Colin Wilson, overpriced at nothing
the-tls.co.uk
the-tls.co.uk
But this is an unbearable, typically provincial, English critique of his work, complete with class-based explanations and snobbery, attacks on him being an autodidact and so on.
I don't think he deserves to be judged nearly as harshly as this article does. I strongly suspect that Wilson's gravest sin in the eyes of the author was his rejection of Marxism (which, of course, automatically makes him a "fascist" by the standards that seem to prevail in the "literary" community).
Wilson's persistent fascination with the occult and hidden potentials of "consciousness" (which he accepts as being a sort of fixed thing in all of history)--and his relative willingness to accept without much criticism the authoritarian elements of a huge swatch of that milieu--does lend itself to this explanation.
OTOH his tendency to resort to epicycles in explaining his theories (which are usually postulating, rather than explaining, something) is more the sign of an undisciplined thinker. On edit, Wilson seems like the hippie answer to J.G. Ballard, whose essay on the "half-educated man" seems relevant for what Wilson stumbles towards. Granted, in the wikipedia era, that's all of us.
Lifeforce is a great movie, though. Definitely better than the book.
An artist seems to have to be general enough to appeal and be understood by an audience while original enough to be compared to other genius on method but not content.
That is abstract but hopefully the point was there. The second piece is groupthink. For example, what would happen if the first 10 well respected critics said his follow on novel was so brilliant it outshined his earlier work. I don't know, but there as a degree of taste shaping, a degree of originality & and a degree of tradition that make up the "value" and it is interesting to think about.