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as the nurse of a half-insane virago who lived in Earls Court; she would prove to be our worst trial so far, and she exhausted us both so much that when we separated—to try and find yet another home—we concluded that we were sick of marriage, and drifted apart.
    During the next three years I worked at a series of temporary jobs—in offices, factories, coffee bars—and tried to write a novel about an ‘outsider’ who feels as Ouspensky did about modern civilisation.I had always been fascinated by rebels and ‘outsiders’, social misfits who loathe what the philosopher Heidegger called ‘the triviality of everydayness’.And it was while working as a dishwasher in a London coffee bar in the mid-1950s that I decided to lay aside the novel and try to express my frustrations in a more straightforward manner by writing a book about ‘outsiders’.
    It proved to be a good decision. The Outsider happened to be accepted by the first publisher to whom I sent a dozen or so pages, and, when it appeared in 1956, became an immediate bestseller.This was partly because it was a book that had something new to say—I am neither stupid nor modest enough to regard its success as a fluke.But it was also because the English literary scene had been singularly devoid of new talent since the end of the war.And the journalists who wrote about me made much of my publisher’s admission that I was only 24, and that I had written it in the Reading Room of the British Museum, while sleeping during the nights on Hampstead Heath to save rent.
    The result, at all events, was an explosion of international notoriety and more money than I had ever dreamed of.But fame, I soon discovered, also had its negative side.The British are not—to put it mildly—a nation of intellectuals.Unlike the French, the Germans—even the Americans—they take no interest in the world of ideas.They were impressed by The Outsider because it had been written by a 24-year-old who had not been to a university.But they were not really in the least interested in romantic rebels with foreign names like Novalis, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Ouspensky.Moreover, it soon became clear that the popular press resented the publicity for which they themselves were responsible, and which had helped to make the book such a success.In the following year, 1957, they seized the first opportunity to announce their complete loss of interest in the whole Outsider phenomenon.This happened to be after the publication of my second book, Religion and the Rebel, which was hatcheted.The Americans, always delighted to see a success-bubble explode, followed suit.( Time ran a headline ‘Scrambled Egghead’.)
    I found it a traumatic experience.But at least I was infinitely better off than when I was working for £5 a week in a plastic factory or coffee bar.Ever since I had been a small boy, I had dreamed of living in a tub, like Diogenes, or in some tiny room under the earth, rather like one of Tolkien’s Hobbit holes—a warm, comfortable retreat stocked with food and books.I didn’t really much care for being ‘famous’ and going to literary parties; mixing too much with people bewildered me and gave me a sensation I called ‘people-poisoning’.I wanted to be allowed to spend my days reading and thinking.So, together with my girlfriend Joy—whom I had met soon after my marriage broke up—I moved to a remote area of Cornwall, into an old cottage that was a fairly good imitation of a Hobbit hole, and went back with relief to reading, writing and thinking about the ideas that interested me so much.
    What were these ideas?Well, to begin with, I had a deep conviction that man is on the point of an evolutionary breakthrough to a higher stage.These strange ecstasies that filled the romantics with an odd sense of power and certainty were not illusions: they were, in fact, glimpses of the unknown powers of the human mind.H.G.Wells once remarked that the world has changed more in the past sixty years