Still an outsider
By Jean Christou

home

ONE OF the most enduring anecdotes in the life and times of British writer Colin Wilson dates back to 1957 when the father of his then girlfriend Joy burst into their London apartment armed with a horsewhip shouting “The game’s up, Wilson”, accusing the author of being homosexual and having several mistresses.

It later transpired, after the police had been, and the paparazzi had left, that Joy’s sister had apparently read part of the manuscript for Wilson’s third book Ritual in the Dark, and believed it to be his personal diary.

Over 100 books and nearly 50 years later, Wilson, together with Joy, were in Cyprus earlier in the week to check out Robert Sarmast’s expedition to search for Atlantis, a subject close to the British author’s heart, having previously published two books of his own on the subject of the lost continent.

When Wilson published his first book, The Outsider, in 1956 when he was just 24. He became an instant celebrity and the darling of the critics and was lumped under what was then labeled “The Angry Young Men” movement, along with John Osborne whose play Look Back in Anger had been performed for the first time a week previously.

“We got enormous publicity which went on and on and on which turned the critics against us,” Wilson told the Sunday Mail. “So when my second book appeared it was murdered by the same critic that held up my first book as a masterpiece. By then the silly horse whipping episode had occurred.”

After that incident, Wilson and Joy fled to Cornwall where they have lived since and where he has churned out book after book after book covering philosophy, criminology, psychology, biographies, novels and a host of literary criticisms.

“My books didn’t sell in tremendous quantities so I had to write a reasonable amount just to keep the bank manager happy,” Wilson said of his prolific output.

At first glance the list of his books is mind-bogglingly diverse. When you ask how on earth he comes up with such an array of topics, he delivers a punch line that bears out the view of many of his critics, and they are many.

“I seem to have written about a lot of topics but really I’ve just written the same book a hundred times over,” he said.

“When The Outsider came out and I said man was on the brink of a huge evolutionary leap… that is what my work is about centrally. Man’s evolution. All my books approach that topic from different angles. I even wrote a book about wine. This has been terribly important to man’s evolution. It puts you into the most wonderful mood and gave man a different glimpse of reality.”

Wilson’s two books on Atlantis, The Atlantis Blueprint in 1987, and From Atlantis to the Sphinx: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of the Ancient World in 1993, explored the evidence to suggest that we are not the first civilisation to exist in history and that many of the world’s greatest mysteries, from the Pyramids to the geological alignment of the world’s most famous religious sites, can be explained by the existence of a civilisation, not necessarily Atlantis, that preceded our own.

Many people have theories on where this civilisation might have been, from the Greek island of Santorini to the Antarctic, following the discovery of ancient maps, most notably the Piri Reis map that dates from the 1500s and which accurately depicts the exact topography of the continent under the ice. The topic is well documented in Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods.

“It’s covered in two miles of ice now. The last time it wasn’t covered in ice was 500 BC. This seems to indicate that what lay behind the map must have been much older than Reis himself,” said Wilson. “This indicates that it must have been peopled. Who else would bother to make a map of the land?”

Although he is convinced that people did once live on Antarctica, Wilson is not willing to bet on it being Atlantis. He’s not convinced of Santorini’s claim either, but he does believe the lost continent may have been in the Mediterranean, hence the interest in Sarmast’s endeavours.

“A man called Roy Bird called me about a month ago and said what did I think of this idea of Atlantis being Cyprus and I said ‘I don’t know anything about it. I’m sure it’s not so’,” said Wilson.

“Anyway he told me more about it and in due course Robert Sarmast sent me most of his book by email. When I read it I became more and more convinced that he could be right.”
Wilson dismissed the standard scholarly argument that Sarmast is wrong because everyone knows that Plato said Atlantis lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which are believe to lie at the Straits of Gibraltar.

“This was my feeling too when I read in Plato but then Robert pointed out we are dealing with something with so many different versions that we can’t be sure Plato got it all right. There was an Egyptian version before that, which the priest passed on to Solon and so I would be quite willing to give the benefit of the doubt, particularly as Robert points out that there were several places in the Mediterranean known as the Pillars of Hercules at that time.

“The two points of Greece to the south are known as the Pillars of Hercules and then he says the two points at the end of the Bosphoros were also known as the Pillars of Hercules, in which case you could say that Cyprus was beyond the Pillars of Hercules,” said Wilson.

“I’m not only very impressed by Robert and by his reasoning but I think he could very well be right. It may well be that in a month or two months from now we may be saying ‘yes Atlantis has now been discovered’.”

And where will Colin Wilson be? Well having just completed his autobiography, which incidentally has been panned by the critics, he will be working on his next book, which he says will put the record straight on the “Angry Young Men” era.

“There is still as much anti-Wilson feeling around as there was back then,” he said. “The autobiography is a masterpiece. It sounds like conceit, but this is a book that will last. It’s one of my most important books and I’ve told the absolute truth about myself, and the consequence of this… it’s been ambushed and slaughtered but it’s my major book and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Whether or not he is right about that, Wilson appears to be a man who has always lived by his own philosophy of “optimistic existentialism”, so I get the feeling that as long as Colin Wilson likes what Colin Wilson has written, then there is probably no better critic of his work.

Copyright © Cyprus Mail 2004