Mark Bold

There are few subjects that Colin Wilson does not feel compelled to write a book about. His output over the last fifty years, since the momentous release of his existentialist handbook The Outsider, has been over 100 volumes on crime, the occult, science fiction and fantasy, the paranormal, pop psychology and just about any cranky subject that approaches his radar. What marks these books out is that they are usually argued from Wilson’s New Existentialist standpoint as he manages to shoehorn in his obsessive concepts of optimism and heightened consciousness. Yesterday he was in Stratford to talk about his next book, this time taking on Shakespearean scholarship. Just how he’s going to fuse his “peak experience” philosophy with the work of the “second-rate” Bard remains to be seen.
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John Gray is writing in the Guardian about fundamentalist atheists (again). “It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonise religion.” It is an excellent critique of zealots like Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens, and the progress and eventual new dawn for humanity that their atheist project seems to promise, using the same tilts against secular humanism that were found in Straw Dogs and Black Mass. Very enjoyable and thought-provoking, but I always wonder what sort of solution Gray would offer to the problems he identifies. He’s assured at corroding others’ arguments and pointing out contradictions, creating a terrible pessimism in his writing, but how does he assure himself that it’s worth getting up in the morning?

(For a little balance, and to refresh your belief in progress, try AC Grayling’s criticisms.)

In the second section of Straw Dogs, John Gray makes a suggestion that is perhaps the aim of his book: ‘to discover which illusions we can give up, and which we will never shake off’ (p83). It is a fact, he says, that human beings cannot live without illusion. The belief that we can is just one of the illusions we need to shake off, and Gray traces the roots of this misconception through a sustained attack on the over-rational, anthropocentric beliefs of liberal humanism.

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The best essays in Jonathan Franzen’s collection How To Be Alone are really only a set of appendices to his bestselling novel The Corrections; some of the others, although often thought-provoking and very well-written, seem to exist only to crave attention, and have little substance other than providing an insight into the author’s self-absorption and exploration of his American identity. But in the interstices of the collection, there are some refreshing and revealing insights into the nature of modernity, and into a mass culture that is frighteningly out of control.

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Primo Levi did not want a film or theatrical adaptation made of his Auschwitz memoir If This Is A Man. It is not difficult to see why, given the way Hollywood rewrites history and trivialises human experience. Imagine how a Zemeckis-Hanks film of Levi’s testimony would ladle on the sentimentalism and sensation until it became an obscene tear-jerking hero myth of one man’s struggle against his Nazi oppressors. No, actually don’t.

Instead, If This Is A Man is free of all sentimentalism, and does not turn away from describing the full horror of a work camp within Auschwitz in clear and calm prose. There is no self-pity, or a defining moment that makes a man determined to survive; there is no place in the memoir where it is the heroic character of the narrator that leads to his final freedom. This is a simple and honest account of what happened to an Italian Jew when he was transported to Auschwitz.

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