Colin Wilson 1931-2013

Colin Wilson died on the same day as Nelson Mandela. I've read a couple of appreciations of Wilson. This obituary from The Guardian provides a fair assessment. But while I agree for the most part with these assessments, I want to add a few words of my own. 

I discovered Religion and the Outsider at a used bookshop in Berkley in 1997, when I was in the Bay Area for a deposition. I hadn't known of Wilson, but the title and a quick perusal convinced me to buy it. From that book (which I read not long thereafter), I went on to read The Outsider and some of the others in that cycle. I've also read his New Pathways in Psychology, which started as a biography of Abraham Maslow; however, it soon morphed into a history of modern philosophy and psychology as well as Maslow biography. I found some of this work quite intriguing. He seemed to have a sense of how existentialism works (or might work) other than by serving as a bleak outlook on life. Wilson developed his own theory of the brain and how it focuses on either the near-term or the long-term. He talked about how boredom can slip in when life has no challenge and no immediate goals. In some ways, he anticipates Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow and McGilchrist's theory of the two brains. Wilson culled his insight from a journey that went from a mundane car ride to a will-we-or-won't-we-make-it battle against inclement weather. The focus was all. This experience provided him with what he dubbed “the St. Neot margin”. In the focus and intensity the battle against the storm, he identified an antidote to the despair that marked so much of Continental existentialism. He seems more at home with the European thinkers than the English heritage of Locke and Hume through to analytic philosophy.

But Wilson was an autodidact, and this was both his strength and his weakness. He could roam into whatever subject his inquisitive mind desired, but he lacked focus and standards of proof to limit his conclusions. He delved into true crime, the occult, rogue gurus, biographies of fringe figures like Gurdjieff (whom, while fringe, is worthwhile), Jung, and contemporary magicians. He also wrote about Shaw and penned literary criticism. He often repeated himself and seemed undiscerning about evidence. He often concluded in favor of suspect occurrences and practices. He explored subjects with an eye toward his fundamental insight about human consciousness, which didn’t seem to have grown or deepened much. My reading of later Wilson doesn't show much deepening of his initial insights. This became the frustration of reading Wilson. Reinforcement is no doubt worthwhile, but one suspects that he spread himself too thin in writing about the fringe or the macabre.

Besides his insights into human consciousness, I appreciated his deep love of books. Wilson was a school dropout. So when he read, he read because he loved to read. Not assigned to read Shaw, Sartre, Camus, or any other author, he read with genuine enthusiasm. He shared this enthusiasm in his autobiography as a record of reading, The Books in My Life. This book serves as a form of autobiography and as a reflection on important works, such as those of Shaw, whom he admired.

Perhaps someone should publish a “Fundamental Colin Wilson” volume that takes nuggets from his vast body of writing and lays them out so that others can explore them without having to search the junk in his work. Until that time, it's worthwhile to search this eclectic and amateur—but often intriguing—thinker.

News from Berlin by Otto de Kat

When I began News from Berlin I expected something along the lines of Alan Furst (whom I’ve enjoyed), but it turned out to be something slightly different and a bit richer, too. I read this book because de Kat participated in the Jaipur Literature Festival. I’m glad I did. 

Unlike Furst, who follows a central character through the perils of time immediately before and at the beginning of the Second World War, in this novel de Kat focuses on a family. The father is a Dutch diplomat in Switzerland, the wife volunteers at a hospital in London, and their adult daughter is married to a member of the German Foreign Ministry. The son-in-law is not a Nazi; in fact, he’s unsympathetic to the Nazi regime and certainly watched by the Gestapo. The novel begins in early June 1941. The war has begun. France fell quickly; Britain just barely survived. The U.S. remains officially on the sidelines while Hitler and Stalin have a non-aggression pact. For the family, life seems balanced if tenuous. But then the daughter passes on a secret to her father about a major German action coming soon. The knowledge becomes like an infectious disease passed (intentionally) from daughter to father to mother, endangering the thin tissue of each receiver’s existence and relationships without reducing (as hoped) the burden on the person passing  on the moral and practical demands that the secret requires of them.

De Kat’s focus, however, is more than espionage and the moral dilemmas of wartime. It also focuses on the members of the family, their relationships with each other and those closest to them. The delicate balance of relationships changes as each comes into contact with the other. New realities reveal themselves and confound the characters perhaps as much as their burdensome secret. History in the family, as in life, intrudes and shapes the present in ways that the characters can’t escape and can only vaguely comprehend. 

Writers like Graham Greene, Eric Amber (I’m now reading another Ambler), and Alan Furst have written a great deal set in this time period. While titanic military and political forces met in epic struggles, individuals and families—at least those lucky enough to live—continue to try to live and maintain a semblance of ordinary life when the time is not ordinary at all. To me, that's what makes this period so fruitful for novelists and historians (such as John Lukacs) and why I’m so drawn to it. Now I add Otto de Kat to the honor role of writers who explore this dark and frightening time not so long ago.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

In Chennai, in perhaps the most organized bookstore that I’ve encountered in India, I came across Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, a novel that knew of but had never read. I’d see a screen adaptation with Michael Caine as the lead character Fowler, but other than imagining Caine as Fowler when reading the novel, I don’t have much recollection of the film or recall it having been compelling. But the book is compelling. 

Written between 1953 and 1955, as Indochina (Vietnam) slipped through the grasping fingers of the dying French Empire, the intrepid world-traveler Greene explored the world of the Vietnam, and in writing this novel he foreshadowed the upcoming American involvement. Greene brings America into Vietnam at this very early date in the person of a young man named Pyle. Pyle, fresh from Massachusetts, Harvard, and full of ideas from books, comes in to change Viet Nam, to change it so that it does not embrace the Communist Viet Minh and nor cling to the French colonialists. Pyle imports a belief in a “Third Way” toward “Democracy”. Pyle and Fowler, an older English journalist who is “not involved” in Vietnam but reports on it to his paper back in England, serve as anti-types of one another. Pyle exhibits the naiveté of the American mentality and Fowler the cynicism of the waning European empires. Between them, they also have the enigmatic young Vietnamese woman, Phuong, Fowler’s hope of love and comfort, whom Pyle falls for as well, with all of his youth and innocence. 

A trip to Greeneland finds men (mostly men) living on the edges of war and society, but for all of the searching, we find few heroes or villains. Instead, we find flawed, needy, and puzzled human beings, attending to everything from drink to women to God; sometimes with insight, sometimes in despair. Greene draws his readers into this world so that they feel the fear and uncertainty of his characters. 

However, I should add that while a sense of gloom or despair often mark Greene’s setting, he also displays gems of comedy and social caricature. Greene’s perceptions of Pyle and the other Americans poke a great deal of fun at us, but not without cause, I fear. These moments of levity help keep the reader from falling too deeply into the flawed world and characters that Greene features. 

Did any of the American decision-makers of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations read this novel before taking us so deeply into Vietnam? One wonders what might have happened if JFK had read this novel, or anyone in power with the perspective to see the perils into which we as a nation had ventured. We Americans have a lot of “Pyle” in us, or at least we did back then, when our government, full of adventurers and idealists, thought that it could change the world into our image for it. After Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, perhaps we’ve outgrown that perspective. I’m not sure, but I hope so. 

One can’t leave a Greene novel such as this one without a sense of human frailty and shortcoming and an immense compassion despite it all. If this is in some sense what Greene sought to achieve, then he was one of the most successful of novelists in the 20^th century. 

The Vintage Greene addition that I read includes an introduction written by Zadie Smith that I highly recommend.

Keynes Got There First: The Paradox of the Great Depression

I pulled this quote of John Maynard Keynes from Paul Krugman, who posted lecture slides from his course on the Great Recession. It encapsulates the great paradox of the modern economy: how can we have all of the physical and human capital that we have ready to serve us and yet it lies idle? This thought struck me when first studying the Great Depression: how come if we still had all of our stuff (don't accuse me of having been too articulate) we were so poor? What happened? It's not like a physical catastrophe occurred that wiped out all of our stuff.  Alas, Keynes got there first. No surprise, I guess. Anyway, think on this: 

This is a nightmare, which will pass away with

the morning. For the resources of nature and

men's devices are just as fertile and productive

as they were. The rate of our progress towards

solving the material problems of life is not less

rapid. We are as capable as before of affording

for everyone a high standard of life—high, I

mean, compared with, say, twenty years ago—

and will soon learn to afford a standard higher

still. We were not previously deceived. But to-

day we have involved ourselves in a colossal

muddle, having blundered in the control of a

delicate machine, the working of which we do

not understand. The result is that our

possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a

time—perhaps for a long time.

Keynes, "The Great Slump of 1930"

D-Day: The Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor

After reading D-Day for several days, I began to feel like Patton, General Leclerc, and their soldiers: I became increasingly eager to reach Paris and thereby liberate myself from this book. Because it was boring or poorly written? Not at all! In fact, Beevor's account of the ferocious battles in Normandy takes the reader into the fray about as well as I expect a book can. The death, destruction, and brutality--with a few fleeting glimpses of kindness--are all there. Just as soldiers wanted to be done with battle and return home and the generals wanted to achieve their glory, so the reader, after only this hint of what it would have been like, wants to conclude the matter. This is a sign of the author's success, not failure. 

I wrote a bit about this book in a recent post, but there's a lot more that can be said about the book. Beevor explains what was happening from Churchill to Norman residents, from the troops to the generals. He does an excellent job of mixing these perspectives. His mix of perspectives also serves to break up the alphabet soup military designations and descriptions of movements on the map. Such descriptions and maps are crucial for understanding the military moves, but such descriptions can sometimes overwhelm a layman like me. 

So in addition to my earlier comments and the comments made above, here are some random notes and thoughts generated by this book: 

• General Montgomery (Monty) was as big a horse's ass as I've heard him to be from other sources. Indeed, many Brits were as displeased with him as the Americans were. He really seems to have taken the cake as a prima dona. 
• General Patton was no slouch when it comes to ego, either. The portrait composed by Beevor, done in small bits, conforms to the impression I have from George C. Scott's biopic, Patton. But in this theatre, Patton, after serving as a decoy, proved helpful. 
• Normandy's sacrifice saved the rest of France a great deal of trauma, but the Normans suffered mightily, perhaps too much from Allied bombing. 
• The politics of the French; to wit, De Gaulle and the Communists, was a real mess. FDR didn't trust DeGaulle, nor should he have, but there was no other choice. The French were proud, although essentially defeated (1940 was a complete collapse of the French) until the Liberation of Paris. It looked like post-war France could erupt in civil war. The Communists, quite important in the Resistance, were putting out pamphlets in Paris to send people "to the barricades" The politics of France at that time remained a mess, and the race to Paris became a necessary ingredient in the campaign. 
• Women in France accused of collaboration horizontale suffered shaved-heads or worse. As Beevor notes, however, much of this consisted of witch-hunting for the benefit males deflecting their non-resistance and enacting their jealousy. Beevor writes: “It was jealousy masquerading as moral outrage. The jealousy was mainly provoked by the food that they [the women] had received as a result of their conduct.” (450). Mob justice is an oxymoron, and there was a lot of it. 
• Americans, arriving in Paris after the grueling battles to take Normandy, treated Paris as a one big carnival, leaving a bad taste in many of the French. Instead of thanks for liberating France, the French remember the gluttony, drunkenness, and whoring. 
• It appears to me (and I don't recall Beevor directly addressing this) that without the almost unchallenged air superiority of the Allies (RAF and Americans), the ground forces may have been outmatched by the Germans. 
• Although not as important in the end, Allied naval superiority allowed the Allies to arrive and establish a beachhead unchallenged from the sea as well as the air. 
• The lack of coordination between ground and air forces often caused a large number of friendly fire casualties. 
• There could be no better demonstration that Clausewitz was right about the reality of the "friction" in war and the reality of “the fog of war”.
• The brutality and carnage on both sides can sometimes leave one shaking one's head. If reading a book doesn't stamp "war is hell" onto your brain, then you'd better check your sense of humanity. This wasn't a "good war"--there is no such thing.