by Colin Wilson
It seems, in that case, that there is some basic opposition between the biological urges of the male and the female. The female wants a mate. The man experiences an undifferentiated lust for the body of a girl—any girl. (The comedian Dave Barry has a private-eye story that contains the line, ‘She was just my type—a woman’.) And since society also agrees that a man should settle down and become a faithful husband, it would seem that there is a fundamental conflict between man’s natural desires and the world in which he finds himself. And this, in turn, carries the terrifying corollary that the rapist or sex murderer is only reacting logically to the dilemma in which nature has placed him.
At the time I was writing the early version of Ritual, in the early 1950s, sex murder was, compared to nowadays, comparatively rare. In fact, sex murder, in our modern sense of the word, began as recently as 1888, the year of the Jack the Ripper murders. I had been interested in the Ripper’s crimes ever since I was a small boy, when my grandfather told me that his parents had refused to let him go out after dark in case he became a victim of the Whitechapel killer. It was also in the early 1950s that the first volume of Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities was published in England, and I was fascinated to discover that one of its central characters was a sex-killer called Moosbrugger—Musil had written: ‘If mankind could dream collectively, it would dream Moosbrugger’. So it seemed that Musil also regarded the sex-killer as a kind of symbolic figure in the modern world. And was it accidental that the first syllable of Musil’s name was the same as that of his sex-maniac (in German Musil is pronounced Moozil)?
Clearly, Musil was not arguing that sex crime is somehow ‘justified’; his point was the same one that Freud had made in Civilisation and Its Discontents—that human aggression seems to mean that man was not made for civilisation nor civilisation for man. I was to suggest later that Nabokov was making the same point in Lolita—that the theme of the book is not really pedophilia, but the fact that the ultimate satisfaction of male desire is somehow unattainable.
All this explains why, by 1954, Ritual of the Dead had turned into a novel about a young man who becomes accidentally involved with a man he gradually comes to suspect of being a sex-killer. In line with my ‘mythical’ intention, I deliberately chose Whitechapel, where Jack the Ripper killed five prostitutes, as the scene of the murders. But why should my ‘Ripper’ become involved with the hero? The solution, I decided was to make him a homosexual. I have since then wondered occasionally whether this was the correct solution, since few sadistic homosexuals select women as their victims. But it enabled me to create an interesting—and I think, convincing—relationship, and to solve the purely logistic problem.
In 1954, I was living in London, and continuing to work at labouring jobs. The chief problem, as always, was lack of time. A room, in those days, cost around £2 (or $3) a week, and food another £3 or so. But the average wage for a 48-hour week was only about £6. So I had to work 48 hours a week merely to eat and sleep. One day it struck me that this was absurd; if I dispensed with a room and slept in a tent, I could probably live on £3 a week, which would mean that every week’s wages could buy me a week’s freedom—during which time I could write my novel in the Reading Room of the British Museum. I bought the tent, but ended by getting rid of it—it was too conspicuous—and sleeping outdoors in a waterproof sleeping bag, usually on Hampstead Heath. At 9 o’clock in the morning I would cycle down to the British Museum and begin work on Ritual. One day, the superintendent of the Reading Room, the novelist Angus Wilson, noticed me scribbling away, and asked me what I was writing. When I told him, he offered to read the first part of the novel when it was finished. I handed it to him just before the Christmas holiday of 1954. And during that holiday—which I spent alone in London—I realized I had nothing to do. For a long time I had been concerned that Ritual was too overloaded with ideas and symbols. Now I made the decision to prune it drastically—in fact, to write a separate book about its basic ideas. What were these ideas? They were centred around the problem of what I called ‘the Outsider’, the man who feels that he has no natural or secure place in the social order. I was inclined to divide ‘Outsiders’ into three groups: the intellectual Outsiders like Nietzsche or Lawrence of Arabia, emotional Outsiders like Van Gogh or Mahler, and physical Outsiders, like the dancer Nijinsky—and, I suspected, like the unknown Whitechapel murderer.
As soon as the British Museum opened in January 1955, I hurried to the Reading Room and began to write The Outsider in Literature. It went unexpectedly fast; since I had always been an avid reader, I knew the life stories of my Outsider heroes by heart. By the time Angus Wilson returned from his holiday, I had written the opening chapter. So although Angus told me he liked the novel, and would show it to his publisher when it was finished, I decided to finish ‘the critical book’ first. I found myself a job working behind the counter of a coffee bar in the evenings, which gave me more time for writing. And after writing a couple of chapters of The Outsider, I tried submitting them, together with an outline, to a publisher I thought might be sympathetic. To my astonishment, he wrote back almost immediately, saying he liked the sound of it, and asking me to submit it as soon as it was finished.
There is no space here to describe the writing of The Outsider, nor its publication in May 1956—anyone who is curious should consult my autobiography Voyage to a Beginning. I woke up to find myself ‘famous’, and the book became a best-seller in England and America. The immense amount of publicity associated with the so-called ‘Angry Young Men’—of whom I was a kind of founder member—meant that I had little time for serious work for more than a year. In 1957, sick of the problems of overnight success, notoriety and the bitchery of critics, I moved to a cottage in Cornwall with my girlfriend Joy—now my wife—and started to rewrite Ritual from the beginning. (The title was changed from Ritual of the Dead, which I felt to be over-dramatic, to the ‘flatter’ Ritual in the Dark.) It finally appeared in 1960, almost twelve years after it had been started.
I have since written another sixteen novels, some of which, like The Mind Parasites and The Philosopher’s Stone, have never been out of print. I have also attempted to deal with its sexual theme in non-fiction works like Origins of the Sexual Impulse and The Misfits. But I think that there can be no doubt that the sheer amount of time and effort that went into Ritual has made it my most solidly constructed and satisfactory novel. It is, at all events, my own favourite.
Colin Wilson
RITUAL IN THE DARK
FOR BILL HOPKINS
I should like to acknowledge the help of the following: Richard Buckle, for refreshing my memory on details of his Diaghilev exhibition and suggesting many improvements in Chapter One; Bill Hopkins, Stuart Holroyd, Laura del Rivo and John Braine for detailed criticism of the book; Dr. Francis Camps for advice on matters of forensic medicine; John Melling and Joy Wilson for preparing the manuscript for press; Philip Stephens for advice on legal matters and police procedure; Pat Pitman, for reading the manuscript for mistakes, and for some stimulating (if unlikely) theories about the identity of Jack the Ripper; finally, Victor Gollancz for constant sympathy and help, and for his many suggestions for improvement.
CHAPTER ONE
He came out of the Underground at Hyde Park Corner with his head lowered, ignoring the people who pressed around him and leaving it to them to steer out of his way. He disliked the crowds. They affronted him. If he allowed himself to notice them, he found himself thinking: Too many people in this bloody city; we need a massacre to thin their numbers. When he caught himself thinking this, he felt sick. He had no desire to kill anyone, but the hatred of the crowd was uncontrollable. For the same reason, he avoided looking at the advertisements that line the escalators of London tubes; too many dislikes were triggered off by the most casual glimpse. The half-clothed forms that advertised women’s corsets and stockings brought a burning sensation to his throat, an instantaneous shock, like throwing a match against a pet
rol-soaked rag.
A thin brown drizzle fell steadily; the passing traffic sprayed muddy water. He buttoned the raincoat and turned up its collar, then opened the woman’s umbrella he carried suspended by its loop from his wrist. The crowd thinned as he crossed Grosvenor Crescent; he walked more slowly, enjoying the noise of the rain on the umbrella.
Outside the gilded wrought-iron gates he stopped and fumbled for his money. The doorway of the house was hidden by a striped tent surmounted by a Russian onion dome; on either side of this stood statues of two enormous negroes, leaning on the marble archway that formed the entrance to the tent. He lowered the umbrella, shaking it to dislodge the raindrops. Behind the negroes, the walls of the house looked black and desolate.
The entrance hall smelt of damp clothes. A queue of half a dozen people was waiting at the box-office. The inside walls of the tent were covered with red and gold striped paper.
There was some delay at the box-office. A middle-aged man was protesting with a foreign voice:
Nevertheless, I am a student at the London School of Economics. It is merely that I have forgotten my card. I have a British Museum Reading Room card if that is any good. . . .
Sorme produced a book from the side pocket of his jacket, and began to read. The queue moved forward again.
He became aware that the man in front of him was looking down at his book, trying to read its title from the page heading. He looked up, and met a pair of narrow, brown eyes, that turned away immediately with embarrassment. In that moment, he had registered a thin, long-jawed face that in some way struck him as oddly familiar. It was ugly, in a pleasant way, covered with small indentations that could have been pockmarks. A moment later, the man bought his ticket, and Sorme had a chance to observe him more fully. The examination brought no recognition. He was taller than Sorme, although Sorme was slightly over six feet tall. His dark grey suit was well cut. The thin face had high cheekbones, and eyes that slanted. It was so familiar that Sorme stared a moment too long, and suddenly found himself looking into the slanting brown eyes again. They smiled at him briefly as the man turned away, and Sorme was suddenly certain that he had never seen him before. The ticket-seller was asking: Student?
Yes.
One and sixpence please. Catalogue?
The stairway that led out of the tent curved round the canvas walls, and exposed the rusty scaffolding that supported it. He walked quickly, disliking the unpleasant memories aroused by the scaffolding. The stairs led to a doorway that had been constructed from a first-floor window, and formed the entrance to the exhibition. The first room immediately dissipated the mood of dislike. It had been designed to look like a Paris street, with iron railings, and a view of the Seine between the houses. Under the leaves of an overhanging tree, a huge poster displayed the words: theatre des champs elysees. ballets russes. The enormous drawing of Nijinsky as the Spectre of the Rose was signed by Cocteau.
The place was warm; there was no one else in the room, and he lost the feeling of tension that the rain and the crowds had induced. There was a sound of music coming from a loudspeaker in another room. He slipped the book back into the jacket pocket, plunged his hands deep into his raincoat pockets, and gave himself up completely to the sense of nostalgia evoked by the room. He stood there for a few moments unmoving, until he heard footsteps and voices on the stairway, then walked quickly past the poster of Pavlova that faced Nijinsky, and mounted the narrow wooden stair to the second floor.
The music was louder there. He recognised the final dance from The Firebird, the soft, drawn-out horn call. It sent a warm shock of pleasure through the muscles of his back and shoulders, and stirred the surface of his scalp. People were already mounting the stairs behind him. He hurried on into the well-lit room. There was only one other person in it: the man who had stood in front of him in the queue. The voices and footsteps that came from the stairway drove him forward into the next room. A violent hatred arose in him of the talking people who talked away emotions into words. A drawling, cultured voice was saying:
. . . and we nearly got a snap of him. He was there on the beach, just changing into a pair of bathing trunks. Lettie grabbed her camera, but she wasn’t quick enough . . . he got them on. Should have been worth something—a shot of Picasso in the raw. . . .
The music had stopped. The voice faltered, embarrassed at the silence. Abruptly the music began again, a violent, discordant clamour that exploded in the small room and drowned all other sounds. He recognised Prokoviev’s Scythian Suite, and smiled. The din was shaking the glass case in the middle of the room; it isolated him as effectively as silence. He examined with satisfaction a design by Benois.
The rooms were not crowded. He worked through them slowly, returning to the first room when the people behind him—an army officer with two girls—caught up with him.
. . . . .
An hour later, the loudspeakers were relaying The Three-cornered Hat, and he was again on the first floor, in the portrait gallery. The heat was making him sleepy. There was a curious scent hanging in the air which he half-suspected of possessing an anaesthetic quality. As he paused in front of a portrait of Stravinsky, he noticed the bust. It stood on a cube of marble, directly below an oil painting of a ballerina in a white dress. The inscription underneath said: Nijinsky, by Una Troubridge. He had remembered then of whom the stranger reminded him. It was Nijinsky.
Somewhere, a long time before, he had seen a photograph that caught the same expression, and the thin, faun-like face had impressed itself on his mind. As he stared at it now, the resemblance was no longer so obvious. Automatically he looked around to see if the man was anywhere near. He was not. Idly, he wondered whether he might be any relation of Nijinsky, his son perhaps. He could remember no son; only a daughter. Anyway, the bust was not really like him. It was not really like Nijinsky either; it had been idealised.
The man was in the Chirico room at the top of the stairs; he stood, leaning on an umbrella, examining one of the designs. Sorme crossed the room and stood close to him, where he could watch his face out of the corner of his eye. The resemblance was certainly there; it had not been imagination. By turning his head a little more, as if examining the design to his left, he could examine the face in profile.
Without looking at him, the stranger said abruptly:
He should have done more ballet designs.
For a moment, Sorme supposed he was addressing somebody on his left-hand side, then realised, equally quickly, that they were alone in the room. The man had not turned his face from the design he was examining. Sorme said: I beg your pardon?
Chirico. He never did anything better than these designs for Le Bal. Don’t you agree?
I don’t know, Sorme said, I don’t know his work.
The stranger looked at him and smiled, and Sorme realised that he must have been watching him in the glass covering the design ever since he came in. He began to feel slightly irritated and embarrassed. Something in the man’s voice told him instantly he was a homosexual. It was a cool, slightly drawling voice.
You know, the man said, I could have sworn I knew you when you came in. Do I?
I don’t think so.
The eyes rested on him detachedly; he had the air of a Regency buck studying a horse. Sorme thought: Damn, he thinks I’m queer too.
I thought you knew me, the man said, you looked at me as if you knew me.
His voice was suddenly apologetic. Sorme’s irritation disappeared. He cleared his throat, lowering his eyes.
As a matter of fact, I did think I recognised you. But I don’t think that’s possible.
Perhaps. My name is Austin Nunne. I was quite sure I knew you.
Austin Nunne . . . ? Did you write a book on ballet?
Yes. And a slim volume on Nijinsky.
Sorme was excited and pleased, as the memory returned: the photograph of Nijinsky.
Of course I remember you. I’ve read them both. So that’s why I thought I knew you!
Y
ou surprise me. It’s a very bad photograph of me on the dust jacket.
No, I haven’t seen that. But the photograph of the Nijinsky bust. Wasn’t that in your book?
The Una Troubridge? O no. Karsarvina found this one in a junk-shop in St. Martin’s Lane. I didn’t even know it existed. But I think I know what you mean. The photo of Nijinsky in L’Après-Midi. The head and shoulders?
Sorme suddenly felt irritated and depressed. He felt that his enthusiasm had placed him in the position of an admirer, a ‘fan’. Nunne suddenly turned away, saying in a bored voice:
Anyway, they’re neither of them very typical of Nijinsky. To tell the truth, I used that L’Après-Midi photo because friends said it looked like me.
Sorme looked at his watch, saying: Well, I hope you didn’t mind my asking?
Not at all. Are you in a hurry to go? Have you been all round?
No. But I’ve been here for an hour and a half. I don’t feel as if I could take any more.
You’re undoubtedly right. It’s my fourth time around. I saw it when it opened in Edinburgh.
