Books: The Tohu-Bohu Kid

RELIGION AND THE REBEL (338 pp. Colin Wilson—Houghton Mifflin ($4

Little more than a year ago, the name of self-taught Colin Wilson, then 25, got on British intellectuals’ lips; today, it gets on their nerves. The critical cheers that greeted The Outsider turned to catcalls upon sight of its sequel. Religion and the Rebel. Flicked the Daily Express’s Nancy Spain: “If civilization needs a new prophet, it will take more than the Boy Colin.”

It was not the Boy Colin’s latest book alone that accounted for the waspish notices. Since success plucked at his turtlenecked sweater, Author Wilson has revealed a bumptious streak of humorless selfimportance: “I am the most serious man of our age.” Early this year, the most serious man of our age proved that life can be dangerous for an Outsider inadvertently caught indoors (TIME, March 4). His girl friend’s father nearly scrambled the egghead with a horsewhip after bursting in on the cozy couple with some gaslit stage dialogue: “Aha, Wilson, the game is up!”

With this volume, Wilson’s game of intellectual hooky is certainly up. The book is a sequence of unblinking non sequiturs, half-fashioned logic and firm disregard for the English language. The merit of The Outsider was that it brought fresh insight to such diverse figures as Shaw and Hemingway, Van Gogh and T. S. Eliot, by casting them in the role of questing near-metaphysicians at the bedside of modern man. The tragic dilemma, as Wilson developed it, was that the Outsider had outdistanced the comforting illusions of everyday society while falling short of the luminous serenity of God.

The promise of The Outsider’s sequel was that it would explore “my ideas about a new religion.” The promise has not been kept. Instead, Wilson offers another hodgepodge of Outsiders—Rilke, Rimbaud, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jacob Boehme, Pascal,

Swedenborg, Kierkegaard, Toynbee, et al. When he does not have his avant-garde up, Wilson sounds suspiciously like Norman Vincent Peale: “It is not original sin that keeps man unaware of his own godhood, but his failure to connect himself with his own powerhouse.”

The only powerhouse with which Colin Wilson has been visibly connected is the reading room of the British Museum. The obsessive idea he picked up there belonged to a previous chair-warmer at the same establishment, Bernard Shaw. It is that the Life Force makes everything make sense. Presumably this is the sense, if any, of Wilson’s conclusion: “If life did not pervade space and time, the universe of matter would be tohubohu, complete chaos.” As for the present state of Colin Wilson’s mind and thought—tohu-bohu.