Roald Dahl Page 24
Most of Pat’s old friends who afterward kept up with her ex-husband (including those most critical of him) speak well of his second wife and of the effects of the marriage on him. One or two go so far as to claim that it even benefited Pat, by finally pushing her out of her despondency and into a fully independent life. Pat’s own feelings on the matter have inevitably been more complicated, and not without bitterness, but today she is often generous about Felicity and about the care she has taken of her stepchildren—particularly Theo.
To outsiders looking in—as millions have been invited to do by magazine features, television programs, and books—a jarring element is the thoroughness with which the new marriage is presented as having supplanted everything that went before it. Felicity and Roald Dahl’s book, Memories with Food at Gipsy House, begins with a family tree. The couple’s parents are at the top: Harald and Sofie Dahl on Roald’s side; Alfonso and Elizabeth d’Abreu on Felicity’s.1 Children proliferate below: Felicity’s three and Roald’s four. Patricia Neal and Charles Crosland aren’t there. It is as if they had nothing to do with their children—not even with their having been born.
To the Dahl children themselves, the change couldn’t have failed to be painful. The older ones, in particular, felt loyal to Pat and worried about her disappearing to the States in her present misery. But even more strongly, all of them sensed a threat to their relationship with their father. Ever since Pat’s illness, they had felt that, in some way, they had him to themselves. Lucy says of Felicity, using an American cartoon baby voice for what seems, all the same, only partly a joke, “This woman was taking away my De-addy!”2 Until now, Felicity’s role in the family, although considerable, had been limited. As Tessa remembers things, Felicity had from time to time made what seemed like promises: that she, Felicity, would never take their father away from their mother; then, that she would never move into Gipsy House; then, that if she were to move in, she wouldn’t change it at all. Inevitably, such hopes were bound to be dashed. According to their friends, Felicity’s strength of will was one of her main attractions for Dahl. She also possessed formidable domestic skills. Among other things, she was interested (to a degree that Pat hadn’t been) in interior decoration, eventually making it her profession: in the mid-1970s, she had helped set up a successful antique-restoration business named Carvers and Guilders. In Memories with Food at Gipsy House some emphasis is laid on the fact that Liccy’s tastes reflect an inherited view of how life should be lived in a country house: her mother’s family, Catholic recusants named Throckmorton, had lived in a grand house which now belongs to the National Trust, Coughton Court, in Warwickshire.3 Again, this was an aspect of her appeal to Roald. So, soon after Roald and Felicity married at the end of 1983, Wally Saunders’s sledgehammer was at work once again. Meals henceforward were to be served in an elegant dining room, rather than the familiar, scruffy, crowded kitchen. In Lucy’s words: “Suddenly we had to have all these manners at the table. And posh wallpaper was being put up. I mean—oh.”
These don’t seem the most heinous of interventions. The girls, after all, were by now for the most part no longer living at home: during the week, Lucy was in London, sharing the Wandsworth house with Ophelia while she studied cookery. And their father may have come to think that “manners” were not such a bad thing, after all. He himself was delighted to have his surroundings transformed, so long as no one touched his writing hut or tried to stop him from passing around the chocolate bars after dinner. He was famous and rich. He liked living in a beautiful house and eating well in it. With these tangible indications of success, happily married for perhaps the first time, he pressed ahead with what was already proving to be a newly productive phase of his writing. It was in the 1980s that he published some of his best books: among them, The BFG, The Witches, Matilda, and the two autobiographies, Boy and Going Solo.
If Felicity created the way of life which her husband needed for the work he did in his last years, another important relationship was also involved. Dahl had been introduced to the illustrator Quentin Blake by Tom Maschler in the late 1970s. On and off, their partnership was to last until the writer died.
In the United States and Britain alone, Dahl had already gone through more artists than he had written children’s books. Most were suggested by his publishers and had no direct contact with the author. Blake was in his mid-forties and well established in Britain, both through prize-winning children’s books and as a teacher at the Royal College of Art, where, in 1978, around the time of his first meeting with Dahl, he became head of the Department of Illustration. Blake was the writer-illustrator of many children’s books of his own, and Maschler had paired him with Russell Hoban in the early 1970s; one of their collaborations, How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, had won a Whitbread Prize.
Educated at Cambridge, where he read English at Downing College under F. R. Leavis, Blake is a gentle, reflective man, in many ways Dahl’s antithesis. There seems to be no malice in him, and the generosity of his sense of humor made him hesitate over some of the first Dahl stories on which he worked. However, he says that The Enormous Crocodile became pleasant enough to draw “once it had been toned down by its editors,” although Blake didn’t find it particularly striking.4 And although he found the next book, The Twits, “very black,” its extreme changes of style gradually grew on him.
On Dahl’s side, one obstacle was financial. He wanted the best illustrator but, as with the earlier notion of approaching Maurice Sendak, was reluctant to sacrifice more of his royalties than he had to. Bob Gottlieb wanted Blake’s drawings for the American editions, but Knopf’s contract with Icarus promised Dahl 15 percent, and Dahl argued that the illustrator should be paid over and above that. From the publisher’s point of view, this was outrageous, particularly for books in which illustrations and text are of almost equal importance. Eventually, a deal was agreed on by which Dahl conceded to Blake roughly a third of the authorship royalties. At the same time, he demanded that sizable new advances be paid to Icarus, in addition to the sums already agreed on with Random House and to those which Cape was paying separately.5
It would be hard not to like The Enormous Crocodile, which has a simple, cumulative plot, exciting in its threat to the children whom the crocodile is determined to eat and funny in his simple, repeatedly thwarted stratagems for doing so. Quentin Blake’s illustrations turn him into an amiably incompetent character. He says that what he had in mind was the crocodile in a Punch and Judy show, but the result is less a reptile than a mischievous, mad-eyed, long green puppy. Dahl was happy with this collaboration and with the two that followed, but kept his options open for the long-planned book (eventually, three books) of comic poems on which he was simultaneously working and for which he now wanted someone different. He was looking, he said, for illustrations less impressionistic and more fully representational than Blake’s—preferably by a new, young artist, who might also, of course, be persuaded to accept less payment.6
For Dahl, now in his sixties and often in poor health, keeping so many new projects in the air simultaneously was complicated. This may have contributed to his mounting irritability with his American publishers and a corresponding rise in the influence of Tom Maschler in London. Where editorial differences arose, it was natural that Dahl should enjoy Maschler’s quick enthusiasm more than the probing attentions of Gottlieb. More than ever, he tended to believe his own publicity, and when Random House wanted to Americanize some usages in The Twits (flannel to washcloth, long knickers to long underwear, holiday to vacation), he came on very grand and subjunctival: “I think an English book by an English author, although it be for young children, should have an English flavour to it. Do they Americanise the Christmas Carol … or the novels of Jane Austen?”7 He took exception, too, when an article about Gottlieb in the Book Review section of The New York Times failed to mention that he edited the children’s books of one writer alone—Dahl.8 Still, Dahl agreed to his American publisher’s request that he cu
t from The Twits a gruesomely detailed passage about nose blowing. He also rewrote the ending of George’s Marvellous Medicine along the lines they suggested, and paid attention to notes on the comic poems from Gottlieb, who was not deterred from commenting on them by Dahl’s telling him that Maschler had seen each one as it came along and that Cape was “enormously high” on the book.
Meanwhile, a new illustrator still had to be found. He and Maschler were, he joked archly, “trying out a young lady—if that is the right way to put it.”9
Despite Dahl’s restlessness, it was clear to most readers that Quentin Blake’s amiable drawings were an excellent complement to his writing. They helped to unify what was in the late 1970s and early ’80s a varied output, and they softened the way the books spoke to a child’s worst prejudices and fears. In The Twits, for example, Dahl uses children’s fastidiousness as an opportunity to dwell on his own obsessive physical revulsions, particularly at facial hair. The bearded Mr. Twit and the ugly, one-eyed Mrs. Twit live in squalor, cruelty, and mutual hatred, united only by their pursuit of birds to eat. Mr. Twit keeps a cage full of pet monkeys, who join forces with an exotic bird to save the ordinary birds from slaughter. In the ensuing war—in part a reworking of The Magic Finger, combined with Dahl’s 1945 fantasy, “Smoked Cheese”10—the creatures invade the house of the “foul and smelly” and now gun-toting Twits, turn it (literally) upside down, and destroy their oppressors.
In Blake’s drawings the extremism of all this is softened by the fact that he depicts ugliness much as a child would: huge nostrils and gaping teeth sketched flat onto the face, hair a mass of bristly scribbles, fingers a bunch of bananas. And where the words are at their most microscopically disgusted—for instance, in the description of the morsels of old food lodged in Mr. Twit’s mustache—Blake supplies a detached, comic-book diagram, with arrows marked “cornflake” and “tinned sardine.”
He was similarly adroit in his handling of George’s Marvellous Medicine. Here, the earlier book’s connubial malice is replaced by frank ageism, most memorably in the depiction of the grandmother, her small mouth puckered up “like a dog’s bottom.” It is on her that the restless eight-year-old George experiments with his homemade size-altering potion. Like The Twits, this knockabout horror story owes something to a circus act or a Punch and Judy show: George “really hated that horrid old witchy woman. And all of a sudden he had a tremendous urge to do something about her. Something whopping.… A sort of explosion.” But again Blake lightens things by visually reminding the reader both how small George is and, as he wanders around the house looking for ingredients for his medicine, how lonely and innocent. His actions come across as prompted more by curiosity than cruelty.
So, too, with the books of rhymes on which Blake eventually worked. Dirty Beasts was originally given to a new illustrator, Rosemary Fawcett; the collection of reworked fairy stories, Revolting Rhymes, to Blake. Blake started later, but for various reasons his book appeared sooner, in 1982. In keeping with their folktale originals, the poems are as comically ruthless as anything Dahl wrote, and Blake was conscious of the artist’s power with such material: when the Prince, in the new version of “Cinderella,” beheads one of the Ugly Sisters (“Try this instead!” the Prince yelled back. / He swung his trusty sword and smack—/ Her head went crashing to the ground. / It bounced a bit and rolled around”), how much should the illustrator depict? His solution is as vivid and funny as the words, but there are no terrifying gouts of blood or splinters of bone: the head jumps up from its neck like a slice of potato, and the reader’s attention is as much caught by an enormous shoe, bigger than the Prince’s thigh, dropping from the victim’s pudgy hand. The pictures also match, but don’t exaggerate, the louche, down-at-heel modernity of Dahl’s rhymes—anachronistic in a way which hadn’t worked in My Uncle Oswald but does here. There is the muddy, jerry-built marketplace Blake drew for “Jack and the Beanstalk,” like someplace out of Ceauşescu’s Romania; or Goldilocks, sprawling with her telephone and her hair dryer; or the eager schoolmasterly types who are Snow White’s dwarfs—little men with mustaches and tweed jackets, clutching at the statuesque legs of her jeans.
Blake later did a set of illustrations for the companion volume, Dirty Beasts, to replace the ones which had been commissioned for the first edition.11 The new version appeared in 1984, by which time he was working with Dahl directly, rather than through Tom Maschler. The results of their collaboration—a rare experience for Dahl—are to be seen in The BFG. But this is to jump ahead. Both The BFG and Dirty Beasts were to appear in the States under the imprint of a new publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. First, Dahl had to disengage himself from Knopf, a process which coincided with the final breakup of his marriage.
Quite apart from the stresses of his private life, his illnesses, and his acrimonious business dealings, Dahl was contending at this time with the often burdensome intimacies prompted by being a world-renowned author. He never took his telephone number out of Who’s Who, and at four o’clock one winter’s morning, when he was about to leave for a holiday in Morocco, a man with a Brooklyn accent rang and said, “At last I have found you.”12 Dahl was furious, but his caller apologized and explained that his eight-year-old son had died the day before. The boy had loved Dahl’s books—would the author write a few words for the funeral? He agreed, and dictated something that night over the phone from Marrakesh. It was a typical response to personal tragedy. No less typically, he made sure that his friends knew about it.
In the same year, 1980, one winter’s morning in her office on the twenty-first floor at 201 East Fiftieth Street, Manhattan, Karen Latuchie, assistant to the president and editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., opened a letter from Great Missenden. Roald Dahl wished to announce that he was running out of pencils. He said that he never failed to use Dixon Ticonderoga and stipulated the precise type: 1388—2–5/10 (Medium). Would Robert Gottlieb please oblige him by instructing someone “competent and ravishing” to buy him a packet of six dozen and send them airmail?13
The two men had barely resolved the latest of their quarrels concerning the Icarus contract, and Gottlieb decided that this was meant as some kind of a joke.14 He didn’t bother to reply. Three months later Dahl wrote again.15 Had his request for pencils reached Gottlieb? This time, after a delay of two weeks, Latuchie responded on Gottlieb’s behalf. None of the local stores seemed to stock Dixon Ticonderoga, but she enclosed samples of the nearest alternative she had been able to find.
Dahl was dissatisfied. The pencils she had sent were, he said, inordinately expensive, yet useless. They had no built-in erasers, weren’t soft enough, and were not the right color. He asked her to continue her efforts on his behalf by telephoning the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company in Jersey City, New Jersey, and getting hold of their sales staff. “This surely,” he added, “will solve our problem.”16
To judge from the addresses and telephone numbers of stationery firms scribbled all over this letter, some hapless office assistant spent the best part of a day on the search—presumably with success, since there was no further correspondence about it. But pencils were far from the end of Dahl’s demands. Apart from his continuing grievance about what he described as the grotesquely unjust four-book deal which, he said, had been forced on him by Knopf,17 he was now dissatisfied with the royalty payable to him from a longstanding U.S. paperback agreement negotiated on his behalf by Knopf.18 These financial complaints brought with them a host of other irritations. In January 1981, he was enraged by the American cover design for The Twits, because his name was smaller than the title and “a good deal more unobstrusive [sic].”19 In February he wrote to Gottlieb, comparing him unfavorably with Tom Maschler in his attention to such matters and claiming, too, that Gottlieb didn’t use his position in the company to “protect” Dahl.20 There was yet another grumble. Random House, Dahl now wildly alleged, had tricked him in arranging a life-insurance policy which he claimed would force him to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars
up front. The firm’s legal department was also making difficulties, he said, and he had decided that if such sources of dissatisfaction continued, he would offer his next book to another house.
Gottlieb had had enough. As a publisher, he has always operated under what he calls the “‘Fuck You’ Principle”—whereby he will take “almost any amount of shit from any given writer,” with the unspoken proviso that when he can take no more, he is free “to turn around and say ‘Fuck you.’”21 He now activated the principle in a letter to Dahl:
Dear Roald,
This is not in response to the specifics of your last several letters to me and my colleagues, but a general response to everything we’ve heard from you in the past year or two.
In brief, and as unemotionally as I can state it: since the time when you decided that Bob Bernstein, I and the rest of us had dealt badly with you over your contract, you have behaved to us in a way I can honestly say is unmatched in my experience for overbearingness and utter lack of civility. Lately you’ve begun addressing others here—who are less well placed to answer you back—with the same degree of abusiveness. For a while I put your behavior down to the physical pain you were in and so managed to excuse it. Now I’ve come to believe that you’re just enjoying a prolonged tantrum and are bullying us.
Your threat to leave Knopf after this current contract is fulfilled leaves us far from intimidated. Harrison, Bernstein and I will be sorry to see you depart, for business reasons, but these are not strong enough to make us put up with your manner to us any longer. I’ve worked hard for you editorially but had already decided to stop doing so; indeed, you’ve managed to make the entire experience of publishing you unappealing for all of us—counter-productive behavior, I would have thought.