Wheatley was now very well established indeed, as he would stress to interviewers who came to visit him at Grove Place: “My books have earned me half a million pounds”, he told one, “I think you can call me a success.” By this time in his life Wheatley had something more than a little Toad of Toad Hall about him.
He was always conscious of money, but this stress on earning it was probably made more emphatic by the knowledge that he wasn’t taken quite seriously as a writer. “I write to make it plain to the reader what’s going on … If the highbrow critics don’t like the way it’s put, well, they can go and write better books, make more money.”
“This is the way to live” he said, gesturing around him, “If I save money, the taxman gets it.” Wheatley liked the phrase – which had been a Peter Cheyney title – “no pockets in a shroud”. He was as fond as ever of his foie gras and lobster and partridges, his hock and vintage champagne and Imperial Tokay. The times might change, but Wheatley still had his smoking jacket and his well-stocked cellar and his library.
It is the smoking-jacketed Duke de Richleau, in The Devil Rides Out back in the Thirties, who considers private ownership will last out his time, although “ ‘After him’, of course, ‘the Deluge’, as he very properly realised.” This was the Deluge Wheatley thought was coming in 1947, when he put his message to posterity in a bottle. Taken together with his cultural pessimism, Wheatley’s lifestyle adds up unmistakably to the notion that “Living well is the best revenge”1.
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Wheatley had assembled some very gratifying personal effects – some “good kit”, as auctioneers used to say – and this was a crucial part of being Wheatley. He wrote his books at a mahogany table desk which had belonged to Joan’s father, sitting in an Empire armchair. Elsewhere there was plenty of Chippendale, including a bookcase and a gilt mirror; a Louis XV bookcase; a few bits of good Georgian silver; some old Rockingham and Dresden china, including Dresden candlesticks; and a plate from Marie-Antoinette’s dinner service.
Wheatley liked porcelain and figurines. There were china figures of Napoleon’s marshals on top of his bookcases, and he also owned china figures of the Dumas musketeers. He had a bronze of Napoleon on horseback, ivory figures of Louis XIV, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and Madame de Pompadour, a bust of Marie Antoinette and a bronze figure of Charles I, another royal martyr.
He owned a bronze bust of Homer, and an ivory and ebony figure of Zeus (chief of the Gods and the “Jove” of the bygone exclamation, still used by Wheatley). Striking a similarly pagan note, in his bedroom he had a bronze satyr and nymph, each forming a two branch candelabra; a bronze dancing faun (the one he had taken down to the War Cabinet); and a bronze group of three cherubs and a ram.
Wheatley had a fondness for things Chinese. He admired Taoism and Confucianism, the latter for its combination of meritocracy and social order, and among his Chinese odds and ends were a Ming bowl, a pair of T’ang horsemen, a blue dragon on his bedroom mantelpiece, a wooden figure of an Immortal on a twisted root base, and two white vases with dragons, used in the hall as umbrella stands. These might be found in any country house, but items with more personal meaning included an ivory carving of Kwan Yin, Queen of Heaven, the goddess he had prayed to in a shop window, and two figures of Ho Toi, the Chinese God of Happiness2: by this time Wheatley would describe himself to interviewers as “a consciously happy man.
”Wheatley also owned a rosewood treasure chest, originally from Arundel castle, and five rapiers wall-mounted on a bracket, the effect being somewhat suburban-baronial. He had a few pictures too – some of Birket Foster’s very English scenes, inherited from his grandfather, prints of Waterloo and Curacao, a collection of miniatures, and an alleged Brueghel, optimistically attributed – but he was more interested in rugs.
Wheatley’s ivory figure of Kwan-Yin, Chinese Queen of Heaven.
All going on in the suburbs: occult nudity in the late Sixties.
Wheatley thought of himself as a collector of Oriental rugs (he lists it in Who’s Who as a hobby, along with Georgian furniture and stamps). There was a Bokhara rug in the hall, and he had a couple of Caucasian rugs, but his particular taste was for Persian rugs in silk. These are technically very fine, and prized by Middle Easterners, although they have a bourgeois or even nouveau riche look (compared to the more Bohemian or scholarly look of tribal rugs, as on Freud’s couch). Wheatley’s bourgeois taste in rugs may have been influenced by having the shop window of “C.John”, carpet merchants to the King, just across the road from him back in his South Audley Street days.
Wheatley loved his possessions, and he took an almost naive delight in them. “His books urge facts with a collector’s absorption”, noted one of his most astute profilers; “He is a collector, obsessive, comprehensive, boyish.”
Along with his library, Wheatley had his stamps. In addition to his main collection, kept in safes, he liked to display stamps under glass on table tops. British Empire stamps were a particular favourite, showing Victoria’s head on all the territories to which the Empire had brought the benefits of British civilisation. Visitors sometimes thought Wheatley had trimmed the perforations off his stamps, but their trimmed appearance was because they preceded the introduction of the perforation. It would have been quite in character for him to make them neat, but very much out of character for him to damage his investments.
“That’s full of first editions”, Wheatley said as he showed a journalist a book cabinet, “Wells, Kipling, Huxley, Dreiser. Those must be worth a lot of money.” Another journalist, less sympathetic to Wheatley’s success, noted that “Mr Wheatley stroked the top of a small table inlaid with foreign stamps – catalogue value £715.”
This £715 (about £11,000 today) is a rather snide detail, as if Wheatley bumptiously volunteered their value himself. Perhaps he did, but I like to think things might have gone something like this:
CRAFTY JOURNALIST (sensing an opportunity to get a rise out of Wheatley): What nice stamps. They must be … ah … worth a few bob, eh?
FAMOUS AUTHOR (innocently taking the bait): £715 actually!
As well as putting his stamps under glass, Wheatley also cut out pictures of fish and applied them to his bathroom walls, swimming about here and there and congregating in corners with a naturalistic, aquarium-like effect.
His masterpiece in this line was his bedroom ceiling, blue and slightly domed, which he carefully covered in paper stars. They represented the Milky Way and the major constellations, like a planetarium, and they were laid out as they would have been at the moment of his birth, while around the walls were large signs of the Zodiac.
More portable items of Wheatley’s kit included his malacca swordstick (and he still had his blue morocco covered swaggerstick from World War Two), some gold Persian coins made into cuff links, a crocodile leather note case, and a “rolled gold fountain pen that lights up”.
While he wrote, Wheatley was surrounded by the homelier items on his desk.
He had two teddy bears, a Chinese soapstone pencil holder, an old cash box, a Wedgwood biscuit barrel, a wooden cigarette box, a large onyx ashtray (an object that appears in his Duke de Richleau books), a glass vessel filled with Alum Bay sand, a pen stand (holding four pens, like something from a bank manager’s desk), and an octagonal crystal-sided and ormolu-mounted box with a miniature painting in the lid. This thoroughly bourgeois little item, a token of Frenchified late nineteenth-century taste, had belonged to his mother, and he used it for paper clips.
He owned more than this, of course, but these items give a sense of his possessions, and they will have to serve here as a musée imaginaire; The Wheatley Museum.
Wheatley also liked joss sticks and big cushions, and in addition to his plum-coloured smoking jacket he had an Arab robe and a Chinese dressing gown with a dragon on the sleeve. This was the exotic Wheatley. People often remarked on the colourfulness of his clothing. “Bright as a rainbow trout”, Kenneth Allsopp reported when he went to interview him, and found him in an azure blue shirt and a yellow paisley smoking jacket. To write he would generally wear a coloured shirt, untucked and often short sleeved, over a pair of equally bright trousers (“tangerine, all sorts of colours”). This was the casual Wheatley.
Around 1960 Wheatley had a large painting of himself done by Cynthia Montefiore – reproduced on the back of Vendetta in Spain – with Grove Place in the background and Wheatley in the foreground, looking like the monarch of all he surveys. It is in a neatly double perspective, with Wheatley sitting beside an urn on the balustrade of the simultaneously distant house. Fictitiously, on some brickwork, as if on a coloured plaque, is a coat of arms consisting of Wheatley’s assumed crest above Joan’s shield.
Wheatley is wearing a plum smoking jacket with a dress shirt and a black bow tie. In his hand is a glass of hock, and the glass has a gold dolphin for a stem (he had six of these glasses from Venice, and one of them is visible beside him, on his desk, on the back of his 1970s Arrow black magic paperbacks). Montefiore’s portrait is distinctly flattering, with Wheatley’s visage austere and commanding. He looks less like the portly middle-aged author with a drinker’s red nose, and more like an older James Bond. In fact he seems to have borrowed not only the Duke de Richleau’s jacket, but Gregory Sallust’s face.
1 A saying which originally meant something very different; in the work of George Herbert and elsewhere, it means the Christian life.
2 The Kwan Yin and the better Ho Toi can be seen in The Devil and All His Works, facing pages 111 and 132.