The Outsider (10 page)

Oliver: There
’
s a worse mischief with most of us, Susan. What we want doesn
’
t count. We want money and we want peace
...
and we want our own way. Some of us want to look beautiful, and some want to be good. And Clumbermere gets rich without knowing why
...
and we statesmen puzzling the best way to pick his pocket. And you want Evan to come back to the middle of it all.

Susan: He belongs here.

Oliver: If he
’
d come back, he or another, and make short work of the lifeless lot of us.
...

Susan: Why didn
’
t Joan marry him? They
’
d have had some happiness at least, and that would have helped.

Oliver
(
a last effort)
: Why doesn
’
t life plan out into pretty patterns and happy endings. Why isn
’
t it all made easy for you to understand ?

Susan: Don
’
t mock at me any more, Oliver.

Oliver: I
’
m sorry. I only do it because I
’
m afraid of you.
^2
9

And the closing cadence of the play is not a real ending:

Susan: Wouldn
’
t you want to be raised from the dead?

Oliver: No, indeed.

Susan: You
’
ll have to be, somehow.

Oliver: Do you wonder I
’
m afraid of you, Susan?
{He goes out.)
³⁰

There is no prospect of anyone being
‘
raised from the dead
’
, for that would mean new motives, new hopes and a new belief.

Earlier in this chapter, I used the phrase
‘
near-religious terminology
’
, and it is now time to elucidate it. At the beginning of the Third Act, Strowde asks Oliver to check a quotation for him:

Strowde: Get me the Bible, will you? I want to verify
I think it
’
s first Kings, nineteen.
...

Oliver: What
’
s the quotation?

Strowde: Now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am not better than my fathers. Very modern and progressive and disillusioned of Elijah! Why ever should he expect to be?
³¹

But that is the whole point. Strowde does expect to be, and Oliver expects to be
...
and they are not. There is an appetite for
‘
progress
’
in all Outsiders; and yet, as Strowde knows only too well, not primarily for social progress.
‘
Not
better
than his fathers
’
—that is to say, not wiser than his fathers, not less futile, being a slave to the same weaknesses, the same needs. Man is as much a slave to his immediate surroundings now as he was when he lived in tree-huts. Give him the highest, the most exciting thoughts about man
’
s place in the universe, the
meaning of history; they can all be snuffed out in a moment if he wants his dinner, or feels irritated by a child squalling on a bus. He is bound by pettiness. Strowde and Oliver are both acutely sensitive to this,
but not strong enough to do anything about it.
Human weakness. When Joan tells Strowde she cannot marry him (at the end of Act II), Strowde, left alone, murmers:
‘
Most merciful God
...
who makest thy creatures to suffer without understanding
...
’
³²
But he is not praying to God, he is only wondering at the pain he feels, his vulnerability, human weakness. And Hemingway
’
s early work, up to the short story about the Major whose wife died, is a long meditation on human vulnerability. And meditation on human vulnerability always leads to
‘
religious thinking
’
, to Hemingway
’
s
‘
He must find things he cannot lose
’
; to a development of an ethic of renunciation and discipline. It leads to a realization that man is not a constant, unchanging being: he is one person one day, another person the next. He forgets easily, lives in the moment, seldom exerts will-power, and even when he does, gives up the effort after a short time, or forgets his original aim and turns to something else. No wonder that poets feel such despair when they seem to catch a glimpse of some intenser state of consciousness, and know with absolute certainty that
nothing
they can do can hold it fast. And this theme, implicit in Sartre, Camus, Hemingway, and even more explicit in writers like T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley, leads to a question,
‘
How can man be stronger? How can he be less of a slave of circumstances?
’
(Mr. Huxley
’
s work has remained so irritatingly inconclusive because he seems to accept it as a premise for all his novels that absolutely nothing can be done about it.)

This is a question that we are not fully in a position to examine yet. First, it is important that we should understand more of the
‘
poet
’
s
’
approach, the
‘
romantic
’
approach, and see how far this can be developed to transcend its own limitations. It might yield observations that will make the
‘
attempt to gain control
’
easier to analyse.

THE ROMANTIC OUTSIDER

The atmosphere of
the Existentialist Outsider is unpleasant to breathe. There is something nauseating, anti-life, about it: these men without motive who stay in their rooms because there seems to be no reason for doing anything else. It is essentially an adult world, this world-without-values. The child
’
s world is altogether cleaner; the air tastes of expectation, A big store at Christmas time is a new world. For the sick soul, the man outside, this
‘
new world
’
produces a feeling of horror; it is a symbol of a mechanical civilization that runs in grooves like a gramophone record, precluding freedom.

This difference between the child
’
s world and the adult
’
s is also one of the main differences between the world of the nineteenth century and our own. The revolutions in thought, brought about by the Victorian sages, J. S. Mill, Huxley, Darwin, Emerson, Spencer, Carlyle, Ruskin, seemed to presage endless changes in human life, and man would go forward indefinitely on
‘
stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things
’
. Before we condemn it for its short-sightedness, we survivors of two world wars and the atomic bomb, it is as well to remember that we are in the position of adults condemning children. The rationalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not a sterile, boring state of mind; it was a period of intense and healthy optimism that didn
’
t mind hard work and pedestrian logic because it felt free as never before; at close quarters, the Victorian sage is often found whooping and cutting capers.

In such a state of affairs, the Outsider is always the man who is not susceptible to the general enthusiasm; it may be that he is too short-sighted to see the establishment of Utopia before the end of the century. At all events, he is bound to be a child of his century if he draws his nourishment from its earth; he cannot be a nihilistic pessimist (like Camus and Sartre) in a century when the philosophers are behaving like cowboys at a rodeo. He cannot believe that it is human nature that is in the wrong, for rationalism has completely discredited such morbid dogmas as original sin. He must believe that he alone
is in the wrong. Human nature cannot be sick, since the prevailing philosophy of the time declares it to be perfectible. It follows that it is the Outsider who is in some way
‘
not of this world
’
, and if he dies young, like Shelley, or is a sick man, like Novalis and Schiller, or takes drugs, like Coleridge, that is all in the proper order of things. It only remains for him to set the seal of respectability on his life by claiming to be a Platonic idealist, a dreamer of dreams, and the bourgeois is quite willing to admit his right to exist. The Outsider has his proper place in the Order of Society, as the impractical dreamer.

This is the situation we find at the beginning of the last century in Europe. Goethe had invented the Romantic Outsider in his
Sorrows of Toung Werther;
the type of the high, idealistic young poet, pale, but manly. In the previous century, the pining lover had been a comic figure:

Will, when looking well can
’
t move her Looking ill prevail
?
¹

Young Werther brought about a change of heart. Schiller
’
s
Robbers
and
Don Carlos
followed. (Nietzsche somewhere quotes a German military man as saying: If God had foreseen the
Robbers
he would not have created the world
’
—to such an extent does it set up the humanistic standard and discredit the divine.) There was Novalis, scientist and romantic, who created Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the poet predestined from birth for a high destiny of singing. In England, German romanticism was introduced when Coleridge translated Schiller and Byron published
^‘
Childe Harold
’
. Shelley
’
s Alastor is a young man who pines away and dies because he can find no earthly counterpart of the beautiful girl who had embraced him once in a dream. The dream reveals to Heinrich von Ofterdingen his future path.

At a little distance rose hazy blue cliffs through whose sides shone gleaming veins of gold. All around him was a soft mellow light, and the skies above him were blue and cloudless.
²

When, half a century later, William Morris writes of his own vision of a socialist Utopia, it expresses itself naturally in
‘
A Dream of John BalP. The romantic Outsider is a
‘
dreamer of
other worlds
’
. He is
not
very active—not for the same reason as Evan Strowde, but because he is essentially a dreamer,
^‘
the idle singer of an empty day
’
. In this role we can trace him from Goethe
’
s Werther to Thomas Mann
’
s Tonio Kroger. He is the father of Barbusse
’
s hero with his hole in the wall, and so of Roquentin and Meursault. The twentieth century simply alters the way of presenting him, feels the need to place him in his environment. The treatment of the theme becomes more clinical, more analytical. The hilltops and mountain caves disappear from the scenery props; Barbusse
’
s Outsider comes on, with his small room in a modern city. But he is still the romantic. His main concern is still the fact that his surroundings seem incapable of fully satisfying his desires. He is afraid that the world was not created to meet the demands of the human spirit. He is troubled and frustrated today, and he is afraid he may die troubled and frustrated, with nothing but a series of only partly satisfying experiences to give him incentive to get out of bed in the morning.

We can witness the change in method of presenting the Outsider in a writer like James Joyce, who kept a foot in both traditions, romantic and social realist. His
‘
artist
’
, Stephen Dedalus, begins as the type of the predestined poet:

The noise of children at play annoyed him, and their silly voices made him feel that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image that his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to find it, or how...
⁸

Joyce writes of:

The unrest which sent him wandering in the evening from garden to garden in search of Mercedes (the heroine of Dumas
’
s
Count of Monte Cristo).
A vague dissatisfaction grew up within him as he looked on the quays and on the river and on the lowering skies, and yet he continued to wander up and down, day after day, as if he really sought someone that eluded him.