Stranded by the tide of fashion

Colin Wilson is a very great man, ‘the only important writer in Europe’. That is his own estimation, and I do not quarrel with it because Wilson’s self-esteem is not just vanity but necessary to his career. As he sees it, the pattern of our lives is created by ourselves through the use of imagination and will. At the age of 13 he decided to become the greatest writer of all times. His first project, never completed, was an encyclopaedia of science, literature and all human knowledge. In preparation for this, he studied geology, biology and astronomy, mastered the whole of philosophy and psychology and read through the imaginative literature of Europe, with special attention to the Russians.

The plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe and their contemporaries came next, followed by the lives and works of artists, musicians, geniuses, great criminals and other exceptional characters. By the time he left school, aged barely 16, he had acquired more knowledge than any formal education could have provided.

He was born in 1931 into a working-class family in Leicester. His father expected him to get the usual kind of job, but Wilson’s imagination rose far above that, and so did his will. In his teens and early twenties he wandered penniless through bohemia, reading and talking philosophy but with his mind constantly on sex. Then he met Joy, his partner and lover for nearly 50 years. Most of that time they have spent happily and creatively in their family house in Cornwall.

Happiness in life is the key to Wilson’s writings. Literary reviewers deride his shortcomings as a writer — his flat, prosaic tone, his literalism and lack of humour — but Wilson does not pretend to glamour. What is important is the message that he has been trying to convey through all these hundred-and-something books.