The Philosopher’s Stone by Colin Wilson. Wingbow Press, 1969. 268 pages. ISBN 0-914728-28-8.
Colin Wilson was a weird character. Prolific and obviously intelligent, he wrote one well-respected work of literary criticism and also wrote less influential works in other fields before he mostly turned to parapsychology and became a crank. At one point, he made disparaging comments about the work of H. P. Lovecraft, which brought him to the attention of Lovecraft’s biggest fanboy, August Derleth.
Derleth is not well-liked by Lovecraft’s admirers, ironically, because he is largely responsible for creating what we now call the “Cthulhu mythos.” Lovecraft, though he borrowed from himself frequently, never envisioned a unified, overarching “mythos” for his work (though he came close in At the Mountains of Madness). It was Derleth who went back over Lovecraft’s work and tried to harmonize it, though he in the process rejected Lovecraft’s misanthropy and Nietzscheanism and replaced them with a more conventional good-and-evil battle. Today’s Lovecraft fans disparage Derleth for this and have largely jettisoned his contributions, but like it or not, he founded the publishing company Arkham House, which is largely responsible for preserving Lovecraft’s work and making it generally well known.
Derleth took offense at Wilson’s dismissal of Lovecraft and challenged him to write his own Lovecraftian fiction. Wilson obliged, first producing The Mind Parasites and following it up with the novel before us, The Philosopher’s Stone.
Wilson, as he explains in his foreword, sincerely believed he could do Lovecraft better than Lovecraft did. However, there is a reason you’ve heard of Lovecraft and (in all likelihood) haven’t heard of Wilson.
The reason is, this book sucks.
The Plot
There is no plot. The narrator of the novel, from early boyhood, showed great intellectual acumen and, after receiving a sizable inheritance from a benefactor, which enabled him to live comfortably, proceeded to study anything his fancy desired, although his main area of study is in how to extend the human lifespan, and he becomes convinced that people die simply because they get bored and give up, and not for any other reason—a theory that’s decidedly hard to swallow, even in a work of fiction. Aside from intellectual arrogance, the narrator has no personality to speak of, and he encounters no dead ends and makes no serious errors in his judgments or ideas, no matter how outlandish they become.
He is clearly the author’s sock puppet.
The story, such as it is, begins around the book’s middle: The narrator meets a man named Littleway, and the two of them begin a study of brain activity, which leads them to try inserting a recently invented alloy in people’s skulls. After noticing singular effects on their subjects, they perform this operation on themselves and develop mental superpowers, giving them the ability to intuit facts with great accuracy, read the psychic history of objects, and project real-seeming mental holograms, among other abilities.
These new-found powers do not change the direction of the book much; the men simply continue their intellectual pursuits. Around two-thirds of the way through the book, there is a subplot in which they discover sure proof of the popular fringe theory that Bacon actually wrote the works of William Shakespeare; although this has nothing to do with the story as a whole, Wilson takes that as an opportunity to dismiss Shakespeare as a bad and shallow writer concerned with nothing but trivialities.
And that, I think, adequately vindicates Lovecraft: It doesn’t prove that anything Wilson said about Lovecraft is wrong, of course, but it does show that Wilson is no judge of literature, and that Lovecraft is in good company, being dismissed by this same man.
Through all of this, the narrator, and thus Wilson, comes across as a blowhard. I occasionally wondered if he were actually the villain of the story since his arrogance sometimes takes on a sinister character: For example, at one point, he muses that he must, given his vast mental powers, become the ruler of the human race. I kept expecting to reach a twist in which it turns out that his experiments had driven him mad, but that never happens.
The Lovecraftian Stuff
It is probably in the last quarter of the novel that the Lovecraftian elements finally show up. The narrator and his companion discover a secret history in which humanity was created by a race of immaterial beings called the Great Old Ones, and they discover fragments of the Necronomicon and other grimoires as dark powers try to thwart them. As they make their discoveries, they ultimately lay out a fairly interesting primordial history of the human race, which was created to be the Great Old Ones’ tools.
Themes
This brings us around to probably one of the most difficult points in Lovecraft’s fiction. Lovecraft frequently treated of the human race as some kind of aberration, and in At the Mountains of Madness, he suggests that the Great Old Ones made man as a joke or a mistake.
Whether Lovecraft was actually such a misanthrope or merely used misanthropy for artistic effect is more difficult to discern—probably, it was for artistic effect. His harshest critics today, following today’s fashions, mostly accuse him of “racism,” an accusation that is not entirely without merit since Lovecraft followed the fashions of his own day, which tended toward eugenics: He considered the Negro inferior, but he was even more terrified of Caucasian backwoodsmen, who he thought were degenerating. In his fiction, he sometimes depicted them regressing into cannibalistic apes.
It should be clear, however, that a racist or a eugenicist cannot be a misanthrope: If humanity as a whole is worthless, there is no point in fretting about its racial purity.
Wilson on Lovecraft
From there, we can move into a discussion of how Wilson’s novel forms a dialogue with Lovecraft’s corpus. The Philosopher’s Stone does have a unique take on some of Lovecraft’s ideas: Lovecraft was a devotee of Friedrich Nietzsche, whereas Wilson was an admirer of George Bernard Shaw—who was Nietzsche’s popularizer. Thus, Wilson and Lovecraft have different approaches to similar themes.
One thing poorly understood by some Lovecraft fans, or at least by August Derleth, is that Lovecraft did not see his elder gods and eldritch abominations as evil; rather, he saw them as Nietzschean supermen with a morality alien to ours; the reason Cthulhu can devour and destroy without remorse is not that Cthulhu is wicked but that he is utterly different from us and also higher than us, so he can crush us as thoughtlessly as we might crush ants.
Wilson, however, probably thanks to Shaw, views humanity as moving toward a higher, superhuman status via what Shaw calls the “life force,” his interpretation of Nietzsche’s “will to power.” Whereas Lovecraft, at least in his fiction, treats of humanity as a joke or a mistake that is soon to be scrubbed from the universe, Wilson envisions a future in which an evolved humanity can confront the Great Old Ones on equal terms: They are supermen, but we can become supermen also.
Conclusion
When viewed as an appendage to Lovecraft’s work, Wilson’s ideas are certainly interesting, and it is probably safe to say that few of Lovecraft’s imitators have taken his ideas in this particular direction. A lot of writers have followed in Lovecraft’s footsteps, but Wilson could probably claim with confidence that he was one of the most original among them.
It is just unfortunate that this novel isn’t very good.
