Dennis Wheatley's Officer and Temporary Gentleman Chapter 12 : Of Authors and Books

All my life I have loved books and I have bought well over 4000. During my teens I devoured historical romances and spy stories - Stanley Weyman, A.E.W.Mason, E. Phillips Oppenheimer and William Le Queux. My favourites were Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda, Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel and Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers. I would so much have liked to have written one of these three, as each gave a word to the English language - 'Musketeers', 'Scarlet Pimpernel', and 'Ruritania'. The first two books make very thin riding now, but alums is immortal. I read every book of his translated into the English Language.

As I have recorded, Gordon Eric led me to serious reading and translations of Flaubert, Tolstoy, Zola, Thomas Mann , Dostoievsky, Ibanez, Gautier.

After the war I became interested in the Ancients - Egypt, Greece, Rome, Frazer's The Golden Bough, the sacred books of the East, Burton's and historical memoirs of all kinds. But about half my buys were English fiction first editions.

My favourite was Aldous Huxley. Beyond all others he possessed a high erudition coupled with a delightful sense of humour. He dined with me several times and I am the fortunate possessor of his first twenty titles, all autographed to me, and several will his photographs pasted in by him.

In the middle thirties I asked a dozen leading booksellers to let me have lists of twenty novels which, in their opinion, were the best published in this century. About half the lists named the same books; then each put down his personal favourites. Altogether the lists included eighty titles. I bought firsts of them all and n the past few years have re-read most of them. They included :

Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale, Chapman and Hall 1908. It concerns two sisters, the daughters of a prosperous Midland draper. One spends all her life in the small industrial town, the other lives for many years in Paris. Both settings as they must have been in Victorian times have a remarkable ring of veracity. A truly great achievement.

H.G.Wells's Tono-Bungay, was the choice of most booksellers; others went for Love and Mr Lewisham or The History of Mr Polly. Wells's gift of foreseeing the future was truly remarkable. Quite apart from such books as The War in the Air, as far back as 1909, when Tono-Bungay was published, he predicted in it the complete change that has since taken place in Britain's social structure. The book is about a poor boy who becomes rich but by no means happy. I have never found Wells's characters sympathetic.

Norman Douglas's South Wind, Secker 1917. This book is arithmetic of enjoyment for the conscious hedonist; for those who regards the Ten Commandments with indifference; for the truly intelligent who seek only beauty and happiness. The scene is a Mediterranean island off Italy; its characters the inhabitants and wealthy visitors. Their ways of seeking pleasure are many and their erudite conversations enchanting.

W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, Heinemann 1915. The principal character is born with a club foot. He is an orphan and his guardian is a mean, puritanical country vicar. The young man fails in all the professions he attempts to enter. Meanwhile, he squanders his small capital on a vicious, lying, little slut by whom for years he is obsessed; then she wantonly destroys all his possessions and leaves him to starve in the gutter. The two last pages only of 648 provide a gleam of hope for his future. Nobody would deny that Maugham was a fine writer, but his personal papers revealed him to have been a horrid man. However, it was once suggested to me that we had one thing in common. A bookstall manager remarked to me: 'You know, Mr Wheatley, there's only two authors who sell year in, year out. That's Mr Maugham and yourself.'

Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, posthumously published by Grant Richards 1903. This is of a father and son, both of whom enter the Church reluctantly. To the end, the father adheres with fanatical intolerance to the (so-called) Christian teachings. The son at length rebels and the book becomes an attack on the cruel moral code enforced on so many millions of unfortunate Victorians. The book stands out as a splendid crusade for tolerance and clear thinking. Bring the first of its kind it has become a classic.

Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street, 2 vols, Secker 1913, 1914. I know of no story that better envisages the thoughts of an infant, a child and a teenager. The scene is mainly London at the turn of the century. The characters are mostly likeable and the book is as good to read now as on the day it was written.

Rudyard Kipling's Kim, Macmillan 1901. Kipling’s fame rests mainly on his verse and short stories, but this novel is outstanding. It is about an impish orphan of British blood, dragged up in the squalor of a native bazaar. A creation of genius that gives a most vivid picture of India under the British Raj.

E.M.Forster’s A Passage to India, Edward Arnold 1924. Magnificent characterisation of whites and coloureds. Again, right at the top of the class.

Joseph Conrad’s Victory, Methuen 1915. Not about war, but of an island in the East Indies. Fascinating in its way but all the characters in it are abnormal. Conrad was the first author I ever met; a small man with pince-nez and a pointed, grey beard. It happened that his son was a cadet with me in H.M.S.Worcester.

D.H.Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Duckworth 1913. No doubt a very good book in its way. It describes life in a Midland coal-miner’s village but none of the characters, with the exception of the mother, have any guts. As for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I thought it a very poor performance. And the author has not a laugh in him.

Sinclair Lewis – both Babbitt (Cape 1922) and Main Street (Hodder & Stoughton 1920) portray the life and prejudices of middle class Americans in a small industrial town, early in this century, with splendid clarity.

R.H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm, Chatto & Windus 1924. The most faultless description of the Ypres Salient as I saw it.

Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Cape 1929. This portrayal of the Italian defeat at Caporetto is excellent. The description of scene and characters are most vivid and the abrupt, repetitive dialogue very telling.

Hugh Walpole’s Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, Mills & Boon 1911. Of two masters at a public school; one old, one young; who quarrel violently and absurdly over an umbrella.

James Joyce’s Ulysses. This was a revolutionary type of English literature; so it must go in. But who would want to read it twice ?

Distinguished contemporaries of the above were John Galsworthy, J.M.Barrie, Max Beerbohm, G.K.Chesrerton, Henry Handel Richardson, Anatole France, George Douglas, William de Morgan, Forrest Reid and F.R.Rolfe.

In the twenties and thirties there was an upsurge of talent and some of the authors at the bottom of the following prargraphs are writing still. Rose Macaulay, Orphan Island; Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man; Margaret Kennedy, The Constant Nymph; Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall; Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica; Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (he once came to tea with us and was as charming as his books); Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy; John Masters; A.P.Herbert, The Water Gypsies; Joan Grant, Winged Pharaoh (a great book – we knew her well and stayed with her many times); the Powys brothers; James Hilton, Lost Horizon (he was a great friend of mine and I missed him sadly when he went to live in Hollywood); Richard Aldington, The Death of a Hero; Georges Simenon; Paul Gallico, The Snow Goose; Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr Fortune’s Maggot; Allen Drury, Advise and Consent; Eric Linklater, Juan in America; Charles Morgan, The Fountain; Morris West, The Ambassador; Edmund Blunden: Radclyffe Hall; Gilbert Frankau, Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant (he was a very good friend of mine and before we had met pushed my first book; we lunched and dined together many times); Howard Spring, Shabby Tiger, Michael Arlen, The Green Hat; A.J.Cronin, The Citadel (these last three were also good friends of mine); L.P.Hartley; Liam O’Flaherty; Dornford Yates; H.M. Tomlinson; David Graham Phillips; V. Sackville-West. Outstanding among the above is Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time series. It is a great work and comparable to Proust.

The most gifted of short story writers in this period are; O.Henry, Frank Harris, A.E.Coppard, John Russell, Thomas Burke, W.W.Jacobs, Stephen Leacock and Charles Birkin. And we must not forget A.A.Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books, for they give pleasure to millions more people than other books.

Historical novels: Rafael Sabatini; Robert Graves, I, Claudius; Norah Lofts; Georgette Heyer; Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind; Jean Plaidy; Leon Feuchtwanger, Jew Suss; and Anya Seton.

Adventure and detection: Conan Doyle sales are still world-wide; Gaboriau; Agatha Christie and John Buchan stand very high; Dorothy L. Sayers; Eric Ambler; Nevil Shute; Francis Iles; John Bingham; Hammond Innes; John D. MacDonald; Alistair Maclean; Edward S. Aarons; Helen McInnes; Peter Cheyney (whom I knew well. His plots were brilliantly devised, but he had no sense of character. His scenes were nearly always smart bars, his women good-time girls. Countless thousands read his books but no one could remember one from another); Frederick Forsyth; Ngaio Marsh; E.C.Bentley; Graham Greene; Francis Clifford; Adam Hall; Edgar Wallace (his plays were excellent, but in spite of his big sales his books were poor stuff); Leslie Charteris’s Saint books have a vast public (we used to be friendly neighbours when we both lived in Queen’s Gate) Ian Fleming hit the high spot with his James Bond stories (he,too, was a friend of mine); the new queen in this field is Evelyn Anthony.

For sea stories C.S. Forrester’s Hornblower series is unforgettable. His successor is Douglas Reeman, alias Alexander Kent. The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. Of soldiers: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maaria Remarque and Ice Cold in Alex by Christopher Landon. The air : Flight into Danger by Frank Castle and Arthur Hailey and Signed with their Honour by James Aldridge.

Space fiction: Arthur C. Clarke is the only author who has a proved scientific knowledge of it, and is the top.

In occult spine-chillers M.R. James was excellent but William Hope Hodgson has never been surpassed.

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Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks broke the taboo on describing physical passion. All honour to her, for no love story is complete without it, and authors like myself have, for the past quarter of a century, been able to write of bedroom scenes without indecency. But the general licence to describe sexual encounters has been shamefully abused. Now, lust, filth, sadism weigh down the bookstalls. Love does not enter into these accounts of lechery. It is simply money for porn. Casanova would have thrown most of this modern bestiality into the fire.

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I have mentioned here only fiction; but, of course, during the past seventy-five years there have been published many biographies, books of travel, memoirs and so on that are very well worth reading.