Trechos de The Devil Is A Gentleman: The Life And Times Of Dennis Wheatley (2009), de Phil Baker.
To Wheatley, it [WW1] was "the greatest tragedy that has befallen mankind since the Goths and Vandals brought about the Dark Ages by the destruction of the Roman Empire."
- - -
The third of August 1914 was a Bank Holiday, and Wheatley went out on his motorcycle to see Douglas Sharp and Cecil Cross, who were both troopers in the Westminster Dragoons.
- - -
Wheatley, of all people, should have had misgivings about the war. Germans had been kind to him, he had loved them, and he had had close German friends even while he was in England. But he was as caught up in it as the rest. His enthusiasm was inexplicable, he wrote later; but everyone in the crowd was "completely war-mad ... swayed by that most terrible of all evils - mob psychology."
- - -
The excitement died down over the next few days, to be replaced by anxiety among the middle classes. There were fears of a run on the banks, and worries about trade. Wheatley's father had built up a thriving business as the agent for a German mineral water called Moselaris (the Wheatley letterhead at this period proclaims "Moselaris Sparkling Natural Table Water" in a flourish of red lettering). All that was ruined.
- - -
Wheatley attempted to join the Westminster Dragoons so he could be with his friends, but it was necessary to ride. Wheatley lied (he had once been on a donkey at Margate, and that was the limit of his experience) but the truth became embarrassingly obvious when they put him on a horse. The Westminster Dragoons were decimated at Gallipoli in a Crimea-style tragedy of slaughter followed by disease, and he later felt he had been lucky.
Wheatley's enthusiasm for his motorcycle inspired him to reply to an advert asking for motorcycle owners to act as despatch riders in France, but he never received a reply. Once again, this came to seem lucky when he met a man who had been involved in organising the motorcyclists; most of the first batch had been killed or captured in the first few weeks.
The HQ of the "Artist's Rifles" was near the Wheatley business, and Wheatley tried to enlist there, but he was too short, at five foot eight. It tells a grim story about the death rate that within a year or two the Army would form "Bantam" regiments, recruiting men under five feet tall.
- - -
The early days of Wheatley's soldiering were distinctly amateur, and very different from what had been going on in Germany. The men had no uniforms, and would march in motley order wearing bowler hats, straw hats and cloth caps.
- - -
Wheatley was proud of his new uniform, and before long his tendency to dandyism came into its own.
- - -
Several of Wheatley's fellow officers were memorable, like "Frothy" Hurst, so called because his violent temper made him froth at the mouth. One of the oddest was Wheatley's battery commander, Major William "Shitty Bill" Inglis, "a very queer individual." Wheatley believed Inglis to be "a sexual maniac", a man whose drive for women became a "pathological abnormality": "the way he used to eye any fresh young woman who was introduced to him was positively nauseating."
- - -
Despite being a married man in his mid-forties and a commanding officer, Inglis would go out with second lieutenants Wheatley, still only seventeen, and Bertie Davis, eighteen, with the aim of picking up young women. This was unprofessional, to say the least, as Wheatley realised at the time. Their favourite hunting ground was the long slope up Richmond Hill, leading towards Richmond Park, with its superb view and its old pubs. In those days it was thronged by young people from all over London; "a moving crowd as thick as one would see on the Parade at any popular holiday resort."
Picking up women was easy with an officer's uniform and the excitement caused by the war, with its suspension of normal standards. Many of the crowd had come with the intention of getting off with somebody. At one point a policeman looking over the crowd said to Major Inglis - one uniform to another, as it were - "There's miles of it, sir. Miles of it, just for the asking."
- - -
If the girls were agreeable then after drinks they might go to Richmond Park and disport themselves in the grass. Wheatley kept a list of women he'd had relations with between 1914 and 1921, most of them probably prostitutes. Some of the women in Wheatley's list have ticks beside them, and the end of the list he scores himself forty out of seventy, corresponding to forty ticks out of seventy women.
It seems likely these ticks mean full intercourse.
- - -
Wheatley was growing so bored with horses and artillery and training that in November 1915 he volunteered to join the Royal Flying Corps. "One doesn't fetch horses in the RFC," he told Hilda, having no idea that the pilots' average life expectancy would be around two weeks.
- - -
Wheatley's main recreation was reading, but more communally it was singing; the officers had an upright piano. They liked the indecent songs of the period such as "Bollocky Bill the Sailor", "Charlotte the Harlot", "Abdul El Bulbul Emir", and "Never let a sailor get his hand above your knee." Few of these have aged well, and "She wouldn't do just what I wanted her to (so I socked her in the eye)" less than most.
- - -
The idea of an amoral woman making her way in the world fascinated him, like Georgina Thursby in his own Roger Brook books, or Amber St. Clare in Kathleen Winsor's once controversial bodice-ripper, Forever Amber, which he owned.
- - -
As we shall see, the degradation of women was a highly charged subject in Wheatley's imagination, whether as sadistic threats in the thriller fiction, orgiastic rituals in the black magic books, anxieties within his own family, or even national prospects in his wartime defence papers. This was so fascinatingly awful that it could never be allowed to happen, but the possibility always had to be raised as fulsomely as possible.
- - -
Compared to the horror taking place in France, Wheatley was having an absurdly pleasant time. The Battle of the Somme had now started, with 57,000 British casualties on the first day, 19,000 of them dead.
- - -
Two deaths hit Wheatley closer to home around this time: his grandfather, William Yeats Baker, died in August, and Wheatley's old best friend, Douglas Sharp, died in Egypt from blood poisoning after a camel bite. Far from glorious, Sharp's death was still sustained on active service, which seems to be the serious point in the otherwise comic poem Wheatley wrote about the two of them and the two girls glimpsed in Streatham.
- - -
It became increasingly clear that at last Wheatley was going to get to France, but it was an incomparably less exciting prospect than it had seemed four years earlier.
- - -
Next morning, Wheatley took the train from Victoria to Southampton. And the day after that, August 8th 1917, he finally left for France.
- - -
Wheatley had gone over to France with a friend from Luton, Captain Colsell. They were camped just outside Le Havre, where the evening streets were full of men in khaki and French prostitutes.
- - -
Wheatley went to the 36th Division Ammunition Column at Vlamertinghe. These were landscapes he never forgot, and years later he was drawn back to make a motoring tour, which he wrote up in a leather bound 'Motor Trips' notebook from the Times Book Club.
- - -
On the road from Ypres he remembered "up this road had to go every ounce of food and ammunition ... an unending stream of traffic never ceasing day or night as thick as Piccadilly at midday and the Boche never ceased to shell it as he knew that it was the only road by which supplies could be got up ... the sides were lined with a thousand and one broken motors carts lorries waggons just thrown over the side so that the stream might keep moving."
- - -
Wheatley wrote to Hilda that on his first night "a German 8in [shell] landed quite near and the bits flew through the tent in which I was sleeping, and covered everything in mud" and then a few nights later (in his autobiography he remembers it as the first night, conflating several events) they were bombed. A bomb landed twenty yards from the Officers Mess, and on running out to see what had happened Wheatley saw his first dead man, his body twisted beneath a wagon where he had dived for shelter.
- - -
Wheatley's first six weeks in France were his worst, although he was grateful he had escaped the fate of the infantry at Passchendaele.
- - -
Wheatley was put in charge of the 4th Corps ammunition dump at the ruined Somme village of Ytres, and looked after it through September 1917. A railway wagon would arrive each night, and Wheatley would supervise the placing and camouflaging of the unloaded ammunition.
- - -
Their destination was the village of St. Simon, which they reached via the small town of Ham. It was at Ham that Napoleon III had been imprisoned, but made his escape disguised as a workman; escaping monarchs always caught Wheatley's imagination.
- - -
Wheatley had minor discipline problems, but he was backed up by a solidly professional Sergeant-Major, a Boer War veteran, and over the next ten days, having lost touch with his Major, he was effectively in charge of around a thousand men, including stragglers and even deserters.
- - -
Wheatley's bronchitis may have been aggravated by the presence of gas, since the Germans were using gas shells.
[...] Wheatley's army career had not been glorious, but he had done his duty; no less, if no more. He was well-liked by the men, seemingly because he was cheerful and humane.
- - -
His leave got him into London four days after the Armistice, with the "mafficking"-type celebrations still going strong. People roamed the streets waving Union Jacks and singing, and great bonfires were lit in Trafalgar Square, damaging the lions at the foot of Nelson's Column. These bonfires were still alight when Wheatley arrived on the scene.
- - -
Leafing through the French Fascist paper Gringoire, George Orwell noticed no less than thirty eight advertisements for clairvoyants. He remembered this when he was trying to fathom the relationship between occultism and right wing politics. For one thing, occultism replaces the idea of progress and the untidy reality of change with a timeless and reassuring vision of eternal myth, instead of real history, as if nothing essential had changed since the days of ancient Egypt. Secondly, occultism and fascism share a sense of spurious elitism, esoteric knowledge being the dominion of a special few and the guarantee of their superiority. More than that, it offers a transcendence of ordinary life, and an idealist fantasy of pure mental power without normal economic or social restraints.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnIS0pJbHFIVVZkXzQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjKkMzziP2Q
http://www.denofgeek.com/27687/a-look-back-at-dennis-wheatleys-black-magic-novels
- - -
The third of August 1914 was a Bank Holiday, and Wheatley went out on his motorcycle to see Douglas Sharp and Cecil Cross, who were both troopers in the Westminster Dragoons.
- - -
Wheatley, of all people, should have had misgivings about the war. Germans had been kind to him, he had loved them, and he had had close German friends even while he was in England. But he was as caught up in it as the rest. His enthusiasm was inexplicable, he wrote later; but everyone in the crowd was "completely war-mad ... swayed by that most terrible of all evils - mob psychology."
- - -
The excitement died down over the next few days, to be replaced by anxiety among the middle classes. There were fears of a run on the banks, and worries about trade. Wheatley's father had built up a thriving business as the agent for a German mineral water called Moselaris (the Wheatley letterhead at this period proclaims "Moselaris Sparkling Natural Table Water" in a flourish of red lettering). All that was ruined.
- - -
Wheatley attempted to join the Westminster Dragoons so he could be with his friends, but it was necessary to ride. Wheatley lied (he had once been on a donkey at Margate, and that was the limit of his experience) but the truth became embarrassingly obvious when they put him on a horse. The Westminster Dragoons were decimated at Gallipoli in a Crimea-style tragedy of slaughter followed by disease, and he later felt he had been lucky.
Wheatley's enthusiasm for his motorcycle inspired him to reply to an advert asking for motorcycle owners to act as despatch riders in France, but he never received a reply. Once again, this came to seem lucky when he met a man who had been involved in organising the motorcyclists; most of the first batch had been killed or captured in the first few weeks.
The HQ of the "Artist's Rifles" was near the Wheatley business, and Wheatley tried to enlist there, but he was too short, at five foot eight. It tells a grim story about the death rate that within a year or two the Army would form "Bantam" regiments, recruiting men under five feet tall.
- - -
The early days of Wheatley's soldiering were distinctly amateur, and very different from what had been going on in Germany. The men had no uniforms, and would march in motley order wearing bowler hats, straw hats and cloth caps.
- - -
Wheatley was proud of his new uniform, and before long his tendency to dandyism came into its own.
- - -
Several of Wheatley's fellow officers were memorable, like "Frothy" Hurst, so called because his violent temper made him froth at the mouth. One of the oddest was Wheatley's battery commander, Major William "Shitty Bill" Inglis, "a very queer individual." Wheatley believed Inglis to be "a sexual maniac", a man whose drive for women became a "pathological abnormality": "the way he used to eye any fresh young woman who was introduced to him was positively nauseating."
- - -
Despite being a married man in his mid-forties and a commanding officer, Inglis would go out with second lieutenants Wheatley, still only seventeen, and Bertie Davis, eighteen, with the aim of picking up young women. This was unprofessional, to say the least, as Wheatley realised at the time. Their favourite hunting ground was the long slope up Richmond Hill, leading towards Richmond Park, with its superb view and its old pubs. In those days it was thronged by young people from all over London; "a moving crowd as thick as one would see on the Parade at any popular holiday resort."
Picking up women was easy with an officer's uniform and the excitement caused by the war, with its suspension of normal standards. Many of the crowd had come with the intention of getting off with somebody. At one point a policeman looking over the crowd said to Major Inglis - one uniform to another, as it were - "There's miles of it, sir. Miles of it, just for the asking."
- - -
If the girls were agreeable then after drinks they might go to Richmond Park and disport themselves in the grass. Wheatley kept a list of women he'd had relations with between 1914 and 1921, most of them probably prostitutes. Some of the women in Wheatley's list have ticks beside them, and the end of the list he scores himself forty out of seventy, corresponding to forty ticks out of seventy women.
It seems likely these ticks mean full intercourse.
- - -
Wheatley was growing so bored with horses and artillery and training that in November 1915 he volunteered to join the Royal Flying Corps. "One doesn't fetch horses in the RFC," he told Hilda, having no idea that the pilots' average life expectancy would be around two weeks.
- - -
Wheatley's main recreation was reading, but more communally it was singing; the officers had an upright piano. They liked the indecent songs of the period such as "Bollocky Bill the Sailor", "Charlotte the Harlot", "Abdul El Bulbul Emir", and "Never let a sailor get his hand above your knee." Few of these have aged well, and "She wouldn't do just what I wanted her to (so I socked her in the eye)" less than most.
- - -
The idea of an amoral woman making her way in the world fascinated him, like Georgina Thursby in his own Roger Brook books, or Amber St. Clare in Kathleen Winsor's once controversial bodice-ripper, Forever Amber, which he owned.
- - -
As we shall see, the degradation of women was a highly charged subject in Wheatley's imagination, whether as sadistic threats in the thriller fiction, orgiastic rituals in the black magic books, anxieties within his own family, or even national prospects in his wartime defence papers. This was so fascinatingly awful that it could never be allowed to happen, but the possibility always had to be raised as fulsomely as possible.
- - -
Compared to the horror taking place in France, Wheatley was having an absurdly pleasant time. The Battle of the Somme had now started, with 57,000 British casualties on the first day, 19,000 of them dead.
- - -
Two deaths hit Wheatley closer to home around this time: his grandfather, William Yeats Baker, died in August, and Wheatley's old best friend, Douglas Sharp, died in Egypt from blood poisoning after a camel bite. Far from glorious, Sharp's death was still sustained on active service, which seems to be the serious point in the otherwise comic poem Wheatley wrote about the two of them and the two girls glimpsed in Streatham.
- - -
It became increasingly clear that at last Wheatley was going to get to France, but it was an incomparably less exciting prospect than it had seemed four years earlier.
- - -
Next morning, Wheatley took the train from Victoria to Southampton. And the day after that, August 8th 1917, he finally left for France.
- - -
Wheatley had gone over to France with a friend from Luton, Captain Colsell. They were camped just outside Le Havre, where the evening streets were full of men in khaki and French prostitutes.
- - -
Wheatley went to the 36th Division Ammunition Column at Vlamertinghe. These were landscapes he never forgot, and years later he was drawn back to make a motoring tour, which he wrote up in a leather bound 'Motor Trips' notebook from the Times Book Club.
- - -
On the road from Ypres he remembered "up this road had to go every ounce of food and ammunition ... an unending stream of traffic never ceasing day or night as thick as Piccadilly at midday and the Boche never ceased to shell it as he knew that it was the only road by which supplies could be got up ... the sides were lined with a thousand and one broken motors carts lorries waggons just thrown over the side so that the stream might keep moving."
- - -
Wheatley wrote to Hilda that on his first night "a German 8in [shell] landed quite near and the bits flew through the tent in which I was sleeping, and covered everything in mud" and then a few nights later (in his autobiography he remembers it as the first night, conflating several events) they were bombed. A bomb landed twenty yards from the Officers Mess, and on running out to see what had happened Wheatley saw his first dead man, his body twisted beneath a wagon where he had dived for shelter.
- - -
Wheatley's first six weeks in France were his worst, although he was grateful he had escaped the fate of the infantry at Passchendaele.
- - -
Wheatley was put in charge of the 4th Corps ammunition dump at the ruined Somme village of Ytres, and looked after it through September 1917. A railway wagon would arrive each night, and Wheatley would supervise the placing and camouflaging of the unloaded ammunition.
- - -
Their destination was the village of St. Simon, which they reached via the small town of Ham. It was at Ham that Napoleon III had been imprisoned, but made his escape disguised as a workman; escaping monarchs always caught Wheatley's imagination.
- - -
Wheatley had minor discipline problems, but he was backed up by a solidly professional Sergeant-Major, a Boer War veteran, and over the next ten days, having lost touch with his Major, he was effectively in charge of around a thousand men, including stragglers and even deserters.
- - -
Wheatley's bronchitis may have been aggravated by the presence of gas, since the Germans were using gas shells.
[...] Wheatley's army career had not been glorious, but he had done his duty; no less, if no more. He was well-liked by the men, seemingly because he was cheerful and humane.
- - -
His leave got him into London four days after the Armistice, with the "mafficking"-type celebrations still going strong. People roamed the streets waving Union Jacks and singing, and great bonfires were lit in Trafalgar Square, damaging the lions at the foot of Nelson's Column. These bonfires were still alight when Wheatley arrived on the scene.
- - -
Leafing through the French Fascist paper Gringoire, George Orwell noticed no less than thirty eight advertisements for clairvoyants. He remembered this when he was trying to fathom the relationship between occultism and right wing politics. For one thing, occultism replaces the idea of progress and the untidy reality of change with a timeless and reassuring vision of eternal myth, instead of real history, as if nothing essential had changed since the days of ancient Egypt. Secondly, occultism and fascism share a sense of spurious elitism, esoteric knowledge being the dominion of a special few and the guarantee of their superiority. More than that, it offers a transcendence of ordinary life, and an idealist fantasy of pure mental power without normal economic or social restraints.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnIS0pJbHFIVVZkXzQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjKkMzziP2Q
http://www.denofgeek.com/27687/a-look-back-at-dennis-wheatleys-black-magic-novels
