Moving from a Literature of Disbelief to a Literature Belief: An Open-Dialogue with The Outsider by Colin Wilson, Part I: I See Too Deeply (Henri Barbusse’s novel, L’Enfer)

There have been three times in my life when I did something irrational and brave:  I said, Screw it, I made a mistake, and I cut chords with the past and almost started down the path to the sort of life I wanted.  But the first couple of times, at the last moment, I faltered and clung to doubt and self-imposed limitations instead of walking out of the picture I was in and into the one I wanted.  Of course, it would not have been perfect, but if I’d had the courage to carry through, it would have been perfect compared to where I’d been.

Pure sunlight shines between two Austrian pines my brother and I planted back in ’96.  The snow, mostly in shadow, is cold, hard and blue.  It seems like the perfect day for reading, drinking hot chocolate and reflecting.  Marci even made Chili.

What I want to reflect on here is moving from a literature and life of isolation and disbelief to a literature and life of connection and belief.  I once thought I’d found my bible, The Outsider by Colin Wilson.  It described perfectly the void I was feeling and the literature I loved.  A window, even if accurate, is just one view of existence.  Having looked through other windows since then, I’d like to go back and look out that window again.

I think all of this will come to play in this dialogue, but I want to get right to the book, and when I found the book, and why it meant so much to me.

It was a cold winter, and during the week I lived alone in a dorm.  I’d dropped out of school and moved back to Dry Creek, this piece of family land that has never let me live fully anywhere else.  But there was nothing here for me.   The only jobs available were the type for college dropouts.  I ended up being a janitor at an indoor mushroom farm on the other side of town and decided a formal education might not be so bad after all, so I went back to school in a bigger town, two hours from Dry Creek.  However, I was twenty-six and really didn’t belong in an undergraduate program anymore.  I’d had some poems published, had been somewhat involved in a writing community in El Paso.  After returning to Utah, all I wanted to do was get my degree, so that I could get a teaching job in my hometown and live the rest of my days at Dry Creek, writing poems about stone, cold water, deer carcasses and drunken nights in the town’s two bars.  I had no belief beyond sight—to live and bear witness to a meaningless universe, which was at least bearable if I were there to witness a deer bounce down a gravel road covered in thin snow, the cottonwood along the creek a faint pink in the last day light.

Back at in college, I’d hear girls laughing outside my dorm room, but they sounded so young, so remote, like distant memories.  They weren’t even that.  I was incredibly shy and my romantic adventures were few and far in between.  Older, I still liked the giddy laughter outside my walls, but it was different.  It did not stir the restless hunger of a teenager.  No, it was more like the fondness of a father.  I had never had a real college experience, but I was mature enough to realize I’d missed that train.  If there was a world for me, this wasn’t it. 

So, during the week, I walled myself in my little cinderblock room to write.   On weekends, I went home, got drunk with a band of single and divorced Paiute women and a drop-out actor, and when not at the bar, soaked in as much of Dry Creek as possible.  The next week I’d start the process all over again.

When at school, I seldom ventured outside my dorm except for class and to go to the library.  My writing professors admired my craft, but as I was writing at a master’s level and most of my classmates had barely opened a book, I had no connection with my peers.  I remember Jim Aton would have us rate each other’s papers and then would give us his rating.  According to my peers, my paper was almost incomprehensible.  According to him, I should get it published.  So, I doubled up on my studies to get out of there.

The campus had a beautiful, new library, with a three story glass atrium, but hardly any books.  On top of that, they had all-but-illiterate undergraduate students weed the small collection they had.  As a result, I’d pick up collectible books on the discard rack for 25 cents.

One of the books I picked up--not a collectable--was The Outsider by Colin Wilson.  As it so accurately named what I’d been feeling and capturing in my own writing, it quickly became my Bible.

I still have the book.  It’s the 1982 Tarcher edition from  Houghton Mifflin with a forward by Marilyn Ferguson.  The cover is simple: a black rectangle with a thin red border.  Centered near the top is the title and author, also red print.  It looks serious, revolutionary—and when first published in 1956, it was.  

Chapter One, “Country of the Blind,” begins as follows:

At first sight, the Outsider is a social problem.  He is the hole-in-corner man.

Damn, I thought, that’s me.

He then quotes from Henri Barbusse’s novel, L’Enfer:

In the air, on top of a tram, a girl is sitting.  Her dress, lifted a little, blows out.  But a block in the traffic separates us.  The tramcar glides away, fading like a nightmare.

Moving in both directions, the street is full of dresses which sway, offering themselves airily, the skirts lifting; dresses that lift and yet do not lift.

In the tall and narrow shop mirror I see myself approaching, rather pale and heavy-eyed.  It is not the woman I want—it is all women, and I seek for them in those around me, one by one.

Defeated, I followed my impulse casually.  I followed a woman who had been watching me from her corner.  Then we walked side by side.  We said a few words; she took me home with her… Then I went through the banal scene.  It passed like a sudden hurtling-down.

Again, I am on the pavement, and I am not at peace as I had hoped.  An immense confusion bewilders me.  It is as if I could not see things as they were.  I see too deeply and too much.

I knew that feeling immediately.  It was my old friend.  I’d written poems about it:

The Question

I think normal people just go to sleep,
which isn’t a bad idea, and I use to.
Nine o’clock always as a kid, and looking forward to it,
that cold blue room in the lean-to add-on.
I plugged in the electric blanket and cuddled up
after a firm talk with God
about how if I did this, he’d do that,
and I’d grow up happy, successful and loyal,
with a wife, five kids,
an architectural firm and a house,
a great space of light and body
headed by me, Patriarch,
like God headed the Church,
the building, the body, the light.

But then, I don’t know, something happened.

Oh, I know it happens to all of us,
and few of us really sleep,
with houses balanced on loans,
beds suspended over arguments with elastic smiles,
marriages held together with kids as tape,
marriages not held together,
kids torn like tape, a piece on each flap,
flapping in the wind,
the guilt of having torn such a little body,
but how do you live in a house so small,
and with her?

And how does she stand you,

both of you growing,
swallowing space?

All healthy things get bigger,

more complex,
cells and histories of cells,
whole cities wiped out within
with new information and cable TV.
The cage can only make you rabid,
the things she says ticking off in your head.

Okay, so I don’t have it so bad.

I have none of this.
I have one single question
that keeps me up at night:

How do I make it mine?

At the time I wrote that poem, my mother thought the ending-line,“How do I make it mine?” referred to marriage.  And it does,  sort of, but not really, because prior to it “something happened,” which is the first fulcrum of the poem, a pivot between the secure fixed universe of youth and the open, uncertain universe of adulthood.  What I desired to make mine was life in all its complexity, but something had robbed me of that possibility.  What was that “something”?

When I opened The Outsider, I knew immediately my something was the same something  that makes the romantic encounter in L’enfer so banal.  Like Henri Barbusse’s protagonist, I also saw “too deeply and too much.”

Or so, I thought at the time.  In this series of essays, I will in fact argue that like so many of my predecessors,  even though I saw deeper than many, I actually didn’t see deeply enough.  But, I'll get to that later.