A cat called Felix - Felix Dennis interview

Martyr of the counterculture turned multimillionaire, Felix Dennis is now happiest writing poetry, says Jim Gilchrist

‘IT HAS completely changed my life and given meaning to it.” Felix Dennis, the man who first hit the headlines as one of the defendants in the landmark Oz obscenity trial in 1971 and went on to establish one of the world’s most successful magazine publishing enterprises, is expounding on poetry. He started writing it in a hospital bed nine years ago and it now consumes him for three to four hours a day, filling the gap once occupied by a life-threatening crack cocaine habit.

When he says that his is “the story of a fool whose life was saved by poetry”, he means it. Now 61, the once famously hedonistic publisher, who is supposed to have evaporated £50 million in a decade, much of it on drugs, women and generally excessive living, has written to date some 1,000 poems, publishing many in widely selling collections. “It’s completely obsessive and I accept that.”

He still enjoys the buzz of making money: “But the risk-reward ratio between sitting down and spending a lot of time writing poetry, then performing it and seeing people’s reactions… making money just can’t compare to that.”

Dennis’s latest collection, Homeless In My Heart, was published last week; Edinburgh audiences can hear him read from it at Jongleurs club on Thursday, which is National Poetry Day. It is the only Scottish gig in his slyly titled Did I Mention the Free Wine? tour, which resembles some rock band’s entourage, complete with two limos – a Maybach 62 and a Rolls – and a helicopter, not to mention copious quantities of the aforesaid (and, this being Dennis, well– chosen) wine.

He is sitting at his desk, uncluttered but for a disquietingly yellow-eyed and patterned human skull by the sculptor Stephen Gregory, at the heart of his bustling office in Soho. In contrast to his reputation, he is drinking water and eating a sausage sandwich – “caviare all the way around here,” he mumbles through a mouthful.

The once-luxuriant cavalier locks and beard of the Oz days have greyed and he peers over half-moon spectacles, in appearance somewhere between the late Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and Mr Badger from The Wind in the Willows. He is sporting a grey sweatshirt from Mustique, where one of his numerous homes was formerly owned by David Bowie.

His latter-day infatuation with the muse hasn’t distracted the media magnate – whose fortune is listed at £750 million in this year’s Sunday Times Rich List – from the getting of wealth, despite the currently fickle state of the men’s magazines market. Having published a proliferation of lads’ mags, computer and motoring titles, including the world’s largest-selling men’s lifestyle title, Maxim and the widely circulating digest The Week, he recently announced plans to create the largest men’s publisher in India in a joint venture with Media Transasia, and The Week is due to launch in Australia. Last year, he sold the US editions of Maxim, Stuff and Blender to a private equity group for a reported $240 million.

One poem in the new collection, We are different when we are alone, suggests a dark side, when “the werewolf of self is loose”. Expansively affable by nature, Dennis has been described as a ruthless businessman. “Absolutely,” he responds, matter-of-factly. “How could you possibly go from living in a bedsit, unable to pay the rent, to being one of the richest individuals in England? It truly is not possible without having an element of ruthlessness in your nature. I did write about this in How To Get Rich …” And he duly presents me with a copy of his critically acclaimed manual on making money. Will it really make me richer, I ask. “It could well do, if you do everything it says,” he replies, “but the trouble is that you won’t, because you won’t like yourself.”

The conversation turns inevitably to the extraordinary and much-publicised statement he made during a wine-fuelled interview with Ginny Dougary of the Times, earlier this year, when he told her he had once killed a man by pushing him over a cliff. He later retracted the statement, blaming it on a combination of alcohol and medication he was receiving for a thyroid imbalance.

I raise the topic with some trepidation: there are no cliffs in W1, but his warren-like office building does have a very steep staircase. “Let me answer your question with a question,” he grins, quite unabashed. “Were we both utterly plastered, more drunk than I’ve been in at least a decade? Yes, I was. Do drunks talk trash? Yes, they do. Did I deserve it? Sure. Am I cross with Ginny? No [roars with laughter]. I rest my case.”

Moving gingerly back to poetry, I suggest that the very phrase “multimillionaire poet” reeks alarmingly of oxymoron, to which he gives a characteristic guffaw. “It certainly does – and it hasn’t helped,” he adds, referring to the criticism his verse, which sticks determinedly to traditional forms and metres, has received from what he calls “the Druids-in-residence of English poetry”. His books, however, bear enthusiastic endorsements from the likes of Tom Wolfe, Melvyn Bragg and Jon Snow.

Relations with the contemporary poetry establishment, he claims, have been improving. “I think they’ve seen that, over the past eight years or so, I’ve worked really, really hard.”

One of his new poems, Old Bailey, is a bitter look back from almost four decades at the celebrated Oz trial, in which Dennis, along with the counterculture magazine’s editor, Richard Neville, and co-editor Jim Anderson, were charged with “corrupting the morals of children”. Dennis was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment, but all three were acquitted after an appeal, though not before they had spent two worrying weeks in Wormwood Scrubs and Wandsworth, in the company of murderers and rapists who initially thought the three were paedophiles.

Dennis was stung by Judge Michael Argyll’s remarks that he was the least intelligent of the three. Yet, he tells me, he has also written a poem about the late judge, whom he regards as just as much a dupe of the system as he was. “The whole thing was just so shabby, it was beyond belief,” he recalls.

Elsewhere, the collection is wry and almost elegiac. Quite Soon, for instance, exudes distinct intimations of mortality, he agrees cheerfully – this from a man who reckons he’ll be dead by the time he’s 70. He’s survived two life-threatening illnesses, not to mention a cocaine addiction which doctors warned was “a one-way ticket to jail or the morgue”. He quotes the title of Terence Blacker’s biography of author Willie Donaldson, You Cannot Live As I have Lived and Not End Up Like This. “That sums it up,” he chortles.

Whatever age he reaches, he will be long outlived by what could become eventually one of the largest broad-leaved forests in England, which he is currently engaged in planting in Warwickshire. Profits from readings and book sales go towards the Forest of Dennis – which, he stresses, is the name of the charity and not, ultimately, of the woodland, currently being planted at a rate of 300 acres per year. “We’ve just passed the 1,000-acre mark. That means well over 600,000 native British broadleaved saplings in the ground.”

It is to this greening of England that the bulk of Dennis’s fortune will go when he passes on. In the meantime, as his poetry tour hits the road, one cannot help recalling wry lines by the Cork poet Patrick Galvin: “Be a chauffeur, my father said / And never mind the poetry. / That’s all very well for the rich / They can afford it …”

In Dennis’s instance at least, it is the poet who is driven by the chauffeur.

• Homeless in My Heart is published by Ebury Press at £12.99. The Did I Mention the Free Wine? Tour comes to Jongleurs, Edinburgh, Thursday 9 October. For further information see www.felixdennis.com

QUITE SOON

Quite soon, the world will turn without me here:

And then? The stars will shine, the moon will rise,

And in a wood the wolves will stalk a deer.

The young will clock off work and sip their beer

And speak of those they worship or despise.

So soon, the world will turn without me here

While crowds at cricket matches clap and cheer,

And, top of class, a shy girl takes her prize.

Within the woods a wolf will stalk a deer

As anglers fling their floats beside a weir,

And backstage, some young Portia dabs her eyes.

Too soon, the world will turn without me here

While ‘auld lang syne’ rings out another year,

And, in a house close by, an infant cried,

And in a wood, far off, wolves stalk a deer.

Though men may ply among the stars and peer

Upon strange suns, or – stranger still! – grow wise,

Quite soon, the world will turn without me here:

And in a wood the wolves will stalk a deer.

• Felix Dennis, West Indies, 2006