Nothing to declare but his genius

Poor Colin Wilson. Has there ever been such a spectacular decline in an author’s fortunes? His first book, The Outsider (1956), was an overnight sensation. Hailed as a literary breakthrough by Philip Toynbee and Cyril Connolly, it earned him £20,000 in its first year of publication — the equivalent of £1 million in today’s money. ‘I have just met my first genius,’ declared Daniel Farson in the Daily Mail. ‘His name is Colin Wilson.’

He was only 24 at the time and, on the back of such fawning attention, seemed destined for a long and distinguished career. In fact, Wilson fell from grace within a year. To a large extent, he brought this on himself. When Farson asked him on television whether he really was a genius, he confessed that he probably was — unlike Shakespeare whom he later dismissed as ‘absolutely second rate’. He became the subject of a tabloid scandal when his girlfriend’s father got hold of some ‘pornographic’ diaries he’d written and, in an attempt to prove his innocence, he turned the diaries over to the Daily Mail. Needless to say, these turned out to be full of juvenile braggadocio and the Mail had a field day: ‘The day must come when I am hailed as a major prophet. I must live on, longer than anyone else has ever lived . . . to be eventually Plato’s ideal sage and king.’

The critics who had acclaimed The Outsider as a masterpiece immediately started backtracking and when a sequel was published in 1957 they leapt at the opportunity to revise their initial opinions. ‘Half-baked Nietzsche,’ wrote Raymond Mortimer in the Sunday Times. His publisher, Victor Gollancz, advised him to get out of London.