The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  Perhaps Hemingway’s susceptibility to success is not entirely to blame. The problem is difficult enough. In the whole of L’Etre et le Néant Sartre says little more than Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. Subsequently, Sartre, for all his intellectual equipment, has failed to advance to a satisfyingly positive position. His philosophy of ‘commitment’, which is only to say that, since all roads lead nowhere, it’s as well to choose any of them and throw all the energy into it, was anticipated by Hemingway in Henry’s finding that the feeling of unreality disappears as soon as he plunges into the fighting.

  Compared with Sartre, neither Hemingway nor Camus is a penetrating thinker. Camus’s Mythe de Sisyphe enlarges on the conclusions of the last pages oiL’Etranger, and concludes that freedom can be most nearly realized facing death: a suicide or a condemned man can know it; for the living, active man it is almost an impossibility. In the later book, L’Homme Revolté, he studies the case of the revolt against society, in men like de Sade and Byron, and then examines the attempt of various social ideologies to realize the rebel’s ideal of freedom. It would be an impossibility to advance from LEtranger and Le Myth de Sisyphe to acceptance of a sociological answer to the problem of man’s freedom; and Camus faces this conclusion squarely at the end of L’Homme Revolté. In this matter he clashed violently with Sartre, whose theory of commitment or ‘engagement’ had led him to embrace a modified communism; thereafter Sartre and Camus, once comrades in Existentialism, went their separate ways.

  Hemingway had never thought in terms of a social answer, or in fact, of any answer except that of his semi-stoic philosophy. This has been the most constant complaint of Marxist critics against Hemingway.

  Our foregoing considerations have made it clear, however, that the question of freedom is not a social problem. It may be possible to dismiss Barbusse’s Outsider as a case of social maladjustment; it may be possible to dismiss Wells’s pamphlet as a case for a psychiatrist. But the problem of La Nausee is unattackable except with metaphysical terminology, and Camus and Hemingway tend to fall into very near-religious terms. This is a point that I must return to later in the chapter, after further consideration of our terms: freedom and unreality.

  Freedom posits free-will; that is self-evident. But Will can only operate when there is first a motive. No motive, no willing. But motive is a matter of belief you would not want to do anything unless you believed it possible and meaningful. And belief must be belief in the existence of something; that is to say, it concerns what is real So ultimately, freedom depends upon the real. The Outsider’s sense of unreality cuts off his freedom at the root. It is as impossible to exercise freedom in an unreal world as it is to jump while you are falling.

  ***

  For an enlargement of the position established by Camus and Hemingway regarding human freedom, it is necessary to turn to a neglected play of the 1920’s, Harley Granville-Barker’s Secret Life. A quotation from George Sampson’s Concise Cam-bridge History of English Literature will make clear its relevance at this stage:

  [The Secret Life] is a puzzling, disturbing post-war play [that] shows us the intellectual world reduced to spiritual nihilism. There is no clear centre of dramatic interest. The characters just come and go, and what ‘love interest’ there is seems entirely gratuitous. The dialogue is sometimes normally dramatic, sometimes philosophically enigmatic, as if the speakers had no other purpose than to ask riddles to which there can be no answer. Perhaps in no other volume is there so complete a revelation of the spiritual bankruptcy produced by the war.19

  The background of the play is the post-war party politics of the Liberal party. The interest centres around two main characters, the middle-aged ex-politician Evan Strowde, and Oliver Gauntlett, his natural son, who has returned from the war minus an arm. What plot the play has can easily be outlined. Before the war, Strowde had been in politics. He had quarrelled with the party leader and resigned. Now the party wants him back.

  Oliver Gauntlett has been invalided from the war, gone into the City, and started to make a business career. When he is arrested at an anarchist meeting, he is glad to make the scandal an excuse for escaping from the futility of the City, It is Evan Strowde who puzzles him most. (At the beginning of the play he is not aware that Strowde is his father.) Strowde’s powerful intellect and great will-power should have made him a success in some field. Oliver wants to know why he has failed.

  The play opens with a curious scene at Strowde’s house by the sea; Strowde and a group of old schoolfriends have gathered to perform Tristan und Isolde on the piano, singing the parts themselves. The performance over, they talk reminiscently of their younger days, and Salomons states his creed as a practical politician:

  Salomons: Never be carried off on crusades you can’t finance… Don’t, for one moment, let art and religion and patriotism persuade you that you mean more than you do. Stand by Jerusalem when it comes to stoning the prophets. I must be off.

  Eleanor: Before you’re answered?

  Salomons: Answers are echoes.20

  Joan Westbury, with whom Strowde had had a love affair sometime long before the war—who represents for him the clearest vision of certainty that he ever achieved—leans on the parapet of the loggia and stares at the moon:

  Joan: I must pray now to the moon ... as one burnt-out lady to another, to teach me to order my ways.21

  She has lost her two sons in the war. More recently, her home was destroyed by fire. She leans, staring at the moon, as the guests leave; from inside float snatches of the Second Act of Tristan—the love duet. The curtain descends on the first scene.

  The fact that the play has no ‘clear centre of dramatic interest’ makes it difficult to summarize. Certain conversations stand out as being important to the exposition. There is the long scene between Strowde and Joan, when Strowde’s sister Eleanor is in London and they have spent the day together. They pick up the threads of their old romance, and Joan admits that she is still in love with Strowde; nevertheless, she insists they were right to separate instead of marrying. She could not have lived her love for Strowde; it would have killed her. Now she asks him the question which also puzzles Oliver: why is he not a success? Why is he not in power instead of these bungling, well-meaning politicians? His answer is the essence of the play:

  Strowde: Save me from the illusion of power! I once had a glimpse—and I thank you for it—of a power that is in me. But that won’t answer to any call.

  Joan: Not even to the call of a good cause?

  Strowde (as one who shakes himself free from the temptations of unreality): Excellent causes abound. They are served—as they are—by eminent prigs making a fine parade, by little minds watching what’s to happen next.... Search for their strength—which is not to be borrowed or bargained for—it must spring from the secret life.22

  He scouts Joan’s suggestion that perhaps it would have been better if they had never met:

  Strowde: No, that’s blasphemy. At least don’t join the unbelieving mob who cry: Do something, anything, no matter what... all’s well while the wheels go round— while something’s being done.

  Joan (with... irony): But seek first the kingdom of God, and the desire of all other things shall be taken from you?

  Strowde (very simply): It has been taken from me. I don’t complain and I don’t make a virtue of it. I’m not the first man who has found beliefs that he can’t put in his pocket like so much small change. But am I to deny them for all that?

  This passage shows Strowde’s affinity with the other Outsiders we have considered. There is the ‘glimpse of power’, of contact with some reality, awareness of a new area of his own consciousness, that came in a time of emotional stress (as with Corporal Krebs and Camus’s hero). There is the constant searching of motive; analysis of other people’s and his own driving force (politicians are ‘little minds’ etc.; Roquentin: salauds). In one passage he even speaks with the accents of Wells’s pamphlet:

  Joan: Evan—stir yourself out of t
his hopelessness of unbelief.

  Strowde {grimly): When the donkey’s at the end of his tether and eaten his patch bare, he’s to cut capers and kick up dust, is he? 23

  It is motive that has collapsed. The Outsider has glimpsed a higher form of reality than he has so far known. Subsequently he loses that glimpse and has to accept a second-best. But the ‘first-best’ is known to exist. Joan admits that she accepted marriage to a civil servant and ‘housekeeping in odd corners of the world’ because the strain of living on the level of ‘first-best’ would have been too much for her. Strowde has not given up the aspiration to the first-best, but he has preferred to do nothing when it seemed out of reach.

  When, at the close of the scene, Eleanor returns with the news that Joan’s husband has died of a heart attack, the full implication of the scene has been hammered home. It was Joan who accepted second-best; now she has lost even that.

  In the Second Act, Strowde decides to return to politics; Oliver wants the job of his secretary, and when Strowde refuses, he automatically turns to the woman they are both in love with, Joan Westbury. There is an important scene between Oliver and Joan. He explains to her the reason he wants the close contact with Strowde. He wants to know why Strowde has failed. Joan points out that Strowde can hardly be said to have failed as a politician; but Oliver was not referring to that kind of success:

  Oliver: Nothing’s much easier, is it, than to make that sort of success if you’ve the appetite for it.... But Evan set out to get past all tricks, to the heart of thingsIs it a stone-dead heart of things, and dare no one say so when he finds out? 24

  Oliver has a symbol for this state of moral emptiness:

  A shell missed me outside Albert and did for my watch. I could shake it, and it would tick for a bit, but the spring was gone. I’ve an idea I don’t grow any older now, and when I come to die, it’ll seem an odd, out-of-date sort of catastrophe.26

  This is Keat’s ‘posthumous existence’ of the last letter to Brown. Oliver’s solution to the question is simple: destruction.

  Oliver: Save me from weary people with their No More War. What we want is a real one.

  Joan: And where’s the enemy?

  Oliver: If I knew where, I shouldn’t be sitting here helpless. But we’re tricked so easily.28

  In spite of this, certain notions still have value for him: courage and discipline. When Joan asks him: Tell me how one soberly hates people—I don’t think I know.’

  Oliver: Well, you can’t love a mob, surely to goodness? Because that’s to be one of them, chattering and scolding and snivelling and cheering—maudlin drunk if you like. I learned to be soldier enough to hate a mob. There’s discipline in heaven…27

  Both Oliver and Strowde are obsessed by a Pascalian world-contempt, an insight into ‘the misery of man without God’. But for either of them to accept God would be bad faith; the Existentialist must see and touch his solution, not merely accept it.

  Strowde’s problem is not a dramatic problem; it can produce none of the violent emotions and make ‘good theatre’. And with the problem fully set out in these two important conversations, Granville-Barker has very little more to do than devise further situations that will show Oliver and Strowde in their characters of world-contemners. Strowde begins electioneering, with Oliver as his secretary; in America, Joan Westbury is dying. It remains for Strowde to throw over the politics and sail for America; renounce the meaningless and turn towards his symbol of meaning. He leaves London on the eve of the election. But Joan Westbury is dead before he gets to Southampton. The reader is left feeling oddly ‘up in the air’ about it all. No happy finale, no dramatic tying up of loose ends.

  The last scene of the play recalls echoes of the first. When Strowde has gone, Oliver talks to the millionaire businessman, Lord Clumbermere. Clumbermere is another symbol of material success, like Salomons. But his philosophy is not so brutal; he is a vague, rather shy idealist, as well as a vastly successful businessman:

  Clumbermere: You think you’re all for truth and justice. Right—come and run my pen factory and find out if that is so.

  Oliver: If I ran your pen factory, I’d be for the pen, the whole pen and nothing but the pen.

  Clumbermere: Then you’d be of little use to me. If we want a good gold nib, it’s religion we must make it with…

  Oliver: But are you a devil then, my lord, that you want to beat the souls of men into pen nibs?

  Clumbermere: I hope not, Mr. Gauntlett, but if I am,

  please show me the way out of the pit…28

  Afterwards Oliver and the American girl Susan argue about whether to recall Strowde with the news that Joan is dead. Oliver finally gives way, with a bad grace. And when Susan tells him that he doesn’t know what he wants, he summarizes:

  Oliver: There’s a worse mischief with most of us, Susan. What we want doesn’t count. We want money and we want peace... and we want our own way. Some of us want to look beautiful, and some want to be good. And Clumbermere gets rich without knowing why... and we statesmen puzzling the best way to pick his pocket. And you want Evan to come back to the middle of it all.

  Susan: He belongs here.

  Oliver: If he’d come back, he or another, and make short work of the lifeless lot of us....

  Susan: Why didn’t Joan marry him? They’d have had some happiness at least, and that would have helped.

  Oliver (a last effort): Why doesn’t life plan out into pretty patterns and happy endings. Why isn’t it all made easy for you to understand ?

  Susan: Don’t mock at me any more, Oliver.

  Oliver: I’m sorry. I only do it because I’m afraid of you.29

  And the closing cadence of the play is not a real ending:

  Susan: Wouldn’t you want to be raised from the dead?

  Oliver: No, indeed.

  Susan: You’ll have to be, somehow.

  Oliver: Do you wonder I’m afraid of you, Susan? {He goes out.)30

  There is no prospect of anyone being ‘raised from the dead’, for that would mean new motives, new hopes and a new belief.

  Earlier in this chapter, I used the phrase ‘near-religious terminology’, and it is now time to elucidate it. At the beginning of the Third Act, Strowde asks Oliver to check a quotation for him:

  Strowde: Get me the Bible, will you? I want to verify I think it’s first Kings, nineteen....

  Oliver: What’s the quotation?

  Strowde: Now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am not better than my fathers. Very modern and progressive and disillusioned of Elijah! Why ever should he expect to be? 31

  But that is the whole point. Strowde does expect to be, and Oliver expects to be... and they are not. There is an appetite for ‘progress’ in all Outsiders; and yet, as Strowde knows only too well, not primarily for social progress. ‘Not better than his fathers’—that is to say, not wiser than his fathers, not less futile, being a slave to the same weaknesses, the same needs. Man is as much a slave to his immediate surroundings now as he was when he lived in tree-huts. Give him the highest, the most exciting thoughts about man’s place in the universe, the meaning of history; they can all be snuffed out in a moment if he wants his dinner, or feels irritated by a child squalling on a bus. He is bound by pettiness. Strowde and Oliver are both acutely sensitive to this, but not strong enough to do anything about it. Human weakness. When Joan tells Strowde she cannot marry him (at the end of Act II), Strowde, left alone, murmers: ‘Most merciful God... who makest thy creatures to suffer without understanding...’32 But he is not praying to God, he is only wondering at the pain he feels, his vulnerability, human weakness. And Hemingway’s early work, up to the short story about the Major whose wife died, is a long meditation on human vulnerability. And meditation on human vulnerability always leads to ‘religious thinking’, to Hemingway’s ‘He must find things he cannot lose’; to a development of an ethic of renunciation and discipline. It leads to a realization that man is not a constant, unchanging being: he is one person one
day, another person the next. He forgets easily, lives in the moment, seldom exerts will-power, and even when he does, gives up the effort after a short time, or forgets his original aim and turns to something else. No wonder that poets feel such despair when they seem to catch a glimpse of some intenser state of consciousness, and know with absolute certainty that nothing they can do can hold it fast. And this theme, implicit in Sartre, Camus, Hemingway, and even more explicit in writers like T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley, leads to a question, ‘How can man be stronger? How can he be less of a slave of circumstances?’ (Mr. Huxley’s work has remained so irritatingly inconclusive because he seems to accept it as a premise for all his novels that absolutely nothing can be done about it.)