Roald Dahl Read online

  There was no opportunity yet for a major row. Roxburgh was doing more of what Dahl called his super-editing on “Boy 2,” the draft of Going Solo, while the author was very busy elsewhere. Sophiechen und der Riese (The BFG) won the major German prize for children’s books, the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis, in 1984. Dahl was in continual demand all over the world for lectures, book signings, and other appearances, at which he drew unprecedented crowds. Although he had forsworn any direct involvement in movies, he spent some time discussing the possibility of turning a Grimm story into a filmscript, and sold the film rights to The BFG, Danny, and The Witches.25 After Icarus was detected by the tax inspectors, Dahl had dissolved the family trusts. All his business was now conducted under the name Dahl & Dahl, from an office behind Gipsy House. Here, clerical staff dealt with his sacks of correspondence while, dressed in a loose cardigan and an old pair of trousers, he sat at the dining table, smoking, making decisions, telephoning his bookies, and dictating replies to fan letters: “Dear lovely, gorgeous Sheila and all the clever children in your class …”26

  On weekends, he was rarely not surrounded by at least some of his large family—wife, children, stepchildren, grandchildren, sisters and their broods. He enjoyed knowing that their cars, many of which he had paid for, were drawn up like a circle of wagons at the back of the house, next to his BMW, Liccy’s Ford, and Theo’s Vauxhall.27 On Friday nights, a random assortment of friends would come for the ritual snooker game: Wally, who now acted as the Dahls’ chauffeur; the local plumber; a surgeon from the Chiltern Hospital; and whoever else happened to be around. Visitors noticed how happy Felicity had made her husband. “All the years that I first knew Roald I never saw him peaceful,” one neighbor says. “If there’s such a thing as inner peace, that came with Liccy.”

  Both he and Felicity were hospitable and knowledgeable about food and wine. Roald had always bought wine cleverly, sometimes at country-house auctions. Often now, he went straight to the source—he “went banco” on the excellent clarets of 1982, investing in “a thousand” cases.28 Felicity employed and trained a succession of gifted cooks. Memories with Food at Gipsy House is a panegyric to the subtleties of this variety of onion or that ham, and the right places to buy butter or pick mushrooms. To a modern version of feudal clan values, also. The recipes were provided by relatives, friends, and retainers, including Felicity’s grandfather’s ex-batman. Posed pictures of napery and fresh vegetables vie for space with family snapshots: picnics, cricket on the lawn. In the all-inclusive but unmistakably hierarchical scheme of things, near the end of the book there is a page about dogs—just before the section on suppliers, whose addresses hover somewhere between the photo credits of a glossy magazine feature and an older, more cap-in-hand form of advertising. You half expect Candle Makers Suppliers (“Food-Grade Wax for Jam Jars”), of 28 Blythe Road, London W14, to have a badge over the door: By Appointment to the Late Roald Dahl, Esq., Purveyors of Culinary Sealants.

  Some of Felicity’s stepchildren missed the days when everyone used to sit around the untidy kitchen table, Pat often still in her dressing gown, Roald with a Bloody Mary, listening to The World at One.29 But a standoff had been reached, partly as a result of firmness on Roald’s part. One day, when Lucy was being particularly intractable, her father called her into his bedroom and told her that she had to give Felicity a chance, “and if you can’t be nice to her, you’re not welcome here anymore.” She says they are the worst words she can remember his ever having spoken to her. After that, she kept her distance, and her father never mentioned the matter again.

  For all of Dahl’s new happiness, life was still often difficult. One or the other of his daughters always seemed to be in trouble. His health continued to be worryingly unreliable. And he hadn’t lost his appetite for quarrels.

  In the summer of 1983, he was asked if he would review a polemical picture book about the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon, with text by a Newsweek journalist, Tony Clifton. The request came from the Literary Review—not from the magazine’s editor, but from its new owner, Naim Attallah, a wealthy Palestinian businessman, one of whose other enterprises-cum-hobbies is Quartet, a publishing house he himself founded.

  Attallah had two strong reasons for wanting the book, God Cried, to be favorably reviewed. Like many people, he was disgusted by the savage bombardment of West Beirut. And he was the book’s publisher. Such was his eagerness to get it good press that he did some of the promotional work in person. He would invite a literary editor to lunch and spend the meal haranguing him about the importance of God Cried and the crucial responsibility involved in his choice of reviewer.30 Attallah had met Dahl and had heard his stories about his own time in Palestine.31 He may also have known something of his views about the state of Israel. But Dahl was more than anti-Zionist. As we have seen, despite his friendship with several individual Jews—among them, his current publishers, Tom Maschler, Roger Straus, and Peter Mayer—he was, like many Englishmen of his age and background, fairly consistently and by no means secretly anti-Semitic. His old Washington acquaintance Sir Isaiah Berlin excuses this on the ground that Dahl’s opinions were essentially fanciful.32 “I thought he might say anything,” Berlin says. “Could have been pro-Arab or pro-Jew. There was no consistent line. He was a man who followed whims, which meant he would blow up in one direction, so to speak. No doubt his imagination went into his works.” It is true that his whims usually went no further than jokes. “The best part of those two guys was thrown away when they were circumcised,”33 he wrote to Charles Marsh once about a couple of Jews. But they could have a violent tinge (as in the fantasy about Charles Marsh and the Jewish waiter34), and Dahl had a weakness for fictional stereotypes like the rapacious and cowardly Meatbein in Sometime Never,35 or the “filthy old Syrian Jewess,” Madame Rosette, in the story named after her.36 According to Robert Gottlieb, the tendency grew worse after Dahl’s falling out with him and Robert Bernstein: “That’s where the later anti-Semitic spewings began.”37 He began to identify all Jews with Israelis, telling Jewish people in London, “You want to watch what your chaps are doing out there, they’re getting your country a bad name.”38 As Dahl explained to a journalist in 1983, “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity.… I mean there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”39

  The review Dahl wrote of God Cried claimed that in June 1982, when the Israeli attack on Lebanon was launched, “we all started hating the Jews.” And he assured prospective readers of the book that, whatever their present opinions, it would make them “violently anti-Jewish.” The then editor of the Literary Review, Gillian Greenwood, changed “Jews” to “Israel,” “Jewish” to “Israeli,”40 allowing Dahl to claim later, “I am not anti-Semitic. I am anti-Israel.”41 But throughout the article, even as it was finally published, he associated actions of the Israeli government (roundly condemned by many other commentators) with the behavior and beliefs of Jews everywhere. On this occasion, his habit of lumping people together was made all the more inflammatory by his claim to be representing the views of everyone else, the “we all” who hate the Jews and know that most of the troubles in the Middle East have been caused by Israel and its American Jewish supporters. “General opinion,” Dahl warned, is that the Arab countries will “annihilate the State of Israel … within the next fifty years,” unless Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon—in Dahl’s overheated opinion, “almost exact copies in miniature of Mr. Hitler and Mr. Goering”—learned to behave better.

  In all this, he quoted the opinions of “the shrewdest Arabs in the Middle East” and referred to factual information from “my own sources” about Israeli-American agreements. What these sources were, he didn’t say, but Dahl had been a critic of Zionism since 194642 and was a generous benefactor of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), a charity which is also a powerful pressure group.43 Many of the views expressed in D
ahl’s piece—for example, that the invasion served no other purpose than to distract attention from Israel’s annexation of the West Bank—chimed with those of the pro-Palestinian lobby.44

  Dahl’s essential charge against Israeli cruelties was just, but his extremist tone didn’t help the Palestinian cause. In The Spectator, the pro-Israeli commentator Paul Johnson rightly called the article reckless and crude.45 Some contributors began to boycott the Literary Review in response to Johnson’s (itself not especially moderate) call “for reputable writers to refuse to be associated with a journal which publishes such filth.” Dahl, meanwhile, poured oil on the flames by claiming that Jews were cowards and that they passively submitted to the Nazi Final Solution. On the Allied side in the Second World War, he said, “we saw almost none of them in the armed services”:46 a claim which enraged representatives and kin of the 60,000 Jews who served in the British forces between 1939 and 1945, many of them winning decorations (including the Victoria Cross) for their courage.47 It was in this same interview that Dahl said Hitler hadn’t picked on the Jews for no reason.

  The row was widely reported in the by no means universally pro-Zionist British press and soon spread. In Israel, a British TV drama series called Tales of the Unexpected was boycotted because Dahl was wrongly believed to be its author. (He had contributed some episodes to an earlier series with the same title but was not associated with the sequel.) In the United States, an article in The New Republic added its own touch of hysteria by interpreting Dahl’s unmistakably ironic story “Genesis and Catastrophe” as “a tale that has the reader rooting for the health of a baby who turns out to be Adolf Hitler.”48 American Jewish readers began to return Dahl’s books to his publishers, and some booksellers announced that they would no longer stock them.49 In reply, Roger Straus—himself Jewish—argued that his author’s views were not reflected in his books. Dahl himself tried to make amends with an episode in Going Solo sympathetic to German Jewish refugees in wartime Palestine.50 But the damage was done, to both Jews and Palestinians as well as to Dahl’s reputation in the United States. Years after the original fracas, he was still getting letters about it. In April 1990, for example, an entire school class of small children in San Francisco wrote to him. One letter said:

  Dear Mr. Dahl,

  We love your books, but we have a problem … we are Jews!! We love your books but you don’t like us because we are jews. That offends us. Can you please change your mind about what you said about jews!…

  Love,

  Aliza and Tamar51

  Dahl replied to their teacher, insisting that it was injustice he was against, not Jews. He was less conciliatory when he was telephoned by the Jewish Chronicle. “I’m an old hand at dealing with you buggers,” he said. “No comment.”52

  As was sometimes the case when Dahl caused a row, he turned out to have been falling ill. In 1985, when he was almost seventy, he went into the Chiltern Hospital for surgery for cancer of the bowel. The first operation was not successful, and according to one of Dahl’s nurses, he “began to sink.”53 Ophelia, who based herself at Gipsy House, came in every day to massage her father’s back. Tessa flew in and out with histrionically large pots of flowers.

  There was another operation, and Dahl slowly recovered. But he was left very weak, hobbling the hundred yards to his hut with the aid of two sticks and writing in a shaky hand to the many people who had sent him messages. He was particularly proud of a letter from Graham Greene congratulating him on Boy.54

  Perhaps to make up to Tessa for having given her a scare, her father soon afterward did a piece of writing on her behalf which reads like a throwback to his practical jokes with Charles Marsh. Tessa had a new baby, was about to hire an Australian nanny-housekeeper, and had asked for help in finding the plane fare. Dahl was more cautious these days about doling out money to his children and suggested that a magazine might be persuaded to pay, if the nanny offered an interview with him in exchange. Better still, he would write the interview himself. Sitting in his shed with a blanket over his knees, he scrawled a 5,000-word eulogy of himself and his household and sent it to the publicity department of Penguin.55

  Dahl, his article said, was without doubt the most popular of living writers for children, yet he spent “half his life performing dotty and unusual acts and going out of his way to make someone happy.” Exceptionally warm and attentive to the needs of others, he was rarely without some philanthropic task to occupy him. His hospitality was described at length, and praise was lavished on his family, particularly his wife—“a lovely lady.” Then the piece turned to the garden and the row of pleached limes leading to Mr. Dahl’s writing hut. Here, the great man recounted his history to the imaginary interviewer—how he had been shot down in the war and so forth—before going on to talk about the importance of writing good children’s books: a much more difficult task than adult fiction, he said. He described his approach to writing: the solitary agony of thinking up a plot, which must be lively, imaginative, and utterly original; the lonely labor of endless revision. In his covering letter to Penguin, Dahl conceded that there was something a little odd about this exercise in autobiography, but “my own opinion is that it’s quite a good little essay.” In more usual circumstances, he said, he would expect it to earn a fee of about £5,000.

  The struggles of authorship were a frequent theme of Dahl’s in these years.56 He tried making a comeback as an adult writer with two sketchy and mildly pornographic fairy tales, “Princess Mammalia” and “The Princess and the Poacher,” which were printed in a little hardback to celebrate his seventieth birthday, in 1986. (They were discreetly omitted from the Collected Short Stories published after his death.) “The Bookseller,” Dahl’s plagiarism of James Gould Cozzens, appeared in Playboy in 1987.57 Playboy also published “The Surgeon,” about some jewels hidden in an icebox which turn up in the stomach of a burglar who has helped himself to a cold drink.58

  But most of his effort went into his last substantial book, Matilda. Once again Stephen Roxburgh was closely involved. Despite, or perhaps partly because of, all his efforts, Roxburgh was to lose the book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Roald Dahl with it.

  Millions of readers know the story of Matilda as it was eventually published. A precocious little girl, extremely well-read and good at math, suffers both at home with her philistine parents and at her school, which is run by a sadistic and reactionary headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. With a new alertness to the climate of the times, Dahl emphasizes how unfairly Matilda’s father discriminates in favor of her talentless brother. A liberal teacher at school, the mysteriously impoverished Miss Honey, tries to educate the parents about their daughter’s gifts, but it transpires that she is herself in the headmistress’s thrall: an orphan, Miss Honey is the niece of the hideous Trunchbull, who has tricked her out of her inheritance. Meanwhile, Matilda develops magical powers which she uses to expose the villainess, restoring Miss Honey’s little fortune and her happiness.

  As Dahl would sometimes relate, the original version was not at all like this. He didn’t say that the main changes were prompted by his editor, or that after the work was done, Dahl picked a fight with him, took the book away from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and left them for good.

  In the first draft of Matilda, a copy of which is still in the Dahl files at FSG, the heroine, not unlike Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda, was “born wicked.” She spends the first part of the book inflicting various tortures on her harmless and baffled parents. Only later does she turn out to be clever. The headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, is characterized much as in the final version of the book, although some details, such as her “shadow of a jet-black moustache” and her dressing in men’s clothes of a military type, were eventually dropped. (Dahl was to base her new appearance on that of the principal of a horticultural school near Thame, where he and his sisters bought plants.59)

  In the second half, nothing in the draft corresponds with the final story as Roxburgh suggested it to Dahl, except that both
versions are in the style of Victorian sentimental melodrama and, in both, Matilda is brought face to face with her teacher’s poverty. In the original version, when Matilda’s teacher—called Miss Hayes—learns of her pupil’s secret powers, she makes a confession of her own. A bookie’s daughter, Miss Hayes is a compulsive gambler and has run up debts of £20,000 on the horses. Keen to help, the fascinated Matilda has the idea of using her powerful eyes to fix a race. She practices energetically by knocking over nearby cows and ponies. Meanwhile, Miss Hayes pawns an old ring of her mother’s for £2,000. The two go off to Newmarket and put the money on a 50:1 outsider. It wins. Miss Hayes pockets £100,000, takes them both home in a taxi, and renounces gambling forever. By now, the beginning of the book has been forgotten. Matilda has long ago stopped being naughty, and Miss Trunchbull has disappeared from view altogether.

  The structural problems with this enjoyable nonsense must have been easier to identify than their solutions, but Roxburgh saw various new possibilities, both in Matilda’s cleverness and in the clash between Miss Trunchbull and Miss Hayes over educational methods. He realized, too, that the book would have more shape, and Matilda more identity, if Miss Hayes’s values (nature, poetry, etc.) were contrasted with those of her pupil’s parents. It was clear that in some way the young teacher’s predicament should arise out of the situation already established in the early chapters. Within what was usable, there would need to be some cuts, particularly in the Trunchbull scenes and in the duplication between Matilda’s naughtiness and that of her friends Hortensia and Lavender.