When I was writing this book I used to tell people that I intended to be the Richard Ellman of Satanic pulp. I wasn’t, however, thinking of Ellman’s reputation for mistakes. A Joyce enthusiast once subjected me to a litany of errors in Ellman’s definitive James Joyce biography, later to be dwarfed by the number of slips in his magisterial book on Oscar Wilde. Horst Schroeder has published a list of these, which has itself now run to an enlarged second edition of 311 pages (Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellman’s Oscar Wilde, Braunschweig, 2002).
Inevitably a few errors crept into The Devil is a Gentleman. It is irritating to have first and second editions which differ in unknown ways, leaving unspecified errors in the first, so I’d like to identify them here. This will also serve as an errata list for the earlier book, to which page references are given:
* Guildford Street [p.97] should be Guilford Street.
* Dr. X. Jacobus [p.111] should be Dr. Jacobus X.
* J.G. Flecker [p.175] should be J.E. Flecker.
* Baron Von Gloedel [p.180] should be Baron von Gloeden.
* Aleister Crowley’s dictum should be “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”, not “name of the Law” [p.299], and there is another misquotation from Crowley’s Book of the Law : “Mercy be let off” [p.305] should be “Mercy let be off”.
* Montague Summers’s secretary-companion should be Hector Stuart-Forbes, not Forbes-Stuart [p.318]
* Two and sixpence should be a half crown, not “a florin” or two shillings [p.320].
* Reticent widows [p.327] should be reticent windows.
* Gerald Gardner’s “Grand Rite” [p.525] should be “Great Rite”.
* To The Devil – A Daughter was not quite Hammer’s last film [p.598]; that was their remake of The Lady Vanishes in 1978.
* Nine words of text (“where the Talisman is hidden. Here,‘the perverted maniac’”) were missing around the pictures on pp.332–335.
Anthony Powell is said by his biographer to have described himself as “a fan” of Wheatley’s work, and I have quoted this on p.589. Having now seen the letter that this is based on (to Timothy d’Arch Smith, 29th April 1988) I’m sure that when Powell says he knew Wheatley “as a fan,” he meant Wheatley was a fan of his.
The absurd thing with errors is that they tend to be things one actually knows – what was I thinking of with “Do what thou wilt…”? – but something I didn’t know was who Charles Morgan was, and I over-enthusiastically confused him with Charles Williams on p.484. Morgan was on the Royal Society of Literature panel, but he was not an esoteric Christian writer and he never appeared in The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult.
Phil Baker
Saint Walburga’s Eve 2011