The Occult

The publication of this book had the effect of changing my life.

Fifteen years earlier, in 1956, I had had the curious – but not necessarily pleasant – experience of achieving overnight fame. My first book, The Outsider, had appeared in May 1956, and was launched with excellent reviews from the most respected critics. Unfortunately, the tabloids were also fascinated by this phenomenon of a twenty-four-year-old working-class writer who had produced a work of philosophy, and I began to figure in the gossip columns.

That same week, another young writer named John Osborne achieved sudden fame with a play called Look Back in Anger. He and I were inevitably bracketed together, under the label ‘Angry Young Men’. And the sheer amount of silly publicity we received that summer alienated all the serious critics. By the autumn of that year we were being constantly attacked. My own second book, Religion and the Rebel, was hatcheted, while Osborne’s satirical musical, The World of Paul Slickey, aroused such hostility that he was chased down Shaftesbury Avenue by the first-night audience. Everyone was sick of Angry Young Men.

I escaped to Cornwall with my girlfriend Joy, and in due course we started a family. But the intense hostility remained, and my books were often not even reviewed. It was obviously going to take a long time for all the silly publicity about Angry Young Men to be forgotten; it was still dogging me in the late 1960s.

Then, in 1969, my American literary agent, Scott Meredith, wrote to ask me if I would be interested in writing a book about ‘the occult’ for Random House, in New York. It was not a subject that interested me particularly, but I accepted it because I needed the money.

That autumn I spent some time as a ‘Writer in Residence’ at the extramural department of an American college in Majorca. We were living in the same village as the poet Robert Graves, Deya. When I asked Graves’ advice on writing a book on the ‘occult’, it came in one word: ‘Don’t’.

But by then, a commission I had treated almost as a joke had begun to interest me. I had assumed, to begin with, that ghosts were a superstition. Then I discovered that they had been believed in by every civilisation for thousands of years, and began to feel that perhaps my dismissive attitude was a mistake. I began meeting people who had experienced various odd phenomena; one woman told me of her ‘Out-of-the-Body’ experience when she was suffering from fever in hospital, while my mother had seen some kind of an angel when she was apparently dying from a burst appendix, and had been told that she had to return because ‘her time had not yet come’. She lived another thirty-six years.

Even my father, who was not particularly interested in my work – being a non-reader – had a sudden intuition that my book on ‘the occult’ would be a success, and said so several times in the early 1970s.

As soon as I began to write, I was carried away. Material seemed to fall into my lap. One story that impressed me particularly was told to me by the wife of the Scottish poet Hugh M’Diarmid, who happened to be a communist. Valda M’Diarmid told me that whenever her husband travelled abroad – usually to some place like Moscow or Peking – she always knew when he would be coming home, because their dog would go and sit at the end of the lane for several days in advance. On one occasion, it had known about his return before he did.

This fascinated me. It obviously did the dog no good whatever to know its master was on his way home. It just sat there. But it clearly possessed some natural faculty of ‘tuning in’ to its master’s mind.

I came to formulate a theory of ‘the occult’: that it is a natural faculty that we all possess, but that human beings have deliberately got rid of because it would be a nuisance.

During the war, a Dutch house painter called Peter Hurkos fell off a ladder and fractured his skull. When he woke up in hospital, he found he could read the minds of his fellow patients, and knew all kinds of intimate details about them. But when he went back to work, he realised the disadvantages of this new ability: he could not concentrate. His brain buzzed continually with unwanted information about his fellow human beings, and he felt thoroughly distracted. It was not until he realised he could make use of this ability as a stage entertainer that he solved the problem of how to make a living.

And he was not simply able to read minds. He could handle a piece of clothing that belonged to someone who had disappeared, and say: ‘That girl was murdered’ or ‘That child was drowned’. And what is even odder, he could add: ‘And the child’s body will reappear on the tenth of next month’, and more often than not, be correct. Yet foreseeing the future ought to be impossible, since it has not yet happened.

The Occult seemed to pour out of me in one long burst. It almost seemed to write itself. The publisher had asked me to write a hundred thousand words – about three hundred pages. But it was obvious that this book would need to be far longer. In fact, the British publisher (Hutchinsons) was so alarmed by the size of the typescript that he suggested I find another publisher. My agent soon found me another who was not worried by its size – Hodder – who, indeed, even offered to let me expand it.

Hodders also decided to issue a pamphlet about me, and to increase my advance, which troubled me. After ten years of poor sales, I was afraid they would lose their money. But they proved to be right. The book was not only widely and respectfully reviewed, but sold excellently. So did the American edition, which immediately went into a Book Club edition.

The English paperback came out in a large, grass-green volume, with some nonsensical quote about it being ‘a book for those who would walk with the gods’. But this also sold impressively. When I went back on a visit to my home town, Leicester, I paid a visit to Lewis’s, the department store where I had met Joy in 1953, and discovered a huge rack of The Occult paperback, holding at least a hundred copies.

So the book did a great deal for me. I ceased to be stigmatised as an ‘Angry Young Man’, and became a more-or-less respectable member of the literary establishment. Since I was by then forty, and we had three children, I was rather relieved.

Why do I suppose the book did so well? I feel I owe this partly to a curious historical phenomenon: that in the last decades of every century, there is a sudden revival of interest in the paranormal. In the last decades of the sixteenth century, it was John Dee; a century later (incredibly) Sir Isaac Newton, who was a dedicated alchemist, a century later, Cagliostro, and a century later still, that whole nineteenth-century movement that included Lord Lytton, Eliphaz Levi, Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn. (A book called The Occult Establishment by James Webb tells the whole amazing story.)

In the twentieth century, it all started again with a book called The Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, which became a bestseller in the 1960s; then came my own book, in the wake of a part-work called Man, Myth and Magic, and then a whole ‘magical revival’, with a flood of similar books. And while The Occult did not go into as many languages as The Outsider, it certainly became a close second.

But for me, The Occult did a great deal more than make me ‘respectable’. It also served as a kind of awakening. Before 1970, I had been inclined to dismiss ‘the occult’ as superstitious nonsense. Writing The Occult made me aware that the paranormal is as real as quantum physics (and, in fact, has a great deal in common with it), and that anyone who refuses to take it into account is simply shutting his eyes to half the universe.