| The Devil Is a Gentleman by Phil Baker | Book review Luke Jennings succumbs to Dennis Wheatley's devilish charmsIn 1966, a young editor named Giles Gordon joined Hutchinson and was handed the latest Dennis Wheatley manuscript. Some streak of devilry made Gordon remove the title page and send it to the publishing house's most intolerant reader. "The book is terribly hackneyed," came the reply, to Gordon's delight. "Above all, [the author] cannot write. Regretfully decline."At the time, Wheatley had 55 titles in print, he had sold more than 20 million books and, as Phil Baker, makes clear, he was not writing for the liberal likes of Gordon, whose objections were briskly overruled, but for a more traditionally minded readership. Wheatley's style and values are laid out in the opening pages of his bestselling work The Devil Rides Out, first published in 1934. The central character is the Duc de Richleau, whom we discover in the library of his West End flat, dressed in "a claret-coloured vicuna smoking suit", drinking "wonderful old brandy" and smoking one of the long Hoyos de Monterrey that were "his especial pride".Discovering that "an age-old evil" is stirring in St John's Wood, he and Rex van Ryn, a "virile and powerful" young American, interrupt a satanic gathering. Among those present is a mandarin "whose slit eyes betrayed a cold, merciless nature", a "fat, oily-looking Babu in a salmon pink turban" and a "red-faced Teuton" with a hare lip. "A most unprepossessing lot," reflects de Richleau, as he defends himself against a mute Madagascan ("a bad black, if ever I saw one").Wheatley was born in south London in 1897 and, following his expulsion from Dulwich College, was schooled on board HMS Worcester, a naval training ship. Commissioned into an artillery regiment, he had a goodish first world war, picking up women in Richmond Park with his battery commander, Major "Shitty Bill" Inglis, and, in France, wallpapering his billet in a ruined chateau so that it was "really tophole".Demobilised, Wheatley struck up a friendship with a literate fraudster named Eric Gordon Tombe. Together, the pair lived the fast life, quaffing champagne in nightclubs and enjoying "hectic nights" with women.Tombe, who would disappear in suspicious circumstances, was one of a number of colourful acquaintances whose exploits Wheatley would draw on when, in 1933, financial crisis led him to try his hand at fiction. Others included Montague Summers, a gay satanist who dressed as a priest and was sexually aroused "only by devout young Catholics"; a black magician named Rollo Ahmed, whose teeth had fallen out after he had "bungled a ritual and failed to master a demon"; and Maxwell Knight, the MI5 spymaster.Knight was the inspiration for Ian Fleming's M, although, according to Baker, he was not the forceful figure of the James Bond books but a rabidly antisemitic closet queen. Wheatley, by contrast, despite his predilection for racist stereotypes, actively cultivated Jewish friends. Indeed, as Baker perceptively suggests, it may be that to Wheatley, "painfully aware that he was merely middle-class, Jewish company could offer a little holiday from the English class system".As the years passed, and his books, with titles such as To the Devil a Daughter and They Used Dark Forces achieved huge sales, he grew to resemble one of his own characters, living the "suburban baronial" existence of the smoking-jacketed connoisseur until his death in 1977. At least as interested in politics as occultism, he seeded his novels with ultra-conservative ideals. To describe him as "a covert Platonic shaper of his people's consciousness" may be overstating the old boy's influence, but Baker's exhaustively researched biography is a terrific read.BiographyLuke Jenningsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Stephen King plots The Shining sequel Horror writer Stephen King has revealed that a sequel to The Shining would focus on a 40-year-old Danny TorranceJack Torrance's little boy Danny was last seen recuperating in Maine after escaping the insane evil of the Overlook Hotel, but Stephen King is now plotting a sequel to The Shining which would age the clairvoyant boy to 40 and transport him to a New York hospice.Speaking to an audience of fans in Toronto about his new novel Under the Dome, King divulged that he'd begun working on a tentative idea for a follow-up to The Shining – first published in 1977 – last summer. Danny, he said, was certain to have been left "with a lifetime's worth of emotional scars" after his experiences at the Overlook, where his father was possessed by the hotel, tried to kill him and his mother and eventually died.How Danny deals with both his nightmarish experiences and the clairvoyance, or "shining", which saved him, might make "a damn fine sequel", King said, according to local Toronto news website the Torontoist. His vision of the book – tentatively called Doctor Sleep - sees Danny now aged 40, working at a hospice for the terminally ill in upstate New York. He is apparently an orderly at the hospice, but his real work is to help make death a little easier for the dying patients with his psychic powers – while making a little money on the side by betting on the horses.King attempted to calm expectations about the sequel, telling the Toronto audience that he wasn't "completely committed" to it, and adding: "Maybe if I keep talking about it I won't have to write it." The Shining was made into a film in 1980 by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson as Danny's father Jack Torrance and Shelley Duvall as his mother Wendy. King also revealed this month that he has an idea for a new book in his epic Dark Tower fantasy series, which follows the adventures of the gunslinger Roland based on Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came". The working title for the eighth book in the series, King announced on his website, would be The Wind Through the Keyhole, but he added that he hadn't yet begun writing it and it would be "a minimum of eight months" before he did.Stephen KingAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Shaker of Movers A collection of Herbert Muschamp’s energetic architectural criticism. feeds.nytimes.com |
Auden and Tolkien | Andrew Brown W.H. Auden turns out to have been a huge fan of Lord of the Rings, and in his review of it put very succinctly the problem of goodAround quarter to midnight I wanted to quote Auden and I couldn't remember the word. It was "clever": "As the clever hopes expire/of a low dishonest decade." Our hosts of the evening didn't have much poetry written after about 1900 and their one anthology that might have done didn't have September 1, 1939. Nor is it in his collected shorter poems, though I don't remember it or even read it as a long one. It's hardly epic; only just about perfect.By the time I had run it down, I had read a lot more of his poetry than I set out to do: difficult to think of a better start to the year. And I had also found a remarkable piece of literary criticism: his review, in the New York Times, of the Return of the King. Auden was a huge fan of Tolkien's, which I find unexpected, and what he wrote about the treatment of good and evil in fantasy is worth discussion:To present the conflict between Good and Evil as a war in which the good side is ultimately victorious is a ticklish business. Our historical experience tells us that physical power and, to a large extent, mental power are morally neutral and effectively real: wars are won by the stronger side, just or unjust. At the same time most of us believe that the essence of the Good is love and freedom so that Good cannot impose itself by force without ceasing to be good. The battles in the Apocalypse and "Paradise Lost," for example, are hard to stomach because of the conjunction of two incompatible notions of Deity, of a God of Love who creates free beings who can reject his love and of a God of absolute Power whom none can withstand. Mr. Tolkien is not as great a writer as Milton, but in this matter he has succeeded where Milton failed.This seems to me a wonderfully shrewd explanation of the way in which Tolkien is more involving than Milton emotionally. I can't imagine reading Tolkien aloud for the sake of the language (I mean that almost literally: the words of some poems demand to be spoken) and I think that is the final test of poetry; but neither can I imagine anyone reading Paradise Lost to find out how it ends. The first paragraph of Auden also repays admiring attention. He puts into three sentences one of the problems which the incarnation is supposed to solve in Christian thought. In fact they fit into the last sentence and a half: physical power and, to a large extent, mental power are morally neutral and effectively real: wars are won by the stronger side, just or unjust. [yet] the essence of the Good is love and freedom so that Good cannot impose itself by force without ceasing to be goodAuden puts it in a way that doesn't mention God, and I think the problem can be understood without reference to Her. It wouldn't be nearly as interesting if it couldn't. But I don't think it's a universal. That is to say, there are people and cultures to whom it appears wrong or absurd to say that "the essence of the Good is love and freedom so that Good cannot impose itself by force without ceasing to be good." This is the sort of thing I would normally put on my own blog, because I am simply thinking out loud. But it's New Year's Day, so I drop it here as an experiment.ReligionWH AudenJRR TolkienAndrew Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
America: Empire of Liberty by David Reynolds | Book review Serialised on Radio 4, this short "alternative" history of America by English academic David Reynolds makes judicious use of contemporary sources to give a speedy, persuasive account of this "youthful old country". Perhaps not as radical a take as Reynolds warns, it nevertheless makes a point of giving natives, Mexicans and non-British Europeans their dues in the shaping of the sort of modern nation where Barack Obama can become president. America's self-image as a perfect democracy, though, should be taken with a pinch of salt, says Reynolds. It is a nation based on contradiction: an empire founded by men escaping British imperialism, a "land of liberty" reliant on black slavery and a "secular state energised by godly ambition".Historyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |