The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley
Phil Baker (Dedalus)
Hardback, £25 (2009) 978-1-903517-75-8
Softcover, £14.99 (Sept. 2011) 978-1-907650-32-1
699pp, black and white illustrations
Dennis Wheatley (1897-1977) was once famous as a highly prolific
popular novelist whose fame rested mainly on his black
magic thrillers such as "The Devil Rides Out" (1934: made into a
Hammer film in 1967) and "The Haunting of Toby Jugg" (1948).
As late as the 1970s his books were repackaged for a new
readership curious about the occult; the same readership, in fact,
as that described by John Coulthart in his article in this issue
about Austin Osman Spare.
Wheatley has since fallen out of the public consciousness, and
his books at first glance seem quaintly dated. But it is his biographer's
contention that Wheatley deserves a reassessment.
As well as a very thorough life of Wheatley (mainly considered
as a writer, though with lengthy consideration of his
political and military interests), Phil Baker has managed almost
to present a history of England during the subject's lifetime,
seen through the prism of Wheatley's activities and adventures
– never failing to provide explanatory historical background,
helpful biographical information about Wheatley's friends and
associates, or authorial interventions suggesting a suitable direction
for the reader's further interest.
Readers may find their attention wandering during the
lengthy narrative of the young Wheatley's love life and promiscuity,
the only part of the story that does not provide essential
background to the subject's primary interest, Wheatley's adult
life as a writer, curmudgeonly patriot and charming snob.
Highbrow literary critics dismissed Wheatley as an incompetent
writer (who, like Jeffrey Archer, took up writing only in
order to haul himself out of a financial hole), and yet his writing
has a power of its own: his friend Anthony Powell asked his
advice on the plotting of "A Dance to the Music of Time", and
Wheatley offers a paradigm of a formula that was later to be
exploited by, for example, Ian Fleming, that of cheap luxury, the
mystique of brand-name goods, and adventurous aristocrats and
gentlemen battling the forces of darkness.
Wheatley was a fine example of the novus homo, whose
grandfather came from humble origins in Huntingdonshire to
London in the mid-nineteenth century, to work in the grocery
and wine trade, which, crucially, permitted the observant social
climber to study the habits of his upper-class customers. The
Wheatley family business, established subsequently, was a wine
merchants. A commission as a junior officer in the Great War,
and years of attention to the things that really mattered (at the
time) if one was to permanently establish oneself as a gentleman,
enabled Wheatley to ascend to his final identity, shown in
the author photograph on his paperbacks (and reproduced on
the dustjacket of this volume), as the connoisseur sitting in his
library with a glass of fine wine, wearing a powder-blue smoking
jacket. Wheatley's apotheosis was his admission to White's
two years before his death: "not bad for the Streatham-born son
of a shopkeeper" he remarked to a friend.
|
|
Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist
Phil Baker, with a Foreword by Alan Moore
(Strange Attractor, 2011) Hardback, £25
323pp + xi, with eleven colour plates 978-1-907222-01-6
Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956), the son of a City of London
policeman, demonstrated such prodigious technical abilities as
a young artist that a stellar future seemed assured. He was even
spoken of as a future President of the Royal Academy. What
happened?
Phil Baker's latest biography uncovers the mysterious story
of how Spare turned away from the bright lights of the West
End galleries and resided in obscurity around Elephant and
Castle for much of his life, making a meagre living by sketching
neighbours, exhibiting his work in pubs, and giving art tuition
privately, but meanwhile consolidating through his drawings
and paintings an imaginative reality inspired by the occult
teachings he encountered as a young man, but often seemingly
more concrete and believable than the world around us.
The connection between Spare and Wheatley is Aleister
Crowley, the twentieth century's most famous occultist (and,
like C. S. Lewis, the twentieth century's most famous lay
Christian apologist, an old boy of Malvern College). Spare was
an early initiate of Crowley's occult order, and Baker puts his
detailed knowledge of London's early twentieth century occult
milieu, gathered during his research for the Wheatley biography,
to further use here.
Spare was conscripted into the Royal Army Medical Corps in
1917, and eventually his artistic talents were put to use as an official
war artist, though he was only sent to the continent after
the war was over, in 1919. His paintings from this period, retrospective
works such as "Motor Ambulances at Ypres", are in the
Imperial War Museum. Another apparently fine work from this
period, exhibited at the Royal Academy in December 1919 but
now destroyed, was a pastel picture of women carrying out an
operation at the Endell Street Military Hospital. (Spare is not
the only official war artist in this issue, by the way: we have an
interview with Xavier Pick on page 31.)
The 1920s passed as Spare wrote and illustrated his artistic/
occult philosophy of life, and nobody noticed. He gradually acquired
a range of health problems that were exacerbated by his
being rendered homeless by bombing in 1941. But his reputation
was carried forward by Kenneth Grant (1925-2011) and
his wife Steffi, who befriended Spare in 1949. John Coulthart
stresses the importance of Kenneth Grant in the maintenance
of Spare's posthumous fame, while noting the sinister "magickal"
emphasis that Grant placed upon Spare's work, which this
volume may help to dispel.
We conclude with a few quotations from Spare's 800-word
obituary in The Times (16 May 1956):
A dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions, he had that complete
other-worldliness so often depicted in romantic fiction
and so rarely found in real life. Money meant nothing to
him...
Of his technical mastery there can be no manner of doubt. The
collection of his drawings may yet become a cult.
|
|
