the morning" (p. 175) gradually and inevitably leads him into a state of boredom and self-contempt, into the very life of illusion from which he has been seeking to escape. After five years of this kind of 'freedom' he finds that he has reached no further than the stage of living like an animal - just eating, sleeping and roaming about the streets with no purpose:

I felt completely lost. I didn't like leaving my room because the street made me feel as if I didn't exist. London made me feel like an insect, and when I got back to my own room and tried to write I still felt like an insect. (p. 326)

   Sorme, the observer of life, fails in the task he has set himself because he remains a passive observer. His identity, so to speak, gets lost in the general drift of time, as he does not possess the power to release his mind from the bonds of his body's contingency. Existence closes him in, people become oppressive and life appears meaningless because he is incapable of imposing his own meaning of life. The Gerard Sorme we meet in the opening chapters is a scruffy-looking young man who gets easily embarrassed or irritated. His main problem after his five years of 'freedom' is how to break away from this futile state of non-existence. This is his position when the story opens.

* * * * *

The event which finally launches the hero on a new direction of purpose is his meeting with the wealthy dilettante Austin Nunne at a Russian Ballet exhibition in London. Nunne is a well-known ballet critic and the son of one of the richest men in England, but also - as Sorme gradually comes to realise - a homosexual with sadistic tendencies, who is suspected by the police of being the killer who over the past months has murdered several prostitutes in London's East End. Through Nunne the hero becomes acquainted, directly or indirectly, with a number of people who in various ways begin to exert an influence on his spiritual development. Each of these characters possesses a set of life values differing from his own. Besides Nunne, the hero's new chain of acquaintances consists of the painter Oliver Glasp, Gertrude Quincey (a Jehovah's Witness) and her young niece Caroline (a drama school student), the Catholic priest Father Carruthers, Dr. Stein (a German pathol­ogist) and the child Christine. Significant, too, is the unavoidable presence of the crazy old man in the room upstairs.

The opening paragraph, in which we meet the hero on his way to the Diaghilev Exhibition through the November drizzle, serves to foreshadow the sinister train of events in which he becomes involved as a result of his acquaint­ance with Austin Nunne. It also illustrates his state of mind at the time:

He came out of the Underground at Hyde Park Corner with his head lowered, ignoring the people who pressed around him and leaving it to them to steer out of his way. He disliked the crowds. They affronted him. If he allowed himself to notice them, he found himself thinking: Too many people in this bloody city; we need a massacre to thin their numbers. When he caught himself thinking this, he felt sick. He had no desire to kill anyone, but the hatred of the crowd was uncontrollable. (p. 7)

These sentiments have the further effect of preparing us for the sense of understanding which Sorme later on develops in regard to Nunne's sadistic tendencies. But in order to explain more fully the deep impact which the discovery of these impulses makes on Sorme's moral education, we must begin by examining those aspects of Nunne's personality which in the first place spark off Sorme's interest in him.

The first and most obvious reason for their friend­ship is their mutual interest in the great Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. We learn that Nunne has published two books on Nijinsky, whereas the book which Sorme has been labouring on for the past five years is a novel on this dancer's 'state of mind'. Nijinsky evidently symbol­ises for Sorme some state of spiritual being which he himself is seeking to achieve:

There was an image of a man walking along a tree-lined avenue at night, listening to sounds of music coming from a hotel lounge. In the man was an obsession with the superhuman, a desire to rise cleanly and naturally beyond human pettiness, maintaining the flight without uncertainty. (p. 299)

Nijinsky found release for his obsession through physical discipline - by becoming the world's greatest ballet dancer. Sorme sees in the god-like quality of his dancing the creation of a bridge between physical existence and the ideal existence of the spirit. But because Sorme does not possess the ability or, for that matter, the child­hood training to express his creative urge through dancing, he does what he thinks is second best: he tries to analyse Nijinsky's obsession by writing a novel about him. But, as we have already noted, the task he has set himself does not bring him any closer to the state of creativity he desires. It is hardly surprising, then, that a certain curiosity is aroused in him when he meets a well-known critic who has produced two books on Nijinsky.

Nunne's and Sorme's interest in the same ballet dancer, however, is only one manifestation of an affinity of mind which goes far deeper. Driving through the traffic-jammed streets of London after their meeting at the exhibition, Nunne reveals his contempt for his fellow drivers and passing pedestrians by screaming oaths of indignation through the car window. This brings to mind Sorme's passive rebellion in the opening paragraph of the novel, and we find similar sentiments in Sorme expressed later on, such as for example: "'When cycling, he felt that the driver of every car was a personal enemy" (p. 139). Both men hate the city because of its rather frigid, formal social relations. Yet there is one notable difference in the way each of them responds:

You're so good-tempered, Gerard. You obviously don't hate people as much as I do.

Sorme said, smiling:

You obviously don't know me as well as I do. (p. 20)

Whereas Nunne has few inhibitions about flinging his hatred at the world, we perceive that Sorme is more in the habit of keeping his irritated outbursts to himself, such as saying things 'angrily to the door" (p. 33) or "swearing under his breath" (p. 98). Another instance of Sorme's passivity is the fact that it is Nunne who initiates their acquaintance, while Sorme himself at first feels somewhat embarrassed and prefers to be left alone. The fact that Sorme is passive, whereas Nunne expresses his feelings by way of action, forms the basis of the hero's most profound interest in the character of Austin Nunne.

Campion states that the basic theme of Ritual in the Dark is the idea that a man who is completely inactive can have no identity; his 'identity' can be discovered by himself only in action" (Campion, p. 178). We shall see, in the course of this study, in what way Nunne's more 'active' mode of life has the effect of germinating new creative vigour into Sorme's basically stagnant existence. It is, above all, the negative and in fact the most repulsive aspects of Nunne's character which eventually relieve the hero from his state of boredom and illusion. These negative factors in Nunne are given vent through his sadism and ultimately in the act of murder itself.

   It might seem strange that a theme so fundamentally repellent should manage to arouse sympathy in a young man whose interests so far have been largely confined to the realms of music and philosophy. Hence, the day Sorme moves into his new room and starts reading a few pages in a book on murder which a former lodger has left behind, his immediate reaction is disgust. And when he receives his first hint, through Robin Maunsell, that Nunne is believed to have sadistic tendencies, the news leaves him feeling "suddenly exhausted and depressed"(p. 70). Even more apparent is his downright nausea after he has been talking with his friends in Fleet Street about the series of murders that are baffling Scotland Yard:

His stomach felt watery and rebellious. It was the talk of murder. It had settled on his senses like a film of soot from a smoking lamp, coating them with a greyness of depression. He noticed also that he cycled with less confidence. The depression brought a sense of his body's betrayal. (p. 58)

Yet the nausea is only a symptom of a disgust which fundamentally points at something in himself. His sense of alieness from the world has its roots in the fact that his illusions estrange him from the 'creative forces' of his being - from his own true identity. Hence we might perceive that his hatred for the crowds, as well as Nunne's contempt for the driver of every car, is simply a manifestation of their own spiritual empti­ness - their tendency to see mostly the physical crust of things, with little or no fellow feeling for other people. It is the physical crust of themselves - their own spiritual deadness - which they in actual fact condemn.

   A living symbol of this is the unavoidable presence of the crazy old man in the room upstairs. Sorme's first encounter with this Mr. Hamilton is involuntary; he is obliged to climb the fire escape and let himself into the old man's room in order to help the police, who have come to make some enquiries. The fact that this senile man, who at the time is drunk, fails to respond to anything Sorme tries to say to him, not only leaves Sorme feeling irritated, but he is also endowed with an overwhelming sense of helplessness. This, together with the sight of the naked, hideous heap of flesh squatting there on the floor, arouses in him a sudden and violent disgust. What surprises him is the sheer violence of his hatred, the inexplicable desire to "stand in the doorway and empty a revolver into the repulsive nakedness". Naturally, good-tempered as he is, Sorme does nothing of the sort, but simply turns round and walks out of the room, irritated and helpless. His inability to act in any way - on the one hand to make the man respond to his plea, on the other to express the violence of his disgust - makes him lose, for a moment, all sense of self-identity. In the old man's eyes he might as well not exist, and hence this scene becomes a caricature of the hero's sense of non-identity in the face of the world. He becomes "somehow the victim of a drunk old man"(p. 38)in the same way that he feels 'victimised' by physical reality. Moreover, in the very existence of the old man, with his pile of gramophone records and his seemingly aimless fragments of religious talk, Sorme apparently senses a terrifying, distorted reflection of his own spiritual emptiness - symbolised, it appears, by the old man's "blotchy nakedness" and his "perspiring bald head". The fact that the man lives on the floor above Sorme's own room serves maybe to emphasise the idea that it is the horror of death and decay which blocks the route between Sorme's everyday self and his vision of the heavenly spirit. This is illustrated by the 'vastation' which Sorme has in his room in the middle of the night, a few hours after his encounter with the old man. He wakes up with a sudden "orgasm of fear" - an oppressive feeling that his body consists of no more than dead flesh, lifeless matter. It is a sudden insight into the cause of his disgust, "the idea of his own non-existence", the feeling - so to speak - of his consciousness being imprisoned within the confines of a room with no exit:

Existence faced him like a blank wall. There was an instinctive desire to penetrate the wall, to assert his reality beyond it, and a terror that came with the recognition that he was trapped in existence; that no detachment from it was possible. (p. 41)

Sorme's room might be seen as a symbol of his person­ality, and the walls represent the limits of his consciousness. The comparison is stated explicitly when Sorme, in a mood of tiredness and low spirits, reflects on the similarity between the bareness of his sparsely furnished room and the spiritual emptiness of his mind: "Dirt. Fatigue. This room. Not anonymous, my room, a prison...it is my consciousness. Sick and exhausted, I choose it" (p. 72). In his attempt to furnish his mind, so to speak, he decorates the blank walls with Van Gogh prints, but his effort to recapture the mood of the artist fails completely. Similarly, we find him playing his favourite symphonies on his gramophone, but he falls asleep on more than one occasion before the record is half played. That Sorme's room should stand as a symbol of his imprisoned personality is interesting when we consider that he has another 'vastation' two days later, not in his own room this time, but while he is spending a morning alone in Austin Nunne's flat.

These remarkable basement rooms, with their black and velvet draperies, the wine-red carpet and divan, and the night-blue ceiling and black wa11s - all permeated by the smell of oriental perfume - afford Sorme an insight into Nunne's mind which reveals his friend as a romantic day-dreamer with a strong taste for the theatrical and the bizarre. This is further confirmed by the partly lyrical, partly obscene paintings on the walls, and the contents of the library, with its mixture of romantic poets and books on violence. Though Nunne is abroad at the time, on one of his leisure trips to the continent, the influence of his personality pervading the room becomes so strong that Sorme has a "curious sense of Nunne's presence, ..Once he looked up startled, expecting to see Nunne standing in the doorway, looking at him" (p. 107). This is his state of mind when he happens to find a book on criminology under the divan; picking it up, he suddenly finds himself looking at a photograph of a murdered woman: "He felt almost as though he had discovered a mutilated body in Nunne's cupboard" (p. 108). Sorme is physically sick, but after the actual nausea has subsided, he refuses to remain passive any longer, and instead of putting the book away, he forces himself to look through the entire volume, page after page, at photographs illustrating the most repulsive details of mutilated bodies, in an effort to probe into the cause of his disgust. Suddenly he is overwhelmed by a feeling of the absurdity of human life. The inescapable impact of death portrayed in the photographs throws into bold relief the discrepancy between the platonic idealism of his mind and the physical reality of death and decay. It is a realisation that all art and philosophy are basically absurd if they fail to take into account these cold, brutal aspects of existence. Sorme realises that only by seeking to base his philosophy on the most negative features of existence can he ever hope to grasp and control the full meaning and beauty of life. Hence, in the hero's mind, Nunne's sadism and the reality of murder take on a new, far-reaching importance.

***

   Before attempting to pursue the theme of violence any further, it might do well if we turn to those circum­stances in Nunne's social background which have turned him into the person he is. To begin with, there is that other aspect of Nunne's divided self - the Austin brought up by his mother and father, and the Austin whom his 'aunt' Gertrude knows, - his social facade, symbolically represented by his Albany Street flat.

It is worth noting that this luxury suite does not actually belong to Austin Nunne himself, but to his mother, who never uses it and leaves it entirely to her son's disposal. In all probability it is she who has furnished these rooms. The contrast with the basement flat is striking. Instead of the dark lamps emitting a "blue glow" and the ceiling painted with the darkness of night, we find that this suite is illuminated by "daylight lamps' and that the ceiling has the colour of the sky during the day. Moreover, there is no trace of any black walls or blood-coloured draperies; instead, the drawing-room is 'furnished completely with a contrast of light wood and a sky blue', with walls of pale amber (p. 131). The suite might well be said to symbolise a certain longing for purity; but that it becomes something else too - a social facade, an image of the materialistic ideals of the modern welfare state - is underlined by the description of the kitchen, which looks as if it had been installed as a showroom, or transferred immediately from the Ideal Homes Exhibition . With its 'rack of glass plates and dishes, the rows of saucepans', it gives the impression that it has never been used (pp. 165-6). In fact, it becomes the spotless emblem of goals which people may strive all their lives to reach, an accumulation of glittering symbols which cannot fill the emptiness of their yearning minds. This is the world that Austin Nunne has inherited from his parents, the sham satisfaction of material security which dulls the will to create. Here lies the irony of Nunne's situation. Seated beneath the immense reproduction of Michelangelo's God Creating Adam adorning the wall above the fireplace, Nunne talks to Sorme of his own worthlessness: "I was always a worthless bastard if ever there was one. Neurotic little bugger all the way through my childhood" (p. 133).

   Nunne, it appears, is a product of the dichotomy between the irreconcilable worlds of spirit and matter. On the materialistic side there is his father, the magnate, who wanted his son to go into business, and who bullied him when he refused. On the other hand there is the influence of his mother, the devoted Catholic, who adored her son and protected him to the point of nearly suffocating all sense of creative identity in him: "my mother sat on me like a hen hatching eggs" (p. 134). Bullied and battered by outward reality throughout his childhood and adolescence, he has never had the chance to develop an inner force strong enough to counteract the pressure. Like Sorme, he feels imprisoned within the impenetrable walls of existence.

But the yearning to break through the barriers - to expand the consciousness and experience a sense of unity and meaning in life - becomes an obsession with both men. After his 'vastation' in the basement room, Sorme realises that it is man's imprisonment within the'immediacy' of physical environment - the narrowness of his vision - which is the cause of his alienation from the sources of beauty and meaning:

Limitedness. I don't want limits. It is limits that are alien to me. The universe, space, time, being. Nothing must be limited. I am god. I am yesterday and today. I am the god Tem, maker of heaven, creator of things which are. If I am not, life is meaningless. (p. 109)

This is the desire that drives a man to creation - to become something more than he is. And, as we see, both Nunne and Sorme have strong elements of the creative artist in them. In his teens Nunne used to stare at pictures by Van Gogh or Munch and pray that he, too, might become a great artist. And, indeed, he has written three "very good" books (this is Gertrude's appraisal), and also become known and respected as a journalist. 

   But Nunne can find no satisfaction in his achieve­ments. Even when Sorme, in an effort to comfort him, tries to point out their positive value, Nunne snorts out his contempt: "By any standard of good writing my books are worthless, and I know it. So do you" (p. 133).No matter how much praise he might acquire for his works, the fact remains that in his mind they are no more than symbols of a social standing which teach him nothing more about the essential questions of his own life than any Rolls Royce or luxury suite might do. To his over­sensitive mind, they are no more than distractions which he takes up to forget, for a while, the emptiness of his soul.

Unable to live within himself, Nunne seeks distractions from outside: "I'd have been bored stiff on my own", he admits to Sorme after their first evening together (p. 30). Indeed, his perpetual need to escape from his own boredom is the underlying cause of all his activities. Nunne is continually meeting people, but the experience of their company never lasts beyond the present: for him they represent only a momentary escape from loneliness. He needs stimulating events around him all the time in order to find life worth living at all. But, like a person addicted to drugs, he continually needs greater doses of stimulants. He flies a private plane, likes driving fast cars, travels to Vienna, Milan or Berlin to listen to concerts which hardly seem to afford him any greater satisfaction than those he might as well attend in London. We find him always moving around, never able to spend more than an hour or two in the same room. Disgusted at his own material wealth, Nunne enters a Catholic monastery in Alsace to seek meaning in the realms of spirit, but is out again within a month - restless as ever. Each instance of defeat leads him farther afield in his frantic search for satisfaction; and because he has no belief in himself, he even tries to persuade Sorme to travel with him to another country and seek a new life far away from cities:

We could go to India ----

It was South America the other day!

No, India. Let's make it India. You know, Gerard,

I'd like to go into a Buddhist monastery for a while ----­You could work there!

I'd rather be in London.

But why? You admitted to me the other day that you're bored here.

I was. That's quite true.

Aren't you still?

Well, that's the odd thing, you see, Austin. Ever since I met you

I've been feeling better ---- I've been getting a sort of sense of purpose.

But you'll be bored again if I go to India!

You don't understand.

(p. 174)

   And Nunne, it seems, will never understand. He lives only in the present. Reality to him is like the foot­print on the sandy beach which time must inevitably wash away. People and events satisfy him only as long as he can 'see and touch' them. Once they are out of his reach in a physical sense, they also cease to exist as meaningful experiences. It seems to be beyond the scope of his imagination to realise that to a man like Sorme, an experience of another person may have the effect of casting light on recesses of his own being which till now have been hidden in darkness. For the sake of contrast, it might be said that Nunne's circle of acquaintances represent no more than glittering lights which dazzle, for a moment, the essential darkness of his soul, whereas Some's true experiences of other people tend to assume the quality of lasting beams of enlightenment.

Returning to his own room after his evening in the luxury flat listening to Nunne's lamentations, Sorme feels this contrast between Nunne and himself. Viewed against the basic absurdity of Nunne's sense of life-devaluation, Sorme's own illusion of self-contempt no longer seems to matter:

Talking to Nunne had given him an intuition of change. He thought, with sudden complete certainty: I have wasted five years. Stuck in rooms. The world was alive. I have done nothing.

Poor Austin. Sadistic and listless, sensual, caring only about people and places. I am freer than he is; yet for five years I have behaved like a prisoner. Why?

(p. 137)

Why indeed should Sorme, who has hardly enough money to keep him going from day to day, possess greater freedom than Nunne, who has the opportunity to go where he likes and do what he wants? Why should Sorme feel "a strange sense of advantage" over those people who never have to think about money? (p. 99) Considering what we observed earlier, that Sorme's and Nunne's rooms might be regarded as symbols of their respective personalities, we may attach a certain significance to the fact that in Nunne's basement flat the "space where the window had been was boarded over...it looked like a continuation of the wall" (p. 107). Nunne has the feeling of being imprisoned within his own restricted consciousness, and he finds that his only way of release - of gaining his natural freedom - is to break through the 'walls' and impose himself on his physical surroundings. His inborn need to create - to expand the limits of his consciousness - thus becomes a destructive force: It's an excitement. It's a kind of inverted creative impulse. I feel as if I'm serving something greater than myself. It's...like a need --- to build" (p. 371).

Sorme's one great benefit over Nunne is his ability to open up the 'windows' of his mind and hence expand the limits of his consciousness by absorbing into it his experience of the world around him:

He opened the kitchen window and leaned out. The night air smelt fresh. He felt buoyed up by an intuition of kindness and gratitude. It came again: the sense of life, of London's three millions, of smells in attics and markets. (p. 137) 

Inside this room, within the confines of that same city which for years has made him feel non-existent, Sorme achieves a new sense of belief in himself and of con­fidence in his own powers that was always latent in him, yet which only rarely became conscious (p. 99). Sorme climbs up the fire escape, past the old man's room, on to the roof, and from there he looks out across the lights of the city, gaining an insight into the true nature of freedom - a knowledge of certainty that all that is beauty and meaning in life is only to be found within the resources of one's own mind. The world outside - the physical world - remains basically unchanged, dead. What matters is the way one looks at the world - the intensity and direction of one's imagination. Sorme realises that Nunne's great illusion in life is that he regards himself only as a fraction of a greater whole, dependent on other men. But man is not a mere grain of sand in a sterile universe; nor is God a power above and beyond oneself. Everything in the whole universe that means anything to man exists only within the immense freedom of his own individual mind; hence man becomes one with God and one with his fellow men. The 'room' may expand into "a cathedral, bigger than any known cathedral", or the sense of limitedness will dissolve, revealing only "a constant intensity of imagination that would require no cathedral symbol to sustain and remind...Until the consciousness stretches to embrace all space and history" (p. 138).

Now, it might be argued that such a philosophy has only relevance to the 'chosen few', and that the great majority of ordinary men and women are compelled to live in suffering and boredom, And we observe that even Sorme, descending from the roof, is afraid of the "numbness in his fingers, aware now of the drop to the concrete flags below (p. 139). However, we should bear in mind that the author does not necessarily regard this state of 'nirvana' as something which should become permanent at any cost, but that it points out a direction towards which man should seek to channel his creative energies, instead of directing them, as most people apparently do, towards worldly goods or material power. The self-confidence Sorme achieves through his vision is an emotional state which lives on even after the vision itself has faded away, Cycling though the streets of London the next morning, Sorme has a feeling of benevolence towards the man in the street, an intuitive sense of identification with him. And, what is more, "he felt no irritation towards the traffic" (p. 139).

  It is this sense of oneness with other people that Nunne lacks, because he himself possesses no moral unity, no self-identity. Sorme's vision on the roof is a direct outcome of his acute sense of the contrast between himself and Nunne. But there still remains the question of how the most repulsive aspects of existence are to be incorporated in his philosophy. Sorme still cannot quite account for the fact that the negative sides of Nunne's character fascinate him most. His revelation of Nunne's true 'identity' comes through his dream in the brothel.

In his dream Sorme sees Austin Nunne standing on the roof of an empty house, shouting at the night sky, while the streets below are filled with crowds watching him and urging him to jump down. The crowds are to some extent identical with the crowds affronting Sorme in the opening chapter of the book; but here they are out of reach, and no longer exist as a physical 'barrier'.
Up here Nunne feels that he is his own master, and must resist the demands of the crowd. For the protesting figure on the roof to jump down into the street would be to commit suicide: "Insanity is when you stop resisting" (p. 414). This statement is perhaps better understood when we consider that the figure on the roof turns into the image of a dancer. In fact, Sorme sees Nunne's plight as identical with that of Nijinsky. We have already noted that Sorme sees in the divine quality of Nijinsky's dancing the creation of a bridge between physical existence and the ideal existence of the spirit. In The Outsider Colin Wilson wrote of Nijinsky's "rhythmic, violent Dionysian upsurge of the vital energies; while he could dance regularly, every day, and restore contact with the vital, instinctive parts of his own being, Nijinsky could not go insane. Sanity lay in creation" (Ou p. 100). Nijinsky becomes a living symbol of the self-divided man. In his everyday affairs he was an insignificant person, bullied by his surroundings, a victim of "endless difficulties and annoyances" (Ou p. 96) But through his creative dancing he held the power to release the latent forces of his imprisoned soul. Then, after the dancing was over, came the tragic return to earth - the pettiness and the "atmosphere of physical suffocation" (Ou p. 100). This, too, is the essence of Nunne's dilemma. In the image of the faun is visualised the notion of half god, half animal; the "faun's face" and Nunne's 'brown animal eyes" (p. 180) symbolise at one and the same time the split personality and the vital, instinctive parts of his being. Nunne can only find release for his "vital energies" through physical discipline, through complete control of the body. 

 But Nunne is no Vaslav Nijinsky. The fact that throughout his childhood he has never been offered the chance to train as a ballet dancer points out the bonds imposed on him by his environment. Given the chance, he might have become something more than he is. The material and spiritual 'security' of his childhood has deadened the creative challenge, eliminated his sense of 'identity', while the inborn need to assert an identity has persisted.

And then the leap, violent as the sun on ice, beyond the bed, floating without noise, on, through the open window. The excitement rose in him like a fire. The rose, bloodblack in the silver light, now reddening in the dawn that blows over Paddington's roof-tops. Ending. A rose thrown from an open window, curving high over London's waking roof-tops, then falling, its petals loosening, into the grey soiled waters of the Thames. (p. 180)

After the ecstatic leap, the intuition of oneness with life, there is the tragic return to earth. Denied self-identity, the soul (the rose) is divided into meaningless fragments. This is to say that denied the self-belief necessary to create, the need for freedom can only find release through destruction. To create is to violate the limits of one's consciousness; to destroy is to violate the limits of one's physical environment. Both kinds of action express man's natural yearning for freedom. This is the true revelation of Sorme's dream, that he cannot comprehend the nature of good if he chooses to ignore the nature of evil.

l). It is worth noting that Colin Wilson himself, when eighteen, developed the idea of choosing ballet dancing as a career, and even began practising pliés and basic ballet steps in his spare time. He regarded ballet exercises as a way of keeping the body fit. Campion mentions that Wilson wrote to Arnold Haskell and Sir Kenneth Clarke, two of the leading author­ities, asking for advice. "Both replied sympathetic­ally but discouragingly; eighteen was too old to begin training as a dancer" (Campion, pp. 36, 53, 69).

 Nunne becomes, then, a living image of the Nijinsky whom Some has pictured in his mind - the symbol of the life-force yearning for release, the frustrated man "walking around the streets at night like a high-pressure boiler, almost bursting" (p. 16). Nunne lacks the inspiration to create, although he possesses the sensitivity of the creative artist. The doctrines of the Church, imposed on him more or less against his will throughout his adolescence, seem to afford him no greater sense of purpose than the worldly security of his father's money or the social standing he has acquired for himself through his own books.

The religious doctrines which have 'suffocated' Nunne are represented, in this novel, through the figure of the Catholic priest, Father Carruthers. Man knows himself as body", says the priest, "and what he knows of spirit comes through grace. The poet would call it inspiration" (p. 227). What shatters Nunne is the belief, expounded here through Carruthers, that "Man has no control over his inspiration. If a piece of music or a poem has moved him once, he can never be certain that it will happen again". Therefore, declares the priest, all that man can do is to wait: "The business of religion is to teach men patience. As soon as man loses patience, he loses all he has" (p. 228).

It is evident that to an over-sensitive mind like Nunne's, filled with dissatisfaction and disgust, such a belief can only lead to frustration and despair. Outward reality imprisons his mind, as do the teachings of the Church. His dilemma bears a certain similarity to that of the Romantic poet, who may experience a beautiful scene, and yet know that he can never hope to grasp its true meaning for more than a passing moment. But in the case of Nunne the plight is much greater, for even the beauty of the moment fails to induce any meaning to him. He sees a beautiful scene, and in a way realises its beauty, and yet he cannot experience it. The intimations of a higher life which such a scene may evoke, set off against the dreary lifelessness of everyday existence, have the effect of arousing in him a creative urge - an urge to expand his consciousness - which can only find its outlet through violation of his dreary, 'lifeless' surroundings. The frustrated force of unfulfilled desire leads only to destruction, to violation of himself and his fellow human beings. In view of the moral idealism of the Church, it becomes a point of grotesque irony in this novel that Nunne begins his life as a murderer only a short while after he has been having a talk with the Catholic priest:

...the first time it ever happened in London. I'd been to see Father Carruthers and I came away feeling sick of everything. He obviously didn't know what I was talking about. And I walked along Charterhouse Street, and there was an extraordinary sunset over the rooftops. And suddenly I detested it all... (p. 375)

Gerard Sorme's response to the question of violence and murder undergoes a marked development in the course of the novel. His antipathy to death and decay in the first chapters originates from his sense of being "trapped in existence". His change is not merely a matter of substituting one moral view for another, but reflects an increasing capability in himself of comprehending the workings of his own mind. His realisation that the artist, the social rerormer and the criminal are driven by the same fundamental life-urge expresses a wakening awareness of his own true 'identity', of the knowledge that if life is to have any meaning at all, he must possess the inner freedom of self-expression.

The victims of the Whitechapel killer are all prostitutes, women who in Nunne's mind are spiritually dead, symbols of civilisation at its most decadent level, an insult to the dignity of man. And this is why the hero feels that, morally speaking, he has a certain right to condone the crimes. Through his acts of violence Nunne is seeking to express his 'identity' in the face of the world. Hence it follows that most people will be more capable of sympathising with him than with the prost­itutes, who possess little if any 'identity' at all. Such, at least, is Sorme's reasoning to Oliver Glasp: "After all, how can anyone really identify himself with an East End prostitute?" (p. 199)

However, in his eagerness to defend Nunne, the hero fails to take into account the self-destructive element inherent in the actions of the murderer. That the plight of the 'fallen woman' has another aspect - an element of innocence and feeling - which Nunne ignores and which Sorme does not fully realise at the time, will be revealed if we turn our attention to the child Christine, and Glasp.

***

   It is on the day after his experience in the basement flat, and hence on the day following his vision on the roof of his house, that the hero decides to call on Oliver Glasp. Whereas in the relationship between Nunne and Sorme it was Nunne who took the initiative, while Sorme was more or less passive, it is worth noting that Sorme is the one who plays the active part in his friendship with Glasp, while Glasp remains basically receptive. The primary reason for Sorme's wish to meet this painter is a feeling that Glasp might be able to provide him with some more information about Nunne. As we remember, it is in Nunne's basement flat that Sorme first sees some of Glasp's paintings. He experiences in these paintings a certain 'fanatic' quality, a need to experiment, which he feels bears a certain similarity to the fanaticism he has observed in Nunne.

What strikes him about Glasp when they first meet is the painter's fundamental loneliness: he shuts himself off from the world by working on his own in his studio, and makes no effort to conceal his hostility when Sorme, a stranger, one morning intrudes upon his privacy. Glasp is a victim to changing moods and emotional strain, manifested through the jerky, emphatic way he paints, and the twitching forehead. Moreover, the strong smell of paraffin on the stairs mentioned each time Sorme passes in and out of Glasp's studio serves perhaps to indicate the latent fire and fury of Glasp's temperament. Sorme observes Glasp as "a man without vitality or direction", his face "bloodless and alien" (p. 263), but after a drink or two in the pub he changes into a diff­erent person, capable of regarding his fellow human beings with a relaxed air of humorous benevolence - that is, until people start meddling with his affairs, when his emotions are apt to flare up with a vehemence equalling that of Nunne in the traffic-jammed streets: The world's full of people who ought to be behind bars - in a zoo! They're no better than animals" (p. 320). At one moment he has the sense that life is good, and feels pity for his fellow men; at the next he is depressed by a feeling that the world is basically evil. In contrast to Sorme, there is no unity in his vision of life.

   It soon becomes apparent to Sorme that Oliver Glasp, too, takes an interest in the topic of murder. His great-aunt was the last victim of Jack the Ripper (so he says), and it seems that his relatives have always somehow attracted criminals: "You notice that, as soon as I settle in Whitechapel, a crime wave begins? That's in the family tradition" (p. 152). Sorme, although somehow feeling that Glasp is inventing these family chronicles, nevertheless senses an underlying seriousness in what he is saying. What becomes apparent is that the cause of Glasp's interest in crime is fundamentally different to that of Nunne, or even Sorme. Whereas Nunne plays the active part of the violator, Glasp's role remains that of the violated. "Crime runs in our family", he says, but our connection with it was always indirect". The fact that Glasp regards himself as descending from a family of victims serves to emphasise his essentially tragic nature - that he is the victim of circumstances and events over which he has no control. It appears that Glasp too is striving to achieve a kind of freedom, though his means are wholly different from those of either Nunne or Sorme. While Nunne finds self-expression through acts of sadism, Glasp's tendencies are more masochistic in character - manifested through outbursts of self-pity and even acts of self-torture. This is illustrated in the suicide motifs recurring in several of the paintings, for instance in the picture of the self-crucified man suspended from an open window over a market-place. Remembering what we observed earlier as regards the symbolic function of rooms and buildings in this novel, the imagery here becomes apparent: freedom (the open window) and hence god-like status (the crucifix) through self-torment. The scene Glasp has depicted thus becomes a symbol of his own spiritual plight.

 Oliver Glasp suffers from a state of emotional torment that he is unable to define. His dilemma has a basic similarity to that of Nunne on seeing the "extraordinary sunset" which he knows that he can never fully grasp. But whereas Nunne refuses to remain a victim to his emotional torment, consequently transforming himself into the role of the violator, it becomes an expression of Glasp's defeatist attitude that he remains in the position of the violated. Glasp regards the human situation as basically tragic, but he feels that there is nothing much that man can do about it. True enough, Glasp, too, is active in a way, but the violence of his feelings expresses itself, as we have noted, essentially by way of self-torment - partly by inducing emotional crises into his life, like his quarrel with Christine's father - but also through a certain degree of physical pain, like wearing (as he once did) a shirt studded with tintacks "as a preparation for eternal torment" (p, 171). It is Nunne who first informs Some about this aspect of Glasp's character, and, as we would expect, Nunne the sadist has little respect for these masochistic leanings in Glasp. "We quarreled", says Nunne; "I couldn't stand his touchiness...he was trying to be an ascetic - sleeping on the bare wires of his bed and all that" (p. 138).

An expressive instance of Glasp's negative attitude to life is his and Sorme's reluctant encounter with Brother Robbins, the Jehovah's Witness, at Gertrude's house. Both Glasp and Sorme conceive an immediate dislike for this pot-bellied preacher with his winning smile and "elaborate courtesy", but especially Glasp, who limits his conversation mostly to scowling at the carpet or expressing a few contemptible grunts. On the other hand Sorme, good-tempered as he is, tries to show some interest in brother Robbins's dissertations on the end of the world; and, indeed, he seems to recognise an underlying 'truth' in what the preacher is saying, that one day the earth - this earth - will be "transfigured and made into a heaven" (p. 271). Glasp's and Sorme's differing attitudes to this belief mark clearly the contrast between Glasp's pessimistic outlook - his belief in 'eternal torment' - and Sorme's far more optimistic belief that if you want to change the world into a paradise, you've got to do it yourself (p. 272). We might call Sorme's attitude the more 'existential' of the two.

   In the eyes of Oliver Glasp the figure of the talented child Christine becomes a living symbol of that ideal state of beauty and innocence which he feels is beyond the full grasp of his experience. The fact that he chooses a child as an object for his affection, instead of a mature woman, stresses the intangibility of his desires: "I don't want to sleep with her. I don't even want to touch her. I'm not a bloody pervert. Don't you see? I just want her. I want her more than I've ever wanted anything ----" (p . 289). It is conceivable that sexual fulfilment might have assuaged his emotional torment, at least as regards the opposite sex, and that an acceptance of his physical desires might have led to a more general acceptance of life. But the purely spiritual idealism he sustains in his relationship to Christine only serves to increase the dichotomy between these undefinable emotions and the physical reality surrounding him. The fact that he somewhat resents physically mature girls, illustrated by his sullenness when he meets Caroline (p. 200), serves to reflect his incapability of accepting an 'existential' solution to his plight. Glasp is unwilling to conceive that true beauty and meaning cannot be attained by suppressing physical reality, but can only be grasped if one accepts physical reality as the starting-point. The sexual act might, in this context, be considered as a kind of 'existential' groundwork with the power to assuage undefinable emotions. This idea is not, however, to be regarded as an end in itself (such a notion would be easily susceptible to parody), but rather as a symbol, or one aspect, of an existential solution involving all life and creation. In this sense Christine's function in the novel might be regarded as basically symbolic; but then, such would also be the case with characters like Gertrude and Caroline. The sexual impulse originates in the same basic life-urge that inspires the artist to create or which, on the other hand, provokes a man to kill. The sexual experience itself is just "raw energy, heat and light. What makes it important are the ideals it illuminates" (p. 238). What this implies within the thematic context of the novel will be seen after we have turned our attention to Gertrude and Caroline. 

   As a personality, Gertrude Quincey obviously bears little resemblance to any other character in the book. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to suppose that her actions, and even her strict morality, somehow originate in a fundamental need for self-identity analogous to that of Nunne, Glasp and Sorme. As a girl, Gertrude used to read about the lives of the female saints, and her greatest wish in life was to become "a woman with some­thing to say'' (p. 78). However, Gertrude never managed to become the kind of woman she intended, and one fundamental reason for this is perhaps hinted through Nunne in the opening chapter, after he and Sorme have paid their brief late-night visit to Gertrude:

Sorme said: Was your aunt ever married?

She's not my aunt.

Was she ever married?

No. Gertrude is a most mysterious case. No one knows all the facts. She had a father.

A what?

A father. You know some people have got a mother who won't let them off the dog lead? Well, she had a father.

In saying this, Nunne undoubtedly has in mind his own mother, and his personal experiences of having been spiritually 'suffocated'. Hence it is possible to perceive a certain similarity between Nunne's situation and the fact that Gertrude evidently had to suffer under the moral domination of her father.   

   Since Gertrude does not possess the self-confidence necessary to turn her into something greater than she is, she needs to compensate her lack of eminence by concentrating her life and energies on those, kinds of people whom she feels are worse off than herself - both in a social and a religious sense. Because she lacks any true sense of identity, she has a need to distract her mind by assuring herself that unhappy people do exist, and hence she manages to maintain her own happiness. Furthermore, she imposes a sense of meaning on her life by feeling that she is taking an active part in helping these people. One instance of this is the fact that she once spent a fortnight living in an East End hostel, helping socially underprivileged women (p. 81). Another is the work she carries out as a Jehovah's Witness - her efforts to convert people into accepting the religious doctrines which she herself claims to believe. In her conversations with Sorme she manages to maintain an air of self-assurance as long as she is talking about other people and their problems (for instance, when she is discussing Nunne's difficulties, or Caroline's worldly-mindedness, or Glasp's silly attachment to Christine), but becomes easily embarrassed or bewildered if Sorme happens to touch upon aspects of her own life. We may go so far as to conclude that it is because Gertrude does not possess belief in herself (that is, in her own identity, in God, in ultimate knowledge) that she needs to base her judgments of other people on what the Bible says. Like Nunne, in a way, she becomes spiritually'lost' forasmuch as she looks for the meaning of life outside herself: she does not experience the Bible; she only learns its doctrines by heart. She differs from Nunne, among other points, in that she ensconces her uncertainty behind an impregnable barrier of moral codes and social 'correctness'.

   In this respect Gertrude stands as the reverse image of her seventeen-year-old niece Caroline, in whose mind apparently moral codes do not exist. One of the most amusing scenes in the book is surely that of Sorme's first encounter with Caroline, his confrontation with the two women together one evening in Gertrude's sitting-room. Like Glasp's unasked-for encounter with Brother Robbins, the humour emerges as a natural outcome of the confrontation between two contradicting modes of conduct, in this case represented through the two women. Caroline takes an immediate liking to Sorme, especially when she learns that he is a writer, and has no scruples about making him aware of the fact, or about telling him openly so afterwards: "Shall I tell you something? I decided to make a beeline for you the first time I met you at Aunt Gertrude's. I shouldn't really tell you that, should I? (pp. 203-4) This first evening of their acquaintance, then, Caroline reveals an unrestrained delight in talking to Sorme about subjects that nearly shock the moral wits out of Miss Quincey, who in the end feels "as if the conversation had become too risqué for her to take any further responsibility (p. 88). The scene marks off very well the individuality of the two women. But what is important in the thematic context is not their traits of character as such, but rather the influence which the contrast of their moral views has on the spiritual 'education' of the hero.

   Although Sorme is charmed by Caroline, and feels a certain "amused tenderness for her, it is Gertrude who arouses in him the greatest physical desire. His wish to penetrate her "icy virginity" originates in his creative urge to "break down the barriers between human beings (p. 276), and Sorme regards all kinds of barriers between people as imposed from without, and hence alien to their true identity. His desire to experience the true identity behind Gertrude Quincey's mask represents no less than a yearning to penetrate the "blank wall" of his own existence and achieve an intenser state of self-awareness: "it's not just Gertrude --- it's me. I want to know where I differ from her" (p. 169). Hence the experience of true love becomes something more than the physical act of lovemaking itself, and even something more than the mere infatuation between a man and a woman. It develops into an expression of a person's inner freedom when he experiences his own true identity in another person. In this way, love between one person and another can only exist as long as both possess the capacity for freedom.

   The hero, after his night with Gertrude, is uncertain of the nature of his feelings for her. As yet he has not gained the true capacity of self-identity: "Am I in lovewith her? Is it possible after one night?...That's the trouble with being self-divided. You can never tell. I feel as if I'm in love with her now. What about tomorrow?" (p. 341) Moreover, Gertrude's ability to experience love (in the true sense) depends, too, upon her ability to cast off the chains of her own delusions - not only when she is alone with her lover, but in the face of the world. But Gertrude is too deeply rooted in her own self-doubt. Sorme becomes fully aware of this when she reveals her inability to understand him when he triesto explain to her the true motive underlying Nunne's crimes, the fact that the sadistic killer possesses a fundamental urge to express his own identity, an overpowering appetite to regain his freedom' (p. 352). From what we have observed earlier, we may be able to conclude that a person who is incapable of comprehending the state of mind of a murderer, can neither possess the freedom of mind to experience true love and beauty. Gertrude is still a mask. Towards Sorme she simply exchanges her Jehovah's Witness mask for that of the mistress or fiancée. Inside herself, she is still a void, lacking self-awareness, incapable of understanding either Nunne, Glasp or Sorme in the capacity of their true identity:

He looked at her with pity; she was listening, but with­out comprehension. When he stopped talking, she only stared past his head at the wallpaper. The insight overwhelmed him: she can never understand. She knows only categories and chapters from the Book of Kings. She can never know real good or evil; the knowledge would wreck her.

It was the answer to his interest in her; the insight brought disappointment and tenderness. A woman's world, a world of people. Without Kali, the insane mother, infinity of destructiveness and creativeness.

At the top of the stairs he turned and kissed her; there was no response in her mouth. He went on down the stairs, thinking: I wonder if a woman exists who doesn't have her roots in limits and self-doubt? Probably not. But the search is not finished yet. (p. 353)

After their visit to Leatherhead, when it is revealed that Nunne really is the Whitechapel killer, and Sorme is in a state of creative fervour, working away on his typewriter, Gertrude unexpectedly calls in upon Sorme
in his room (obviously to make sure that Caroline is not with him), and immediately sets about dusting the bookshelves and grimacing at the stains on the table­cloth beneath his typewriter. It is not difficult to imagine the misgivings which Sorme, with his will to limitless freedom, must then harbour at the notion of being married to a woman like Gertrude, with her "categories and chapters" and her countless little limits.

   Similarly, it is the hero's refusal to be standard­ised or classified within the social concepts of 'personality' which is the main cause of his misgivings about Caroline. He is charmed by the girl's spontaneity and attracted by the atmosphere of unrestraint he feels in her presence, but he realises that ultimately her kind of freedom is only an illusion, a habit of living in the present. In the long run it can only lead to increasing constraint. After only a few days' acquaintance with Sorme, Caroline has already made up her mind about his 'personality', and wrapped it neatly up, so to speak, within the confines of a labeled 'box':

She rubbed her head against his shoulder.

I wouldn't mind being married to you.

What! On less that a week's acquaintance?

As he turned to face her, she put both her arms round his neck; she said softly, defensively:

I don't need to know you for a long time. I know what you're like already.

Do you? What am I like?

Well, you're good tempered --- and one day you'll make a huge success.

(p. 203)

   Sorme senses that a life based on living up to such ideals, shallow as they are, would imply nothing less than mental suicide, and hence he thinks to himself: "But I don't want to be a husband. Nice little hubby, good dog" (p. 242). These sentiments certainly bear much similarity to Nunne's remarks on the kinds of mothers and fathers who won't let their children "off the dog lead" before it is too late, before the identity gets lost for ever. In Sorme's mind (and, as we have seen, in Nunne's) the glories of social success, which Caroline is trying to achieve through her drama school training; are transient and hence false. The fact that she is a drama student serves to point out, symbolically, that her adult life will be a series of roles which she must play in order to get on in society. At seventeen, she still possesses the natural spontaneity of her childhood, but this mingles badly, in Sorme's ear, with the "controlled, sophisticated drawl" which she imposes on her speech when her social consciousness gets the upper hand,. He surmises that "in two years' time she would speak with a drawl all the time, and call everybody darling; in the meantime, her manner was a hybrid of schoolgirl and theatre"( p. 85).

   A person who achieves success will, when the first exhilarating surge of achievement has subsided, be left groping in a void if his ambitions do not involve a purpose beyond the mere social feat. And the experience of sex will, once the exhilaration of having broken down a physical barrier has subsided, become a mere animal ritual - an escape from boredom - if it does not transcend into a greater purpose. It is this ultimate purpose which Caroline does not possess, neither socially nor sexually. Sorme conceives a more fundamental interest for Gertrude as a sexual partner than for Caroline, because Gertrude, with her air of feminine mystique, challenges his imagination to a greater degree, and hence arouses those vital forces of his being which expand his sense of freedom, his will to see into himself. Caroline, on the other hand,, is nothing more than her social self, and anything that passes through her mind comes out again through her mouth. Now Sorme feels that there is nothing wrong with her frankness as such; on the contrary, this is what in his mind const­itutes her attractiveness. Wnat is wrong is that her frankness does not originate from her own true identity, but from the patterns she sees on the physical crust of things: "The unseen, the imaginative adventure, was just what she did not represent...it was an idealism she offended...Her animal vitality conducted the tension away, like an earthing wire" (p. 140). Caroline's narrow world has no room for the imagination or for the experience of God. 

   It is this 'ultimate freedom' that Glasp experiences in the child Christine, but at the same time he chooses to subdue physical reality (in contrast to Nunne or Caroline), and thus his sense of freedom is associated with something indefinable, a state of perpetual emoional torment. Certainly Glasp is aware that his affection for Christine is something that points beyond the girl herself; in this sense he possesses greater creative awareness than Nunne. But Glasp's limitedness lies in the fact that he associates this 'beyondness' with other people.

Christine's good for me because she makes me think about other people. Not just about her. She makes me realise that hundreds - thousands - are living in complete misery ... They don't feel like giants or gods, and they don't feel like insects either. They're just ordinary men and women, and most of their lives is suffering or boredom. (p. 327)

In his best moments his emotions become one with his fellow men in their misery, but in their misery only. Hence, through his paintings, Glasp is capable of expressing himself fully only by portraying human suffering.

Nunne, on the other hand, has no sense of identity with his fellow men. Too much security has dulled his imagination, his ability to see beyond the 'here and now', to penetrate the physical crust of things amd see into the mind of others as a revelation of himself. When Nunne experienced the 'extraordinary sunset' it was not the physical elements of the scene that aroused his sense of beauty, but something inside himself. His tragedy is an outcome of his blindness to this 'inner' truth: he travels round the world, seeking for something, but returns empty-handed.

   To the man who lacks imagination, life becomes boring, and the easiest way of stimulating the imag­ination, it seems, is through sex, which has the power to stimulate not only emotionally but also physically. Such stimulation is, however, largely dependent on the violating of taboos, on the sense of penetrating an 'alien' being, on merging oneself into the profoundest mysteries of life. Hence follows that once the sexual act stagnates into a ritual - a mere barren everyday affair - the intensity disappears, and the act becomes a distraction born of boredom. Thus we might perhaps begin to understand why Sorme felt impotent that night with the bored girl from the cafe. Her whole attitude to sex was a negation of the creative impulse. Beyond her bare physical needs, she possessed no identity, only a meaningless void.

2). It is, of course, beyond the scope of this study to discuss fully Colin Wilson's philosophy of sex, expounded in his book Origins of the Sexual impulse. As I have tried to show, however, his ideas on sex form an integrated part of his whole philosophy of the creative impulse. Wilson states that the main topic of his book is existential psychology, and that sex is only "the avenue through which it happens to have been approached". One of the main points of the book is to show that "man can respond sexually to almost anything". What man subconsciously is seeking to acquire through sex is greater intensity of imag­ination, an awakening of the creative faculties. The sexual impulse is not the basic human drive, as Freud maintains."It may be stronger, but that is an entirely different thing'. 

***

On the day of Nunne's 'arrest' Sorme is taken, by Dr. Stein, to the morgue at the London Hospital, where he is shown the body of a prostitute, the latest victim of the Whitechapel killer. The sight of the corpse leaves him wholly unmoved. He sees in it "no resemblance to living humanity, although the human shape was plain enough". His mind mechanically associates this dead body with the alien, meaningless kind of existence which has been the cause of his own spiritual decay. However, the sight of the second corpse, the young mother of three children who has been killed by her husband, arouses his imagination to life, and by imag­ination is implied his creative faculties. In a way he manages to identify himself with this woman; there is a "recognition of humanity":

The fascination was one of pity and kinship. It might have been Gertrude Quincey or Caroline. The flesh had once been caressed; the body had carried children. He felt the stirring of a consuming curiosity about her. Why was she dead? Who was she? There was an absurdity in her death. How could twenty-five years as a human being lead inevitably to a mortuary slab, the breasts and smooth belly carbonised out of relevance to life? The belly and thighs were well shaped. If she had been alive, sleeping, he would have felt the movement of desire: its failure symbolised the absurdity of her death. (p. 398)

   Sorme's differing response to the two bodies reflects the contrast between Nunne's and Glasp's attitude to life. One sees only the body - the physical crust, whereas the other experiences only the emotions - the spirit. Nunne regards his victims as dead matter, beings who have no right to live. Glasp, however, sees in the figure of the child Christine a state of pure innocence and beauty, bearing no relevance to the physical world. What is significant in this connection is that Sorme, during his visit to the morgue, senses no relationship between the two dead bodies. The fate of the prostitute seems to have no affinity to that of the young mother. The incident which finally makes Sorme realise that the two 'modes of being' cannot be divided is his encounter, shortly afterwards, with the child Christine.

  Sorme has been told through Glasp that Christine's one great ambition in life is to become an art student. She has both the will and the ability to do well as an artist, but her parents violently resist the idea. The one thought they have in mind is to make her work and earn money. "Her family have lived in slums for generations", says Glasp. 'They don't want to do anything better (p. 286). The very fact that Christine is "brilliant enough to get a scholarship" implies that she is capable of bettering her life. Her surroundings, in their ignorance, might be said to represent the conservative unwillingness in the majority of people to change the order of things. Rather than embark on a new and enlightening course which might improve the happiness and purpose of their lives considerably, they prefer to keep firmly to their everyday ritual of living. The fact that Christine's father is a drunken prison warder intimates, symbolically, the tragic results that might ensue from too much suppression of a person's need for creative self-expression. Christine's natural will to freedom is imprisoned and guarded closely by her narrow-minded parents and her social environment. She, too, is tied to the 'dog lead'. 

  It is somewhat ironical that the child's mother, in her ignorance, becomes the indirect cause of that very condition which she is warning her daughter against, for with her threatening attitude she unintentionally forces the child to seek refuge with Glasp when, one day, she falls into a pond while playing in a park; while her clothes are drying in front of Glasp's fire, she poses for him in the nude. Even more grotesquely ironical is the mother's assertion that 'art students are no better than prostitutes' (p. 286), for it is her refusal to let Christine become an art student - that is, to seek a better life - that inevitably leads the child on to a path that might ultimately end up in prostitution. The general passive acceptance of triviality is, in this context, the cause of the sense of boredom and futility that forces people to seek for satisfaction through distractions of an extreme kind. One such distraction is violence; another is sex. Both are manifestations of man's inborn need for the freedom of self-expression. This is the plight of the nymphomaniac, the girl from the cafe: 'She had sex for the same reason that she chain-smoked. Boredom". And this, too, is Nunne's dilemma: "I'd have been bored stiff on my own". Viewed against this background, Some must inevitably sense forebodings of tragedy when the child says to him: "I don't mind getting into trouble --- But I hate being bored" (p. 104).

 Sorme's encounter with Christine makes him see with sudden clarity that the 'spiritual deadness' of the East End prostitute does not preclude, even from such a person, the potentiality of the divine being. Even the 'fallen woman' possesses, latent within her, the origins of beauty and innocence that are the source of meaning. It is the ignorance and the triviality of her environ­ment that have ruined her. It is not Christine's fault that she is raped by her cousin. It is not her fault that her parents refuse to let her study art. Hence it is not basically the child's fault if she drifts into a state of indifference that leads her into prostitution. These are the aspects of the 'fallen woman' that the killer Austin Nunne does not see:

Pooh, a few prostitutes. Women who'd sold their lives, anyway. Do you know what that woman last night said to me? 'I suppose you might be Leather Apron'. She knew I might be...She just didn't care...These women aren't too poor to give it up. They could live better as shop assistants or hosiery workers. They just don't care. (pp. 370-1)

   Christine might, on these grounds, be regarded as a synthesis between the dichotomised worlds of spirit and matter, the one represented through Glasp and the other through Nunne. Sorme, representing the world of intellect - of abstract thought - stands in a way apart from these, but is merged together with them when, immediately after he has seen the two corpses at the morgue, he experiences the true nature of the child Christine. The three men are meant to complement one another, and Christine becomes a symbol of their unification. In an early notebook on Ritual in the Dark Wilson states: "Nunne, Sorme and Glasp are the body, the heart and the intellect of the same man, like Blake's Tharmas, Urizen and Luvah. Their separation is a kind of legend of a fall" (Campion, p. 160). A similar division of man is repeated in the novel which will be the subject of the next chapter, The World of Violence, but here the emphasis lies more on the conflict between reason and intuition, between the destructive insight into chaos and absurdity, and the creative vision of unity and meaning.

End of Chapter 1. 

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