Roald Dahl Read online

  To be perfectly clear, let me reverse your threat: unless you start acting civilly to us, there is no possibility of our agreeing to continue to publish you. Nor will I—or any of us—answer any future letter that we consider to be as rude as those we’ve been receiving.

  Regretfully,

  BG

  According to Gottlieb, when his letter went off, everyone at Knopf who had lately been dealing with Dahl “stood on their desks and cheered.”

  Perhaps publishing, as much as marriage, represents the triumph of hope over experience. When Tom Maschler steered the typescripts of Dirty Beasts and The BFG downtown to Farrar, Straus and Giroux at Union Square, Dahl’s next American publishers were delighted: none more so than a young editor, Stephen Roxburgh. In his previous career, both in a children’s library and as an academic specialist in children’s literature, Roxburgh had seen the extraordinary hold his new author exerted over child readers—readers who, in the prosperous and indulgent post-Spock middle-class families of the 1980s, had a good deal more say than previous generations of children over which books were bought for them.

  As always, Dahl was keen to start the relationship on a footing of complicity. He wrote to Roxburgh, inviting his comments on The BFG while making it clear that he didn’t want to have to do any major new work on the book. In the course of the letter, he took the opportunity to disparage both Gottlieb (“too much arrogance there and that is not easy to stomach”) and his former publishers in general. He promised that on a future occasion he would reveal to Roxburgh what he described as the “astonishing financial evils perpetrated by the Random House gang.”22

  A serious, precise, tweed-jacket-and-gray-flannel-trousers Anglophile, Roxburgh was flattered. He admired and liked Dahl personally, and quickly became a proxy son with whom the older man could trade opinions about books and wine. In a way, it was the relationship with Alfred Knopf, with the seniority—and the power—reversed.

  Their first dealings were straightforwardly professional. Farrar, Straus and Giroux decided to delay publication of Dirty Beasts, partly to avoid a clash when Knopf brought out Revolting Rhymes, but principally because they wanted to begin their association with Dahl on a more substantial book. It was already clear—not least to its author23—that The BFG had the makings of a commercial success comparable at the very least with that of James or Charlie.

  Imaginatively, the draft was already superior to both of the earlier books. As in most of Dahl’s children’s stories, the essential plot is like a folktale: a giant and a small girl together bring about the defeat of a cannibalistic tribe of monsters.24 Both the relationship and the bullying which threatens it were situations of a kind that had always brought out Dahl’s strongest feelings, but there are several other elements. The Big Friendly Giant is a resonant fictional character, with his funny and in a way beautiful confusions of speech (learned from Pat), and his skill as a dream maker. And out of the familiar child’s-story premises of reversal and changes of scale, Dahl had invented some memorable comic episodes: the downward-acting lemonade which makes the BFG fart (he calls it whizzpopping) rather than burp; his breakfast in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace, off a Ping-Pong table resting on four grandfather clocks. There was plenty here for Quentin Blake to work on.

  The draft had already been seen by an editor at Cape, Valerie Buckingham, who made a number of comments which, if “politically correct,” were more importantly motivated by narrative plausibility.25 For example, she suggested to Dahl that the BFG’s original list of the international victims of the Bonecruncher would impress Sophie more if they weren’t all men. “Agree,” Dahl cheerily replied. “It takes a woman to spot this!” Similarly, he agreed to her idea that when the BFG says that boys despise girls’ dreams, it would be natural for Sophie to show some reaction.26 His concessions, though, were based on character and plot: he was persuaded by what made sense in relation to Sophie, not by any appeal to the tastes of his audience. When his editor’s caution extended to a religio-dietary anxiety about the BFG’s demands for sausages and bacon at breakfast in Buckingham Palace, Dahl was unmoved.

  All of Valerie Buckingham’s comments were passed on to FSG, but the ambitious Stephen Roxburgh preferred to do his own editing and approached the typescript afresh, as if all the responsibility were his own. He took the book home and read it several times, working in the evenings and on weekends. He even read it aloud. Then he spent a couple of days drafting a letter to Dahl: ten typed, single-spaced pages commenting minutely on inconsistencies, superfluities, repetitions, clichés, and matters of taste.27 He also entirely rewrote two short passages of dialogue28 and made a number of other substantive comments, one of which was to prompt Dahl to write the famous episode in which the BFG whizzpops for the Queen. All this was more, of course, than had been asked for. Roxburgh diplomatically dressed his comments up with compliments to the author on his “unusual” and “wonderfully refreshing” attention “to the minutest aspects of the manuscript.” Nothing he had picked on was of any great significance, he said. The book “could be published as it is and be quite successful.”

  Quite successful? In American English the adverb means “very,” but in Britain its usual implication is “moderately.” Perhaps half-jokingly, Dahl seized on it in his reply, saying that he believed he had never written a book which was only averagely successful. But for the rest, he fell into the BFG’s own boisterous idiom and said that he was “absolutely swishboggled and sloshbunkled” by the trouble Roxburgh had taken, assuring him, as he had previously assured Robert Gottlieb, and before him Fabio Coen, that no editor had ever treated his work so meticulously. Dahl now incorporated word for word Roxburgh’s new passages of dialogue. He even accepted without demur that there was too much danger of causing offense with his original description of the Bloodbottling Giant, a dark-skinned, flat-nosed monster with “thick rubbery lips … like two gigantic purple frankfurters lying one on top of the other.” This was a “derisive stereotype,” Roxburgh told him plainly. At the end of his reply, Dahl scrawled, “The negro lips thing is taken care of.”29

  In their exchanges Roxburgh often referred to classic authors like Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, and phrased his comments on Dahl in the critical language he might have used of them. The author repaid the compliment in a way that reflected still further glory on himself, by nicknaming Roxburgh “Max Perkins,” after the famous editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. In one letter Dahl also compared himself with Flannery O’Connor, who had said that after the first draft, she took all the advice she could get.30 Meanwhile, he and Roxburgh began to correspond regularly about other writers: Steinbeck, Golding, Graham Greene. Dahl resisted the younger man’s recommendation of Isaac Bashevis Singer, but shared his enthusiasm for thriller writers, particularly Robert B. Parker and Elmore Leonard. Soon Roxburgh was invited to stay with Roald and Felicity at Gipsy House, where, in the course of many subsequent visits, he gradually came to meet most of the family. When Ophelia visited New York in her late teens, she was encouraged to spend time with him, and they became good friends. Dahl also asked him to look out for one of Felicity’s daughters, Charlotte, when she visited New York on the rebound from a love affair.

  It was a far cry from Rayner Unwin’s view of the proper relationship between publisher and author. Unwin says he saw himself, like his father before him with the third Earl Russell, as an Edwardian tradesman: each party kept his distance. Roxburgh’s intimacy with his author was likely to end badly, not only because most of Dahl’s professional friendships did, but because as the younger man’s editing became more and more thorough—a matter of wholesale reconstruction rather than simply of adjustment—so it became obvious to Dahl that his protégé was in danger of seeing himself as someone important. In terms of Dahl’s writing, he soon was important.

  For a year or two, all continued smoothly. That Roxburgh’s reverence for Dahl had limits was obvious both to himself and to his boss, Roger Straus, as early as Februa
ry 1983, when Roxburgh wrote an internal memo on a selection of classic ghost stories which Dahl had put together for Alfred Knopf’s movie producer half brother Edwin twenty-five years earlier, and which Cape was now planning to publish.31 Roxburgh thought the selection not only outdated and excessively British but uninteresting even on its own terms. The introduction, he said, was “hopeless—a long ramble involving women in the arts, children’s books, personal reminiscence, and, it seems, anything else that came to mind while he was at his desk.” But a typescript with more potential was about to arrive at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It was the first draft of what was to become one of Dahl’s most popular books, The Witches.32

  Dahl was now writing steadily and fast. The BFG, published in 1982; The Witches (1983); Boy (1984); Going Solo (1986); and Matilda (1988) are all full-length narratives, and he also turned out another picture book for young children, The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (1985), dedicated to his stepdaughters, Neisha, Charlotte, and Lorina. One factor in his productivity, as well as in the books’ fast-increasing success, was, as we have seen, the relationship with Quentin Blake. At first Maschler wanted only a few pictures for The BFG. Blake roughed out sketches of the main characters and scenes and showed them to Dahl, but Dahl was disappointed that there were not more, and they discussed how to develop them.33 Both men were prepared to work hard on the minutest details. The BFG originally wore boots, but when Dahl saw the drawings, he decided that a change was needed. Together, he and Blake considered other forms of footwear, until the author produced a Norwegian type of sandal which he himself wore and which Blake copied. Similarly, an apron which the BFG was described as wearing in the original draft “got in the way” in the pictures, so Dahl removed it. These harmonious dealings, and Dahl’s with Roxburgh, formed a basis for the fuller collaborations which were to follow.

  In the case of The BFG, Dahl was also rewarded by one of those coincidences in which life imitates fiction. The story takes the giant to Buckingham Palace, where he blows a dream through the Queen’s bedroom window, warning her of the bad giants’ attacks on children. When she wakes, Sophie is sitting on the windowsill while the BFG prowls in the garden outside. One night in July 1982, between the book’s completion and its publication, the real Queen Elizabeth II woke up in Buckingham Palace to find a man called Michael Fagan in her bedroom. Dahl delighted in the story, and long after it had died down in the newspapers, he would fantasize ribaldly that Fagan had “actually done it” with the Queen and had been got rid of by the security services.34

  The most likable of all Dahl’s books, The BFG was an instant success. In Britain, it was reviewed in almost every newspaper and magazine, including by other children’s writers, novelists, academics.35 A report by the Book Marketing Council showed that of the ten largest-selling children’s books at that time, four were by Roald Dahl: The BFG, George’s Marvellous Medicine, Revolting Rhymes, and The Twits. The new story became Dahl’s most popular children’s title in Germany.36 In France, where he is better known than any French writer for children, it is second only to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.37 It was translated into Afrikaans, Basque, and Slovene, and appeared in a bilingual edition in Japan. Dahl rewarded himself by taking Felicity for a winter holiday in Barbados.

  The first edition of Dirty Beasts, with Rosemary Fawcett’s illustrations, had a less smooth passage. To one British critic, Russell Davies, “the buzz of misanthropy from Roald Dahl grows stronger.”38 Candida Lycett Green rightly said there was nothing new about this mood: she saw the first poem, in which a pig forestalls its destiny by turning on the farmer and eating him, as a version of the macabre, much earlier story “Pig,” in which a boy brought up as a vegetarian ends up in an abattoir.39 She thought that Dahl’s imagination was well illustrated by Rosemary Fawcett: “The nastiness of her pictures is exceptional.”

  This was meant as a compliment, but not everyone saw things this way. There couldn’t be a bigger contrast than between Quentin Blake’s benignly funny sketches and the giddying, lurid, surrealistic images Rosemary Fawcett produced. Her cover picture sets the tone: a child in bed with a teddy bear, both of them bug-eyed with terror at the sight of something positioned above and behind the viewer’s head. It is the perspective that is often most violent in these images—that, and the colors. For “The Tummy Beast,” Fawcett threw the greedy child over so that he is somehow flying, upside down, all chubby knees and protruding eyeballs, beneath a gaudy tableful of purple and mauve blancmanges and ice creams. And in “The Porcupine” the reader is made to peer, as if through a keyhole, onto a murky scene, lit by a single lamp, in which a goggling dentist waves his gigantic pointed pincers over the little girl’s much-spiked rump.

  Fawcett does more than justice to Dahl’s ferocity, but not to his humor or his underlying traditionalism. Dahl himself hated the drawings. He said he couldn’t face giving the book to any of his relations and offered to incinerate all the unsold copies and dance around the bonfire.40 Many of the British reviews warned that Fawcett’s pictures would give children nightmares, and this was the general opinion in the States, where the children’s librarians were in full squeamish cry: “Sadistic, predictable and unfunny”;41 “From stem to stern this is a gross, course [sic] unpleasant book.”42 The edition didn’t sell badly in Britain, but although, according to Murray Pollinger, Tom Maschler swore by Fawcett’s work,43 the illustrations were unpopular with Continental publishers.44 Revolting Rhymes, meanwhile, had sold over 100,000 copies in Britain alone. So Fawcett’s Dirty Beasts was eventually allowed to go out of print, and Quentin Blake was brought back in for the new edition.

  Stephen Roxburgh was not surprised by the response to Dirty Beasts and was keen to educate Dahl about other aspects of the new climate in which his books were appearing. This was not “censorship.” Like any good editor, including Robert Gottlieb before him, Roxburgh saw it as part of his job to point out where an elderly, conservative, distinctly bloody-minded Englishman might, in modern America, cause offense of kinds or degrees which he perhaps hadn’t intended, or which, even if intentional, seemed gratuitous. Dahl was free to reject these suggestions, but was not always as inflexible about them as might have been anticipated.

  In the case of The BFG, as we have seen, some of the softening up had already been done by Valerie Buckingham, the editor who first worked on the typescript at Cape. For The Witches, Roxburgh was in sole charge, and because Dahl had been so impressed by his work on the earlier book, he let him see the new manuscript in what, to the editor’s eyes, was a much less finished state. This time, the first discussions took place in England, and in an atmosphere of some tension.45 Dahl dropped the book off at the house in London where Roxburgh was staying. Almost immediately, the author’s agent was on the phone. Dahl, he said, was anxiously waiting for a response.

  Unintimidated, but not without apprehension, the methodical Roxburgh read the typescript through twice. The following morning he traveled by train from Marylebone to Great Missenden. Dahl met him at the station, took him home to Gipsy House, organized coffee and cigarettes, and asked for his reactions.

  The draft contained the embryo of the final version: a plot by the Grand High Witch and her fellow hags to turn all the children of the world into mice. As in the published book, the plan is accidentally discovered by a little boy and his grandmother. But in the manuscript, they otherwise took little part in the action. Their function was to give Dahl an opportunity to include long passages of autobiographical material about Norway and his schooldays. In another narrative strand, a different boy, the gluttonous Bruno Jenkins, single-handedly outwits and defeats the witches.

  Roxburgh wrote to a friend soon afterward describing his reaction to the draft, and his solution:

  A thoroughly disagreeable character, other than the first person narrator, gets all the good parts, while the narrator, the barely displaced Dahl/boy, was merely an observer.… Somehow the narrator had to become the hero. My suggestion … was that Dahl have the witches
turn the narrator into a mouse and then he could do everything that Bruno did. It took quite a while for me to nerve myself up to making this suggestion, because [those I made] for The BFG, while extensive, were hardly radical—i.e., entailing a complete revision of the manuscript. Frankly, I wasn’t at all sure how he would take to what I had to say. Well … he immediately saw what I was about, and began imagining the consequences of such a development. We toyed with it for an hour or two, came up with some terrific possibilities, and broke off for a walk after about two and a half hours. He was going to proceed according to what we had discussed and send me a revised ms.46

  Roxburgh also suggested that, in revising the book, Dahl should set aside most of the autobiographical material.

  A second version reached FSG in March. Once again, Dahl’s agent telephoned immediately, spelling out to Roxburgh that he had better be “both gentle and quick.”47 Once again, the editor wrote his author a long letter.

  Dahl had taken all Roxburgh’s advice, but several weaknesses remained and others had been introduced with the new material. The grandmother was now a strong character—perhaps too strong, if the little boy was to be the book’s hero. He needed more initiative and more autonomy, and Roxburgh cautiously proposed some new turns in the plot:

  Our hero, for instance, could remember that the Witch’s room is under their own. He could, perhaps, remembering his experiments with William and Mary [his pet mice], suggest some kind of rope trick that he could perform. In other words, he could initiate some of the action and proceed, if you will, through the maze of the plot, finding his way around obstacles as he does in the new scenes you’ve created.

  There were other suggestions, to do with the characterization of the Grand High Witch and the tone of the ending. All these new details were finally incorporated by Dahl, as well as Roxburgh’s idea that the witches might find it harder to smell dirty children than clean ones, and dozens of other minor points about consistency, repetition, and probability.