Wheatley’s next book, The Ka of Gifford Hillary, was about a man who comes back from the grave with a freshly acquired social conscience. This was something of a new departure.
Its main supernatural plank was the Egyptian idea of the “Ka”, a kind of astral body. Wheatley had long been interested in Egypt – when his secretary Audrey went to Paris in the mid Thirties, the two places he particularly advised her to visit were Prunier’s for its lobster and the Louvre for its Egyptian galleries – and he owned a bronze figure of the Ka, along with another of the resurrected god Osiris.
Gifford is a military shipbuilder, and he has employed a Professor Owen Evans to develop a “death ray”. Short and bearded, Evans is a parody of a redbrick professor, and in this instance not merely provincial but a stage Welshman (“Land of my fathers!”).
Gifford goes trustingly with Evans to a demonstration of the death ray, only to feel a pain in his chest. Looking downwards, he is astonished to see his body lying there in its burgundy velvet smoking jacket. Evans has murdered him, but his consciousness survives.
Evans has been having an affair with Gifford’s promiscuous wife, Lady Ankaret, carried away by her beauty and social class, but she is not serious about him, and she is appalled by what he has done. Wheatley goes to town on Evans’s Welshness as the pair fall out (“Is it mad you are, woman?”). Ankaret helps him dispose of the body, then kills him. Gifford forgives her for leading Evans on: she was “a born pagan but in no way evil. I longed to comfort her.”
The Ka Of Gifford Hillary was one of Wheatley’s top five best-sellers. Much of its appeal comes from the depiction of Gifford’s existence after death: as The Times once wrote of Wheatley, “He makes the unbelievable seem absolutely real”. Gifford finds he can now fly, although it is not quite as he expects:
Naturally, I supposed that, as a disembodied spirit, I should be able to flit from place to place without effort and, having no weight, I – or rather the mind of which I now solely consisted – could remain poised high up in the air or sink to any more convenient level as I desired. But it did not prove quite like that.
[…] … I rose slightly and drifted in the direction I wished to go, but only for a few yards, after which I became static again till I once more made a conscious effort to advance. The movement can best be likened to that of a toy balloon which having been thrown with some force bounces in slow graceful arcs across the floor. It was a most pleasant sensation and I recalled having on rare occasions experienced it in dreams.
It has the appeal of books on ‘astral projection’ and the fraudulent best-sellers of Carlos Castaneda, which also featured out-of-body-experiences.
Gifford realises he must rejoin his body and try to re-animate it (the concession to plausibility is that the death ray has somehow not fully killed him), but having rejoined his body he is trapped in it, and comes close to dying permanently. Wheatley gives the reader a vivid treatment of being buried half alive, dehydrated, almost too weak to move, and trying to attract attention. Ka has a generous quota of desperate setbacks and a superbly orchestrated plot, which involves Gifford clawing his way back from near-death only to be found guilty of murdering Evans and sentenced to hang.
When Gifford’s Ka glides about London he sees the evil that goes on behind walls and doors, brightened only by a couple of voyeuristic moments, and in particular he sees how the poor live in areas such as Notting Hill and Walham Green, Fulham (slummy in the Fifties). “That must not be taken to imply that I became a sudden convert to Socialism”, he adds.
Gifford’s position is closer to so-called “One-Nation Toryism”. The character of his suburban and selfish first wife, Edith, is made to stand for the modern rich and their middle-class lack of duty and noblesse oblige:
Helping to run the Women’s Institute, visiting sick cottagers, reading to the elderly bedridden poor, and other such good works to which most women of any position in the country consider it incumbent on them to devote a certain amount of time, were entirely foreign to Edith … the fact of the matter was that not having been brought up to talk to labouring people as fellow human beings it embarrassed her horribly, apart from giving them orders, to have anything to do with them at all.
Just as Jugg found time to ruminate on the nation’s ills while being menaced by a giant spider, so Sir Gifford, despite his desperate situation, decides that neither Socialism nor higher taxation are the best answers in the long run, and pins his faith on duty and charity.
Wheatley originally wrote another ending to the book, not used in the published version. After his last minute escape from the hangman’s rope, Sir Gifford gives away the bulk of his fortune and resolves to become an itinerant knife grinder, pushing his knife grinder’s barrow and working with ordinary people.
Believing me to be poor they will tell me their troubles freely and without ulterior motive. Wherever I find genuine hardship or distress, particularly in old people struggling along on very meagre incomes, I shall be able to relieve it a little. I can hardly wait for the thrill I shall get the first time that, having sharpened the knives of some poor housewife who is going through a bad time, I can push a few pound notes under a plate on her kitchen dresser without her finding out what I have done until after I have left.
He seems to have become half George Orwell and half the reborn Scrooge, as at the very close
after all my tribulations, I shall find contentment and a real freedom, sharing the joys and sorrows of my fellow men, as through sunshine and rain I tramp the roads of England.
This was all removed from the published version.
The Ka of Gifford Hillary is a big-hearted book: Wheatley’s work is generally humane, but this is positively sentimental. Its benevolence extends to Sir Gifford’s first family, his ex-wife Edith, son Harold, and daughter Christobel, with whom he makes amends after realising that he has neglected them.
There are several points of similarity between Sir Gifford and his author. Sir Gifford has “a comfortable late Georgian house” with “really beautiful views across the Solent to the Isle of Wight”. Lady Ankaret is Gifford’s second wife, and better bred than he is, but he has already been married to Edith. He remembers the attraction was mostly physical, and looks back on her as a suburban woman with bad taste, but at the same time he worries “had I been justified in leaving her?” This question is all the more heart-tugging when he remembers Harold, his son, asking “Why don’t you come home and live with Mummy?”
Sir Gifford seems to express something of Wheatley’s pain and guilt in the aftermath of his first marriage. Thinking of the way Harold and Christobel have turned out, he asks “Would they have been two quite different people had I carried out my full responsibilities as a parent?”
*
In November 1955 Wheatley was invited to take part in a debate at the Oxford Union, to argue the proposal ‘That Equality is in Theory a Pestilential Heresy and in Practice a Pitiful Illusion’. His star opponent was the publisher Victor Gollancz, the man behind the Left Book Club.
The evening began badly with a power failure, leading to candlelight and delays. At last, just before nine o’clock, the motion was presented to the House. Various undergraduates spoke, with the star speakers being kept until the end.
Unfortunately Wheatley had no experience of this kind of debate. He opened with a dictionary definition of debating, and told long and unfunny stories. The nearest he came to rigour was his early observation, “that all men are born equal is not self-evident”. He then presented a historical analysis which led to his main theme: the advantage of Plural Voting – i.e. weighted voting power, and not universal suffrage on the ‘one man one vote’ basis – for which he said the criterion should be “superior mentality”.
This went down badly. Wheatley said that he was going to stick his neck out, and the student paper Cherwell reported “Mr Victor Gollancz, who spoke sixth and last, seized the metaphorical chopper and hacked off same at its thick-set base.” Gollancz airily dismissed Wheatley’s point that egalitarian revolutions have always led to massacres, and said the idea that some people have superior mentality was “damn impudence.” He argued that all men have a right to develop their potentialities as far as possible, and made the fine-sounding but rather nebulous claim that until we respect everyone simply because they are human beings, the threat of war will always be present. Finally he appealed to Christianity, to which he had converted after a nervous breakdown.
The proposal was “defeated by acclamation”. Wheatley had been trounced, and by the man who had refused to publish Orwell’s Animal Farm because it was “unfair to Stalin”. Cherwell wrote the debate up under the headline ‘These Men Were Not Equal’.
*
Plural voting was something of an idée fixe with Wheatley, and he had deep misgivings about the workings of universal suffrage. Ancient Greece is generally credited with inventing democracy, but Greek voting was limited to a relatively small section of the population: only those who were property owners and bore the burden of taxation were eligible to steer the community in its democratic decisions, and not hoi polloi. This system, “the soundest possible form of government”, according to Wheatley, is not to be confused with the present arrangement; “this very sensible form of government has now degenerated into something very different from the original”.
Wheatley liked Disraeli’s idea of ‘Fancy Franchises’ where the number of votes a voter had would depend on the extent of his education and the amount of tax he paid. He also liked the similar idea put forward by the novelist Nevil Shute, who suggested everyone should have one basic vote, but then to weight the system towards more intelligent decisions, certain qualifications should entitle people to extra votes, so people might have up to six votes. Higher tax was one qualification, and the others now have a period flavour: having had a commission in one of the Services, having a university degree, and having lived abroad.
Wheatley could get quite excited about these issues: reading the letters of John Cam Hobhouse, a friend of Lord Byron, he noted Hobhouse’s hatred of Viscount Castlereagh (also hated by Byron and other romantics, who saw him as an oppressor, responsible for the Peterloo Massacre). Wheatley annotated as he read:
Castlereagh was like a red rag to a bull to the author Mr Cam Hobhouse who was a most poisonous lot. More or less of a Bolshevik – a believer in popular assemblies – parliaments & all inventions of Satan
Some form of weighted voting – like a literacy test for juries – has a perennial appeal to a certain temperament. Wheatley was later appalled by the abolition of the property qualification for juries in 1973, whereby instead of house-holders over 21, jury service could now be done by anyone over eighteen, including “young fellows who tear up the seats of railway carriages.”
*
The Ka of Gifford Hillary also contained a new propaganda message about nuclear armaments. This was very topical: the CND was founded in 1957, the year after the book was published (Wheatley was not in favour of the CND, and probably regarded it as Russian-funded). He wanted to see Great Britain armed to the teeth, because without nuclear status, “Britain will be as much a thing of the past within ten years as Greece or Rome.”
The crux is that Britain must reduce her conventional weapons, the ‘Old Look’ and in particular her expensive conventional navy, in order to afford the ‘New Look’ of nuclear weapons, and the public – despite their sentimental attachment to the Navy, and resistance to cuts – must be brought on side. A well-placed friend tells Sir Gifford that the heaviest burden in a democracy is “that of persuading the mainly ignorant masses to accept a programme that sound evidence has shown to be best for them.”
It is sometimes said that anyone seeking real power would do better to own newspapers than seek elected office, and Gifford and his friend discuss the role of the Press Barons in influencing public opinion, with Lord Northcliffe’s role in the First War as an example. The friend asks Sir Gifford if he will raise public awareness of the issues by rejecting a Ministry of Defence order for conventional warships, despite the impact on his firm’s profits, and writing a letter to the Times to explain exactly why he has done so.
The Ka of Gifford Hillary was a remarkably topical and informed book, slightly ahead of the 1957 White Paper on Defence. In publishing a million-seller with these pro-nuclear discussions, Wheatley achieves the same publicity mission that Sir Gifford is asked to undertake within the narrative.
*
Wheatley had always said he would be dead at sixty, with an air that he was fully resigned to it, or would even welcome it. On Wheatley’s sixtieth birthday a card arrived at Grove Place from Annette Wheatley, Anthony’s wife. “Hypodermic follows”, it said. Wheatley understood the joke, but he was not amused.
Wheatley was fond of Anthony and Annette, in his fashion, and he would sometimes bring them spectacular confectionery as a token of his affection: a big garden trug full of crystallised fruit, for example, or an enormous chocolate egg from Gloriette, the Knightsbridge patisserie. Joan was less fond of them; understandably, to a degree, since they weren’t her family, and she may have resented Wheatley having other ties. They sensed a certain coolness from her, and felt that she tried to keep Wheatley away from them.
Annette had converted to Catholicism and they began to raise a family, having six children. Wheatley was pleased to be a grandfather, and in his notes for a speech a few years later he wrote of Anthony:
We share a love of good wine and any other things; and he’s a better man than I am, Gunga Din! I only produced one child – that is as far as I know – but he has given me six fine grandchildren – so that the name of Wheatley should not perish from the earth.
Wheatley liked to have Annette over to stay at Grove Place when she was expecting a new baby, for fresh air and feeding up. On one of those visits Joan told her that she was doing some charity work for Ceylon, adding “Of course, they breed like rabbits.”
It may have been a perfectly innocent remark, but as the children grew older, Joan managed to produce further statements that may have been put-downs: “I don’t know why you teach them to ride, when you don’t live in the country”, for example.
On one occasion the family were down at Grove Place when their youngest daughter climbed up to an open bookcase with a display of Venetian glass on the top shelf, and accidentally proceeded to smash it. Annette was talking to Joan but she ran into the room as soon as they heard the glass starting to go and managed to save the rest. In this instance, Joan had the grace and presence of mind to say “You know, I never liked that Venetian glass anyway.”
*
Wheatley’s new book for 1957 was The Prisoner In The Mask, which covers the Dreyfus case. It is the earliest Duke De Richleau novel (he was born in 1872) and fills in his background, mentioned in The Devil Rides Out and elsewhere, of being involved in an unsuccessful plot to restore the French monarchy. It is clearly inspired by Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Man In the Iron Mask.
It was in this year that Wheatley wrote the introduction for another Dumas novel, The Queen’s Necklace, concerning a scandal which enmeshed Marie-Antoinette, and his introduction is chiefly interesting for the way it shows his identification with Dumas; so much so, that he seems to be writing about himself. Dumas was a hack who wrote for money, sometimes at great speed. And yet no one can read him without being gripped by the plot (or so Wheatley believes, perhaps optimistically). More than that, his books have two wonderful features. Whatever is happening, “there runs like a golden thread the doctrine of Noblesse Oblige”, and young people are influenced by his books into developing “loyalty, courage, and fortitude”. This is what Wheatley said about his own books.
Secondly, his books are highly educational. They are a form of “history without tears”, and just as Kurt Hahn complimented Wheatley, so the French historian Michelet had already complimented Dumas: “You have done more to teach the people history than all the historians put together.”
It is for these reasons, says Wheatley, that although the work of many finer writers has passed into oblivion, the work of Dumas has achieved immortality, despite the carping and quibbling of “small-minded literary purists”.
*
Wheatley’s literary stock had not risen very much since the days when Time and Tide complained about him, although he had picked up some spectacular accolades from the popular press. The Times Literary Supplement had virtually ceased to review his fiction since the War, compared to seventeen books before and nine during (the latter perhaps covered partly on patriotic grounds). Compared to its more gentlemanly and amateur pre-war range, the paper’s post-war face was a little more austere and professional. It was less likely to recommend undemanding thrillers, or to complain that books were too big to read comfortably in bed.
Much of the problem even with Wheatley’s better books was his prose style, not helped by Hutchinson’s editing. This allowed him to place the capital of Sweden in Denmark, use “infer” when he meant “imply”, and similar errors.
Literary critic James Agate was at a party in the Reform Club one evening, talking with Humbert Wolfe and Pamela Frankau, when the conversation turned to the extraordinary literary phenomenon of Dennis Wheatley. Wolfe said Wheatley had told him that his novels had been translated into every European language except one, adding “I can’t think which.”
“English,” said Frankau.