Roald Dahl Page 23

  Later, Felicity in turn had to have an operation, and it was at Gipsy House that she stayed to convalesce. Such intimacies come to seem merely cynical, once the falsehood underlying them has been exposed. But neither Roald nor Felicity wanted Pat to be hurt, and when she eventually learned what was going on, they made an effort to break off. Once again, Tessa was involved. Over lunch in a Knightsbridge restaurant, Pat asked her point-blank whether her father was having an affair. Although she knew the answer, Pat went wild when she heard it. Tessa was asked to join her parents at a meeting with Felicity, but, for once, stayed out of it. After days of increasing tension between them all, Felicity decided to go away. She wrote to Pat saying that she was sorry to have caused such wretchedness and was going to take a long holiday in France and Scotland. She hoped that matters would somehow resolve themselves.24

  They didn’t, of course. The Dahl family spent a tense couple of weeks in Norway. Although several more years would pass before Pat and Roald finally split up, it was their last holiday together. Roald was soon desperate to see Felicity again. He himself had to spend time in the hospital, at the London Clinic, and persuaded her to visit him there. Around this time, Roald wrote Pat a long letter. He promised that he loved her and would never leave her, but told her that he still felt strongly for Liccy and wanted to be free to spend time with her. Sex was not involved, he said—he was too tired for that: perhaps physically big men like himself tended to wear out sooner than others. But he would like both to go on living with Pat and to be close to Felicity—although this was so miserable a situation for Felicity (he said little about Pat’s feelings) he doubted that she would tolerate it. In a way, Roald said, he hoped that she would not. She would probably find another man before long. But until then, the best course would be for Pat to be “non-jealous and normal,” in the certainty that “this family will go on as long as I live.”25

  With the possible exception of himself, no one was taken in. To his friends it was clear that the point had come where, as Dennis Pearl says, “nothing would have persuaded Roald to give up Felicity” and that, from this point, there was no longer any hope for his marriage. During this period, Dahl quarreled with almost everyone he knew: family, friends, publishers. First in line was his neighbor Rayner Unwin.

  Dahl was tired of Unwin’s calm, courteous approach to publishing and wanted someone more dynamic. Robert Gottlieb suggested his friend Tom Maschler, at Jonathan Cape. Dahl met and liked the exuberant, gossipy Maschler and quickly began to engineer what Unwin saw as a deliberate falling out with his old firm. He started various quarrels, turning up without warning, for example, at Allen & Unwin’s production department in Hemel Hempstead, where he made a scene about the fact that people were working on a mathematical text rather than one of his own books. And when, by accident, the standard draft contract sent to him for Danny, the Champion of the World omitted a special clause which had been inserted into his previous deals, he used the mistake as a pretext for moving on. Unwin saw no future in trying to dissuade him, and even felt a certain amount of relief. Among other sources of tension between the two partners was the fact that Dahl seemed to be going “closer and closer to the edge” in finding ways of avoiding income tax.

  Money was once again a mounting preoccupation. By the time Danny was published, in 1975, Tessa was eighteen, Theo fifteen, Ophelia eleven, Lucy ten. The brain-damaged Theo was not flourishing at his school, and Dahl had decided to hire a private tutor for him instead. The younger girls were about to go away as boarders to Abbots Hill, a small but expensive school in Hertfordshire. As he grew older, and with Tessa’s chaotic way of life in mind, Dahl was concerned to provide them with a secure financial base. Perhaps it had also occurred to him that if he were ever to break with Pat, it might be convenient if his earnings were safely tied up out of her reach. Early in 1976, he contacted the Society of Authors about the tax position on books whose copyrights are made over to people other than the author—for example, to his children.26 The answer wasn’t encouraging, but Dahl soon found another solution. He turned himself into a hard-to-trace anonymous company (“S.A.,” for Societé Anonyme) based in Switzerland. Unsuperstitiously, he called it Icarus.27

  In 1977 he published The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. The title story concerns a man who learns how to see through playing cards, so that he can read the hidden side. He decides to become a latter-day Robin Hood, taking money from the bookmakers in order to give it to children.28

  Henry Sugar learns his trick from an Indian magician. Pat and Roald had been to see one like him in 1954,29 soon after they married. In recent years Dahl had written very little that was new (two of the seven pieces in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar first appeared in the 1940s; a third was his account of “How I Became a Writer”). He was meanwhile also scraping the barrel by filling out his Uncle Oswald stories as a novel.

  My Uncle Oswald is an extended rude joke about a fictional early-twentieth-century plot to procure the semen of some of the world’s great men and sell it. No one at Knopf was very enthusiastic about the book, but they were still anxious not to lose its author. Robert Gottlieb, Knopf’s gifted president, had taken over as Dahl’s editor and treated the text with no less care than that of any of the more serious books he was publishing at the same time. Their correspondence about it must be one of the odder exchanges in publishing history.30

  Gottlieb’s comments fell into two categories: first, those to do with the main character and how readers’ feelings about him are controlled; second, matters of historical fact raised by the story’s comic display of learning. The first group involved making the libidinous Uncle Oswald nastier, so that “one is happier when he gets cheated in the end.” The second was trickier. Dahl’s historical education was sketchy, and anyway, he found anachronism intrinsically funny. In the draft, characters used the words “queer” and “fairy” in their modern sense, and contemporary phrases such as “Boy, what a creep she was,” “What’s bugging you?” and “chickening out.” Gottlieb did what he could to reduce the number of these jokes. He also, and with a factuality which couldn’t improve the story although it certainly made it no worse, tried to sort out various mistakes. He argued, for example, that despite Dahl’s expertise in modern art, Modigliani and Léger weren’t sufficiently well known in 1919 to fit Uncle Oswald’s roster of famous geniuses. Balzac, on the other hand, he pointed out, had died in 1850. Gottlieb suggested that there was, in 1919, “no such animal as the ‘Texas millionaire’ with grapefruit trees. They’re a much later phenomenon,” and questioned whether ping-pong and judo were known then, either. And he pointed out inconsistencies other than historical ones: “If the Sudanese beetle product is sold (even secretly) in Berlin, Amsterdam, etc., how come it’s such a surprise when O. reveals it at the dinner party?” Then, too, even allowing for the nature of the story, there were certain errors of taste which the editor was particularly concerned not to let through. He was worried, for example, about references to the size of Stravinsky’s penis. “Madame S. is still alive (and wonderful),” he said, “and I feel she would be distressed.”

  Dahl accepted most of Gottlieb’s suggestions, but it’s clear from their letters that, despite this display of evidence, he had difficulty in grasping that his editor was at least as knowledgeable as himself. Late in their exchanges, in a letter telling Gottlieb that he had decided to introduce T. E. Lawrence as a new character, Dahl still thought that he would need an explanation: “Let them [the book’s readers] puzzle that one out. He’s Lawrence of Arabia. A great figure in 1919.” Nor did it strike him that when the partly European-educated, Jewish Gottlieb objected to Dahl’s having called Proust an anti-Semite, tout court, his opinion might be worth considering.

  These exchanges were amicable, but there was trouble in store. Emotional and physical pain (in March 1977, Dahl had a hip replacement), heavy dependency on alcohol and analgesics, a fear that his writing might finally dry up—all these, combined with Dahl’s native vani
ty and argumentativeness, made him harder and harder to deal with. He was already, of course, well known to his family and friends as a maker of scenes.31 At one dinner in New York, he tore into the elderly photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt, who was telling a story about having been refused entry into a South African club of which he wasn’t a member. Why the hell should he have been admitted? Dahl wanted to know—a reasonable enough question, except that he asked it with what seemed quite disproportionate anger, and went on and on until Eisenstaedt moved to another table. On another occasion, in London, an actress dared to venture the notion that critics were a useful part of the artistic process. Dahl became so incensed that the woman’s husband intervened, and soon the men had to be prised apart by other guests. After one of these turns, Dahl rang his hostess the next day—not, as she anticipated, to apologize, but to ask, “Why do you invite people who hate me?”

  His reputation for such outbursts spread further at the beginning of 1979, when he made a scene at the Curzon House Club and was thrown out. He had been having dinner with Pat, Tessa, and Tessa’s latest boyfriend, a rich Greek. The Curzon House had been redecorated in a way which irritated him. He also resented some of his fellow diners: Tessa says he started to complain about the number of Jews in the club. His drunken grumbles grew louder and louder, and eventually he got to his feet and began to make a speech. People at neighboring tables told him to shut up—“Go home if you don’t like it,” one shouted. When Dahl stumbled off toward the gambling tables, he and his party were firmly deflected into the street outside. Subsequently he was deprived of his club membership.

  The story was in most of the gossip columns, but by then Roald and Pat no longer bothered to conceal even from visiting interviewers that things were going badly between them. For a long time, appearances had been just about kept up. In 1978 Patricia Neal was the subject of a This Is Your Life program. Dahl sat beside her throughout, eyes hooded, mouth turned down, while family and friends joined them on the platform to pay tribute. Hollywood stars appeared on video—John Wayne, Kirk Douglas (who delivered his message sitting on a horse). Eamonn Andrews, the host, jauntily urged everyone to reminisce about Roald and his “young bride,” and their early years in the sleepy village of Great Missenden. Wally Saunders made jokes about the successive reconstructions of Gipsy House. The entire band of Pat’s volunteer therapists streamed in. Pat loved it all—particularly when the fourteen-year-old Ophelia said, to her evident surprise, “I don’t think anyone realizes how lucky we all are.” The only hint of what sounded like irony came from Kenneth Haigh, an actor friend of the Dahls who was a neighbor in Great Missenden and who referred to Roald as “Big Daddy Survivor himself.” But for those in the know, there was an unambiguous giveaway at the end, as the crowd milled around and the credits rolled. With tears of affection and gratitude in her eyes, Pat leaned over to kiss her husband’s left hand. He pulled it away and stuffed it into his pocket.

  In everyday life now, the marriage had deteriorated into snarls and the slamming of doors. Pat, whose emotional condition at the time Tessa moderately describes as “disheveled,” was in the States a great deal, and when she was in England, she for the most part lived at Tessa’s house in Wandsworth. She grumbled to Angela Neustatter, an Evening Standard reporter, that Roald wouldn’t join her on a forthcoming retreat at an American convent.32 Dahl was cynical about this latest manifestation of her mild religious questing—a potentially strong card for Pat to have played against the Catholic Felicity, but too late.

  The following year, Dahl gave a headline to another journalist, Susan Slavetin of the Boston Globe, by describing himself as “an adolescent at heart.”33 Pat had bought a house in Martha’s Vineyard, and he was reluctantly and briefly staying there with her. At the end of his part of the interview, Dahl said, “People get tired of being with each other for years—day in, day out. They need some time away from each other.” Then he wandered away. Slavetin quoted Neal as having shrugged the comment off:

  “Men are such conceited asses. But I love being here on the Vineyard. Tomorrow we’ll have a gorgeous party. Cagney will be here. Hellman, too.”

  She smiles broadly. Somehow, the smile does not synch with what seems to be a great well of sadness in her eyes.

  Dahl then returned and delivered another scarcely coded message: “Our daughter Ophelia is set on becoming an actress. I find it difficult to think about. She’s letting herself in for a lifetime of unhappiness, what with constant rejection and bad marriages.”

  Ophelia didn’t become an actress. Later, perhaps under her father’s influence, her ambitions turned toward medicine. But neither she nor Lucy was to escape unhappiness as their parents’ marriage disintegrated. Lucy, in particular, entered a phase little less wild than the older of her sisters’—shoplifting, setting fire to the kitchen of her school, and, at sixteen, becoming addicted to cocaine.34

  Lucy says that when Dahl discovered the extent of her drug habit, “immediately he blamed himself. He quietly said, ‘Lukey, I don’t know where I went wrong,’ and went for a long drive alone—about four hours—which was a worse punishment than screaming and shouting.” After that, he was limitlessly busy in seeking out the best help for her: so much so that her counselor at one clinic had to fight hard to keep her when Dahl heard good word of another. “All I had to do,” Lucy remembers, “is to say, ‘Help me, I need to go to a therapist,’ and I would have been there in an hour.” But to her father, everything he had worked so hard to make good seemed to be falling apart. It was almost as if the crises which elicited his by-now famous practicality, resourcefulness, and ingenuity were somehow caused by earlier actions of his own.

  Even his elaborate tax-avoidance schemes turned out to involve commitments by which he felt entrapped. In the summer of 1979, Icarus, S.A., of rue Friesl, 1700 Freiburg, Switzerland, had entered into a contract with Knopf.35 The Swiss company agreed to supply the publisher with four works by Roald Dahl: My Uncle Oswald, two books for children, and one for either adults or juveniles, whichever “Icarus” chose. Knopf, in return, would pay Icarus $750,000 when the contract was signed and a further $115,341.34 plus simple interest at 5 percent per annum from the date of the agreement, on delivery of each of the other stipulated works.

  At first sight, the interest payments look mysterious. Why should anyone pay interest on a debt not yet incurred? But as the contract’s small print makes clear, the lump sums were not in fact advances at all. They were money already owed to Dahl from his previous books. The promised new works were from the start to earn him royalties over and above these payments. Dahl’s plan—which he flattered himself was “semi-legitimate”36—was to avoid income tax not only on future earnings but on the more than one and a quarter million dollars which his earlier books had already earned, and which Knopf (whose role in these arrangements was not improper) had been banking for him while he decided what to do with it.

  Whatever the apparent advantages of the agreement to Dahl, it began to chafe on him almost as soon as it was signed. Random House had exacted a price for cooperating: they had made him commit himself to letting them publish not only My Uncle Oswald but three further books after that. And until these were delivered, part of the money the publishers already owed him was tied up. It was, he pretended—to Bernstein, to Gottlieb, even to himself—an imposition, a monstrously unfair trick. The angry irrationalism of his complaints is hard to convey without quoting the letters in full: those on the receiving end began to think he was unhinged. Surely, Dahl railed at Gottlieb in 1979, never before in literary history had an author’s income from existing books been frozen until he finished new work. Did Gottlieb and Bernstein imagine that such a policy would increase his affection for them, or encourage him to stay with them when he had fulfilled his contract?37

  Still, the effect was to make him get back to his writing. Within a year, he had delivered drafts of three books for children. They were short, but were to be among his most popular: The Twits, George’s Marvellous
Medicine, and a collection of comic poems, some of which were to form the nucleus of Revolting Rhymes.38 Dahl was delighted to hand over the typescripts. He asked Gottlieb for written confirmation that what he called the crooked four-book agreement between Knopf and his Swiss company had now been completed. “I have felt that fucking contract clutching at my throat like a bloodsucking vampire ever since it was written.”39

  13

  Pencils

  In 1983, thirty years after their marriage, eighteen years since Patricia Neal’s strokes, she and Dahl were finally divorced. He was sixty-six years old, she fifty-six. For Pat, disabled and rejected in favor of a younger woman, the past years had been a period of almost unalleviated wretchedness, but there was worse to come. The divorce settlement was, she says, worth next to nothing: the lawyers took account of her house in Martha’s Vineyard and her earnings from films and lecture tours, as well as of Dahl’s claim that most of their children were to varying degrees dependent on him. Although Tessa was now married to a successful businessman, James Kelly, Theo was living at home and working in a new incarnation of his father’s antique business, proudly renamed Dahl & Son, and Ophelia and Lucy were still in their late teens.