Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (82 page)

Wheatley married in 1922, just after Tombe’s disappearance. (His decomposed body was discovered in a cess pit, a year later.) His bride was an heiress and a son, Anthony, was born soon after. It was a troubled period, with social upheaval in the air. Wheatley brandished, and actually fired, his old service handgun against strikers in 1926. To the end of his days he feared Red Revolution. His early novel,
Black August
, foresees Bolshevik takeover by 1960 (the novel clearly inspired Constantine Fitzgibbon’s much superior
When the Kissing had to Stop
) and in his best novel,
The Haunting of Toby Jugg
, Satan allies himself with the Kremlin, to bring about a duopolistic world dominion: for ever and ever. Wheatley had an instinctive sympathy with Oswald Mosley, but he was too old-school English, and inherently decent to join the BUF and kow-tow to that German riff-raff in ludicrous black uniforms. The plum-coloured dinner-jacket was Wheatley’s uniform. He took over the wine business on his father’s death in 1927 and brought flair to the company. Among other things, he takes credit for inventing what he calls the ‘Napoleon Brandy racket’ – very ancient, usually wholly faked up, liquor, in cobwebbed bottles. It was one of his finer works of fiction.

However resourceful he was, it was a bad time for high-priced luxury goods and the slump bankrupted the firm in 1932. His first marriage had failed (his adultery) and it was his second wife, Joan, who pointed out that people may have stopped drinking expensive plonk but they were still reading Edgar Wallace, the ‘King of Thrillers’. Wallace had died in 1932 and Wheatley perceived a vacancy for that throne, methodically setting himself up as ‘the Prince of Thrillers’. An astute merchandiser of consumables – whether in bottles, cases or hard covers – in liaison with Hutchinson, his lifelong publisher, he ‘pushed’ his first novel,
The Forbidden Territory
(1933), by means of 20,000 advertising postcards. In current terminology, Wheatley invented the mail shot. It worked for thrillers as well as it had for Beaujolais nouveau. The novel was reprinted seven times in the first seven weeks.

The Forbidden Territory
is a disciple’s updating of Wallace’s
Four Just Men
(itself an update of Dumas’s famous three). It introduced a crime-fighting, Commie-bashing, quartet headed by the aristocratic Duc de Richleau, the drawling embodiment of cosmopolitan and wine-bibbing cool. He has ‘devil’s eyebrows’ and a connoisseur’s taste for Imperial Tokay wine and Hoyo de Monterrey cigars – the characteristic whiff of a ‘Wheatley’. Richleau’s comrades include the subtle Jewish intellectual,
Simon Aron and the supercharged all-American Rex Van Ryn. William Joyce (later ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, the Nazi radio propagandist) with whom Wheatley had a passing acquaintance, relayed the fact that Goering was a great admirer – alas, given Aron’s race, the books were banned for the larger German public. Joyce also told his Nazi superiors that Wheatley would make an excellent
Gauleiter
for London, after the country’s takeover.

Once he had found his public, Wheatley varied his game skilfully.
Black Augus
t (1934) introduced Gregory Sallust, and a run of eleven novels over thirty-four years. Other series heroes were Julian Day (suave diplomat) and Roger Brook (Wheatley’s Scarlet Pimpernel). In all his novels, Wheatley was at pains to introduce at least one ‘hot scene’ – typically a fragrant English maiden whose virtue is in peril from some foreign violator. The novel of Wheatley’s which endures is
The Devil Rides Out
(1934), in which Richleau et al. take on the Evil One himself. It would be the first of eight such occult romances. In them Wheatley drew on ‘research’, as he called it, about necromantic rituals, which were in fact picked up, second-hand, from personal acquaintance with Aleister Crowley (the ‘Great Beast’) and Montague Summers (the ‘Evil Priest’).

There was a rage for detective fiction at the period, and in 1936 Wheatley pioneered the ‘Crime Dossier’ detective novel, with
Murder off Miami
. It arrived as a box containing physical ‘clues’ (cigarette ends, envelopes, etc.) with loose leaves of narrative in pseudo-documentary form. As a novelty, they sold brilliantly. The first cleared 200,000 copies and earned a laudatory third leader in
The Times
. By the time war broke out in 1939, Wheatley had restored his lost vintner’s fortune with fourteen bestsellers. Whatever the limitations of the novels, Wheatley had a remarkably fertile imagination. It had been recognised in high places and he was recommissioned, this time into the air force, and recruited to advise the War Cabinet on ‘Deception’. His papers, ‘for the eyes only’ of George VI and the Chiefs of Staff, were wildly fantastic, but not without a certain shrewdness. It was Wheatley who, as the German invasion seemed imminent, suggested turning round all the road signs in southern England. It created much confusion for the uninvaded British people. When the war was won, one of his papers suggested, the whole German male population should be sterilised in the interest of European peace. Joyce was right; he would have made a good
Gauleiter
.

He left with the rank of acting Wing Commander. Now very rich, he retired to a fine country house where he collected fine wine, furniture, stamps and books. He would clock up some seventy-five thrillers by the time of his death. He loathed the Labour government (‘half way to communism’) – and its 19 shillings in the pound taxes – but was too patriotic to retreat into tax exile. By the 1960s his novels
were very old-hat. But New Age obsession with the occult revived interest in him.
The Devil Rides Out
was picked up by Hammer Films in 1968 with Christopher Lee, as a superbly OTT Richleau, and a script by Richard Matheson (author of
I Am Legend
, source-text for the 2007 zombie film). The Hammer adaptations kicked off a Wheatley cult, including, along with the diabolist nonsense, the preposterous
The Lost Continent.
It was made of seaweed, floated in the Sargasso Sea, and was infested with monstrous crustaceans and cannibalistic descendants of marooned pirates. The studio ran out of money halfway through, and had to do desperate things with papier mâché.

Wheatley, a firm believer in reincarnation, had at least one second life. He died, full of age and money, indomitably ‘jolly’ to the end (he wanted a gigantic champagne party for his ‘return’, rather than a wake for his departure), leaving a fortune of some £80,000.

I am fully intelligent only when I write.

Stephen Spender and his wife were on visiting terms with Elizabeth Bowen during the war years, when the poet and novelist were both London fire-watchers. Natasha Spender liked to recall a supper party with Bowen in early autumn 1940, during the Blitz. The guests had adjourned to the balcony, overlooking Regent’s Park, to smoke their after-dinner cigarettes in the warm night air. As the bombs rained down on the city, Bowen turned to her guests and stammered: ‘I really do apo-apologise for the noise.’ War, she confided to Virginia Woolf, made her feel ‘vulgar’. Few presented loftier defiance to the Hun, even when, as happened two years later, a V-1 landed on the balcony where Bowen and her guests had been standing on that earlier evening.

War was the soundtrack to her life. She was born, Anglo-Irish in southern Ireland, during the Boer War. She was a teenager during the First World War. The Irish Civil War raged around her beloved ‘Big House’, Bowen’s Court, in the early 1920s. It, unlike others, was spared the Republican torch. She worked for the Ministry of Information (Orwell’s ‘Minitruth’) when not an air-raid warden, in the Second World War. Her last novel,
Eva Trout, or, Changing Scenes
, was published in 1968, as
the B-Specials ran riot, the Provisional IRA was born, and another Irish war broke out. By now her Big House was rubble.

Her stammer, unlike the stutter, a physiological defect, she plausibly ascribed to ‘psychic’ causes. The only child of a grossly broken family, she was also a displaced person most of her life: yet, paradoxically, an extraordinarily serene one. If there is a word which describes her (ignoring, for the moment, Virginia Woolf’s deadly accurate ‘horsefaced’), it is
hauteur
. She was the only child of a prosperous Dublin lawyer. The Bowens traced their line back to the Cromwellian beginnings of the ‘Ascendancy’. Their fine country seat had been erected in 1775 and was the enduring love of Elizabeth’s life. When, in later life, she decided to write a memoir, she called it
Bowen’s Court
(1964). Elizabeth’s father suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown when she was six. Elizabeth and her mother moved to poky lodgings in Hythe, on the south coast of England. Here, her mother died of cancer five years later.

A remote committee of aunts then took charge. The distress echoes through her fiction – most incisively in
The Death of the Heart
(1938) in which Portia, the pubescent heroine, finds herself the ‘odd’, orphaned child, prey to any sexual predator or victim of any negligent guardian. Bowen once said she wrote to ‘feel grown up’. Doubtless she smoked her sixty cigarettes a day for the same reason (few pages carry a stronger whiff of nicotine than hers): a bewildered child is always somewhere in the background.

Bowen’s father recovered sufficiently to remarry in 1918 – but did not create a home for her. She took refuge in her own marriage in 1923, the event coinciding with the publication of her first volume of short stories. It was the more important event for her. She chose as her spouse a middle-ranking educational bureaucrat, Alan Cameron, six years her senior. He was English, had a third from Oxford, and had distinguished himself as an officer in the war. His eyes were permanently damaged by gas; he was unintellectual, and as devoted as a Basset hound. Bowen did not use his name on her books and the marriage was apparently unconsummated. Cameron would eventually fade out as a drink-sodden, unregarded parenthesis to his wife’s brilliant career, conscious of himself as ‘Blimpish’, fat, red-faced, walrus-moustached, cuckold: a figure of fun to his wife’s smart friends (and possibly her as well, as the pathetic Major Brutt in
Death of the Heart
suggests). None the less he supplied what Bowen needed in the formative years of that career – ‘fatherhood,’ she called it. Sex was as off-limits in the marriage as incest would have been with her other father.

During the early years of the marriage, Cameron ascended the rungs of the Civil Service. Momentously, for his wife, he was appointed Secretary for Education for Oxford, in 1925. They took up residence in Old Headington, close to Lord and Lady Tweedsmuir (i.e. the novelist John Buchan), who became her special friends. Over
the next ten years, Bowen’s literary personality would bloom. With nothing but a modest boarding-school education behind her, she was cultivated by a coterie of the university’s most fashionable dons: Maurice Bowra, Lord David Cecil, Isaiah Berlin, and later the Bayleys, John and Iris Murdoch. She had, enthused Bowra, ‘the fine style of a great lady’. Oxford adored her novels and the adoration was crowned with an honorary doctorate in later life.

Oxford was the making of Elizabeth Bowen – but what it did to her fiction was dubious. It pleased her friends – and dedicatees – to believe that she was writing novels for them principally. She was cocooned in a coterie of warmth which gave her strength, but stunted her development. Writing in response to her early copy of
The Heat of the Day
(1949), Rosamond Lehmann gushed about ‘the sustained excitement, the almost hyper-penetration, the pity and terror. It is a great tragedy … Oh, and the wild glorious comedy, the pictorial beauty, the unbearable re-creation of war and London and private lives and loves. You do, you really do, write about love. Who else does, today?’ This over-pitched praise from a claque of cultural power-brokers encouraged a vein of inane portentousness.
Chapter 5
in the novel Lehmann is raving about throws off, in its second sentence, the following: ‘The lovers had for two years possessed a hermetic world which, like the ideal book about nothing, stayed itself on itself by its inner force.’

What on earth does that mean? Yet, on the opposite page, is a passage of sublime delicacy, describing the spiritual inertia of wartime London, awaiting nocturnal destruction from the air. What follows is a snatch of Bowen’s best: ‘The night behind and the night to come met across every noon in an arch of strain. To work or think was to ache. In offices, factories, ministries, shops, kitchens the hot yellow sands of each afternoon ran out slowly; fatigue was the one reality.’ How can a writer write so well and so awfully? Coterie caressing encouraged Bowen to neglect the perennial weakness of her narrative, an inability to handle mechanism. At the conclusion of
To the North
(1932), one of the two heroines, who has made a bad choice in love, sets up a
Liebestod
– careening up the Great North Road, her cad lover in the passenger seat, intending to crash and end it all. In an open car, roaring along a busy highway at 70 mph, they converse with the suavity of a couple in a quiet nook in the Savoy Riverside Bar.

On her father’s death in 1930, Bowen inherited Bowen’s Court. She was the first woman in the line to do so and, it would prove, the last of either sex. For the next thirty years she would move, socially, between metropolitan England and rural Ireland. In 1935 Alan Cameron was appointed secretary to the Central Council for Schools Broadcasting and Bowen established herself as a London literary hostess at 2 Clarence Terrace, the fine property overlooking Regent’s Park, acquired on lease from the Crown.