Colin Wilson

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 10:05

For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1978 and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Colin Wilson0:17

Uh

Presenter0:30

This week, our castaway is the writer, Colin Wilson. Colin, I know you're interested in music. You have a big collection of records, haven't you? Yes, I've about fifteen thousand. I suppose. Fifteen thousand?

Speaker 20:39

So

Presenter0:41

I started to buy them when uh the Outsider came out as soon as I could afford to buy records and they've just gone on accumulating. Fifteen thousand. Now if you wanted to sit down and play all those it would take you quite a long time.

Speaker 20:47

Fifty thousand

Presenter0:53

Hmm, yes, I worked out about three years, playing ten hours a day. Well, we're just going to spend about thirty-five minutes now. Your first record for a Desert Island, what's it going to be?

Presenter1:02

Since one of my main interests is opera, I've a large opera collection, I'd like a bit of Wagner to start off with, another lifelong obsession, a bit of um Rheingold, the storm music.

Presenter2:14

An excerpt from the recording of Wagner's Das Rheingold, directed by George Schelty, and we heard the voice of Eberhard Wechter.

Presenter2:22

What part of the country are you from, Colin? I'm from the Midlands, from Leicester. Now, your father worked in a factory there, a shoe factor. Yes, he was in the boot and shoe trade all his life.

Speaker 12:29

Yes, he was in

Presenter2:32

Now, you became, as a child, a voracious reader. What inspired that?

Presenter2:38

Uh I'm not sure. I've always been a kind of romantic, I suppose. What sort of things did you read, first of all?

Speaker 22:41

What sort of

Presenter2:44

Uh escapist fiction, things like King Solomon's Minds.

Presenter2:51

And then at the age of ten I became fascinated by science fiction. This got me interested in science, and from then on the only thing I wanted to do was to become a scientist. I wanted to work on the atomic bomb, but I never got a chance. They invented it just as I reached the right age. You started to write very early, too.

Presenter3:08

Yes, I think I wrote my first story at the age of eight, but uh

Presenter3:13

I started to um write my first book at the age of thirteen. It was an enormous compilation that was an attempt to summarize all of the scientific knowledge in the world.

Presenter3:22

Well very modest enterprise.

Presenter3:25

So that was already your ambition. That's what your career was going to be, writing? No, I wanted to be a scientist.

Presenter3:31

And uh I continued to want to be a scientist until I was uh sixteen when I left school. No one suggested you should stay on at school and go further.

Presenter3:40

Well, you know, it's a funny thing. It it isn't the kind of thing that uh gets suggested somehow, or at least it wasn't then. Somehow it was taken for granted that I left school at sixteen and started to work, and besides, my father kept saying that he didn't want me lazing around the place any more. What was your very first job?

Presenter3:56

When I left school I worked in a warehouse, a wool warehouse, for a couple of months. I must say I hated it. I've always hated work.

Presenter4:03

And after that?

Presenter4:05

Then I went back to school as a lab assistant.

Presenter4:08

and uh soon found that I'd lost interest in science in the two months that I'd been away from school when I spent all the time in my bedroom reading romantic poetry in an attempt to reconcile myself to work.

Presenter4:20

What was the next step? Well, they threw me out of um the lab assistant's job when they found that I wasn't really interested. And so uh

Presenter4:27

I then began to do any kind of job. I worked in the civil service in various offices.

Presenter4:33

Um I finally became an established civil servant in taxes. Oh, collecting taxes? Yes, I was in the collector of taxes in that. Well, I spent most of it reading.

Colin Wilson4:40

Data

Speaker 14:41

Uh

Colin Wilson4:42

Yeah.

Presenter4:44

I I had a very tolerant boss who was really delightful and who didn't in the least mind walking through the office and seeing that I was reading Shaw or

Presenter4:52

Wherever.

Presenter4:53

Let's break here for your second record. What's that to be?

Presenter4:56

Um, I'd like to hear an old favourite, Yves Monton, singing a song called E la Fette Continue, because it's one of the gayest and jolliest songs that I know.

Colin Wilson5:05

Hey, woo vero.

Colin Wilson5:09

Idis paired in the celebrities, sent réglais les consolmations.

Colin Wilson5:16

Paris dans left continuance a chance.

Colin Wilson5:28

Ah

Presenter5:36

Yves Montan et la Fette continue.

Presenter5:39

So you were collecting taxes.

Presenter5:42

And still, of course, reading and writing.

Presenter5:45

Were you submitting anything you wrote by now?

Presenter5:48

Yes, I'd sent off a few things, but I always found that I got so completely miserable when they were promptly rejected that I finally stopped sending things off. I've an absolute hatred of being rejected.

Presenter5:59

Those were the days of national service. You were called up into the RAF. What did you do there?

Presenter6:05

Well, I was a clerk.

Presenter6:06

And uh

Presenter6:07

I only spent six months in the RAF, then I managed to get myself thrown out by claiming that I was homosexual.

Presenter6:13

And that's a shrewd book.

Presenter6:15

It was almost accidental. I was so sick of it I hated it.

Presenter6:19

And uh they threw me out.

Presenter6:21

and I decided that I would never again be tied down that if I had to become a tramp and wander around the lanes, I'd rather do that than settle back in an office again. You did go tramping for a bit in France, didn't you? Yes, I tramped round England, too.

Presenter6:34

But uh

Presenter6:35

I'm a sort of typical home lover, you know, I'm a cancer.

Presenter6:38

And I didn't really find that I enjoyed wandering around with a knapsack and nowhere to sleep.

Presenter6:43

What were you planning to do had you started thinking about your your first book, The Outsider?

Speaker 16:48

The other

Presenter6:49

I'd always intended to be a writer, and I'd decided to write a novel at that time, a novel that later became Ritual in the Dark, which at that stage was about a man who thinks, but is not certain, that he's committed a murder in a sort of state of semi amnesia.

Presenter7:05

This eventually um turned into Ritual in the Dark.

Presenter7:08

But uh only after another ten years.

Presenter7:13

No. In fact, not only did I not finish it, I somehow couldn't get into it. I wanted it to be an enormous novel full of all kinds of interesting cross-references, full of all kinds of ideas. And finally, there were so many cross-references and ideas that the thing was completely overwhelmed. It was like an overweighted boat. And then came the outside. Well, no, what happened was that I finally decided that the sensible thing to do was to take all the cross-references and ideas and the sort of um joycean erudition and so on out of it.

Presenter7:44

Stick that in a separate book.

Presenter7:46

and confine myself in the novel simply to a straightforward story.

Presenter7:50

and the separate book became The Outsider.

Presenter7:52

Which is an extraordinary book to have been written by a young man, what, were you, twenty-three? I was twenty-two when I started it. Yes.

Speaker 17:57

I was twenty-two.

Presenter7:59

Especially a a self-educated young man of of of twenty-two.

Presenter8:04

In order to get it done, you went on really short commons. You were living you were camping out for a while, weren't you? Well, what happened was that I decided at a certain period that the sensible thing would be not to pay rent all the time, because obviously this was taking far too much money.

Presenter8:19

I thought that if I had a tent this would save rent, so I bought a tent and tried putting this up on Hampstead Heath, but that attracted too much attention, so I ended by simply having a waterproof sleeping bag and sleeping out on the heath, and then going down the hill to the British Museum in the morning every morning and writing the outsider there.

Presenter8:36

How long did it take?

Presenter8:38

Not very long. Uh I started sketching the thing out in the Christmas of nineteen fifty four. A lot of it had been written uh by early nineteen fifty five, at which point I sent a big chunk of it off to Victor Golancks because I thought he'd be sympathetic. In fact, he did accept it, but at this point my mother became very ill, had peritonitis, and so I broke off the book and kept rushing up and down to Leicester to see her.

Presenter9:03

I didn't finish it, therefore, until uh late August or early September. But Golanx had already told me by that time that he would accept it when it was finished. It was accepted then by the first publisher you sent it to? Yes, accepted on the strength of the first half dozen pages, virtually.

Presenter9:18

What's your third record?

Presenter9:20

Yeah.

Presenter9:21

One that reminds me very much of this period.

Presenter9:24

Freder stare seeing something's gotta give. On the day when I got the letter from Golanx saying that um he would have published The Outsider,

Presenter9:31

I went out to the cinema in the haymarket with my girlfriend Joy.

Presenter9:36

We went to see the film Daddy Longlegs with Fred Astaire and Leslie Carron, and I remember the tremendous feeling of gaiety that suddenly came over me as I listened to this Something's Gott Give with these blaring trumpets in the middle of it. It brings it back very strongly.

Speaker 29:56

When an irresistible force such as you

Speaker 210:03

Meets an old immovable object like me.

Speaker 210:10

You can bet as sure as you live.

Speaker 210:16

Something's gotta give, something's gotta give, something's gotta give.

Presenter10:20

Freddister, something's gotta give. So now at twenty-four you were a celebrity. The Outsider is a serious book.

Speaker 210:23

So now

Presenter10:29

A difficult book, a rather gloomy book. Would I be writing in

Presenter10:34

thinking that it was talked about rather more than it was read.

Presenter10:37

Very probably. You see, what happened was that

Presenter10:40

On the day that The Outsider was reviewed, John Osborne's look back in anger was also reviewed. Uh the two of us, as it were,

Presenter10:47

achieve this notoriety together. We were instantly linked together as angry young men, and suddenly the press had a sort of literary new generation to write about, and it was the silly season of the year.

Presenter10:59

This was early June, and the consequence was that quite suddenly we were in the news all the time for thoroughly silly and trivial reasons. They'd ring me up and say What do you think about the seams in ladies' stockings?

Presenter11:12

What did you follow it with?

Presenter11:13

Had you got one already on your mind to follow it with? Well, yes. I'd originally intended the Outsider to go on to various mystics.

Presenter11:22

And uh religious figures.

Presenter11:25

And there simply wasn't room, so they're all squashed into the last chapter of The Outsider, and so I allowed myself to expand into the second book, a thing called Religion and the Rebel, which came out eighteen months later. But of course, interestingly enough, by this time there had been a complete backswing. In fact, this had begun to occur about three weeks after The Outsider came out. People were saying, Oh, this is just a mishmash of quotations. And so uh

Presenter11:48

The consequence was the second book was slaughtered it was panned.

Presenter11:53

Philip Toynbee, who had hailed The Outsider, said that the second book was a rubbish bin.

Presenter11:57

And uh of course it stopped selling.

Presenter12:02

Well, in a funny sort of sense it was an effect of relief. You see, I'd always believed that I had genius. I'd always believed this ever since the age of about ten. But suddenly having people saying yes, yes, um you know, you are a man of genius worried me. I thought I must have been wrong.

Presenter12:18

And uh and now suddenly I was in a situation I once again recognized. I was back on my own.

Presenter12:24

uh back in this situation of working away alone.

Presenter12:28

By this time I'd moved to Cornwall, because old Golanx said for God's sake, get out of London, or you'll never write another book.

Presenter12:34

And so suddenly there was this strange feeling of quiet and solitude.

Presenter12:39

Luckily Joy was an ideal sort of person to be with anyway.

Presenter12:43

you know, the sort of s solid, steady background and uh

Presenter12:48

I found that I enjoyed living in the country and simply working away.

Presenter12:52

Record number

Presenter12:53

Fall we've got to.

Presenter12:55

Hm. Well, at this this was the time when I started buying records in quantité.

Presenter12:59

And uh the Beethoven quartets were very much her favourite. Beethoven always impressed me because he was one of those people who continued to develop, didn't stop, and this struck me as the enormous challenge.

Presenter13:10

I like the escherzo of his last quartet, opus one, three, five, simply because he makes the violinists work so hard.

Presenter14:16

part of the second movement of the Beethoven Quartet opus one thirty five

Presenter14:20

BY THE AmADES QUARTET. Are you a compulsive writer?

Presenter14:26

I suppose, yes.

Presenter14:28

At least I'm a compulsive worker.

Presenter14:30

This is not sort of necessarily a good thing. I find that at times it uh

Presenter14:35

brings a tremendous strain. In fact, I almost had a nervous breakdown in 1973 just because whenever I'm faced with some challenge I tend to grip my teeth a bit too hard.

Presenter14:44

And sort of

Presenter14:45

grind into it and the consequences that I can run down. In other words, I've never really learned to relax as I should. I'm having to learn this sort of rather slowly and painfully.

Presenter14:54

Are you are you disciplined? Do you work regular hours? Get up at the same time every morning? More or less. I uh seldom go down to my workroom until about eleven in the morning, but then I tend to work straight through the day.

Presenter15:06

until five o'clock, go and have a hot bath, and uh then pour myself a glass of wine and watch the T V News. Now you've written about thirty non fiction books now, a dozen or so novels, a few plays.

Presenter15:19

Are your novels?

Presenter15:20

Ostensibly spy stories, detective stories, science fiction. They're not quite what they seem. What I always wanted to do was to use the novel as a form of propaganda, if you like, so that I always tended to write a novel in tandem with a non-fiction book, as I'd started doing accidentally with Ritual in the Dark and the Outsider, one of which explicates the other. And I've continued to do this.

Presenter15:43

So that book after book has been linked with another novel with a non-fiction book.

Presenter15:48

Record number five.

Presenter15:50

Well, I'd like um the opening movement of Eric Coates's London suite, the Covent Garden bit, partly because it reminds me of old Golancks and his office in Covent Garden partly because I love in music this kind of fizzy vitality that Coates gets into the music here.

Presenter17:02

Cotton Garden from Ettick Coates's London Suite.

Presenter17:06

A few years ago, Colin, you wrote a long book, The Occult, really a history of occultism, and you've just followed that up with well, a sequel, really, Mysteries, which is

Presenter17:17

Even longer. Have you had any supernatural experiences or so? No, not at all. Um, except for telepathy and one or two other things like this that I describe in the occult, you know, actually with my wife or children. Um nothing. I'm I'm what you might call ESP thick.

Presenter17:35

What's on the stocks next?

Presenter17:37

What are you going to write? Or what are you writing? I've written a book on Wilhelm Reich, which is the next major thing. And then I'm I've been working to write.

Speaker 217:43

Yeah.

Presenter17:46

Yes, Wright was the a psychologist who believed that sexual frustration is the basis of all neurosis, which I think is absolute nonsense. But at the same time he was such a curious and fascinating character.

Presenter17:56

and came to such a tremendously sad end.

Presenter17:59

that I've been studying him for years with deep interest, and I've now finally finished a book about him. But the book that I've um really been preoccupied with for a long time now, for more than twenty years, is an enormous novel called Lulu.

Presenter18:11

The original idea

Presenter18:13

Was that uh Lulu, who was a character in two plays by Frank Vadikind.

Presenter18:18

is a woman who is completely irresistible to men, and who destroys every man she comes into contact with, and yet does it with total innocence, and has no intention whatever of destroying them. It's as it were this archetypal feminine principle that draws men like moths into a candle flame.

Presenter18:33

Uh finally, two or three years ago the BBC asked me if I had an idea for a good novel, a big novel, that could be serialised as a television serial, and I proposed Lulu. So they've now actually commissioned it, and after twenty years I'm going to be forced to go ahead and write it. I've got one enormous problem which is really holding me up, and that is the fact that all my novels so far have covered a very short time period, sometimes a mere twenty-four hours, and I've followed them with a camera, so to speak, inch by inch. Now I've got a whole year to do, and I've spent the first two hundred pages of this novel describing something less than its first twenty-four hours. So you see, at this rate, the thing will be thousands of pages long. You have problems. It is a technical problem, indeed, yes.

Presenter19:11

Record number six.

Presenter19:14

I'd love to hear Bix Beiderbeck's Jasmine Blues, because Bix Beiderbeck is one of the few jazzmen that I've always loved very much, and again this enormous nostalgia of the early period in London, Soho, that um Bix reminds me of.

Presenter20:27

Jasmine Blues by Big Spiderbeck and his gang, recorded in nineteen twenty seven.

Presenter20:32

In your youth, Colin, you had a this long spell of camping out on Hampstead Heath.

Presenter20:37

How do you feel about doing it again under rather tougher conditions under tropic skies? Could you look after yourself? Probably, yes. Could you face solitude?

Presenter20:47

Uh this is the basic idea of the outsider. I think I could. I once wrote a novel called The Black Room, which was about this question. How could we strengthen the mind to

Presenter20:56

spend all our time in total solitude if necessary.

Presenter21:00

You live on on the Cornish coast, so you should know a little bit about fishing. I'm not very good at it.

Presenter21:06

I hate the sea.

Presenter21:07

No good with small craft? Um well, we gave away our boat a few weeks ago because I hadn't used it for years. Would you try to escape?

Presenter21:15

Uh yes, very probably. I have this persistent tendency to look for solutions to problems.

Presenter21:21

We got to your seventh record.

Presenter21:24

A piece from Kurtweil's Rise and Fall of the City of Maha Gone.

Presenter21:28

the piece um Racheln's Hay, which I love because it has this sort of superb marching music feeling about it. He sh it is funny that um Weil and Brecht should have been Communists, they should have been Nazi marching music.

Colin Wilson21:43

Rush Yungate, Rush Yungate.

Colin Wilson21:48

It had been some form of

Colin Wilson22:03

In King Swansic Bunden Come, they share them all

Colin Wilson22:15

You'll get some buttons.

Colin Wilson22:21

Your beds is not Russia.

Colin Wilson22:25

Complex a fashion and everybody moves.

Presenter22:37

An item from Courtweil's Mahogany.

Presenter22:41

And now your last record.

Presenter22:43

What I'd love to end with is the last chunk of the opera by Gilbert Beco, who, as you know, is basically a French pop singer, called the Aran Opera, and which I've always loved and always thought

Presenter22:55

has been unfairly dismissed. It was a flop, in fact, when it was presented. I think that this end bit, where the boat sails out to sea, bearing the girl Maureen, and the awful Italian Angelo, and the boyfriend yolls Angelo from the shore, is really tremendous dramatic stuff.

Presenter24:10

A closing passage of Gilbert Beco's Opera d'Arant. Now, you said it was a flop, Colin. It it is still being done quite a lot in in French provincial opera houses. It still lives.

Presenter24:22

Now one disk out of your eight, if you could only take one.

Presenter24:25

If I could only take one, I'd like the Beethoven if I could have the whole quartet opus one three five. Oh yes, of course you do.

Presenter24:32

And one luxury.

Presenter24:34

Well, I suppose wine, as much as you'll allow it to have. A reasonable supply. What kind of wine?

Presenter24:40

Beaujolais, probably. Splendid. A good Beaujolais.

Speaker 124:41

Uh

Presenter24:43

And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare and big encyclopedias.

Presenter24:48

I'd be tempted to take Shaw's complete plays, but I know those so well that I think maybe Doubt is Arabia Deserter, which is a book that I've often tried to read from beginning to end and never quite made it. Doubt is Arabia Deserter. And thank you, Colin Wilson, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 125:14

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.