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Press review for The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley
"The nearest that I have ever come to practising Satanism was at the age of sixteen, when I attended what was supposed to be a Black Mass. It was actually a spoof entertainment, devoid of all religious content and designed to spice up a party held by friends from school. What is significant here is that everybody present understood the model that it parodied: the portraits of devil-worship in the novels of Dennis Wheatley.
As Phil Baker explains in The Devil is a Gentleman, this was entirely appropriate, because not only was Wheatley best known for his accounts of black magic, but he was very influential in forming the contemporary public stereotype of it. It is true that he wrote more stories on other subjects, mostly history, espionage and love. He had inherited a family wine business, but broke it through extravagance and turned immediately to writing, which was his natural vocation. In one sense, he did it badly: he could never spell properly, had a poor literary style and committed howlers. His editors weeded out most of these, but one story still made Copenhagen the capital of Sweden. What he provided were superb plots, designed to build and release tension expertly, in wave-like patterns. His characters, though stock, were vivid, the settings luxurious and the historical and cultural backgrounds usually carefully researched. He published on an industrial scale, completing two new books per year in the first half of his long career and one thereafter. His experience of business enabled him to excel at marketing them, and though they never earned him honours from the literary world or the nation, they did make him rich. Baker argues plausibly that, in his range of subjects and the associations that his name evoked, Wheatley was the greatest nonliterary writer in twentieth-century Britain.
To a historian interested in following up its findings, Baker’s book is slightly under-referenced: largely because of an understandable desire to appeal to the widest possible audience, the author provides endnotes for all his quotations but not all his assertions. The arguments and information in the text, however, are excellent, so that a consistent and well-rounded personality is constructed for Wheatley and the sources of his ideas and images carefully traced. Although the whole of his career is explored, and with it all his different kinds of writing, the fullest analysis is saved – quite rightly – for the novels that deal with Satanism in modern Britain. The inspiration and much of the material for these were provided by the revival of interest in occultism in the late Victorian period, which had in turn created the genre of occult fiction. Wheatley was the person who blended this with the format of the thriller, giving it a much larger audience. He thus exerted a powerful influence on, and found an even bigger readership in, the second wave of enthusiasm for the occult in the 1960s.
Baker carefully exposes the traits in Wheatley’s own nature which facilitated this achievement. One was a fascination with sex, which resulted in numerous visits to prostitutes in his youth and the acquisition of a large collection of written and visual erotica. He instinctively associated sexuality with the Devil, making it easy for him to manage a classic puritan double-take in his novels: lushly describing the sexual orgies of Satanists and in particular their sexual degradation of beautiful women, while deploring them and having his heroes rescue his heroines from a similar fate. He also possessed an instinctive belief in a cosmos divided entirely into warring powers of absolute good and evil: a rare case, in modern times, of an adherent to the ancient heresy of the Manichees. Wheatley was never content to keep these beliefs to his novels, for throughout his life as an author he delivered public lectures and broadcasts on the threat posed by Satanism to modern society.
He swiftly amassed a stock repertoire of examples, and Baker has carefully traced every one of these to an older work of fiction. Why, then, was Wheatley so anxious to publicize an imaginary danger? Again Baker provides a full answer: that he always made Satanism stand as a metaphor for the bogies of his embittered brand of politics. His novels portrayed it as the hidden force behind, variously, Communism, Nazism, the trade union movement, avant-garde art and music, and Black Power. Hatred and fear of the working class, non-whites and cultural modernism were his propelling emotions.
Having devoted so much space to the “life”, Baker has only a small amount for the “times”, but that suggests some fascinating lines of future enquiry. One is the link between right-wing politics and occultism in the early twentieth century. Another is that between occultism and post-Christian culture: Wheatley despised Christianity, but his anti-Satanic crusade appropriated its imagery. How far did Wheatley engender the phenomenon that he claimed to oppose? The peak period of his popularity was also that at which forms of Satanism (or behaviour which imitated
it) actually appeared in Britain: my boyhood chums provided one tiny, mocking, echo of a much wider phenomenon. It would be wonderful to hear more from Phil Baker on all three points."