Uncharted Seas (1938)

Wheatley freely admitted that Uncharted Seas was a reprise of They Found Atlantis; he was even happy to pronounce the newer effort distinctly inferior.
It certainly is derivative, but I generally found it the better book (save in one respect that would scarcely have troubled Wheatley, and which I will get to shortly). The fantasy elements, when they come, are not quite so distractingly weird, and because it is almost entirely action it doesn't feel so much like a work of two (warring) halves. The book does not draw breath once until its final quarter, and then only very briefly.
Try this for size:

Another great wave hit the ship a resounding thud. She gave a sickening lurch, lifted with alarming rapidity, hovered a moment, shuddering through all her length as the screws raced wildly, and plunged again - down, down, down - so that the passengers scattered about her lounge felt once more the horrible sensation of dropping in a brakeless lift.

All good, suspenseful stuff, but the important point here is that this is the very first paragraph of the book. We are accustomed by now to Wheatley plunging us straight into the action, but never so literally as this! What these opening chapters reminded me of most was The Poseidon Adventure, but whereas that film (and most disaster movies like it) begin as soap opera, introducing us to the characters and their situations and then putting them in peril one third in, Wheatley starts with the disaster and lets us catch up on the protagonists, their pasts and their personalities in short gasps while the action is ongoing. As technique, it's both intelligent and effective.

So who do we have on this lurching Swedish cargo vessel? Well, firstly we have the expected selection of intriguing character names, including a heroine called Unity Carden and another called Synolda Ortello ("vaguely reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich, but Marlene in a part where she was a bit shop-soiled and prematurely old"), with Yonita Van der Veldt showing up at half time.
Keeping them company are the typical Wheatley's winter assortment of disparate males. There's Juhani Luvia, a plucky Finnish ship's engineer, resourceful from first to last, save for a brief interlude when he gets drunk out of his nut in a jealous rage for the love of Synolda, and accidentally gets one of his own crew shot. ("How could you, honey - a sweet thing like you - interested in that greasy wop, and - snakes alive - he's old enough to be your grandad!")
Jean De Brissac is a French army captain with the inevitable D'Artagnan moustache, and a good sort, if a touch accident prone and hot-headed. ("Queer people, the English," he reflects at one point, looking at Unity, "and particularly their colourless, flat-chested women".)
Basil Sutherland is an Englishman who starts off a wastrel and a drunkard, but abandons his reprobate ways and comes good when he falls for Unity and starts writing her soppy poems. (This is the least he can do, considering his attempt to steal brandy in a lifeboat precipitates a race war that leads to the death of her father; luckily she hated him and stops just short of thanking Basil for the service.)
And lastly, there's Vicente Vadras, an "amorous dago," and shifty to boot. He's basically a reincarnation of Atlantis's Nicholas Costello, and caddish enough to use his knowledge of Synolda's guilty secrets as a means of manipulating her into bed. Synolda is at first apprehensive ("he probably wore woollen combinations"), but ultimately philosophical: "Her husband Henriques Ortello had been a Venezuelan and she was well versed in their idiosyncrasies,"
For various reasons they're all travelling slightly below the radar, hence the non-top drawer transport. The storm turns deadly, and they abandon ship, with several crew members killed in the panic (along with three nuns - an ill-omen, that!) It's almost too much for Unity, who reflects that she'll "never live to ride another horse":

It's no good fooling myself any more. We'll be swamped inside ten minutes; the boat will sink and we'll all be struggling in the sea. God! how I wish I'd allowed George to make love to me when he wanted to so badly.

Cast adrift in an open boat, with the corned beef running precipitously low, a black stoker called Harlem Joe seizes the opportunity to stage a mutiny, which ultimately fails, but leads to much loss of blood and life. With order restored, but no hope of reaching land, all seems lost until a distantly sighted ship turns out to be the same one they had abandoned, still upright and now in calm waters. Back on board they repair the damage and head for the nearest land, but become stuck fast in a thick carpet of green weed. Attempts to hack a course through it are abandoned when it proves a hiding place for vicious giant octopussies. Once again they find themselves seemingly helpless, albeit somewhat better provisioned than previously:

Unity's first thought was the happy one that she would be able to get all the things she had been compelled to leave in her cabin when they abandoned ship; her own hair tonic, brushes, bath salts; sleep the clock round in her favourite nightdress, and revel in clean undies when she got up.

Then when all seems hopeless again, they glimpse what seems to be a strange animal with long legs and a huge head making its way towards them across the weed, which turns out to be a person on stilts with a huge balloon strapped to them. This is the fair Yonita ("little more than a child, although an exceptionally well-developed one"), part of a 250 year old colony of shipwrecked mariners inhabiting the nearby island. But hot in her pursuit are some of the inhabitants of the next island along: a tribe of "devilish negroes" who kill any white men who land on their shores, but stage periodic midnight raids on the neighbouring island, snatching away their women and confining them in their grimly euphemistic 'marriage house'.

From here, stopping briefly for a brush with some giant decapitating crabs, the book overtly reprises Atlantis, as they prepare to settle in this brave new world, and learn of the strange ways and customs of the people. But while the Atlantean civilisation was like some ghastly hippy commune, this lot live in something approximating the manner of an English country house party in the 1930s. It is, unsurprisingly, a Wheatley paradise: no organised religion, no sexual hang-ups, good food and drink and plenty of feudal deference.  They acknowledge the sovereignty of Christ but have outlawed Catholicism and Protestantism, and radical politics get the Dennis elbow too:

"One of the German sailors who reached us in 1904 had some books by a man named Marx. He would talk for hours, I'm told, about a thing called a 'Proletarian State', but nobody here comprehended very fully what he had in mind, although his description of the way in which the lower orders lived in European countries was curiously grim. His strange preoccupation with this subject became a harmless enough hobby, since, despite his attempts to upset everything here at first, he soon settled down like the rest of us to plough his few acres and drift quite happily from day to day. But I digress..."

As Juhani puts it: "No taxes, no wars, no crook politicians, or any other darned thing to worry about. It'll be grand - simply grand!"
This much is Wheatley at his most charming. But paradise is lost when the heathens next door snatch away Unity and Synolda, and the whites stage their rescue in a long (and literally cliff-hanging) race war finale, that plays as an elaboration on the Abyssinia scenes from The Secret War and, while unquestionably suspenseful, is also unrelentingly bleak. 

Reading the novel at the same time as the dialogue between myself and Wheatley's new, posthumous editor, Miranda Vaughan Jones (immediately below this posting), I'm wondering just how she possibly managed to balance the twin needs of retaining authenticity and removing the distastefully outdated in this case. As Phil Baker notes, the racial issues are not throwaway here but of the essence: "ethnic conflict on board the ship is followed by the discovery of a black island and a white island". 
In other words, the casual racial insensitivity we know to expect from Wheatley (and which I tend not to make too much of) is on this occasion elevated to the status of one of the novel's key thematic elements, suggesting a temporary preoccupation on the author's part (and going far beyond his habitual fixation upon his characters' origins, appearance and racial composition). 
As well as the expected fact that the black islanders are presented as utterly degenerate savages, and the casual, inevitable appearance of outdated terms and attitudes, there is a grimly pessimistic tinge to  the book's take on race relations generally. One might have hoped for the black island, for example, to have nurtured a rebellious younger generation intent on overthrowing their leaders and making peace with their neighbours... hokey, perhaps, but better than the hopelessness Wheatley opts for, and which is everywhere evidenced, throughout the novel. It would seem there is simply no chance, even in this literal utopia, of overcoming a fundamental incompatibility between members of different races. Wheatley underscores his point still further in a terse dialogue between Luvia and the mixed-race Gietto Nudäa, who exclaims: "May der ole white sot an' der coloured bitch what made me rot in hell!"

Luvia nodded slowly. Poor devil, he was thinking. Half-caste - outcast - no race, no nation, neither liked nor trusted by men of either colour.

Somewhat in keeping with this glum cynicism, the ending is a strange and unexpected one. As in They Found Atlantis, the travelers are resigned to never seeing their world again when a surprise twist enables them to regain it after all. But this time, some stay and some go; some find happiness and others only a stoic resignation. Not every love affair ends happily, and not every problem is neatly resolved.

The most fun element of the book is all the splendid stuff about the balloons and stilts, the means by which the colonists negotiate the treacherous, octopus-stocked weed. The idea did not sprout from Wheatley's wildest imaginings but was instead inspired by a novelty craze of the time: balloon jumping. By incorporating it within a fantasy narrative Wheatley again shows that alertness to the zeitgesist that makes his books such lively little time capsules. 

This, then, is Uncharted Seas: sometimes surprising, often naive, and from first to last the sheerest tosh - and all delivered with such perfected story-telling finesse that the pages practically turn themselves.

They Found Atlantis (1936)

I read most of They Found Atlantis in Cornwall, in early morning sessions by the sea, not far from Land's End, as the early morning breakers crashed against the rocks. The perfect backdrop for an entertaining if at times utterly insane fable.
The first half of the book is pretty straightforward stuff, a maritime adventure combining underseas exploration with a bit of high society intrigue, some sex, rivalry and a gangster plot above water level. Wheatley was by this time well practiced in the art of keeping two simultaneous plots on the move, and the opening chapters, mixing gangster thriller and sea adventure story, are as accomplished as ever.
But then, halfway through, it switches abruptly and - by me, at least - quite unexpectedly into outrageous sci-fi fantasy, as our intrepid heroes, stranded on the ocean bottom with no hope of returning to the surface, encounter an undersea kingdom of Atlanteans who grow plants in a sealed chamber, spend months asleep during which their astral bodies wander the surface of the earth and follow the lives of the inhabitants (on waking they then update their fellows with the latest developments, soap opera-style), see by earthlight, live for several hundred years, enjoy group sex, are forbidden from mentioning bad things lest they cause bad thoughts, and are plagued by a sub-race of blind, fish-eating sea humanoids and briefly glimpsed savage mermen.
Our heroes end up among them, get married and are then booted out again when sexual jealousy - long since evolved out of the gene pool of these enlightened ancients - leads to manslaughter. Not fancying spending the rest of their lives with the savage mermen they clamber up through the earth's crust to freedom.
Oh yes, and the one who's supposed to be an heiress isn't, and the one who's supposed to be just her dowdy relation turns out to be the heiress, and the attempt by smart-spoken gangster Oxford Kate (a man) to fleece her comes to nothing.
But I sense this is getting confusing. Let me retrace my steps.

What we have in They Found Atlantis is a Wheatley who has taken a gamble with fantastic and supernatural elements in The Devil Rides Out and seen that gamble pay off, plunging fearlessly into science fiction absurdity with a relish that I sometimes found myself wishing had been more cautiously applied. There is much wide-eyed fantasy, a schoolboy-like delight in the creation of alternative worlds, some left-over horrific detail from Devil (the description of the travellers' escape from the fish men is gruesomely described: "Tripping and stumbling over dead bodies and writhing wounded they literally hacked their way through the mass of short, naked, stinking, grey-white people"; Wheatley accurately describes the tableaux as "like a scene from hell conjured up by the vivid brush of some early Flemish painter"), and all combined with the usual clean-cut character dynamics of the straight, Rider Haggard-style adventure yarn.
Add to this the now customary fruits of his peripheral research, including lots of real, interesting scientific information about the techniques of undersea exploration that sits oddly indeed alongside the mermen, and you have a book that cannot fail to be interesting, but which must ultimately be counted among Wheatley's most eccentric diversions.

Of course, we don't doubt that they will find Atlantis - the title hints as much - but the discovery that it is still tenanted, and by a race of free-loving paganist weirdoes (this is the second book in a row in which characters have patiently explained to uptight western moderns the ancient glories of polygamy), will surely take most readers undefended.

Atlantis as a concept in a work of fiction I can swallow, but the non-Darwinian farrago of the book's final chapters I found a little too daft. Learned disquisition on the Atlantean phonetic alphabet further adds to the book's weird if often undeniably beguiling mix of rationalism and madness.

This is what Atlantis looked like, according to Wheatley, his wife, and his step-daughter

The book - which Wheatley described in Drink and Ink as "one of the best I have ever written" - was inspired by Wheatley's reading of Half Mile Down, adventurer William Beebe's account of the undersea discoveries he had made in his 'bathysphere', a reinforced iron sphere that allowed him to explore to depths previously impossible. The book had been published in 1934, and must have immediately set a train of thought in motion for Wheatley, who was fascinated by Beebe's account of the strange, twilight world beneath the waves, and the many strange and undiscovered lifeforms who make their home there. Wheatley dedicated the novel to Beebe when it was published two years later. (According to Phil Baker, Beebe was gracious enough to write him a letter of thanks, presumably for including so much of the technical detail concerning the bathysphere he had included in his own account.)

Beebe and his bathysphere

What Beebe made of the book's more fantastic episodes I do not know, nor am I sure how, when and why Wheatley decided to tie Beebe's invention with the myth of Atlantis in the first place. Judging by past form and Wheatley's own temperament, one might have expected something more along the lines of an undersea treasure hunt, with competing groups looking for treasure lost on the ocean bed. (This all sounds a lot like Peter Benchley's The Deep, and I was frequently reminded of Benchley's novel in the early stages of Wheatley's.) Almost certainly, I think, this would have been Wheatley's approach prior to the success of The Devil Rides Out, but the public response to that novel could well have emboldened (and drawn) him towards more fantastic themes.

It's possible that he may have read of the Atlantis myth during research for Devil: certainly there had been a revival of interest in the subject in the first half of the twentieth century, as an offshoot of Theosophy and similar occult and esoteric revivalist movements. But Wheatley does not mention anywhere that he took any particular personal interest, and it is relevant that (as noted in this extremely interesting discussion of the book and its influences) it is never clear when reading the book if Wheatley is himself a believer or simply using the old myths to help spin his yarn. (Whereas part of the unique power of Devil Rides Out derives from the reader's certainty of his absolute sincerity when describing Satanic powers.)

That the general occult research undertaken for Devil may have been his primary source of influence is further suggested by this passage, doubly interesting for its foretaste of the homunculi that would later become central to To The Devil, A Daughter:

"As with all other nations we had had in our midst from the beginning certain persons who practiced what, for want of a better name, I will call the Black Art. At first they were comparatively harmless, dealing only in spells, love-tokens and minor witchcraft, but the time came when they began to concern themselves with what you call 'science' and that proved the most unholy alliance which has ever entered the world.
"... the sorcerer-scientists saw their great chance to corrupt our people with their evil arts. They carried out many experiments in order to see if they could not succeed in creating life without the sanction of the Gods. 'Black' magicians in your upper world have endeavoured to do the same and have, as you may know, at times been partially successful. Such creatures are incubated in large glass containers and are termed Homunculi. They have the rudimentary form of man yet lack that God-given flame which you call the Soul. Our masters of Evil succeeded in the dread mystery at last, thus introducing a new and hideous race upon the earth. Beasts which moved and talked and functioned just like men although, unlike the lowest forms of true animal, they had not the faintest spark of the divine nature in them."

(That contentious swastika reappears too, in the pagan rites of the Atlantean women: "When she had done she kissed them both, made the sign of the Swastika on their foreheads, breasts, and thighs with a curiously scented oil from a tiny bottle...")
But another possible influence, of course, may have been his old mentor and prototype of Gregory Sallust, Eric Gordon Tombe (see here), who would have responded both to the wild esoteric fantasy and Greek classicism of the myth. Certainly the pagan Utopia that is Wheatley's Atlantis, all magic powers and no-strings sex, has a very definite touch of the Tombes about it:

"You see, each of us make what we require for ourselves and nothing more" Lulluma explained "and when we wish to eat we gather whatever fresh fruit is in season from the trees or net a fish in the lake and cook it. All waste is consumed immediately after by the earthshine."

"How does that work?" he asked. "It seems to have all the properties of sunshine."

"It has," she assured him. "You doubtless know that the centre of the earth is molten and gives off gases which are exactly similar to those which shoot out in great flames from the sun. Long ago our people tapped that source of heat and light and then it was a comparatively simple matter to conduct it through certain minerals so that it should give a steady glow. The circular arrangement round the roof enables the trees and plants to benefit from it at every angle in the same degree so that they are never distorted in one direction. The result is similar to that produced by the movement of your sun."

"Forgive me, but there are so many things I want to ask you" he smiled down at her. "From the way you speak you are obviously familiar with our upper world?"

"There is little do here" she answered enigmatically "except make love!"

"You find that pall at times?"

"No, never - because we do not abuse our zest for it. Once every year or two each of us has some tremendous affair which lasts a few months, then when we are satiated for the moment, we go away. Later the urge rises again and when we feel it really strongly we take our happiness with another."

"You speak of going away. What do you mean by that?"

"Two of us are always what you would call 'on duty' here. It was the turn of Nahou and myself when you arrived. The others spend most of the year in sleep. Sometimes we sleep for a month or more at a stretch, and during that time our spirit travels - as quickly as an ether wave. We have learned to direct it to the place where we wish to go. The eyes of our invisible bodies can observe your customs and our ears can hear your speech. That is how we have learned your languages and know quite a lot about you, but there are many things you do which puzzle us still."

The party's prudishness in particular tickles the Atlanteans: "They do not understand nakedness, as we do who are so old in time that we have come to appreciate the wisdom of reverting to the customs of simple savages in some things," they muse, then educate: "You will soon learn the joy of being free from such stuffy clothes and your skins will be the better for it."

I did find myself hoping, as the travellers become more and more enamoured of this dreary paradise, mooning about with a bunch of hippies twenty thousand leagues under the sea and never a thought for the world of fine wines and Hoyo cigars they have left behind, that the Atlanteans would suddenly prove less obliging than they seem, possessed of a sinister side, perhaps even that the whole thing may have been some kind of trap... but no, in true W. B. Yeats fashion it is we who are not worthy of the faeries, and when nasty human emotions cloud the antiseptic perfection of Atlantis it is time to travel back to the surface with all the other reprobates.

I get the feeling the champagne was flowing a little too freely at the Wheatleys' when much of this was being penned, and it is a relief on the occasions, not rare but not quite frequent enough, when the man's bluff cynicism shows through the hippy-dippy veneer. ("What do you hope to find if we go on," asks Nicolas in response to the suggestion that they should proceed further into the strange and perilous undersea world into which they have stumbled, "the Ritz-Carlton Grill Room round the corner or a handy Lyons?")

And there's a fascinating, lengthy passage in which the hero questions an Atlantean wise man as to the mechanical means of their survival underwater, and how such fantastic things as we have been bombarded with for several chapters could possibly be. Each absurd invention of previous episodes is accounted for in patient, thorough, painstaking and surely redundant detail, with each point made clear followed by some fresh objection, and again by a fresh explanation - of a sort demanded surely, by this time, by no more than one reader in a hundred. (Any who needed such validation to accept the events of the book would have given up on it long before it arrives!)

In moments like this it's as if the tension between Wheatley the fantasist and Wheatley the rationalist is actually being acted out on the page.

Certainly he is at his most relaxed and characteristic when then book is above water, the thrills are rational, and the pace measured enough for his customary expansiveness, discursiveness and trademark merciless characterisation.

The hero McKay (referred to as 'the McKay' throughout, and modelled on a recent acquaintance of Wheatley's, Captain Magee RN Retd, "a delightful character" who also contributed technical information to Black August, according to Drink and Ink) is a salty rogue, with Wheatley's own preferences in politics, women and lifestyle, presented, like so many Wheatley heroes, as somewhat rough around the edges, somewhat older and more dissipated than your average fiction adventure hero and by no means classically handsome, but possessed of tremendous strength of personality. And here is Wheatley on the heroine, Sally:

Sally's skin was good, her nose straight, her mouth full and red, her teeth excellent, the eyes wide set but not large enough to give her face distinction. She was attractive but not a real beauty.
Her cheeks were just a shade too full and nothing, she knew, could alter that any more than the most skilful plucking would ever convert her golden eyebrows from semi-circular arches to the long narrow Garboish sweeps which she would have liked. Besides, shame of all shames, her otherwise quite perfect figure was marred by thick ankles.

I say, steady on, old chap!
That reference to Garbo is one of a pair, by the way: elsewhere Camilla, the phoney heiress, contemplates breaking into movies and "outgarboing Garbo". Wheatley always took a keen interest in movies and movie people (a character called King Karloff is mentioned in passing, and one of the Atlanteans is likened to Mae West: a deliciously unimaginable image!), but it was perhaps ill-feeling towards their latest attempt to adapt his own work (The Secret of Stamboul, see here) that caused him to create the utterly repellent character of Nicolas Costello, crooning romantic lead of Hollywood movies, thief and coward, one of Carmilla's many jealous suitors and the ultimate cause of the travellers' ejection from Atlantis.
Sally and McKay have this exchange after the latter describes Costello as "that little filth":

"Nicky's not so bad. He's rather fun I think, and quite a famous film star. You've only got a hate against him because you don't like crooners - you said so the other day."
"I'd croon him if I had him in a ship with me," said the McKay grimly. "I took a dislike to that young man before I even knew what brand of idiocy he indulged in..."

Wheatley later describes Costello as "resplendent in a pale blue flannel suit that no man other than a film star would have dared to wear", and, as he exercises "the muted cross between a tenor and alto which he called his voice", observes:

Some people like listening to crooners. Obviously many people must, for the records of the theme songs from Nicky's pictures sold in their millions all over the world. Camilla certainly did, and lay back with half-closed eyes savouring to the full the primitive emotionalism of 'Dear baby God gave me, I'm holding your hands' and 'In all the world, Mother - there's no one like you'. Not so the McKay, who fifty feet away in the deck lounge, trumped his partner's trick, apologised and muttered fiercely: "God! how I'd like to tan that youngster's hide!"

It is in passages like these, rather than the more bizarre stretches of Jules Verne-like fantasy, that the authentic Wheatley voice is most clearly heard.