The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  In another matter, Lawrence reinforces Steppenwolf’s conclusions: Haller’s recognition that he has not two, but many conflicting I’s.

  Now I found myself dividing into parts.... The spent body toiled on doggedly and took no heed, quite rightly, for the divided selves said nothing I was not capable of thinking in cold blood ... they were all my natives. Telesius, taught by some such experience, split up the soul. Had he gone on to the furthest limit of exhaustion, he would have seen his conceived regiment of thoughts and acts and feelings ranked around him as separate creatures, eyeing, like vultures, the passing in their midst of the common thing that gave them life.15

  This capacity of Lawrence’s to bear physical pain is of central importance in understanding him. His clear-sighted intellect could not conceive of moral freedom without physical freedom too; pain was an invaluable instrument in experiments to determine the extent of his moral freedom. His nihilism was fortified when he found himself unable to bear extremes, when, for instance, beaten by Turkish soldiers, the pain mastered his will not to cry out. Yet his conclusions point towards ultimate moral freedom:

  During [our revolt] we often saw men push themselves or be driven to a cruel extreme of endurance, yet never was there an intimation of physical break. Collapse arose always from a moral weakness eating into the body, which of itself, without traitors from within, had no power over the Will.

  While we rode we were disbodied, unconscious of flesh or feeling, and when, at an interval, this excitement faded and we did see our bodies, it was with some hostility, a contemptuous sense that they reached their highest purpose, not as vehicles of the spirit, but, when dissolved, their elements served to manure a field.16

  The will is supreme, but, as for Schopenhauer, it can exercise its ultimate freedom only by willing negation. Yet the belief in its fundamental importance gives us the key to Lawrence’s life; he had never ceased to experiment to test the power of his will:

  Such liberties [abstaining from food and sleep] came from years of control (contempt of use might well be the lesson of our manhood) and they fitted me peculiarly for our work; but in me they came, half by training, half by trying... not effortlessly, as with the Arabs. Yet in compensation stood my energy of motive. Their less taut wills flagged before mine flagged, and by comparison made me seem tough and active.

  There is, admittedly, a sort of contradiction involved in the two paragraphs quoted above. The Emersonian parenthesis, ‘Contempt of use might well be the lesson of our manhood’, follows logically from his earlier statement that ‘his senses... needed the immediacy of contact to achieve perception’. His asceticism is an attempt to ‘cleanse the doors of perception’ (in Blake’s phrase). Yet this does not fit in with the earlier paragraph and its complete denial of the body. One line of thought leads to the conception that the body reaches its highest purpose with perfect ‘immediacy of perception achieved’, which is the conclusion of the mysticism of Boehme and Blake. The other leads to complete contempt, a cleansing of the senses that ultimately leads to throwing the senses away too.

  Obviously, Lawrence’s metaphysics does not form a self-complete system, and where it shows contradictions, it does so because he never worked systematically at self-analysis. This particular contradiction is inherent in mysticism—the saint who sees all existence as holy, and the saint who is completely withdrawn from existence—and if Lawrence had ever empirically resolved it, the last fifteen years of his life might have been much easier to understand. The ‘mind suicide’ of joining the R.A.F., and thereby involving himself with ‘the ignorant, the deceived, the superficial’, might have been rejected in favour of some less frustrating form of asceticism. Lawrence deliberately complicated the difficulty of self-realization by refusing to believe that he had any self to realize. He stated: ‘Indeed, the truth was I did not like the “myself” I could see and hear’,17 but had no notion of how to proceed to unearth the self he didn’t dislike, the self he was aware of on that ‘clear dawn that woke up the senses with the sun, while the intellect...was yet abed’. Lawrence has all of the powers of a man who is capable of making tremendous efforts of will; he fails because he has no purpose towards which to direct the will. His failure is due to his inability to analyse the vague urges that stir in him, and bring them into the light of consciousness.

  It is a curious fact that Granville-Barker sent Lawrence one of the first copies of The Secret Life, which he acknowledged reading in a letter of 7 February, 1924. There is no evidence that Lawrence saw a reflection of his own spiritual state in Evan Strowde or Oliver Gauntlett; he praises the play as being one of the best pictures of real politicians ever drawn! This is the disconcerting thing about Lawrence after the war; he seems to have given up the struggle. There is something about the abnegation of will of his R.A.F. years that is terribly like that paralysis of motive in the insanity of Nijinsky or Nietzsche. Steppenwolf has said, ‘There is no way back ... the way lies on, ever further into guilt, ever deeper into human life.’ But often a point of strain is reached where the Outsider cannot go on; the complications are too much. He asks for nothing but rest. Lawrence reached that point, and perhaps, in some ways, Steppenwolf’s ideal of cutting his throat would have been a more satisfactory conclusion than the ‘mind suicide’ of the R.A.F. But there were still some things that had the power of exciting Lawrence to direct sensation, in spite of the ‘thought-riddled nature’, and one of these was speed. It was speed that eventually killed him, for he swerved his motor-bike to avoid two errand boys at the top of a hill, and crashed into a hedge at seventy miles an hour.

  ***

  Lawrence’s work has introduced new implications into our study of ‘the Outsider’s problems’, and these can be seen most clearly by reviewing the ground covered so far. Lawrence has characteristics in common with all the Outsiders we have considered, and in him we can see the point to which some of them were tending.

  From Barbusse, we can see that the Outsider’s problem is the problem of denial of self expression. This gave rise to the question of whether the Outsider is therefore a merely sociological problem. The introduction, in Wells’s pamphlet, of a definitely un-sociological aspect, led us naturally to Roquentin, where it was seen that the problem is, in fact, metaphysical.

  Camus and Hemingway have emphasized its practical nature. It is a living problem; the problem of pattern or purpose in life. The Outsider is he who cannot accept life as it is, who cannot consider his own existence or anyone else’s necessary. He sees ‘too deep and too much’. It is still a question of self-expression.

  In The Secret Life we see the Outsider cut off from other people by an intelligence that ruthlessly destroys their values, and prevents him from self-expression through his inability to substitute new values. His problem is Ecclesiastes’ ‘Vanitatum vanitas’; nothing is worth doing.

  The romantic Outsider has broadened the approach by showing that it is not necessarily the problem of disillusioned men. On a different level, the romantic lives it in his striving to give flesh to the romantic ideal. Hesse’s conclusion was: more self-analysis, ‘to traverse again the hell of the inner being5. The Outsider must know himself more. This involves Roquen-tin’s way and Meursault’s way; the way of metaphysical analysis and the way of acceptance of physical life. But the ultimate failure of both Goldmund and the Magister Ludi, the ways of flesh and spirit, leave us still faced with Strowde’s: Nothing is worth doing, no way is better than another.

  It is Lawrence who has finally indicated the way out of this impasse. The others have accepted it as a problem in one variable, as it were. A ‘way5 is to be sought. The question ‘A way for whom* would be answered by Roquentin or Strowde: ‘A way for me, obviously.5 Lawrence has made the great step forward: ‘You are not what you think you are.’ Instead of saying: Nothing is worth doing, you should say, 7 am not worth doing anything.5 Oliver Gauntlett5s question of where the enemy is, has been answered by Lawrence: ‘You think he is you.5 Oliver’s real war is a war again
st oneself. Lawrence has made the vital distinction in one sentence: ‘Indeed, I did not like the “myself55 I could see and hear.5 ‘He is not himself5, Kennington5s schoolmaster had said. Lawrence does not divide himself up into two parts like Haller and then say ‘Man hates wolf5. It was a whole complex of body and mind and emotions that Lawrence hated, his ideas about himself that made a constant suffocating-blanket around his vital impulses.

  This is a situation that is by no means unfamiliar to saints and mystics; Lawrence’s misfortune is in having so far found no biographer qualified to deal with his spiritual conflicts. The popular ideas of a ‘Lawrence enigma5 have culminated in Mr. Aldington’s attempt to explain Lawrence in terms of Freud5s inadequate psychology. But the ‘Lawrence enigma5 was cleared up by Lawrence himself in The Seven Pillars. Man is not a unity; he is many. But for anything to be worth doing, he must become a unity. The divided kingdom must be unified. The deluded vision of personality that our Western civilization fosters and glorifies, increases the inward division; Lawrence recognized it as the enemy. The war against it is therefore inevitably a revolt against Western civilization.

  Lawrence’s achievement takes us even further. The war is not to be fought by mere reason. Reason leaves the personality comfortable on its own ground. The will’s power is immense when backed by moral purpose. Reason’s only role is to establish moral purpose by self-analysis. Once the enemy is defined, the will can operate, and the limit of its power over the body is only the limit of moral purpose to back it.

  If our reasoning is correct, the Outsider’s problem is not new; Lawrence points out that the history of prophets of all time follow a pattern: born in a civilization, they reject its standards of material well-being and retreat into the desert. When they return, it is to preach world rejection: intensity of spirit versus physical security. The Outsider’s miseries are the prophet’s teething pains. He retreats into his room, like a spider in a dark corner; he lives alone, wishes to avoid people. ‘To the thinkers of the desert, the impulse into Nitria had proved ever irresistible.’ He thinks, he analyses, he ‘descends into himself: ‘Not that probably they found God dwelling there, but that in solitude they heard more certainly the living word they brought with them.’ Gradually the message emerges. It need not be a positive massage; why should it, when the impulse that drives to it is negative—disgust?

  The prophet is a man of greater spiritual integrity than his neighbours; their laxness revolts him, and he feels impelled to tell them so. In his embryonic form, as the Outsider, he does not know himself well enough to understand the driving force behind his feelings. That is why his chief concern is with thinking, not with doing. In the Outsiders we shall deal with in the rest of this book, we shall watch the emergence of the distinctly prophetic element in the Outsider.

  ***

  Consideration of Hemingway introduced the Outsider’s obsession with pain and death. One of the finest passages in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is the episode of El Sordo’s last fight on the hilltop. As the Republicans, led by El Sordo, watch the coming of the planes that will bomb them, the boy Ignacio begins to repeat an aphorism of the Communist heroine Passionaria, then switches into prayer: Hail Mary, full of grace.... With the roar of the planes in his ears, he can only remember: Now and at the hour of our death, Amen. A few minutes later, everyone on the hilltop is dead; Hemingway’s evocation of the suddenness and brutality of their deaths is oppressively convincing. Dramatically, the episode is perhaps even finer than the end of A Farewell to Arms. The two extremes are swept together: religion, deeper-ingrained in man than any political creeds; and death. It is death that seems to have the last word.

  For a certain type of Outsider, this problem is the only real problem. Basically, it is the same problem as Roquentin’s ‘nausea5; instead of ‘humanity versus naked existence’ it expresses itself ‘as aspiration to life versus death’. Its effect is the same: negation of the will to live. It goes without saying that no half-way houses will serve instead of an answer, no belief in spiritism or an after-life or reincarnation; it must be the one and only answer, and no ‘credo ut intelligarrC involved.

  But we have already stated that no amount of thinking can lead to a final answer. It looks as if we have arrived at another impasse; but if we follow the course of the argument backwards, we discover that the impasse occurs when we identify the two concepts ‘understanding’ and ‘reason’. ‘ Credo ut intelligam to believe in order to understand, does not cut off the Outsider completely from using his reason. But it demands that he use other means beside reason. The remainder of this chapter will make this point clear; we must consider the lives of two men who were in no sense philosophers. The first of these Outsiders was a painter, the other a dancer.

  ***

  Vincent Van Gogh was born in Holland in 1853, the son of a Protestant pastor. He began to paint when he was twenty-nine. Eight years later, he shot himself in the stomach with a revolver, and died, at Auvers in Provence, in August, 1889. All his life he had lived on the edge of nervous crises, and during the last two years, he was for periods actually insane.

  Of all painters, Van Gogh is perhaps the greatest letter-writer; it would not be an exaggeration to say that he owes his universal acclaim since his death to the letters (and popular biographies constructed from them) more than to the paintings themselves. In spite of this, their value as self-revelation is not to be compared with the introspective documents we have studied so far; he was a painter; words gave him no release. His interest for us lies in the incidents of his life, and in his painting. He is the first Outsider to be considered in this book who was not a writer and not an analytical thinker.

  Van Gogh was never an easy person to live with; fits of nervous depression made his temper uncertain. He left home when he was sixteen to work in an art gallery in La Haye, and four years later he came to work in London. There he had an unhappy love affair that increased his tendency to brood. He returned to his father’s home, and the atmosphere soon became overcharged with irritation and intolerance. A year later, he again returned to London to make another attempt to persuade the girl to marry him, and again failed. Obviously, he was not one to take life lightly; miseries and disappointments cut deep.

  In the following year he was in Paris, and had crises of mysticism. He read and commented on the Bible. But the unsatisfaction refused to let him alone; he gave up his job and returned to London; there he had an experience of the slum quarter that stirred a deep feeling of pity. The religious enthusiasm grew, and he made his decision: to become a pastor, like his father. A year later, he was among the miners of the Borinage, in Belgium, preaching, giving away his money and clothes until he was poorer than the miners. But even this was a failure; the miners were poor, but it was a mistake to suppose that their experience of hardship would make them sympathetic to the voluntary poverty of a saint. Van Gogh was as much a stranger among them as he had been among his bourgeois relations in Holland. Finally, someone notified his superiors of his ‘eccentricities’, and he was recalled.

  There exists a painting from the last year of his life called ‘Memory of the North’. A red winter sun sinks behind masses of sludgy green-grey cloud; all the sky is full of dirty, twisted scraps of cloud, tinted with the sun. In the foreground, small grimy houses, trees and bushes, repeat the twisting, red-tinted lines of the sky. The whole picture is overcast with a sulphurous light. We see the North as Van Gogh saw it in the year of his ‘mission’.

  He decided to study drawing; for a while, this satisfied him. Then, in the following year, there was another unhappy love affair. This time the defeat was so bitter that he contemplated suicide. From this period we have a typical story of the ‘wild man’ aspect of his nature that made people he lived with nervous and suspicious. He had called on the girl’s family— she was his cousin—to make a last attempt to persuade her to marry him. He was told that she was not at home, but could see, at the dinner table, her place still partly laid, as she had left it when
his arrival was announced. He held out his hand towards the candle and asked: ‘Let me see her for as long as I can hold my hand in this flame.5 Someone snatched the candle away. Eventually he got his own way and was allowed to see his cousin. It came to nothing. That was the last time he saw her.

  A year later, he took up painting seriously. He had also taken in a woman of the streets who was pregnant, thereby scandalizing all his friends, who abandoned him as lost. Even this affair was a failure. But now he had the painting to counterbalance his nervous tensions. As each crisis was overcome, the painting became stronger, more certain. In Paris, he absorbed the influence of the Impressionists, and the canvases became lighter. His brother Theo supplied him with money to live on while he painted; but even Theo, his most constant ally, found the ‘wild man’ a strain to live with. Finally, constant nervous tension had its effect on Vincent’s health, and he left Paris for the South in 1888. Gauguin joined him there, but, like everyone else, found him too explosive and highly strung to live with; the rupture occurred when Vincent attacked him with a razor and then, later, cut off his own ear and presented it in a matchbox to a prostitute at the local brothel. Periods of insanity followed; he was removed to the hospital, but continued to paint.