The 8th of January 1972 was Wheatley’s 75th birthday. Hutchinson put out a handsome celebratory booklet, featuring a cake with candles; it looks rather like an album cover of the period. He’d had a family party the night before, with a visit to the theatre, supper for eight at Cadogan Square, and “lots of champagne”. Even though it was a Saturday, Wheatley then worked through the day on his next book.
Wheatley’s birthday was widely noted in the press, as befitted a national institution. That year he appeared on the radio programme Desert Island Discs, his first choice of record being the ‘The Man Who Broke The Bank at Monte Carlo’; a man with whom he could probably identify. The recording is lost, but it is likely that Wheatley talked about his good fortune.
Wheatley’s other choices show a mixture of patriotism, sentimentality, and unpretentious musical philistinism. He had the Chelsea Pensioners performing ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’, from the First War, and from the same period ‘If You Were The Only Girl in the World (and I were the only boy)’, along with Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance, recorded at the Last Night of the Proms. Finally he chose Noel Coward’s ‘I’ll See You Again’, from Bittersweet, which had been the theme song of his romance with Joan.
Wheatley’s books were now widely advertised in the Sunday Colour Supplements and elsewhere, in the ‘Heron Library’ editions. Heron specialised in sets of classic books bound in luxurious, heirloom quality, leather-look plastic (“like the creamy skin of one of Miss Du Maurier’s heroines, these books cry out to be caressed”). Heron’s forte was extraordinarily sensational advertising copy, which positively dared readers to buy the books. “For every real man who has a place in his heart where no women are allowed” was their advert for Darwin’s Origin of the Species, while “Lose all your illusions about Russian women – for only 75p” was the Heron Dostoyevsky. Those Heron adverts now seem part of the Monty Python era.
Given the genuinely sensational nature of Wheatley’s writing, his adverts were less ridiculous than some of the others. They featured a “A solemn warning by Dennis Wheatley” – his old disclaimer from The Devil Rides Out – along with a picture of a naked blonde standing before a robed and hooded figure. “Now – if you dare – accept this wickedly handsome volume The Devil Rides Out FREE”, ran the offer. Like a box of chocolates, the Heron Wheatley was “a collection of almost sinful luxury”, and it was highly contemporary to boot: “witchcraft … black magic … hardly a week goes by without a sensational headline appearing in our newspapers …”
Heron published around fifty volumes of Wheatley, which quite often turn up in charity shops. A few seem to have met a stranger fate, with stories of moral crusaders and born-again Christians throwing expensive leather-bound sets of Dennis Wheatley on to bonfires. Apart from Wheatley’s own set of his books, later owned by John Paul Getty, there have been precious few leather-bound Wheatleys. The books in question must be the Heron Library.
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Wheatley had recently published The Ravishing of Lady Mary Ware, the tenth book in the Roger Brook series. He was pressing on with the Brook novels at speed because he was anxious not to die without having completed them, and before long (having knocked off The Strange Story of Linda Lee in the meantime) he was at work on another, The Irish Witch.
Knowing what his public now wanted, the penultimate Roger Brook story is a tale of black magic. At the climax of the book, with its familiar Wheatley crux of sexual degradation salaciously avoided just in the nick of time, Roger Brook’s own daughter is being held down by a large negro named Aboe so that Father Damien, the evil priest, can rape her. The horrified Brook can do nothing except watch, when fortunately a gigantic frog suddenly appears, and gobbles all the Satanists up.
The Irish Witch is not Wheatley’s best book. He was particularly mortified when Hedman wrote to point out an error in the opening sentence, which makes Copenhagen the capital of Sweden. He pressed on with the next volume.
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Wheatley had a number of re-usable ‘lines’ for journalists, but in 1973 he came up with a new one. Interviewed for the popular paper Titbits, he pointed to the wall map he had made of his travels, on which it was apparent that he had been almost everywhere except Russia. And there was a very good reason for that, he said, because he had been so closely involved with secret strategic planning during the War:
the Russians … undoubtedly keep dossiers on people who have been engaged in Intelligence work, and they’ve probably got one on me. It would be very easy nowadays for somebody to slip something incriminating into my luggage and give the Russians an excuse to pull me in for questioning.
Did he believe it himself ? We shall never know, but whether Titbits thought it was likely can be judged from their Walter Mitty title, ‘The Secret Life of Dennis Wheatley’.
The 1970s were continuing to be anarchic. Following Bloody Sunday in 1972, the IRA stepped up their bombing campaign. Baader-Meinhof and the Red Army Faction were also in the news, along with the Japanese Red Army massacre in Israel, and the Olympic Games murders by the Black September group.
1973 saw immense controversy over the film of A Clockwork Orange, with its rape and violence. There was more IRA bombing in London. The young John Paul Getty III was kidnapped and had his ear cut off in the autumn, when things seemed to be reaching rock bottom with the oil crisis, the Three Day Week, and the Miners’ Strike. The unions had already been closing one or other of the nation’s three TV channels for a night at a time, and now they cut the electricity supply. All over the country, families played board games by candle light. The word “diabolical,” which should have been more at home in the work of Montague Summers, could now be heard on television as shop stewards accused the management of taking diabolical liberties. “We are having a pretty grim time here but hope for better times in 1974”, Wheatley wrote to Hedman in December 1973.
1974 was, if anything, worse. A State of Emergency was declared in January. Wheatley had long been suggesting that someone had to “take a pull”, and this was becoming a widespread view among people of his vintage and outlook: things were looking pretty bad from clubland. There were rumours of counter-revolutionary forces being mustered, and 1974 was the year of the so-called “private armies”, notably “Civil Assistance”, headed by General Sir Walter Walker, and “GB 75”, headed by David Stirling, founder of the SAS and a member of White’s. These were said to be ready to step in and “keep essential services running”. A number of the people involved were friends of Wheatley, including Sir Colin Gubbins and Sir John (“Jack”) Slessor, Marshal of the Royal Airforce and now a member of a group called the Resistance and Psychological Operations Committee (RPOC). He had promised practical assistance to Sir Walter Walker.
It has subsequently been suggested by specialist commentators that the private armies never amounted to very much in reality, and that this was less because they represented the fears of a few old men and more because they were a form of PR, their machinations being carefully leaked now and then to the press. They were, it seems, largely a form of ‘psy-ops’ psychological warfare, or even deception planning.
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Wheatley’s life had become clubbier, largely thanks to Derrick Morley. The Boodles’ fiasco was long behind him. In 1968 he had become a member of Pratt’s, and in 1969 Morley had put him up for White’s. Wheatley had given him a list to help, “Members of Whites Who Are Friends of Dennis Wheatley” with fifteen names and notes on each. He was still on the waiting list for White’s, but he was already very much at home in St.James’s Street. His favourite restaurant, Prunier’s, stood towards the bottom of the slope, with his shoemaker, Lobb, just across the road. Justerini and Brook’s had moved once more and now also stood on St.James’s Street, just on the corner with Park Place, where Pratt’s has its discreet basement premises.
He was also making more use of the St.James’s Club on Piccadilly, which Morley had got him into some years earlier. Christopher Lee remembers Wheatley lunching him there, and that on one occasion Wheatley turned up wearing a teddy-bear coat and a white Homburg hat, which Lee said made him look like Al Capone; this made Wheatley laugh.
Wheatley had also become good friends with Anthony Powell, who rather unexpectedly seems to have described himself as “a fan” of Wheatley’s books (and whose sinister character Canon Fenneau seems to have something of Copely-Syle about his appearance, although Powell denied any borrowing). They would lunch quite regularly at the St.James’s Club. Powell inscribed a number of books to Wheatley, including a copy of Books Do Furnish A Room, which he inscribed “from a fellow furnisher”. Wheatley brought along his copy of Powell’s plays The Garden God and The Rest I’ll Whistle for Powell to sign, and Powell admired his bookplate with Eric Tombe as Pan: he wrote beside it that it was “eminently appropriate, first, I thought, for the G.G., but really for either play.” When it came to Hearing Secret Harmonies, a late volume in The Dance to The Music Of Time which involves a Crowleyish cult in the late Sixties, Powell wrote “I fear I rather trespass on your own territory here”.
Powell sought Wheatley’s help with A Dance To The Music of Time, not on some point of occult esoterica, but with the plot. Powell was stuck with his plotting, and wrote to Wheatley in January 1972,
Briefly, the situation is this; the new book opens with Widmerpool involved in trouble with his East/West commercial/cultural activities, in which he has given something serious away to a Communist power … Ideally I would like something then to happen that gets him out of the bag… it did occur to me that you might have a suggestion …
Wheatley wrote back with several suggestions for developing the plot, and Powell (“Tony”) in due course wrote back and thanked him for sorting out the situation in the book.
Writing later in his Journals, Powell mentions “the Dennis Wheatley category … of relatively intelligent men who write more or less conscious drivel.” By Powell’s standards of condescension, “relatively intelligent” was in fact high praise (compare Henry Green, “not all that intelligent”; Graham Greene, “absurdly overrated”; and Nabokov, “appallingly third rate tinsel stuff ”.)
A month or so later in the same journal he promotes Wheatley to simply “intelligent”. He is now “an intelligent man who writes absurd historical romances”, and Powell discloses that the protagonist of his own last novel, Valentine Beals in The Fisher King, is “slightly modelled” on Wheatley in that respect, although “not of course in any other.”
Not in any other? We shall see. Powell’s picture of Beals is worth a closer look for the light it sheds on both of them, and on the reasons why a Wheatley figure should have the strange distinction of being Powell’s final protagonist.
Beals is not a very common name, but it was the name of the butler in Wheatley’s board game Alibi. Valentine Beals has switched from selling drink to writing, and although he is unloved by reviewers, he knows “more than most writers about the ways of business.” Beals is not the sort of writer whose acquaintance offered “the smallest intellectual cachet, indeed rather the reverse”, although he has his good points. As for intellectual and critical neglect, he finds compensation in the revenue from his books. In his role of international best-seller (almost everywhere except America, which irks him) he gears any flashes of his imagination “to purely commercial requirements; in practice limiting them severely to the capacities of his regular readership, which he did not overestimate.”
He has also been something of a pioneer in putting explicit sex into the historical novel. Another character has never read a Beals book, but he can guess the tone: “I was a great reader of historical novels as a boy. Stanley Weyman, Jeffrey Farnol, Baroness Orczy, Rafael Sabatini. I understand you [Beals] have given them all cause to look to their laurels – anyway, regret their inadequate treatment of life’s sexual side.” Salacious details aside, his books are educational for the young because of their “easy history”; he has a knack of putting “a lot of information down in a readable form”. You could learn a lot about the Lollards, for example, from his book The Wizard on the Heath.
The particularly salient point about Beals is that he has “an innate taste for pin-pointing archetypes”, and he spots at once that the crippled photographer Saul Henchman is the Fisher King of the Grail myth (“archetypal figures were a hobby of his”). This is precisely Powell’s own taste, and what he does in his own work. The Fisher King relies on Beals’s point of view in this respect, and it is something Powell and Wheatley share, underpinning Powell’s much greater novel sequence A Dance To The Music Of Time.
In their perception of grand parallels, Powell, Beals and Wheatley all transmute ordinary circumstances into the timeless and reassuring realm of myth, transforming the merely contingent and chaotic into something more Platonic. At the opening of Dance, some modern workmen standing around a brazier become firstly Roman soldiers and then the figures in Poussin’s painting A Dance To The Music of Time. Through the mythological and even astrological patterns that Powell weaves into his work, modern life becomes as harmoniously ordered as the Music of the Spheres, just as Wheatley can subsume a jumble of contemporary problems and anxieties into the timeless struggle between Light and Darkness.
Both writers – the one immensely subtle in this respect, the other notoriously simplistic – share this conservative aesthetic of taking refuge from the slippages of history by turning to the timelessness of myth, something often remarked about reactionary modernists such as Yeats and Eliot. In his final book, Powell assigns this quality to the Wheatley figure, just as he generously gives him the transcendental moment – in this case more Powell than Wheatley – of watching a dancer whose performance seemed to be “taking place on some transcendental plane. The musicians were immediately aware that they were participating in an act of magic.”
At the opposite pole from this reassuring magic comes the revealing final line of Powell’s last novel, describing the view across a misty Scottish loch. It becomes “the frontiers of Thule: the edge of the known world: man’s permitted limits; a green-barriered check point, beyond which the fearful cataract of torrential seas cascaded down into Chaos.”
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P.G.Wodehouse, writing the foreword to Charles Graves’s book about London clubs, Leather Armchairs (which Wheatley owned, a present from “Don” Donegall) said the subject seemed almost “too sad for my typewriter. I got the impression that all the clubs in London were crying for bread and at a loss to know where their next ten bob was coming from.” This was certainly the case with the St.James’s Club, which was beset by financial problems. Wheatley was always good at dealing with “the Demon Finance” and “the Boodle Fiend”, and he suggested a quarterly members’ lottery, to which members could subscribe by Bankers’ Order. This idea seems not to have been taken up.
Wheatley liked the St.James’s Club, and when he dined there he enjoyed being looked down on by portraits of the original Hell Fire Club, founded by Sir Francis Dashwood; these belonged to the old Dilettanti Club which, having no premises of its own, had loaned them to the St.James’s. It was a blow when in 1974 it finally had to close; moving with the times, the building is now a college for teaching English as a foreign language.
In 1975, however, Wheatley at last became a member of White’s, a club slightly older than the Bank of England and described by its historian, Percy Colson, as “an oasis of civilisation in a desert of democracy”. J.G.Links remembered that Wheatley was so pleased “his first object was to get to the Candidates’ Book when no one else was looking and see his own page.” He found his candidacy had been supported by thirty-five members, and he couldn’t help boasting modestly to Links, “Not bad,” he said, “for the Streatham born son of a shopkeeper.”.
Wheatley still loved joining things – a 1969 Times profile said “He pines, I think, to belong” – and in 1975 he joined a different sort of club, a dining club called the Saintsbury Club. This was founded back in the 1920s in honour of the literary critic and wine buff George Saintsbury, author of Notes on a Cellar Book, and it meets twice a year. The club exists by the generosity of its members, who donate the wine that is drunk.
Wheatley’s donation included six bottles of Old Brown Sherry, sixty years in the bottle, from the cellars of a marquis, twelve bottles of 1964 Dom Perignon, and four bottles of 1955 Chateau d’Yquem. None of them were drunk in his lifetime. Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde’s grandson and keeper of the Saintsbury Club Archives, describes it as “a very generous gift, especially given his age and the fact that he was only a member for such a short time.”
Wheatley had joined both White’s and the Saintsbury Club rather late in his life. Writing of the archetypal clubman, back in 1911, Ralph Nevill says how much he loves his club, and how he likes to spend time there.
So he lunches and dines, dines and lunches, till the sands of the hourglass have run out, and the moment comes for him to enter that great club of which all humanity must perforce become members.