Roald Dahl Read online

  Is this high camp? Or is it just well aimed at male readers of limited subtlety? Whatever the tone, Dahl’s book-loving friend Dennis Pearl didn’t like it and had an argument with him about what he saw as a waste of his talent.17 Pearl much preferred the sensitive, imaginative, warmer stories in his friend’s first collection, Over to You, and thought that this was the kind of thing he should have been building on. Dahl told him that what mattered was to give readers what they wanted. Pearl—who was beginning to read Saul Bellow and John Updike—said, “Being a chap who only connects with literature through reading, I think that’s wrong. You should write what you want to write. They’ll read it if it’s good.” But Dahl made it clear that he had to earn a living and that the Playboy type of story was what sold. Besides, he found it amusing to write that way.

  However humorous the intention, these stories—especially those collected as Switch Bitch (1974)—depend unmistakably on a repelled, vengeful, invasive attitude to sex. In “The Visitor,” Uncle Oswald finds he may have had sex with a leper. In “Bitch,” he is assaulted by a hideous woman to whom he himself has administered a powerful aphrodisiac. In “The Great Switcheroo,” two men engineer a means of going to bed with each other’s wives without the women realizing. It took Dahl longer to run out of plots like these than out of the situations of his earlier fiction, but eventually they, too, dried up. More than twenty years later, Playboy published, under his name, a tale about a bookseller who blackmails the families of men whose deaths have recently been announced by sending them a bill for what he pretends were their recent purchases of pornographic books.18 He is caught when he chooses a blind man as his victim. The situation is padded with long descriptions dwelling on the physical repulsiveness of the blackmailer and his woman accomplice and jokes at the expense of the English establishment types they prey on. All this is in the manner Dahl often slid into when he wasn’t particularly trying—an infantile mix of exaggeration, greed, and adjectival vagueness (“a dozen Moroccan servants were laying out a splendid buffet lunch for the guests. There were enormous cold lobsters and large pink hams and very small roast chickens and several kinds of rice and about ten different salads”). But if the style is his own, the plot wasn’t.19 It belonged to a story by James Gould Cozzens, which first appeared under the title “Foot in It” in 1935, and later as “Clerical Error,” under which title it was included in a popular anthology in the early 1950s. Some readers wrote to Playboy drawing attention to the plagiarism, but their letters weren’t published.20

  While the forty-eight-year-old Dahl, wretched over his daughter’s death, anxious about his maimed son, envious of his wife’s fame, desperate to get back into The New Yorker, was busy imagining a middle-aged gynecologist’s revenge rape of the love of his youth, Patricia Neal went each day to the studio, put on a pair of trousers, and pretended to be a medical missionary in China “who scandalizes her Christian sisters with her worldliness—a morality that later allows her to save them by sacrificing herself to the ravages of a Mongol barbarian.”21 7 Women had begun filming. No one knew that Neal was pregnant—a worry when she found that her part required her to ride a donkey, but perhaps there was no connection between that and what happened at the end of the fourth day of shooting. She was helping the nanny with the children’s baths when she felt a violent pain in her head. As she told Dahl about it, her eyes began to lose focus. Recent tragedies made him act with a decisiveness that was urgent even by his own imperious standards. He instantly telephoned a top Los Angeles neurosurgeon, Charles Carton, whom they had met socially and had informally consulted about Theo.

  The call saved Neal’s life. By the time her husband put the phone down, she was unconscious and vomiting, but an ambulance was racing to collect her and Carton was on his way to meet them at the hospital. She regained enough consciousness to ask, “Who is in this house? What are the names of the people in this house, please?”22 They were the last words she was to say for many weeks.

  Neal had suffered two successive aneurysms—a form of stroke in which a congenitally weak place in the wall of an artery in the head is ruptured, allowing blood to jet into the soft brain tissue.23 A third stroke, the worst, happened while she was being x-rayed. Carton spent the whole night operating, using a saw to make a trapdoor into her left temple, removing a clot of hemorrhaged blood from between the brain and its coat, cutting into the left temporal lobe (which controls movement and speech) in order to remove another clot, clipping the aneurysm and spraying on plastic to reinforce the artery wall. Before he began, he didn’t know whether his patient would survive. When she did, he wasn’t sure at first that he had done her a favor.

  Tessa, who had seen her brother’s accident and had been at home when Olivia was taken to the hospital to die, also saw her mother being carried away and was intensely involved in everything that followed. It was an appalling experience for the volatile child. Her father was continually at the hospital, and according to her own memories, she didn’t see him for the next three or four days, or her mother for as many weeks. The gates were crowded with reporters and photographers. Eventually, when she was taken to see Pat, she was quite unprepared to find that her famous, beautiful, husky-voiced mother “could not talk, could not move her right side, had no hair, had a crooked mouth … wore an eye-patch and didn’t even know how to say my name.”24 To Theo, by contrast, these horrors seemed familiar; perhaps even reassuring.

  Patricia Neal’s friend the actress Betsy Drake visited her on the night of the operation and saw her immediately after it. Drake says that Neal “looked as though she was in a storm at sea.” Dahl quickly assumed the role of ship’s captain, jettisoned needless cargo in the form of superfluous flowers and messages sent by well-wishers, and repelled visitors whom he didn’t like—including some of his in-laws. Those whom he let in were horrified by what they found. But slowly, Neal came back to consciousness. Through some strange quirk of the brain’s organization, the words of poetry and songs are stored separately from other forms of communication, so she could sing. And gestures enabled her to indicate when she felt the most important of her needs: to smoke. But her head was shaved, her face screwed up, her paralyzed leg had to be supported by a caliper, and when words began to come back to her, they were usually gibberish. She called a cigarette an “oblogon,” a martini a “red hair dryer” or a “sooty swatch.”25 She was still pregnant.

  In March 1965, a month after she had gone into the hospital, Neal was taken home to the Ritts’ house. Large numbers of friends managed to get through the vetting process, among them Lillian Hellman, Cary Grant, Margaret Leighton, Donald Pleasence, Hope Preminger, and John Ford. Another visitor was Anne Bancroft, who had won a British Film Academy award for the part Neal had turned down in The Pumpkin Eater and now stepped into her role in 7 Women.

  A star was ill, and Angela Kirwan thought that some of the visitors came just to say they had been there. But others—particularly Betsy Drake, Mildred Dunnock, and Marian and Ed Goodman—were persistent and helpful. As the weeks went by, Dahl began to see that such goodwill might be translated into something of lasting practical value. With physiotherapy, Neal was beginning to walk, but as far as her powers of communication were concerned, she needed to retrace much of her development since childhood. Although some simple grammatical structures were returning to her, her vocabulary was cruelly limited and still often jumbled. According to the doctors, the early months would be all-important. Dahl’s approach was, first, to announce that his wife would make a one hundred percent recovery, and then to set about goading her into it. Those who already disliked him saw his strategy as of a piece with his usual domineering behavior. One describes it as somewhere between that of a dog trainer and a traffic cop.26 It was his custom, another says, to humiliate people in front of others: that is how he treated Pat.27 But some, closer to him, were more sympathetic about the strain he was under and remember how his mood could swing from rigid control to open vulnerability.28 This was Southern California in the
mid-1960s. If authoritarianism had not disappeared, it was certainly out of style. When, within two months of her stroke, Neal was pushed by Dahl to go out to dinner and to struggle with the same food as everyone else, many of her friends were scandalized. Undeterred, he began to make plans for a press conference before their return to England in May. He coached his wife in her lines: “I feel fine. The baby will be fine. I’ll be back to work in one year.” But for all her public optimism, Pat mostly felt exhausted, frustrated, and miserable.

  There were two new members of the returning household. Dahl had persuaded a nurse from the UCLA Medical Center to come back to England with them, bringing a friend to help her. The Marshes’ foundation paid everyone’s fares. At Heathrow, all the Dahl sisters were there to meet them, and Roald promptly resumed charge of the tribe. “I called in no doctors,” he later wrote; it was a matter that had to be sorted out by the family, alone.29 Pat’s speech was not all that was affected. She could not read or write, or do even the simplest sums. She was listless and prone to bouts of deep depression. “Unless I was prepared to have a bad-tempered, desperately unhappy nitwit in the house,” her husband recalled, “some very drastic action would have to be taken at once.” The National Health Service speech therapist could offer no more than two half-hour sessions per week. Dahl persuaded his sisters and various local friends—the Kirwans and a dozen others—to take part in a relay. Pat was to have six hour-long lessons a day, each with a different volunteer. Members of the team also took turns with the children, the cooking, and the housework.

  When some of the helpers saw Neal for the first time after her return, they went home and cried. Later, working with her regularly, they soon realized that she was not only crippled but in mourning. She was an actress who had lost her speech and her memory: whatever her husband said, she knew that her career could never fully recover. Lame, her face fallen and either inexpressive or wildly melodramatic, she had also lost the best of her looks. This was dejecting for the wife in her, as well as the actress. As for the mother, in a sense she had lost her children, too. There were two usurpers. Tessa, if only in her eight-year-old’s imagination, took on the roles of hostess and of conversational companion to her father. More obvious to Pat herself was the fact that while the man she called “Papa” (after Hemingway) did not himself take part in her lessons, he was both their coordinator and, even more fully than before, the organizer of the entire ménage. He gave up their New York apartment and had an extension built onto Gipsy House for their new staff. He discussed meals with the cook, vaccinations with the nurse, drove the children to school, and arranged for them to see their friends, cousins, and aunts. “Everything was changed,” Pat says now. “It was sad because our marriage, it had been good, it really was good. I did the cooking, I did the children, keeping the house, the garden, the weeds—and then when I got ill, everything changed in the end. He was the only person who really could control the children, and it was ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ You know, they looked up at him and it was just so irritating to me. Everything was turned upside down. We’d been through so much, and [before] we did it equally, really.”30

  Not everyone remembers the pre-stroke Neal as having been quite that much of a housewife, or the marriage as having been such an ideal of mutuality, but it was easy to see why she was irritated and depressed by Dahl’s absolute dominance, both in the family—including, it often seemed, the families of his sisters—and over the volunteers whom some visitors called “the handmaidens.” For that reason, but also because her well-advanced pregnancy left her even more lethargic, she looked for subterfuges to avoid the tougher parts of the new regime, deflecting her teachers into games of dominoes or into making cups of coffee. The weather was damp and cold. She would sit indoors for hours, smoking or eating sweets, bored, isolated, and in despair. Quite often, she would tell people that she had lost her mind. She couldn’t even make sense of Pigling Bland when she tried to read it to Theo. It seemed that her new baby would never be born. And when it was, what kind of a state would it be in?

  Dahl, meanwhile, continued to insist that she was on her way to a full recovery. The doctors were skeptical, but less so than they had been, and it was clear to them that his methods, along with Neal’s own strength, were responsible for much of the improvement she had already made. One of those methods was publicity.

  That summer, he agreed to a proposal from Life magazine that a journalist should come to Great Missenden and follow the last stages of Neal’s pregnancy. Barry Farrell was a sensitive writer whose own marriage had been destroyed when his child died.31 He sympathized intensely with Dahl, and often sat up with him late into the night, drinking his good wine and “enjoying his large small talk.”32 Dahl, he wrote, “is the best storyteller I know, and listening to him often worked a kind of spell on me.” Under this spell, he seems to have written down whatever Dahl told him and put it into his Life article and, later, into a book, the financial proceeds of which were shared between them.33 The book was titled Pat and Roald, but Roald, or his version of himself, was so much at the center that Pat complained that she scarcely seemed to be in it. Certainly, Pat and Roald—of itself, and because it became a main source for other journalists—helped to fix the myth of Roald Dahl in the public mind. Here, readers could learn again how his Gladiator had been brought down in flames by “a burst of machine-gun fire … while strafing a convoy of trucks south of Fuka, a village not far from Alexandria.”34 Farrell also mentioned Dahl’s “invention” of the gremlins: the very word “gremlin”—he gasped—“was Roald’s contribution to the dictionary, a word he had coined to name a race of aerial saboteurs during the war.” Every one of his short stories “appeared in The New Yorker as soon as they were submitted.”

  This last idea must have been a particularly consoling fantasy to Dahl. His most recent rejection letter from The New Yorker (about “The Last Act”) had arrived only three months before Farrell. And at around the same time, his latest book for children—the ill-fated anti-shooting story, The Magic Finger, which Macmillan had commissioned and then refused—had been turned down by his own editor at Knopf, Virginie Fowler.35 Fowler preferred Dahl, she says, as a writer of “wonderful fantasies”: the new book was satirical or, as she puts it, “rather sticky, and much more adult in feeling.”36 Dahl himself, who had other things on his mind, had been untypically self-deprecating about it, so she let it go without further consultation. Harper & Row then stepped in and bought the rights for $5,000.

  Alfred Knopf didn’t seem troubled when he first heard what was going on, but Dahl soon changed that. Abject letters were rushed off to the incensed author and icy memos to the unfortunate editor. “While I respect greatly the high editorial standards you maintain,” Knopf told Fowler, “I think there are cases where the basic interests of the house override, and must override, your opinion of a given manuscript, and that sometimes if an author wants to publish a given story sound policy requires that we publish it regardless of our opinion of it.… Am I not correct in saying that your decision in this case was never discussed with me, Mr. Cerf, Mr. Klopfer, or Mr. Bernstein?”37

  Meanwhile, Robert Bernstein quickly set about repairing the damage. He sent Dahl word that the Book-of-the-Month Club had bought Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for its Christmas, 1965, mailing, and that he anticipated over 5,000 sales. He knew that although Dahl was very busy with his family, he felt he was in need of money. Would he like to edit a book of “Knock, Knock” jokes? “I should tell you,” Bernstein added, “that I have still not recovered from the shock of hearing that Harper’s was going to publish one of your books. My feeling about you is that you are a wonderful writer and anything that you wish to put your name on we should publish.”38

  It would be five years and several more quarrels before Dahl had anything to offer them. For the moment, he was preoccupied with three overriding aims. He wanted the new baby to be safely born. He wanted to get his wife not only better but back at work. And he wanted to become so rich that
they would never have to think about money again.

  The first proved no problem. The child, born in perfect health on August 4, was a girl, and they called her Lucy Neal. The press agencies had the news before Lucy’s grandparents. Life magazine’s photographers were in the delivery room within minutes of her arrival. The pictures show Neal, battered but triumphant, her hair still not fully grown back from her operation. Dahl, looking vaguely North African in his surgical gown and hat, gazes inquiringly into the crib.39

  The birth gave Neal a brief surge of confidence, but she soon relapsed into an ever deeper depression. Dahl pressed on toward his second objective. In place of the roster of handmaidens, he persuaded someone new to work with her single-handedly in her own home. Valerie Eaton Griffith had herself recently been ill with a thyroid complaint. An unmarried friend of Angela Kirwan’s parents, she had given up her job with Elizabeth Arden and was living with her father a mile from Gipsy House. Roald drove Pat over every morning, after he had seen the children off to school, and left her there for most of the day. The two women got on well, and Valerie grew both very fond of Pat and increasingly absorbed in her difficulties and the best approach to their cure.

  Dahl, in the meantime, went back to his shed in the garden and set about getting rich.

  10

  Credits

  It was from what had until then been Patricia Neal’s world that Dahl was to earn most of their income in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

  There was a lot of sympathy for Neal in Hollywood, and within months of her strokes, her husband was offered a chance to write his first big screenplay, You Only Live Twice. According to Neal, the James Bond movie paid him more than she had ever earned.1 But it was with a great show of reluctance that he agreed to do it, telling his publisher that he found the idea “exceptionally distasteful.”2 The harder he found it to write prose fiction, the more protective he was of his literary self-image. He told Barry Farrell what he also kept promising Alfred Knopf, that his “only real ambition” was to turn out a new, “really solid” collection of short stories.3