The God of the Labyrinth
Colin Wilson
THE GOD OF THE LABYRINTH
Colin Wilson was born in Leicester in 1931. He left school at 16 and worked at various jobs while reading and writing in his spare time. His study The Outsider was published by Victor Gollancz in 1956 and became an overnight sensation in England and America, bringing widespread popular and critical attention to its 24-year-old author; the book has never been out of print. He followed The Outsider with two further nonfiction works, Religion and the Rebel (1957) and The Age of Defeat (1959), which were not as well received, before turning to fiction in 1960 with Ritual in the Dark, a novel he had worked on since age 17.
He continued to write prolifically in numerous genres, both fiction and nonfiction, including works on the occult, crime, and serial killers. His extensive output of fiction includes two subsequent novels featuring Gerard Sorme, the protagonist of Ritual in the Dark—Man Without a Shadow (1963) and The God of the Labyrinth (1970)—as well as novels in the vein of H. P. Lovecraft, including The Mind Parasites (1967) and The Philosopher’s Stone (1969).
Wilson has published more than 150 books and resides with his wife Joy in Cornwall, where he has lived for more than fifty years.
Gary Lachman (b. 1955) was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, but has lived in London since 1996. A founding member of the rock group Blondie, he is now a full-time writer with more than a dozen books to his name, on topics ranging from the evolution of consciousness and the western esoteric tradition, to literature and suicide, and the history of popular culture. Lachman writes frequently for many journals in the United States and United Kingdom, and lectures on his work in the U.S., U.K., and Europe. His work has been translated into several languages. His website is http://garylachman.co.uk/
Fiction by Colin Wilson
Ritual in the Dark (1960)*
Adrift in Soho (1961)
The World of Violence (1963)*
Man Without a Shadow (1963)*
Necessary Doubt (1964)
The Glass Cage (1966)
The Mind Parasites (1967)
The Philosopher’s Stone (1969)*
The God of the Labyrinth (1970)*
The Killer (1970)
The Black Room (1971)
The Return of the Lloigor (1974)
The Schoolgirl Murder Case (1974)
The Space Vampires (1976)
The Janus Murder Case (1984)
The Personality Surgeon (1985)
Spider World: The Tower (1987)
Spider World: The Delta (1987)
The Magician from Siberia (1988)
Spider World: The Magician (1992)
Spider World: Shadowland (2002)
* Available from Valancourt Books
THE GOD OF THE LABYRINTH
by
COLIN WILSON
With a new introduction by
GARY LACHMAN
Kansas City:
VALANCOURT BOOKS
2013
The God of the Labyrinth by Colin Wilson
First published London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970
First Valancourt Books edition 2013
Copyright © 1970 by Colin Wilson
Introduction © 2013 by Gary Lachman
The right of Colin Wilson to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by Valancourt Books, Kansas City, Missouri
Publisher & Editor: James D. Jenkins
20th Century Series Editor: Simon Stern, University of Toronto
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.
Wilson, Colin, 1931-
The god of the labyrinth / by Colin Wilson ; with a new introduction by Gary Lachman. – First Valancourt Books edition.
pages ; cm. – (20th century series)
ISBN 978-1-939140-29-6 (alk. paper)
I. Title.
PR6073.I44G63 2013
823’.914–dc23
2013008112
All Valancourt Books publications are printed on acid free paper that meets all ANSI standards for archival quality paper.
Cover by M. S. Corley
Set in Dante MT 11/13.2
INTRODUCTION
No Mean Minotaur
Anyone familiar with Colin Wilson’s work will know that throughout it all runs a particularly vital thread: his obsession with sex. From his first book The Outsider, which begins with the anti-hero of Henri Barbusse’s novel Hell catching a glimpse up a wind-blown skirt, to later works like The Misfits, Superconsciousness, and The Angry Years, Wilson has maintained a tenacious analytical grip on what he calls the ‘sexual illusion’. But although for sheer entertainment and stimulation his prose passes muster with more well-known and intentionally erotic writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, Wilson’s fascination with sex is never aimed at the act itself. Sex, for Wilson, is important because of what it can tell us about his other lifelong obsession: consciousness. Through practically all his work, from the first Gerard Sorme novel Ritual in the Dark to mammoth studies like The Criminal History of Mankind, Wilson has been erecting—if I may put it that way—a phenomenology of sex. And if his Origins of the Sexual Impulse—an entry in his ‘Outsider Cycle’—brings to bear some of the insights of Edmund Husserl and Alfred North Whitehead upon the problem of sex, in The God of the Labyrinth he resolutely leads this philosophy to the bedroom. But don’t worry: both the philosophy and the sex in Wilson’s third Sorme novel are more interesting and exciting than anything the Marquis de Sade got up to in his boudoir.
I first discovered The God of the Labyrinth in the late 1970s in Los Angeles, in a wonderful old bookshop, Papa Bach, that sadly no longer exists. For some reason they kept a large supply of UK imports and by the time I came upon the 1972 Mayflower paperback edition of The God of the Labyrinth, with its fleshy cover, I had already added The Mind Parasites and The Black Room to my burgeoning Wilson library. (The Mind Parasites, by the way, is one of the few Wilson novels without a good helping of sex; The Black Room however has enough for two.) For Wilson sex is the closest that most of us get to a mystical experience. It reveals a powerhouse of energy and purpose that, for the most part, remains hidden from us. This inner force—what Wilson, borrowing from Husserl, calls ‘intentionality’—can be elicited by crisis or threat, or even by a determined act of concentration. It can also arrive unbidden, of its own volition, in what G.K. Chesterton called a sense of ‘absurd good news’. But it is most pleasantly, immediately, and effectively awakened by sex.
And this, indeed, is what Gerard Sorme, Wilson’s fictional alter-ego, discovers as he, and his own alter-ego, the philosopher-rake Esmond Donelly, deflower maidens and relax the virtue of worthy women in two centuries and on two continents.
The God of the Labyrinth is a kind of sexual Pilgrim’s Progress, and the title of the expurgated American edition, The Hedonists, makes this clear. Sorme makes his way through nymphomaniacs, sadists, masochists, pyromaniacs, lascivious hypnotists, erotic philosophers, fetishists, and a sexual secret society. Through it all he repeatedly asks what seems a ridiculously naïve question: ‘Why should a man want to thrust his erect penis into a woman?’ Neither De Sade nor Lawrence nor Miller actually ever asked this question. I can’t think of any writer on sex who really does,
from the erotically deadpan Michel Houellebecq to the radical Freudian Otto Gross. They all accept it as a given, simply ‘how it is’. Even that arch dark magician of sex, Aleister Crowley, the model for Caradoc Cunningham in the second Sorme novel Man Without a Shadow (otherwise known as The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme), never actually poses this question. But phenomenology, as Wilson knows, is about jamming an epistemological crowbar under such implicit, ‘obvious’ givens as the fact that when aroused all a man wants to do is to enter that warm embrace. What Wilson discovers is that although the sensual pleasure of sex is indeed delightful, the real location of ecstasy is not in the genitals but the mind. Asking why a man wants to insert his penis into a woman’s vagina is like asking why the mind wants to know and understand itself and the universe. Both are about penetrating the unknown, piercing the darkness, and entering a strange, mysterious world.
And what happens when we do manage this is remarkable. ‘Human beings are like car tyres,’ Wilson tells us. ‘To get the best results, you need to keep them inflated.’ We can think of sex as a kind of air pump. When gripped by the sexual illusion our tires become rock hard. Yet, soon after, they spring a leak and the pressure drops. What Wilson has been trying to do for more than half a century is to discover a way of keeping our tires hard, so that they can cover any terrain. That is, of keeping the mind, not the penis, erect. We can think of it as a kind of mental Viagra. One way of doing this is to recognize that it is the inner concentration triggered by sex, and not the sex itself, that does the trick.
What fascinates Sorme/Wilson is ‘the gap between the mind and reality.’ Like threat, crisis, or an unusual effort of concentration, sex can bridge the gap. Yet when the spell passes, it returns, and that hair’s breadth distance makes all the difference between being alive and merely living. De Sade, Casanova, Crowley, Georges Bataille and other seekers of some ultimate sexual release spent their lives pursuing a phantom, thinking that it was the sex itself that gave them reality, as if Proust went on eating madeleines, hoping for another whiff of Combray, instead of getting on with writing À la recherche du temps perdu. Yet Proust knew that Combray was not in the madeleine, but in his mind. Esmond Donelly knows this too, and his taste for sweets—for him bedding women was just a piece of cake—soon passes to more serious fare.
I have concentrated on the philosophical element of this novel, but its literary qualities are considerable too. Well in advance of Umberto Eco or Dan Brown, Wilson is writing about a mysterious secret organization, in existence for centuries, whose members come from the upper echelons of society. The inspiration for the book came from Borges, and Wilson takes the Borgesian literary detective tale, with its blend of real and fictional scholarship, and runs with it. Wilson is also in advance of the postmodern appropriation of popular culture, using specific literary forms self-consciously, for philosophical purposes. He has written science-fiction, detective, horror, spy, police procedure, and in this case even erotic novels, using each as scaffolding for his phenomenological pursuits. His ‘timeslips’ into 18th century Ireland—similar to those in The Philosopher’s Stone—are very much like those Peter Ackroyd uses in his novels Hawksmoor and The House of Doctor Dee. One reason why Wilson’s literary value is overlooked in his native country, I think, is that, unlike Ackroyd, he has an optimistic outlook and takes ideas seriously, something that is apparently not done among British literati. Yet recently, some literary heavy-hitters like Philip Pullman have spoken out against the idiocy of ignoring Wilson’s work. It’s about time and the literary generation who turned their noses up at the indefatigable Outsider is long gone anyway.
The God of the Labyrinth has all the best elements of Wilson’s fictions. It is a gripping philosophical-erotic detective story, packed with ideas and convincing mystical and sexual encounters which leave the reader with a powerfully increased sense of the sheer possibilities of life. That I would say is the central effect of Wilson’s fiction: that it shows us how interesting things really are, and that the power of making them interesting lies in our own minds. His prose often has the power to elicit that inner force of intentionality that is the subject of everything he writes. In this sense, reading Wilson on intentionality makes one’s consciousness more intentional. A neat trick that all good writing pulls off: of making the mind more awake. Valancourt Books should be applauded for making this and other of Wilson’s fiction available for a new generation, and I am grateful to them for having an excuse to return once again to the adventures of Gerard Sorme. ‘We have to master the strange trick of allowing the body to remain quiescent, while pushing the mind to explore interior savannahs and mountain ranges,’ Sorme/Wilson tells us. They are right. So sit back, relax, and get ready to enter a very exciting labyrinth.
Gary Lachman
London, 2013
THE GOD OF THE LABYRINTH
No, I want sky not sea, prefer the larks to shrimps,
And never dive so deep but that I get a glimpse
O’ the blue above, breath of the air around. Elvire,
I seize—by catching at the melted beryl here,
The tawny hair that has just trickled off—Fifine.
Browning
‘God keep from hurt’, said he, ‘the good fellow whose great codpiece has just saved his life. God keep from harm the one whose long codpiece has been worth to him, in one day, one hundred and sixty thousand and nine crowns. God keep from hurt the one who, by his long codpiece, has saved a whole city from dying of famine. And by God, I’m going to make a book On the Advantages of Long Codpieces as soon as I have time’.
In fact, he did compose a large book, and a very good one, complete with diagrams; but it has not been published yet, as far as I know.
Rabelais, Bk II, Ch. 15
Esmond Donelly died in December 1832, at the age of eighty-four. Towards the end of his life, he became fascinated by numbers, and corresponded with the great mathematician Gauss, who quotes him in the preface to the fifth edition of the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. It is in one of his letters to Gauss that Esmond speaks about the ‘magical’ properties of the number 137—which is, of course, a prime. Coming across a copy of this letter the other day in the archives of Mr Xalide Nuri, I was thrilled to realise that this book will be published exactly 137 years after Esmond’s death. I take it as an auspicious sign.
The story of my ‘quest for Esmond Donelly’ begins on April 10 of this year. In January, I had flown to New York to begin a lecture tour that took me from Florida to Maine, from New Mexico to Seattle. I had taken my family with me—my wife Diana and my daughter Maureen (Mopsy), aged three, but since it was impractical for them to travel with me, they stayed with friends in New Haven, and I spent weekends with them whenever I was on the east coast. After two months or so of one-night-stands, the strain was beginning to tell, and I struggled to preserve a degree of detachment by writing every day in a journal notebook. On re-reading these entries recently, it struck me that there could be no simpler way of beginning this account than quoting them exactly as I wrote them.
April 10, 1969
It is eight thirty in the morning, eastern time—five thirty for me, since I flew in from Portland, Oregon, yesterday. I am propped up on my bed in the campus guest room, drinking tea and eating buttered whole-wheat biscuits; at nine thirty I have to address convocation. They tell me Dylan Thomas slept in this room, and caused a scandal by allowing the football team from Koyukuk, the male university on the other side of town, to sleep on the floor and vomit in the washbasin. That man’s energy must have been fantastic. After nine weeks of lecturing around America, I’m in a state of glassy-eyed exhaustion. I always know when I’m getting run-down because objects suddenly take on a curious, intense quality. Diana packed me a cake of ordinary green kitchen soap—motels provide tiny cakes that slip out of your hand in the shower—and when I went to pick it up this morning I had to stop and stare. It’s hard to explain the sensation. It wasn’t
simply that it seemed as green as a piece of malachite; it also seemed soft, almost fuzzy, as if it was trying to expand. Seen in these moments, objects seem to have another dimension or sense: hardness, colour, smell, taste . . . and something else, quite distinct from these. In a human being you might call it personality, or even soul.
I walk around the room in this dream-like state, feeling like a new-born baby; oddly helpless, yet strangely happy. When I poured hot water on this tea—sent to us from Findlater’s in Dublin—I had a momentary sensation of dissolving in the rising steam, and the smell of the tea became exotic, almost frightening.
These tours are killing. My agent wants me to do another one next year, but the idea revolts me. The best moments are sitting alone on airports, eating hamburgers and drinking fresh orange juice. Occasionally in these moments, I achieve a beautiful detachment, a sense of the sheer size of this country, and feel suddenly contented. It also happened two nights ago, sitting in the motel bar in Portland, watching cars and buses slashing through the black rain, tearing the reflection of the neon sign into red shrapnel. And I never fail to experience a certain delight as I approach an airport bookstall, even if I only have five minutes between changing planes, and I already have more paperbacks than I can carry. At O’Hare yesterday, I bought Apollinaire’s Debauched Hospodar, a surrealistic piece of pornography, and I read about the poor devil’s miserable life while waiting for the plane. And then it came to me with great clarity: my business and the business of all writers: to refuse to be a part of everyday life, to stand aside, even if this demands a pose of brutality or nihilism. We must not be absorbed. There is a perfectly simple relation between the mind and its environment. The environment carries us along like a stream, and the mind is like a small engine that can carry the boat upstream—or at least enable it to stay in the same place. While the engine works, man is fundamentally healthy; if it stops, he is no better than a piece of driftwood.
