Phil Baker does an admirable job of pulling all these strands together. When Anton Lavey hammed it up in the Church of Satan, it could have be a scene straight out of The Devil Rides Out when the great satanic ritual abuse scare took place in the 1980s, the “memories” recalled by the survivors were equally informed by Wheatley’s lurid descriptions. Think of black magic and satanism and it’s Wheatley’s imagery that comes to mind. They were bodice -rippers with black magic, if you will, and pre-empted the current vogue for globe-hopping exotic locations. In post-war, ration-starved Britain, they offered a world of opulance (Wheatley’s narratives was famously food and drink obsessed), and one in which there were few moral dilemmas. They’re Boy’s Own romps, written in a style that is, at best, turgid.
The irony is that Wheatley’s books were the antithesis of the writing he admired. He’s an intelligent chancer in short, one who seems to have lived a charmed life but he’s not as intelligent as he thinks he is. He looks at Ulysses and reads it with incomprehension. And he’s a fascinating character class obsessed, snobbish, fixated on sweet things and women (he keeps a scorecard of all the women he’s had sex with) inducted a little too late into the fin de siecle aestheticisism of Wilde and Husymans. Fraud? Murder? Meeting with Huxley and Crowley? Here too. Events in Wheatley’s life read like a thriller. Whatever the case for the novels, the biography is a cracking piece of work. Maybe their fate has been even more undignified: used to prop open windows, scrunched up to light fires, left to moulder in a rubbish tip somewhere. You wonder where all those books have gone, because they sold in their millions, and they’re seldom seen now, even in second hand bookshops. I never quite worked out what the flame was for: perhaps it was to keep the poor dear warm, her being a state of semi-undress and all. They bring to mind dog eared Pan paperbacks, usually with a semi naked woman, a goat’s skull and a flame on the front cover, possibly with a pentacle thrown in for good measure. Re-reading Proust has been abandoned temporarily, first to read Alan Garner’s latest (and possibly last),Boneland, and currently Phil Baker’s biography of Dennis Wheatley, The Devil is a Gentleman.ĭoes anyone read Dennis Wheatley’s novels any more? They were notoriously stilted affairs when first released, and they certainly haven’t have aged well.
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