Roald Dahl Read online

  A flurry of in-house discussions ensued about what Dahl might be persuaded to write next and how he could be kept from the clutches of Harper & Row. Random House had responded to the expanding market among educationally anxious parents by launching a series called Beginner Books. In the spring of 1968, when Dahl visited Patricia Neal in New York during the shooting of The Subject Was Roses, he met Robert Gottlieb, the new head of Knopf. Gottlieb reported to Robert Bernstein, president of Random House, that they had discussed various possibilities, including a contribution to the new project.7 They also talked about a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and about a new collection of stories for adults.

  Dahl was hesitant about taking on anything substantial at this stage, but the idea of another short picture book appealed to him. He started work at once and, early in June, sent in a hastily written little story—in prose, but with sketches of his own—about ruthless farmers and an embattled family of foxes.

  “The Fox,” as the story was titled, caused pandemonium at Knopf. The author was earning them millions of dollars, was notoriously touchy, and had shown that he could easily be lured away by another publisher. He had in effect been commissioned to write the new book. The problem wasn’t only that, as one internal memo put it, “the writing is poor, the fantasy is unbelievable, the plot is badly worked out and … contains a long middle section in which there isn’t really much to illustrate.”8 “The Fox” also flagrantly incited its readers to become shoplifters. From the point of view of the moral education of children, and therefore of the book’s likely sales in a market still believed to be dominated by teachers and librarians, it was, everyone agreed, unpublishable.

  Dahl’s draft typescript begins roughly like the now well-known book, and is an allegory of how he tended to see his domestic situation at the time. A family of foxes are trapped in their den by men with shotguns, who are waiting for the animals to starve, to drive them out. Mr. Fox has an idea, and that is where, in his publishers’ view, Dahl’s original went most seriously wrong. With his children, Mr. Fox simply tunnels from the wood to the nearby town, under the main street, and into a supermarket. The young foxes yelp with pleasure at the sight of shelves and shelves of groceries, sweets, and toys. “Fantastic,” cries Mr. Fox. “Grab a trolley!” He warns them not to take too much, so that the losses won’t be noticed and they will be able to come back again. The family returns home to a feast, which Mr. Fox assures his wife can be repeated every night. “Mrs. Fox smiled at her husband. ‘My darling,’ she said, ‘you are a fantastic fox.’”

  In New York, hectic discussions ensued about how to salvage the situation, while telegrams began to arrive from Great Missenden asking what was going on. Pat Neal had been away for several months making The Subject Was Roses. Dahl told Bob Bernstein that he was feeling the strain of running the house and dealing with his children’s, as well as his own, spring viruses and other problems.9 Tessa, in particular, was miserable at Roe-dean, where she was being bullied. Dahl himself underwent an operation on his nose that summer. A week later, he took Pat, Tessa, Theo, Ophelia, and the three-year-old Lucy to Norway for their annual family holiday, but developed a torrential nosebleed and had to go into hospital.10 For a week, his nostrils were plugged with wads which, he grumbled, were the size of frankfurters.

  Bernstein wrote sympathetically, temporizing about the book and pleading staff holidays as an excuse for the delays.11 Four months and half a dozen readers’ reports later, the brief typescript landed on the desk of Fabio Coen, an executive editor of children’s books in an elevated corner of the newly expanded Random House empire, Pantheon Books. Coen’s objections were no different from anyone else’s, but he had a solution, which he summarized in 350 words. The main change is that the foxes steal from their persecutors, the farmers:12

  Mr. Fox digs out to get his bearings. Finds he has dug right where he wanted to be—in the chickencoop of farmer No. 1. Mr. Fox and little foxes steal eggs and chicken. Meanwhile the three farmers still waiting where we left them. Mr. Fox and children carry eggs and chicken back to Mrs. Fox, then start digging tunnel in a new direction. They dig and dig right into smokehouse of farmer No. 2. Steal hams and other goodies. Carry back to Mama fox who stores things away and begins to prepare a large meal. Mr. Fox and little foxes dig third tunnel in yet another direction. Dig and dig right out to farmer No. 3’s cider cellar. Littlest fox particularly delighted, likes cider. Each one steals big bottle of cider, and return to mother fox who by this time has everything ready for a feast. All sit down to huge banquet. Switch back to three angry farmers still waiting with guns for foxes to appear.

  Coen was deputed to put his idea to Dahl himself,13 but Robert Bernstein first prepared the ground with more than one long, circumspect letter, making it clear that they wanted to publish everything Dahl wrote and, that if he was not convinced by the proposal, “in the end we will do it your way.” Dahl had earlier defended his version energetically. He said that he had considered the moral problem raised by the foxes’ shoplifting but decided it was of no importance. In the first place, that is how foxes survive, and he thought children should be aware of the fact. Second, neither Beatrix Potter nor Tolkien had been concerned about such matters, so why should he be?14 Bernstein could have answered that neither of these arguments might seem as conclusive to a parent or teacher in downtown Los Angeles as in rural Buckinghamshire, but Dahl was in fact sufficiently mollified to agree to consider Coen’s suggestions. In the event, he was delighted by them. They were, he joked, “so good that I feel almost as though I am committing plagiarism in accepting them.” Nonetheless, like the foxes, he would “grab them with both hands” and start immediately on a completely new draft of the book. It was the first time, he gratefully if untruthfully added, that any of his publishers had ever come up with a “constructive and acceptable idea” for his writing.15

  Coen’s was the version of the book which finally appeared, and which, decades later, is still a bestseller. Fantastic Mr. Fox was published by both Knopf and Allen & Unwin in 1970, and soon throughout the rest of the world. Dahl dedicated it to the memory of Olivia.

  Dahl was now fifty-four: hardworking and prosperous, but in poor health, balding, and distinctly lame—when he and Neal walked side by side, they lurched into each other like a pair of penguins. The children would hear him groaning in the morning as he reached for his pill bottle, before he came down in his dressing gown to breakfast, a pile of letters, and the organization of the household.16 His wife and his son were both disabled. His oldest surviving daughter was clever and articulate but, like her brother, unhappy at school: he moved her from Roedean to Downe House, but she didn’t like it much better. The fees were enormous, and there were all the others to educate. The youngest, Lucy, was still only five.

  If Tessa hated school, she seemed no more contented at Gipsy House. When she came home for the holidays, Lucy remembers, “all hell would break loose”—particularly if their mother was there, too.17 Both independently and together, they were tempestuous women. Quite often, though, Patricia Neal was away. She appeared in a TV drama called The Homecoming, made in Hollywood and in Wyoming, and as a speech therapist in the film Baxter. She was increasingly in demand for American projects concerning illness and disability: lectures about stroke rehabilitation, the voice-over for a documentary on cancer. And through Dahl’s advertising friend, David Ogilvy, she was soon offered a lucrative contract making a series of TV commercials in New York for Maxim coffee.

  When Tessa was small, the whole family traveled around with Pat. Now Pat either went alone or with Valerie Eaton Griffith, and correspondingly she was less of a presence in the lives of her younger daughters. Dahl believed that Tessa’s problems were largely a result of the instability of her early upbringing and was determined to provide something different for her sisters. He couldn’t depend much on Pat. And having, for most of his own childhood, been without a father of his own, he had to make things up as he went along. In his younger chi
ldren’s eyes, he succeeded wonderfully. Lucy says that to her and Ophelia, with no memories to contend with of Theo’s accident, Olivia’s death, or their mother’s strokes, “it [was] like there were two portions. There was the Tessa era, with all the tragedies, and then there was my era, which was calm and lovely.”

  Her favorite memories are of the many times when she and Ophelia were alone with their father and, in the background, their Filipino cook and nanny-housekeeper. Lucy was a self-contained child, happy playing alone. Ophelia, when she was home from school, followed her father around as he pottered in the orchid house or the aviary. Sometimes he would take them and the dogs for a walk up the hill behind Gipsy House into the woods, where they looked for rabbits. He made games for them, such as a weighted metal spiral, attached to a pencil, which drew patterns on a sheet of paper. At bedtime he mixed sweet drinks which he called “witches’ potions”—canned peaches or pears, blended with milk and food coloring. (His own potion would be a large Scotch.) Then he told them stories about a friendly giant who concocted dreams in a jar and blew them into children’s bedrooms. More than once, after he had left the girls to sleep, he put a ladder up to their window and stirred the curtains as if he were the giant himself. In the way of paternal jokes, it became something of a routine as the years went by—one which Ophelia and Lucy dutifully humored.

  From the younger girls’ point of view, Tessa and their mother spoiled such idylls, partly just by being there and partly because of the pressures they brought to bear on Roald. “If there was one thing my father hated,” Lucy says, “it was to be demanded of. He liked to give, but he didn’t like to be demanded of.” But of course the others see things in their own ways. To each of the children, Dahl was “my” father, and Tessa’s own relationship with him was if anything more intimate and more jealous than anyone else’s. He wrote to her almost every day when she was at school, and she remembers her mixture of pride and agonizing embarrassment when he came to collect her for free weekends and holidays, shambling around in his old clothes, tieless, with a flask of coffee or whiskey, among the other children’s tidier and more circumspect parents.

  Pat, too, has her own happy domestic memories: games of Scrabble with Roald’s sisters, outings to the village pub with Roald, dinner parties with friends. And there were their holidays: in the Basque country near Annabella’s farm at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, or in the Caribbean with the Bryces or with Claudia Marsh (Charles had died in 1964, after his ten-year silent paralysis). Almost every year, too, they went to the west coast of Norway, where they stayed at the same hotel, the Strand at Fevik, near Kristiansund. Each day their routine there would be the same: a hired boat, a short voyage to an island, fishing along the way, cooking the catch for lunch.

  There was a cost to such idylls, and not only in the financial terms which so preoccupied Dahl. The new head of Knopf, Robert Gottlieb (later to succeed William Shawn as editor of The New Yorker), visited Gipsy House several times with his wife, the actress Maria Tucci. They describe an atmosphere which was lively, jolly, full of excitement, but not at all relaxed. Dahl was charming, Tucci says, “completely in charge—a puppeteer making everything work.” He took her around the garden and showed her his orchids: it was the flowers’ perfection that he liked, he told her. Dinner began with jellied consommé, and he proudly drew attention to the fact that it had been made by Pat. But even the food was for the most part his responsibility. He had grown all the vegetables, and when his guests praised the main dish, Scottish smoked haddock cooked in cream, it was he who later sent them the recipe.

  Maria Tucci was intrigued and moved by Dahl. She had expected something different. Pat’s friend Mildred Dunnock, with whom Maria had worked, had warned her that he was snobbish and cruel. She saw nothing of that, but what she did see, she thought, was a grueling performance. Before dinner, on their first visit, Roald had gone to tell stories to the younger children. Passing their open bedroom doorway, Maria saw him off guard, his face utterly exhausted. She later came to think of him as “a man whose need for perfection was so extreme that I was very glad I was not his child or anyone close to him.”

  If the perfectionism was exhausting, so was the conflict from which it arose. Dahl wanted not only others to be better than they were but himself, too. He complained about how Pat’s stroke had intensified what he saw as some of her worst characteristics—her lack of intellectual curiosity, her selfishness, her quick temper. But he knew that he had faults, too, such as the restlessness which made him pace up and down in the house which he believed he was making into a haven of calm. He still insisted that anything wrong could be put right. “Daddy got so caught up in making things better,” Tessa says. “He used to say, ‘You’ve got to get on with it.’… He used to shout, ‘I want my children to be brave.’” Dahl’s moral universe was one in which there could be no question without an answer, no battle without victory, no irresoluble complexity. This was true of his writing, also.

  Although he wrote little in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he still hoped to return to adult fiction, and his earlier books for adults now reached an increasingly far-flung readership. As part of a demonstration of enthusiasm after it lost The Magic Finger, Random House brought out a selection of his stories in the prestigious classics series, the Modern Library. Other compilations soon appeared, and through Rayner Unwin, Dahl negotiated a deal with Penguin for paperback editions of Someone Like You and Over to You, as well as of Charlie, James, The Magic Finger, and Fantastic Mr. Fox. All these appeared between 1970 and 1974. Penguin officially claimed at the time that they paid no author a royalty higher than 12.5 percent, but Dahl got 15 percent.18 By 1975, his books were becoming best-sellers in Britain as well as the United States. Charlie had sold 225,000 copies in the U.K. in paperback, 60,000 in hardcover; James, 115,000 and 45,000; Fantastic Mr. Fox, 74,000 and 15,000. Meanwhile, Kiss Kiss had been translated into Russian and Japanese and The Magic Finger into Indonesian. From now on, as soon as the English-language rights in his books were sold, foreign publishers would be negotiating to translate them.

  While he waited for new ideas to come, he occupied himself with various recyclings of earlier work: the sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator); a collection of some of his Playboy stories, entitled Switch Bitch; a children’s book based on one of his New Yorker stories, “The Champion of the World.”19 He was also planning a miscellaneous collection called The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, and a novel developing the character of the salacious Uncle Oswald, first introduced in “The Visitor.”20

  Meanwhile, he had made some revisions to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Although the early critical response to the book had been favorable, some readers objected to the book on a variety of grounds. The most glaring was the characterization of the Oompa-Loompas. But this was of a piece with the story’s outlook on other human relationships: in particular, Mr. Wonka’s ready disposal of people he dislikes and his high-handed way with objectors. In 1972 a wide-ranging attack on the book was published by Eleanor Cameron, a leading American writer of children’s fiction.21

  Her article, in the respected journal for children’s literature specialists The Horn Book, was damaging because of its intellectual weight, and also because it stemmed from ground Dahl had claimed as his own: hostility to the corrupting power of television. This was a theme whose public impact had been increased, since Charlie first appeared, by Marshall McLuhan’s best-selling books Understanding Media (1964) and The Medium Is the Message (1967), which assumed that television had already taken over from printed books as irreversibly as they had taken over from illuminated manuscripts—and with no less revolutionary effect. Like Dahl, Eleanor Cameron drew a contrast between the values of TV and those of literature. But she said that those who want to defend literature must remember that it isn’t valuable of itself, irrespective of its quality. Very few books last, or deserve to. You have to sort out the good from the bad. Furthermore (and here she decisively parte
d company with Dahl), goodness in fiction is partly a moral matter, bound up with “the goodness of the writer himself, his worth as a human being.”

  Cameron claimed that, for all its satire at the expense of the television-addicted character, Mike Teavee, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is only speciously opposed to what she saw as the medium’s shallow gratifications. The pleasures the book offers, she said, are like those of a game show, or of chocolate itself: instantly enjoyable but temporary. Everything depends on the plot. The human situation, especially Charlie’s poverty, is “phony.” And “as for Willy Wonka himself, he is the perfect type of TV showman with his gags and screechings. The exclamation mark is the extent of his individuality.” However amusing the book may be for adults to read, and however greedily children consume it, it is underlyingly cheap, tasteless, ugly, sadistic, and, for all these reasons, harmful.

  Dahl had often complained that critics didn’t take him seriously. Now that one had, he dashed off an angry, superficial reply which avoided the main arguments and concentrated on personalia.22 He “had not heard of [Mrs. Cameron] until now,” he said. She, on the other hand, ought to have found out more about him before writing her “extraordinarily vicious comments.” Her observations about the moral connection between a book and its author showed, he said, that she could not have read either Barry Farrell’s Pat and Roald or any of the numerous articles on Dahl and his family, which would have told her that they had suffered tragedies from which they had emerged “quite creditably.” One of these misfortunes had befallen his son, Theo, to whom Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was dedicated. With more feeling than logic, Dahl said that it must be clear that he would not have written a book which would hurt Theo, or any other of his children, who “are marvellous and gay and happy,” and whose happiness he believed the book had increased.