Roald Dahl Page 26

  Meanwhile, with a fair amount of apology for the “pseudo-liberal librarian mentality,” Roxburgh drew Dahl’s attention to occasions in the story when women took “a lot of abuse.” The author dismissed all this as brusquely as his editor’s concern for wig wearers (who, Roxburgh seems to have feared, might be upset by the grandmother’s assertion that all witches are bald). “No,” Dahl replied, “I am not as frightened of offending women as you are.”

  Besides, as he pointed out, the nicest character in The Witches is a woman: the grandmother. And one of the story’s points lies in her encouragement of unorthodoxy. For example, she is a heavy smoker and offers her grandson a puff of her cigar.48 With Roxburgh’s help, Dahl had developed the relationship into an unexpectedly benign parable of toleration. In the first draft, the child was turned back into a human being. In the new version, he remains a mouse, and the moral is explicit: “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you.” This is like the lesson the BFG learns when his fear that he speaks “the most terrible wigglish” is allayed by Sophie’s telling him she thinks he talks beautifully.49 Later, there was to be a similar appeal on behalf of outsiders in the characterization of Matilda—an outcast at home because she is clever, likes reading, and is a girl. Under the combined influences of Stephen Roxburgh and of marital happiness, Dahl’s books were changing, and had something more durable to offer readers than current social orthodoxy.

  Both in Britain and in the United States, however, literary criticism was turning at the time into a kind of secular Inquisition bent on rooting out heresy. From a historical perspective, there was something depressingly circular about a response to The Witches published in The Times Educational Supplement, where the feminist cultural commentator Catherine Itzin compared the book with fifteenth-century witch-hunting tracts, without noticing that she was talking like something of a witch-hunter herself. Itzin described Dahl’s story as “part of the process” of both pornography and the physical abuse of women.50 It didn’t matter that Dahl’s much-seized-upon words, “A witch is always a woman,” are followed in the book by “a ghoul is always a male. So indeed is a barghest.” Nor did it change anything to argue that the idea “witches are always women” isn’t the same as “women are always witches.” Despite all this, and despite the character of Grandmamma, The Witches, Itzin asserts, is an example of “how boys learn to become men who hate and harm women.”

  A difficulty in answering such criticism is that when Itzin says “Womanhatred is at the core of Dahl’s writing,” some of his earlier fiction seems to bear her out. Stories like “Nunc Dimittis” and “The Last Act” could easily be thought to disparage women. But even in them, Dahl’s misogyny is arguably just one side of his misanthropy. In other stories, such as “The Way Up to Heaven” and “William and Mary,” the gender sympathies are reversed, women taking enjoyably savage revenges on men who have ill-treated them. Similarly, The Witches is The BFG after a series of sex changes. An old woman and a little boy collaborate in overthrowing the forces of evil, represented by (female) witches. In The BFG, the characters are an old man, a little girl, and (male) giants.

  For this kind of argument, though, it was enough to have found a few examples of unpleasant women in his children’s books: the aunts who are disposed of at the beginning of James and the Giant Peach, the grandmother in George’s Marvellous Medicine who doesn’t want George to grow and who is therefore obviously a castrator. According to one critic, “Almost every one of [Dahl’s] numerous books re-hashes the same tired plot: a meek small boy finally turns on his adult female tormentors and kills them.” This was Michele Landsberg, in a reference guide to children’s literature published (to Dahl’s fury) by Penguin in 1986.51 To make her theory work, one has to improvise a fair amount. Perhaps Danny (whom Landsberg doesn’t mention) has bumped off his own mother before his story begins. Both Sophie and the bad giants in The BFG (also omitted) are, say, transvestites. And in Fantastic Mr. Fox (again, not referred to), the husband and children must be secretly planning to turn Mrs. Fox over to the gunmen outside. But if such dogma takes on an imaginative life of its own, its results couldn’t be more comical than Landsberg’s own reading of the moment in George’s Marvellous Medicine when the grandmother feels the first effects of George’s powerful potion: “There’s squigglers in my belly!” she cries. “There’s bangers in my bottom!” This, Landsberg says, is “a parody of a rape.”52 It’s hard to imagine what she might have made of the BFG’s whizzpopping in front of the Queen.

  Dahl won support in all this from an unexpected quarter. One of the best reviews of The Witches was written by Erica Jong for The New York Times Book Review.53 Jong, the author of a book about witches, praised Dahl for seeing that “children love the macabre, the terrifying, the mythic.” His witches have to be horrifying, she says, in order for the tale to convey not only its heroism but its deeper meaning, which is “about the fear of death as separation and a child’s mourning for the loss of his parents”:

  Mr. Dahl’s hero is happy when he is turned into a mouse—not only because of his speed and dexterity (and because he doesn’t have to go to school), but also because his short life span now means that he will never have to be parted from his beloved grandmother as he has been from his parents. Already well into her 80’s, she has only a few years to live, and he as a mouse-person is granted the same few years.…

  “The Witches” is finally a love story.… It is a curious sort of tale but an honest one, which deals with matters of crucial importance to children: smallness, the existence of evil in the world, mourning, separation, death.

  Jong’s short review, which also conveys the fun of the book, helps to bring into focus how Dahl—here as in The BFG—was drawing together and fantasizing upon his deepest relationships: with his dead mother and father and with his own children and his granddaughter, Tessa’s child, Sophie—after whom the heroine is named. In the case of The Witches, it was his editor who had shown him how to link these preoccupations to the narrative which, originally, was simply superimposed on them. Dahl told Roxburgh, “I am overwhelmed by the help you have been giving me.”54 Not long afterward, he wrote saying that he was horrified that someone like himself, who had once been quite a good writer of short stories, skilled at paring his work down to the minimum, was now “having to be taught this art all over again—by you.”55

  He was by then at work on a new project which Roxburgh had put to him. Why, he had asked, didn’t Dahl take some of the autobiographical material he had finally left out of The Witches and put it toward a separate memoir, written for child readers?54 Dahl answered that he found the notion “rather intriguing” and agreed that perhaps he could collect some anecdotes. But he disapproved of straight autobiography: “I regard that as the height of egotism.”55

  14

  Three Cheers for Stephen Roxburgh

  While Dahl was becoming increasingly dependent on Stephen Roxburgh’s input into his writing, he also got on very well with Roxburgh’s boss, the shrewd and tough Roger Straus. All the more so after the income-tax inspectors found out about Icarus and demanded almost a million dollars in overdue taxes.1 Searching for ways to help Dahl raise funds, Straus discovered a loophole in the American paperback contract on his earlier children’s books—one of the agreements with whose supposed iniquities Dahl had become so obsessed. There was a clause, Straus discovered, which allowed the author to free himself in the event of Random House’s coming under new ownership—as had recently occurred with the takeover by “Si” Newhouse. After lengthy negotiations, and despite the increasingly frantic pleas of Random House (who were themselves planning a new juvenile paperback imprint2), Dahl triumphantly reclaimed the paperback rights to six of his best-known titles, among them James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and sold them to Peter Mayer, chief of Viking Penguin, who was expanding his children’s list, Puffin, in the United States. The advance was $1.3 million, although Dahl grumbled to
Straus that after slices had been taken by the Inland Revenue, Random House, and his agent, his share would come to only $50,000 a year.3 Still, Dahl described it as “a victory over the forces of evil.” What a monster his former Random House publisher Bob Bernstein now seemed! He had just appeared on British television. “My God, how ugly he is,” Dahl wrote of his old friend, before launching into a minute, repulsive, verbal caricature of his appearance.4

  By now, 1987, Penguin had in print more or less everything Dahl had ever published, except The Gremlins, which is owned by Walt Disney; Sometime Never, which he had decided to forget about; and a couple of autobiographical pieces which he now intended to rework in his memoir. For some time already, paperback readers had been able to buy not only all of Dahl’s original short-story collections, including Over to You and Someone Like You, but also, or instead, many of the same stories reshuffled under new titles: Tales of the Unexpected (1979) and More Tales of the Unexpected (1980). After 1986, they could buy them yet again, as Completely Unexpected Tales. All these volumes were kept in print simultaneously. The packaging of Roald Dahl had begun.

  Part of the process involved his being presented as not only an extremely good writer of children’s books and a best-seller but a Great Writer. From his earliest Washington days, Dahl had not only imagined being, but had behaved as if he were Great, and saw no inconsistency between this and his willingness to tailor his writing to the market. After his return to England, he had been irritated by the fact that he wasn’t always mentioned—indeed, perhaps hadn’t been heard of—by leading British critics of the time such as Cyril Connolly, V. S. Pritchett, and Peter Quennell.5 In the eyes of Martha Gellhorn, his literary ambition was one of the things that differentiated him from Ian Fleming. According to her, Fleming’s writing was “so embarrassing it was never mentioned. But Ian didn’t have any notion of anything else. I think Roald thought he was really writing very good stuff [for adults]. He thought he was a serious and good writer, and I don’t think he was very pleased that nobody serious took him seriously.”

  As we have seen, Dahl had offered his first children’s books to Alfred Knopf because writing adult stories had become more and more difficult, and when he finally had some new adult fiction, he found it hard to get it published in reputable magazines.6 In more recent times, though, he had increasingly come not only to accept but to insist that he was a classic children’s author. On the issue of Americanization, he argued to Stephen Roxburgh, much as he had to Robert Gottlieb, that to change The Witches for American readers would be as absurd as to rewrite Alice for them.7 Beyond the question of his personal standing, if there was one thing he and the literary critics could agree on, it was that children’s books were a last bastion of cultural values against the inroads of television. And if writing for children was therefore more important than writing for adults, it was also, he now claimed, much harder. The fact that so few famous adult authors had tried to do it was in his view clear proof that he was right. He had seen Iris Murdoch on television talking about the value of children’s books, and he told people that he had wanted to ask the “silly old hag” why she didn’t produce some herself.

  One of the reasons for his vociferousness was that Dahl’s popularity in his own country was not matched by any kind of official recognition. Just as at school he wasn’t a prefect, and during the war he had won no medals, so it was not until 1983 that he was given a British literary award: the Whitbread Prize, for The Witches. He was delighted, but it wasn’t enough.8 He was beginning to expect a knighthood.

  His first move in this direction was a new campaign of self-publicity. Dahl took pride in what he called his “Child Power.”9 Without much exaggeration, he said that he could walk into any house in Europe or America, and if there were children living there, he would be recognized and made welcome. It would have been all the more a pity, then, if what they knew about him as a person had been presented in an unfavorable light. One of the ways in which Roxburgh made a memoir seem a good idea was to remind Dahl of a forthcoming biography about him which was being written for children by Chris Powling,10 and to hint that what the kids really wanted was Dahl’s own version: “I think it would be so much better for young children to have your account written as only you can write it of whatever part of your life you choose to make open to them.”11

  The suggestion was attractive now, coming as it did only a couple of years after the embarrassingly timed transmission of a TV film, The Patricia Neal Story, based on Barry Farrell’s Pat and Roald. Directed by Anthony Page and Anthony Harvey, the drama-documentary about Patricia Neal’s stroke and recovery was completed at around the time that the couple were splitting up. Dahl himself, played by Dirk Bogarde, is favorably treated in the film (and has a great deal more hair than in real life), but although his behavior is seen as crucial to Neal’s rehabilitation, there is no attempt to gloss over his cruelty—early on, in the hospital, he is shown slapping her face hard—or the moody aggressiveness of his temperament in general. To Dahl, another unwelcome surprise may have been that the main character in the script, unlike in the book, was not himself but Neal. According to Anthony Page, Dahl telephoned Dirk Bogarde at the Connaught Hotel during the shooting and said he wanted to rewrite the whole thing. If there was any resistance, Bogarde and Glenda Jackson would have to leave the project. “He was just trying it on. But he wasn’t at all pleased with the result.”12

  Other, more compliant accounts of Dahl’s life appeared in the 1980s. As it turned out, Chris Powling’s Roald Dahl, first published in 1983, proved as satisfactory as Barry Farrell’s book. Here, once again, was the Dahl who had been “shot down and crippled in an air-battle,”13 who invented the RAF myth of the gremlins,14 and was the first to expose America’s dastardly plan “to take over Europe’s commercial airlines after the war”—a discovery which Dahl made all the more dramatic now by redating it so that it came before Pearl Harbor.15 There were new elements to the myth. In 1965 Dahl had ditched the then-little-known Robert Altman from an unrealized film project which had been Altman’s own idea.16 In Powling’s book, the episode is presented as a battle fought on Altman’s behalf but lost to the mighty producers, who “couldn’t recognize talent when they saw it staring them in the face.”17

  Meanwhile, the autobiography encouraged by Stephen Roxburgh enabled Dahl to put his legend in a longer perspective and to record, too, some colorful stories of his early life with which he had entertained his own children. In compiling them, he used Roxburgh as a research assistant, sending to New York boxes full of childhood letters to Sofie Dahl, school essays, and photographs. Roxburgh put them in order, sifted them, and cannibalized them for information, which he then returned to Dahl for the narrative. Or narratives—for it soon became clear that there was enough material for more than one book, and that episodes which Dahl had drafted about Shell, East Africa, and the war in Greece could be saved for a subsequent volume, leaving the first focused on his schooldays.18

  The draft still consisted of little more than a number of scrappy and unlinked anecdotes. Roxburgh suggested various ways in which Dahl could develop, expand, and pull them together, for example by repositioning a section about holidays in Norway, adding to the material about Repton, and particularly by giving shape to the relationship with his mother, whose full importance Roxburgh had gleaned from the childhood letters. “You are not the only … major character,” Roxburgh boldly told Dahl. “From before your birth until 1936, your mother dominated your life.” For this reason, he thought that Boy (for which the first title suggested by Dahl was “I Want to Grow Up”19) should end with the family’s seeing the young man off at the docks, bound for Africa. The climax of the second volume, eventually, could be his return from the war, “straight into the arms of the waiting mother.”

  In effect, Roxburgh was explaining Dahl to himself, turning a collection of noisy but unassimilated memories into a more coherent and reflective story. It may not be a coincidence that during the couple of years in wh
ich they worked together, reconstructing his childhood, Dahl’s tendency to slip back into the idiom of a rather stagy English schoolboy became increasingly marked. His letters were strewn with “By golly” and “Absolutely spiffing.” “Three cheers for Stephen Roxburgh,” he wrote to Roger Straus about Boy.20

  If Roxburgh helped Dahl to interpret himself, he also confirmed his sense of Greatness. He sees Dahl as “a truly great writer” and told him at the time that the childhood papers he had sent to FSG were “an extraordinary archive of a life, a period in history, and a society.” Dahl repaid the compliment by inviting Roxburgh to be his official biographer. It was understood that progress would be slow. The book was not intended for publication during its subject’s life, and Roxburgh had domestic commitments, as well as a full-time job. But by May 1985 he had cleared his desk of other work and was beginning to plan his research.

  Although Roxburgh didn’t notice, things were already beginning to show signs of going wrong. Dahl had become very keen on his paperback publisher, Peter Mayer, chief executive of Penguin and a charming, gifted, and energetic man. His author always liked to deal directly with the top. Roxburgh was still only a relatively junior figure at FSG—although, partly as a result of Dahl’s encouragement, he was gaining confidence and prestige to a degree that the older man did not always welcome. When, in the summer of 1984, Dahl delivered The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me, Roxburgh didn’t send one of his diplomatic letters, full of cautiously presented suggestions, but simply annotated the typescript.21 Dahl wrote thanking him but—somewhat ominously to anyone who knew the history of his dealings with publishers—enclosed a copy of an enthusiastic letter about the book from Tom Maschler: “Vintage Dahl. And with new aspects as well. What more could one ask?”22 Socially, too, it seemed to Dahl that Roxburgh was becoming bumptious. Roxburgh thinks, with hindsight, that he may have angered the old man by finishing an anecdote for him in front of other people and by arguing with him on a question of wine.23 Dahl began to complain about such solecisms to Maschler, telling him, “I can’t stand that pedantic, prissy Roxburgh anymore.”24