Putting the frustrations of American television behind him, Wheatley resumed his travels. He and Joan spent early 1966 in Brazil, Peru, Guatemala and Mexico, before going on to Fiji and the South Seas. “It was a wonderful trip,” he said, “we enjoyed it immensely and I collected a lot of material for future books.” This was literally the case. “I bring back a mass of material,” he told an interviewer:
Menus, timetables, museum catalogues, plans of cities, postcards. If I want to set a book in Italy I only have to say to my secretary, ‘Bring me Italy.’ All in cellophane bags in a big trunk. ‘Bring me Persia!’ Find the names of characters. ‘Bring me Portugal!’ Ancient monuments. ‘Bring me Egypt!’ Brings it all back. Stuff you can’t get in a library. The dishes, the drinks. The money! ‘Bring me Brazil!’ Can’t get it out of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica.
Wheatley would often say that he had never attended a magical ceremony, which wasn’t quite true; we have already seen him watching as Joan Grant’s naked body was sprinkled with petals while she went into a trance. In Brazil he attended a voodoo ceremony with friends at the British Embassy, Tony Wellington and his wife Pussy. Knowing his interest in the occult, Wellington had arranged for Wheatley to watch a macumba gathering, where the Loa, or voodoo gods, come down and possess members of the cult.
Wellington had arranged a discreet police guard for the party in case things went wrong. Wheatley feared that the crowd might turn on them if they discovered they were not real cult members (although plenty of white people were, at least in Wheatley’s mind, so ethnicity was not the problem). Like the Satanists in his books, Wheatley was sure that many “rich, white people” in Brazil, although nominally Catholics, were actually voodoo-worshippers.
Together with Tony and Pussy Wellington, Wheatley and Joan had drinks with the local Chief of Police. Then, together with four police – two men and two women, all in plain clothes – they drove out of Rio into the night, through the dark forest. They were in two cars and they stopped “at a place where there was already a long line of cars at the roadside”, some of them Rolls-Royces. Wheatley had been living with this kind of scenario in his head for thirty years, and now he found himself inside it.
They walked into the forest, up a walkway made of planks and ornamented with dead chickens, to the meeting place itself. It was the size of a tennis court and at the end was a voodoo altar, with various offerings and crude pictures of Christian saints adapted to serve as voodoo gods. Wheatley was not impressed by his first sight of this altar:
A Voodoo altar looks like a stall at a cheap jumble sale. One that I saw in Brazil had heaped on it pictures of the Virgin Mary and several saints, bottles of Coca-Cola, little pots of wilted flowers, shredded palm fronds, a dagger, a fly-whisk and flasks of rum.
Jumble sale or not, Wheatley abominated voodoo. It was “one of the vilest, cruelest and most debased forms of worship ever devised by man. It origins lay in darkest Africa, and the Negro has carried its foul practices with him to every part of the world which he inhabits.” Now it is seen as a legitimate religion, but for Wheatley it meant bestial cruelty, “compared with which the Black Mass is a civilized proceeding.”
It does seem that animals would sometimes have their bones broken, and other cruelties, before being killed, and the recent Mau-Mau troubles in Africa would have been in Wheatley’s mind, where new recruits were required to drive a thorn into the eye of a living goat.
“Few people can be so bestial as the Haitian Voodooists,” thought Wheatley.
Moreover, Zora Hurston tells us in her very informative book Voodoo Gods that they are fundamentally dishonest and should never be paid in advance for any service, as they think themselves clever not to perform it, and they cannot be trusted with even a few cents.
Wheatley must have wondered what he was letting himself in for; at the very least, perhaps, a spectacle of topless frenzy, but how far would it go, and what would happen then?
Wheatley grew anxious when he and Joan were separated. The policewomen went with Joan and Pussy to the one side of the arena, while the policemen sat with Wheatley and Tony on the other. They waited as more people arrived, and the place became packed. Then at last the ceremony began.
An elderly black man with white hair, dirty white clothes and a beat-up old straw hat made his way into the central space, walking with the help of a stick. A line of girls followed him, all wearing white dresses with long skirts to the ankle. The line began to dance, swaying to and fro to the beating of the voodoo drums.
It was a hot night, and the air was completely still. Then Wheatley felt a big drop of lukewarm water fall on him, followed by another. People became aware that it was raining, and in moments the rain increased to a torrential downpour. The dancers abandoned their dance and ran for cover. The audience, too, picked itself up and made a near stampede for the exit.
Rain had stopped play.
Wheatley makes a surprisingly fair-minded valediction to the whole business of voodoo in his late non-fiction book, The Devil and All His Works, when he writes
In extenuation of normal voodoo ceremonies, it must be remembered that its votaries are among the most poverty stricken people in the world, and, as Sabbaths were to the witches in Europe, their excesses are the only thing that makes life worth living. It is a tragedy that they should have been ensnared into such cruel and bestial practices.
*
Wheatley had another memorable experience in Mexico, where he had a sensation of near panic, comparable to his feeling in the First War of being looked at while he had his back to the old German casualty station. He was at the Aztec temple complex of Teotihucan, and he was taken underneath the Pyramid of the Moon to see the treasure chambers (which were more like dungeons; or that was how they struck Wheatley). Suddenly, despite the fact that there was electric lighting and that he was with other people, “I was suddenly seized with such a sense of evil that I could not get out of the place quickly enough”.
This was quite unlike his benign experience of the Egyptian pyramids. His impression of Teotihucan must have been influenced by knowing it had been the site of immense sacrificial slaughter, with as many as 20,000 victims regularly killed in a single day; and by the time he published this account he had an interest in playing up all supernatural effects.
The Wheatleys travelled on to the South Seas, where they stayed at Suva, the capital of the Fiji Islands, and were entertained by Sir Derek Jakeway, Governor of the Fijis, and his wife Phyllis. Like the Duke of Edinburgh before him (who is worshipped as a god by one of the cargo cults in the region) Wheatley was honoured to take part in the Kava ceremony, in which he drank an intensely relaxing preparation of kava kava.
They were there because Wheatley wanted to see the fire-walking ceremony, which in those days was infrequently performed. Fire walking is no longer regarded as a great mystery, but to Wheatley it was an astonishing phenomenon, like something from the lives of the saints. He went on to assure readers of The Devil and All His Works that “there is as yet no scientific explanation. It is achieved by white magic.”
*
Still in Fiji, Wheatley was impressed by the paintings of the Fijian artist Semisi Maya. Maya’s painting – which is figurative, and typically consists of landscapes, flowers, cyclone scenes and underwater scenes – was remarkable because he had been crippled by leprosy, and his hands were so damaged that he was unable to hold a brush. He would apply paint directly with his deformed knuckles, and use the hair on his forearms to achieve special effects.
Wheatley wanted to meet Maya, and went to St.Elizabeth’s leprosy home where Maya was an inmate. Wheatley bought several paintings – which were absurdly cheap by Western standards – and resolved to do something to help him when he returned to England.
*
As usual, when Wheatley got back in March 1966 he was swamped by the accumulated correspondence waiting for him. He also had to correct the proofs of The Wanton Princess, revise the typescript of Unholy Crusade, and write a new novel for autumn delivery, which would become The White Witch of the South Seas.
To the relief of Michael Horniman, Wheatley now had a new handler at A.P.Watt, Hilary Rubinstein. Rubinstein was the nephew of Victor Gollancz, the distinguished publisher who had trounced Wheatley on his ‘all men are equal’ ticket at the Oxford Union. Lunching an author at the Savoy Grill, with Rubinstein present, Gollancz ordered a cigar for his author. As the cigar waiter was about to leave, the author generously said “What about Hilary?” “What, him?” said Gollancz, full of scorn, then turned to the waiter and said “Give him the smallest you’ve got.”
Somewhat to Rubinstein’s surprise he got on reasonably well with Wheatley and found him congenial enough, without altogether liking him. Rubinstein was a man of liberal views, who later served on the board of the Institute for Contemporary Arts, and he couldn’t warm to Wheatley’s politics.
Wheatley was, says Rubinstein, obviously an arch conservative: he had “rabid” views on the Labour Party, who were then in power under Harold Wilson, and he was “full of vitriol” about the Government. Worse, Rubinstein anticipated when he first dealt with Wheatley that “I might find traces of anti-Semitism”, although he adds fairly “but I did not”.
*
Wheatley lived up to Rubinstein’s image of him when, in 1967, he was asked for his opinions on the Vietnam War for a book entitled Authors Take Sides On Vietnam. This was inspired by Nancy Cunard’s famous 1937 questionnaire, Authors Take Sides on The Spanish War. Cunard’s writers had been overwhelmingly against Franco, with Arthur Machen – as if to demonstrate the reactionary tendencies of occult and supernatural writing – being one of the few in favour.
Wheatley had not been asked for his opinion in Cunard’s day, but now he was, along with a great spread of writers from Pamela Frankau to William Burroughs. Writing with his strategist’s hat on (“ex-Wing Commander … member of the Joint Planning Staff of the War Cabinet which prepared the strategic plans for Sir Winston Churchill”) Wheatley was in favour of the war. He thought a firm stand in Vietnam was absolutely imperative to stop the spread of communism, on the domino model: if the Vietcong took control of Vietnam, neighbouring countries would soon go down too.
*
Wheatley and Joan set off for more holidays in early 1967; they went to Morocco, Turkey, and Iran. The highlight of the trip for both of them was seeing “wonderful Persian art”, and they returned, as usual, with a great stash of ephemera for Wheatley’s big trunk.
Wheatley had not forgotten his promise to do something for Semisi Maya. Through a nun at the leper home, Wheatley had been buying Maya’s paintings with the intention of getting him a show in a West End gallery. He had so far bought about forty paintings for fifty pounds the lot (about £500 now), and managed to get his friend Sir Danvers Osborn interested: Osborn was a partner in the New Bond Street Art Gallery, near Asprey’s.
With the business sense that he had used as a wine merchant – and hardly less as a writer – Wheatley costed the paintings at about 25/– each including air freight (about £15 today). Selling them at Bond Street values therefore promised substantial profits, and the main expense was framing them to a standard in keeping with the prices.
Wheatley wanted about eighty pictures, and he was prepared to commission them on a fully entrepreneurial basis (“For your guidance we do not want any more blue landscapes and prefer landscapes in natural colours. We particularly like his flower paintings and undersea scenes”). Wheatley foresaw that after the publicity gained by the show, American and other dealers would try to buy Maya’s work up “at its present absurdly low price” in order to make a profit out of him, and suggested a protective contract, which could be drawn up by his friend Ronald Knox-Mawer, Chief Justice of Fiji, whereby “from May 1967 no more of his paintings should be offered for sale except to me, for a period to be agreed.”
The show went ahead in June 1967, with Wheatley making no money from it but sending the profits to the nuns, to be divided between the St.Elizabeth’s Home and Maya himself. It may not have sold as well as he hoped, because he originally envisaged another show the following year, which never happened. Wheatley had a strong sense of publicity and human interest journalism, but he was a stranger to the fine art world, and the leprosy angle was not part of it.
The show at least raised Maya’s profile, and his work was later featured on Fijian stamps. At the end of his life Wheatley owned more pictures by Maya – possibly unsold stock – than any other artist, his nearest competitor being the English genre painter Birket Foster.
*
Wheatley was now seventy, and the world around him had changed. Even in his fiction, Richard Eaton’s little daughter Fleur, who so narrowly escaped being sacrificed in The Devil Rides Out, had grown up to become “a product of her age and the University of London … a red-hot Socialist [who] believes passionately in all the ‘freedoms’ including that of sex.”
Young men had long hair, and girls were wearing mini-skirts from Mary Quant; these had come in simultaneously with “the Pill”, which had become almost as famous an entity as “the Bomb”. Posters of Wheatley’s old bête noir Lord Kitchener were appearing, and the Kings Road was full of young men who might wear sergeant’s stripes as patches on their flared jeans, or guardsman’s tunics from groovy boutiques like ‘I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet’.
It was The Summer of Love. The prime cultural mover was recreational drug-taking by middle-class youth, and the ‘psychedelic’ aesthetics of the period were shaped by cannabis and particularly LSD. There was a new interest in the irrational, whether in the form of madness or mysticism, and people were reading Herman Hesse and Tolkien, along with the I Ching and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Eastern religion was big, along with joss sticks, astrology, and tarot cards; and suddenly so was the occult, in a widespread revival that is sometimes referred to as “the occult explosion”.
The ‘underground’ hippy paper, the International Times, ran a major feature on Aleister Crowley. By the end of his lifetime Crowley had become something of a joke, but now no one was laughing. The 1967 Beatles’ album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, featured Crowley on the cover in its Peter Blake collage of ‘people we like’. Pink Floyd’s equally trippy and lysergic album of the same year, The Piper at The Gates of Dawn, took its name from the strange episode with the god Pan in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows: a bit of belated Edwardian paganism, like Wheatley’s bookplate. As for the Rolling Stones, their album for 1967 was Their Satanic Majesties Request.
And so it went on for several years: Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page would become a serious Crowley collector, even buying his old house at Boleskine in Scotland. Another, more downmarket, heavy metal band appeared in 1969 with the name of Black Sabbath, and profiles of the band often claimed this was from a Wheatley novel title (which is not true; it is from a Mario Bava horror film).
There was a darker side to the occult revival, and increasingly to the Sixties themselves, with acid casualties, Altamont, and the Charles Manson killings. Wheatley collector and bibliographer Richard Humphreys was a teenager, reading Wheatley’s The Satanist, when he heard on his transistor radio that Sharon Tate had been murdered. Asked for his opinion on the mystery slayings by the British press, Wheatley said there was probably an occult angle.
By the standards of the day’s youth, Wheatley in person would have been a Churchillian dinosaur, although they might have admired his dragon dressing gown and his smoking jacket. But now his black magic writing took on a new and seemingly contemporary lease of life, as his dated and jingoistic fictions were buoyed up and carried along on the occult wave.