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Booker's Neophiliacs discusses 'The Outsider'.
Wilson as a symbol, the scruffy son [Wilson wore turtleneck pullovers and horn-rimmed glasses] of a Leicester shoe factory worker, sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath, working in coffee bars.
'Rambling survey of conspicuously neurotic misfits, such as Van Gogh, Nijinsky, and T.E. Lawrence.'
Like [writers of the time] Bishop of Woolwich, McLuhan and Marcuse, 'so clumsily written that the message emerges only in fitful Delphic gleams.'
'Wilson was willing to co-operate to the full with the machinery of publicity.'
A very long, and odd, and apparently favourable review is extant, by Oswald Mosley, once of the British Union of Fascists. He includes a German, Werner Jaeger, author of Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture in English translation.
But lots of people found this book 'consoling' (listen to Wilson in 1996 in Canterbury, promoting from Atlantis to the Sphinx. He said that every day he got letters beginning "I am an outsider".
And many critics were very enthusiastic, partly I imagine because the endnotes included T E Hulme, William James, G K Chesterton, Henri Barbusse, Wells and his Mind at the End of its Tether, Camus, Sartre, Hemingway, Harley Granville-Barker, James Joyce, Novalis, Hermann Hesse, Thompson, Kafka, D Halévy on Nietzsche, Blake, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mann, George Fox, Ernest Dowson, Edmund Wilson, T S Eliot, Søren Kierkegaard, and Indian writers. Much of his reading took place at the British Museum (the British Library had not yet been separated from it).
Wilson has interesting rule-of-three stuff, possibly just to generate discussion. For example, emotional misfit (i.e. with emotions out of control), the intellectual misfit, and another type; the physical misfit?
I haven't tried to check; Wilson seems to have lived most of his life in Cornwall, turning out books, for example A Criminal History of Mankind, including Stalin (but not American mass killers of course). Wilson may have made a lot of money from The Outsider, but on the other hand income tax rates were high at the time, except, no doubt for Jews.
I didn't at that time notice what now seems obvious, in common with huge numbers of Jew-naive people.
The copy in front of me is a paperback; publishing information is 'First Published in Great Britain, 1956, by Victor Gollancz Ltd.' In those days print-on-demand publishing did not exist, and few people risked the vanity publication route, in all probability with zero chance of reviews, however good a book might be.
My copy includes a 1967 Postscript ('... eleven years ago...'), a 1978 Introduction ('Twenty Years On'), and a 1990 note to 'A Gollancz Paperback'. Between them, Wilson's two notes gave his point of view very clearly, including his recollection of publication and rather frantic publicity, and his family background ('... English working class families—particularly factory workers—live in a curious state of apathy...')
In 1956, French and Algerian existentialist writers were popular, or at least talked about in the mainstream media, including the newish TV. I presume Wilson had read up on them in the British Museum. Sartre's The Diary of Antoine Roquentin (1949ish)—understandably retitled Nausea—and Albert Camus' The Outsider or The Stranger (1946ish; before the Algerian war with France) illustrate the sort of thing. Jean Genet, a sort of homosexual down-and-out in Europe, illustrates as well, but hardly figures in Wilson.
Wilson's detail doesn't particularly interest me. The point to understand is that the Jewish hold on publication and 'mainstream' ideas was intense, just as now, and they must have had their usual interests. It's significant that Wilson contacted Victor Gollancz, perhaps with Angus Wilson's advice. Gollancz's Jewish 'Left Book Club', was cancelled in 1948, after Jews collectively won the Second World War. So, whither propaganda? Jews of course wanted no intelligent investigation into wars. The books they wanted were distractions, away from the reality of the Jewish-crushed regions of eastern Europe, and Germany. The 'Holocaust' fraud was in the future, awaiting its time. Immigration of inassimilable aliens was planned, but its time was to come. North Africa was planned for Jewish takeover; so was Palestine. The fraud of the 'Cold War' was in process, and nuclear fake research was colossal. By publication of The Outsider; H Bombs supposedly existed, though Wilson would have believed that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been atom bombed. Probably Gollancz discreetly advised Wilson against inclusion of some material of this sort.
Anyway; books were wanted which said nothing about Jews, which was easy enough. Wilson lists gossip column types, and a bunch of writers more or less at the same time as Wilson—Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Iris Murdoch, Brendan Behan, François Sagan... and Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot...
And the existentialist movement was talked about in France—not US bombing of France, not Freemasons controlling France, not Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Their USP was despair, ennui, existentialism ('based emotionally on exasperation, and intellectually on errors of syntax', said Bertrand Russell). Sartre was a Jew, part of this 'movement'. Many authors listed in Wilson's endnotes were, or thought they were, Jews, though I doubt he had any clue about this. Arthur Koestler was one. Kafka was a central European Jew. George Fox, the Quaker in Chapter VIII The Outsider as Visionary appears to have been a Jew: see Miles Mathis on this. Herman Hesse may well have been. Henri Barbusse edited a 'Communist' (read: Jewish) newspaper, and presumably was a Jew. Halévy, biographer of Nietzsche, must have been a Jew, and poor Nietzsche seems to have been warned off any criticism of Jews—hence his unreadable work. Nijinsky seems to have been a Jew from Russia. Thomas Mann (a writer in Germany) was a homosexual Jew.
There were of course non-Jewish authors: H G Wells, Hemingway presumably, William Blake, Dostoievsky. Wells, in his Mind at the End of its Tether, was in despair after 1945; he just couldn't work out what was happening—for reasons which I trust the reader will grasp. Hemingway doesn't really fit; Blake was arguably a Swedenborgian, who appears in Wilson's next book, a failure. Dostoievsky was beloved of existentialists because his stories are grittily unpleasant, yet count as 'culture', and include disguised revelations of Jews and Christianity for Jews up to the present such as Jordan Peterson. Two of Wilson's Chapters (VI The Question of Identity, and VII The Great Synthesis) are laced with Dostoievsky. There's more sex than I'd remembered, for example Barbusse on women with skirts blown about. Of course a Jewish theme, which Wilson mentions but keeps under control for his readership.
I could say more; but this will do.
RW © 5 July 2019