I once met….Sir Felix Dennis

The sad recent death of amateur poet, multimillionaire media mogul, and manic tree planter reminds me of the day I interviewed him back in 2008. Preparation is everything and knowing that this most eligible bachelor was rather fond of attractive young ladies, my magazine sent me to meet him with a pretty Dutch photographer in her twenties whose dress of choice was a very clinging all-leather cat suit. I can’t for the world think why she chose this particular outfit, but there you are.

In the Forest of Dennis

With Oz defendants Neville and Dexter

Anyway, we arrived for the interview at the office below his penthouse flat off Carnaby Street, which he still rented after four or more decades. While I sat on a huge couch next to an aquarium, which seemed to take up most of one side of the large but rather dingy room, the photographer was shown upstairs to take pictures of Dennis’s superb  library of mainly modern firsts. When the great man arrived late from a generous lunch he was clearly in a good mood, as you might say. This was confirmed when, after adjourning to his office, I prepared for the interview by dropping my tape recorder and allowing all the batteries to fall out. ‘Hah! Hah! Hah! he gleefully exclaimed, ‘Another technophobe’ . I wasn’t, of course, but I knew that he was. I’d been warned that despite the fact that he owned several high-tech magazines, he wasn’t online and had no mobile phone. Nor, despite publishing for car-mad young men, did he drive. I also suspected that he had health problems when he soon after reached for several small bottles in his desk and swallowed a handful of pills.

The interview went remarkably well. There was to be a lot more raucous laughing from his direction and eye-popping amazement from me. We were there principally to discuss his latest book, How to Become Rich, but, of course, I was much more interested in his early hedonistic lifestyle and book collection. On the latter topics he did not disappoint. It appeared that long before the OZ trial one of his principal ambitions had been to defy the mores of his middle class childhood in Kingston on Thames. He dropped out

Inadvertencies

I have found a curious pamphlet from the rather neglected Mill House Press which was run by Edward Gathorne- Hardy whose pic is below. Printed on mould made paper in 1963 It is one of 200 copies only and called Inadvertencies collected from the works of several eminent authors.

Basically a collection of inadvertently obscene passages from mostly 19th century classics. The double entendre game. This passage from Charles Dickens gives the flavour -- 'She touched his organ; and from that bright epoch, even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable, as he had thought, of elevation, began a new and deified existence.' My favourites are from Henry James. There is always a faint air of embarrassment with the Master anyway and Gathorne- Hardy has found some corkers.

"'Oh, I can't explain,' cried Roderick impatiently, returning to his work. 'I've only one way of expressing my deepest feelings - it's this.' And he swung his tool." (Roderick Hudson)

 "You think me a queer fellow already. It's not easy to tell you how I feel, not easy for so queer a fellow as I to tell you in how many ways he's queer." (Passionate Pilgrim)

'What an intimacy, what an intensity of relation, I said to myself, so successful a process implied! It was of course familiar enough that when people were so deeply in love they rubbed off on each other....' (The Sacred Fount)

"It 's just like Longueville, you know," Gordon Wright went on;"he always comes at you from behind; he 's so awfully fond of surprises." (Confidence)

"Then she had had her equal consciousness that within five minutes something between them had--well, she couldn't call it anything but come."  (The Wings of the Dove)

"This time therefore I left excuses to his more practised patience, only relieving myself in response to a direct appeal from a young lady next whom, in the hall, I had found myself sitting.' (The Coxon Fund).

 For more on Eddie G-H go to Bookride. If anyone has a tape of the man talking please send it over.The sound of his voice and his eccentric delivery are still talked about in these parts...