Colin Wilson: It's time to look back in anger

He's no longer young, and he was never that angry but, at 76, Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider and over a hundred other books, is, as he states in the preface to his latest book, The Angry Years: A Literary Chronicle, "virtually the last survivor" of the Angry Young Man movement, a media invention that briefly enlivened a moribund British literary scene in the late 1950s. Never as global as the Beats, who moved from New York to California, Mexico and Tangiers, nor as cool as the Parisian nihilists, who mixed ennui and angst with black turtlenecks and dark glasses, this Fifties literary phenomenon was aggressively parochial, fixing its sights on the drab, uninspiring landscape of post-war Britain, and establishing itself as the "kitchen sink" school of writing.

Looking at Wilson's own oeuvre, which ranges from evolutionary philosophy, serial killers and ancient civilisations, to science fiction and the occult, it's surprising that he should ever have been corralled with the likes of Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, Kenneth Tynan, John Braine, John Wain, and the rest. What linked Wilson to Osborne and Braine, as well as to Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and Arnold Wesker, was that he was working-class. Although "frankly indifferent to the class issue", Wilson argues that he and his unlikely peers were the "first group of working-class writers that had ever existed". Being so, and post-war England being what it was - hyper-conventional, adamantly buttoned-down, and rigidly stratified into deadening class distinctions - it comes as little surprise that a few of them were angry. The tabloids loved them, and for a time the group was flooded with the kind of publicity that drug-taking rock stars and anorexic models receive today.

From the perspective of his years, Wilson sees "that the fame that arrived with the publication of The Outsider 50 years ago, with all its publicity about Angry Young Men, was, as far as my work was concerned, a total waste of time." This may sound a bit ungrateful. As far as Wilson's career was concerned, it was a particularly beneficial waste of time. It established him as an important author at the age of 24, and created perhaps the only work of existentialism that qualified as a best seller. In the spring of 1956, when The Outsider, a study in "alienation," and Osborne's gritty Look Back in Anger, received glowing reviews almost simultaneously, it looked like the vacuum in British letters that had been felt since the generation of Auden and Isherwood was about to be filled. Even so, it took the efforts of "a combative young drama critic with a craving for celebrity" by the name of Kenneth Tynan, to launch the petulant Jimmy Porter and his creator on their rise to stardom. Wilson's own relations with Tynan were not so cordial, and when Tynan and the poet Christopher Logue disrupted a performance of a religious drama, The Tenth Chance, by Wilson's friend Stuart Holroyd at the Royal Court, the three almost came to blows. Wilson, labelled a "fascist" by Tynan and others - which meant that, unlike them, he wasn't a Marxist - didn't mix well with the crowd. Kingsley Amis hated The Outsider and said so in a review. His dislike of Wilson went so far that at a literary party he had to be stopped by the novelist John Wain from pushing him off the roof. Amis later told friends that a bottle of whisky Wilson had given him was poisoned, and he left it unopened, although why he didn't throw it away is unclear. He found out it was fine only later, when a friend guzzled it. Given Amis' fondness for drink, his "paranoia" seems disturbingly strong.

Wilson's impetus for writing The Angry Years, which, he admits, does return to some material covered in his autobiography Dreaming to Some Purpose, is that the most recent book on the period, Humphrey Carpenter's The Angry Young Men, wasn't serious. Carpenter argued that the really important movement of the Fifties was the satirical trend that began with Beyond the Fringe. Wilson has no argument with satire, but he sees it as less serious that what the Angry Young Men were trying to do. Although he has his "reservations" about the movement, he sees it as essentially concerned with "real political protest that hoped to get something done, to change things as Rousseau and Cobbett and Godwin had wanted to change things". Although less sensitive to class than people like John Braine, whose Room at the Top was another success, Wilson discovered early on that much of the backlash following The Outsider, and which nearly wrecked his career, had to do with the fact that he hadn't gone to university. Iris Murdoch, whom he met and became friends with at this time, offered to get him a scholarship to Oxford, and she, with Doris Lessing and, surprisingly for his political stance, Arnold Wesker, are the few of Wilson's contemporaries for whom he has praise: all three, he argues, are concerned with "the evolution of the individual" and with the "peculiar inner solidification that makes them far more resistant to the sense of futility" that permeated the others.

Although the book is sandwiched between a Preface and Epilogue in which Wilson situates the Angry Young Men in the context of Romanticism, existentialism and post-modernism, bringing his account of British letters up to date with remarks on a more recent Amis, the bulk is a no-holds-barred tussle with Tynan, Osborne, and Kingsley, as well as with Alexander Trocchi, Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Maurice Girodias (of the Olympia Press), Guy Debord, Vladimir Nabokov, Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, Terry Southern, Elias Canetti, Philip Larkin, J P Donleavy and others. Wilson has been persona non grata among the literary establishment for half a century now, but at the time of his first success, he was one of the movers and shakers, and his appointment book must have been filled with droppable names. One also suspects that with most of the people he is writing about being dead - he speaks of "a feeling of sadness as I contemplate the wreckage of so many of my contemporaries scattered over the literary battlefield" - he can let rip without worrying about the consequences. It's gossip, and some we may have heard before, but Wilson tells it with an engaging, entertaining and often educative relish.

Although not one of the angry ones, Samuel Beckett comes in for a kicking. Wilson admits that when he met Beckett, he found him so likable, that it would have been rude to tell him what he thought of his work, that it "poisons our cultural reservoirs by declaring life is meaningless"; at a performance of Endgame in 1957, Wilson wondered why everyone was "listening patiently to this depressing rubbish"? Alex Trocchi, author of Cain's Book, who like Lessing and Wesker, "recognised the need for an evolutionary change in consciousness", wasted himself on heroin, and in a morbidly gripping account, Wilson describes a party Trocchi threw at 24 Chepstow Villas in Notting Hill, where Wilson and he lived, while his girlfriend was having an abortion in the next room. Unfortunately, there were complications and she nearly died from blood loss. The pornographer Maurice Girodias wasn't sold at first on The Naked Lunch, saying "There's no fucking in it," but Terry Southern convinced him to add William Burroughs' nightmare narrative to his "Traveller's Companion" series. For Wilson it "is as close as it is possible to come on the page to displaying a mutilated corpse".

But Wilson reserves most of his bile for his own countrymen, and as far as Tynan, Osborne and Amis are concerned, the book should have been called Sex Lives of the Angry Young Men. Promiscuity, adultery, and fetishism, laced with hefty quantities of booze, took up so much of their time, at least according to Wilson's account, that it's a wonder they ever wrote anything. Wilson himself has admitted to being a panty fetishist, so when he points out that Tynan had a taste for masturbation, spanking and exposed anuses, we know few skeletons will be left in the closets.

In many ways, it's the wives and lovers of these angry men who, more than anyone else, had something to be angry about, and throughout Wilson shows admiration for those who read the signs, pulled up stakes and moved on. Some thought otherwise. Of the actress Jill Bennett, married to John Osborne, Osborne's agent remarked: "She broke his balls. She killed him." But Wilson disagrees. "Writers are not killed by their wives. They are killed by something in themselves." Women in general are given much credit in the book, and an insightful comment on the mothers of working-class writers deserves wide attention. Wilson writes that "imaginative working-class women are the evolutionary spearhead of society, since the narrowness of their lives imparts an intensity to their dreams that middle and upper class women, lacking the desperation, find it harder to achieve."

Narrowness of life, however, prompted little evolution in John Osborne, and Wilson remarks that he gets "small satisfaction from recording that his decline as a dramatist is one of the most spectacular in the history of British theatre". Sad reading indeed is Wilson's account of how Osborne, whose The Entertainer made him feel that he was "asking me to take a bath in dirty water" fell from grace. Through drink, philandering, and an anger that was "like listening to a drunk tell you how badly life has treated him", Osborne went from massive successes like the film version of Tom Jones which made him a millionaire, and A Patriot for Me, to selling the manuscript of Look Back in Anger in order to make a dent in his tax bill, and accepting grants from the Royal Literary Fund. But financial struggles weren't the main problem. Osborne had lost all direction as a writer, and when he felt negative "allowed it to darken his mind like a giant storm cloud over a landscape," continuing to believe that, as in Look Back in Anger, "vituperation was an acceptable mode of self-expression", with the result that his last plays are an embarrassment.

Wilson's own attitude is defiantly optimistic, and the fact that he is still alive and producing speaks for itself. The class situation may have changed since the angry years, and being working-class these days provides some proletarian chic. This can only be a good thing. "Human beings are all in the same boat," Wilson writes. "The only important question is what they do with their lives."

To order a copy of 'The Angry Years' by Colin Wilson (Robson £16.99) for £15.50 (free p&p), call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897