Roald Dahl Page 28

  Roxburgh put all these points to Dahl. If they proceeded as before, Dahl would incorporate his suggestions into a new draft, on which the editor would offer further comments, having polished and cut as much as his author would tolerate.

  The first stage went fine. Dahl saw the advantages of emphasizing Matilda’s intelligence and enthusiasm for books. Following Roxburgh’s suggestions, he developed a contrastingly boorish home background for her and reduced the episodes of her bad behavior, turning them into acts of revenge on her illiterate, sexist, and semi-criminal father. The aptly renamed Miss Honey was built up, meanwhile, into an attractive, sweet-natured, and liberally inclined teacher, a much stronger foil to Miss Trunchbull. All of this took up considerably more of the book—almost a hundred pages of typescript, to the first draft’s fifty—allowing Miss Honey’s new revelations about the financial and domestic villainy of Miss Trunchbull to come closer to the climax. Here, Matilda’s powers now play a positive, much briefer, and more dramatic role: the exposure of Miss Trunchbull through magical writing on the blackboard.

  All this was in Dahl’s next draft. Inevitably there were still roughnesses. There was too much both of Miss Trunchbull and, now, of Matilda’s parents. The antique school-story idiom (“New scum,” “We’ve seen her at prayers,” “‘Steady on,’ the boy said. ‘I mean, dash it all, Headmistress’”), however reassuring to middle-class British parents, was incongruous in the setting of a contemporary day school and wouldn’t make much sense to American kids. But Roxburgh could put all this to Dahl in person at Gipsy House when they discussed what was needed in the final draft.

  Except that, as it turned out, this was the final draft. Perhaps because he was increasingly busy at FSG, perhaps (as Dahl complained) because of complications in his private life, but perhaps also because he had been irked to hear that Dahl had been complaining about him at dinner parties with other publishers, Roxburgh’s letter about the new manuscript was not fulsome. “The story holds together and moves along briskly,” he wrote early in October 1987.60 “I had hoped to read the manuscript one more time before returning it, but Frankfurt [the Book Fair] looms.” He suggested that he might come to Great Missenden on his return, in two weeks’ time, to review the draft, “or whatever.”

  Dahl was tired of being put to so much work. And when financial negotiations began, it became clear that there was a way out. In all the editorial discussions about Matilda, Roxburgh had omitted to make sure that Farrar, Straus and Giroux had a contract with Dahl for the book. They didn’t, and Dahl was now quick to demand, through his agent, a full 15 percent royalty over and above whatever was paid to Quentin Blake. Roxburgh was left with little choice except to agree, but instead of capitulating graciously, he made the mistake of warning Pollinger that he wouldn’t be able to offer such good terms if Farrar Straus were the originating publishers of any future Dahl book.61

  Pollinger showed Roxburgh’s letter to Dahl, who flared up at this hint not only of reduced earnings but, as he chose to take it, of a desire to charge him for editorial help.62 Not even the redoubtable Max Perkins, he said, had dared to expect such a thing. There were disagreements, too, over paperback royalties. But most of all Dahl resented the fact that, in conversation, his American editor had implied that the book was not yet ready to publish: this despite the fact that his British publishers, Cape, said that they were delighted with it and were already announcing it for the spring of 1988.

  From a purely literary point of view, Roxburgh was right. But Dahl was again falling ill and may have felt that he would never be able to satisfy his perfectionist editor. He discussed the matter with Felicity and Ophelia, and sent Roxburgh a self-extenuating letter. His family were very sad about the decision, he said, but agreed that he “must not allow sentiment to prevent me from getting the best terms I can for my works.”63 They believed that it was best at this juncture for Dahl to make a move. Despite all that Roxburgh had done with the book, Dahl also pretended that the younger man was too busy these days for “the kind of super-editing that you did for me in the past.”

  Dahl now made some changes to the last chapter of Matilda. Cape’s editors corrected a few spelling mistakes (arithmatic, repellant, and so on64) and added some punctuation. Otherwise the printed book followed the second draft exactly, incorporating all of Roxburgh’s suggestions. In the United States, its publisher was Viking, the hardcover wing of Peter Mayer’s Penguin. Their confidence in the story as it stood was amply justified. No book of Dahl’s ever sold so fast. In Britain alone, half a million paperback copies went across the counter within six months. Stephen Roxburgh’s role, of course, was never acknowledged.

  15

  You’re Absolutely Wrong and I Am Right

  The public side of Dahl’s life now often wearied him as much as his dealings with his publishers. Book fairs made him particularly irritable. At Frankfurt in 1986, when his foreign publishers lined up to pay their respects on his seventieth birthday, he was as difficult as a spoiled child.1 At Gothenburg the following summer, he harangued an audience of “500 idiotic Swedes” for what seemed to him an hour and a half, and remembered Alfred Knopf’s remark that the Swedes were Germans in human shape: too generous a verdict, in Dahl’s view.2 As if what he saw as the audience’s dull complacency weren’t enough, he then had to sit at “the so-called Banquet” between Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble (“not many laughs”) and opposite John Updike.

  Not the least disadvantage of book fairs is that they make a writer aware of other writers and how highly some of them are regarded. If illness and pain were principal causes of Dahl’s cantankerousness, envy was another. Going Solo had been an inspired title for the second volume of his autobiography; he could never be a mere member of a group. According to one friend, “A committee, to Roald, would be twelve men and women who had to be dominated. His view was the only view. If black is white today, then that is it, and until I’ve persuaded you dolts that that is the case, we are going to have to have a confrontation.”3 This was the Dahl encountered by the journalist Lynn Barber, who disagreed with something he said in the course of an interview. “You’re wrong!” he shouted. “You’re absolutely wrong and I am right. Do you understand now? I am right and you are wrong.”4

  A BBC radio interviewer, Brian Sibley, was almost routed in a similar exchange, but saved the occasion by quoting verbatim the last words of George’s Marvellous Medicine, about making contact with a magic world. Was that what Dahl wanted to do in his books? Sibley appeasingly asked. Dahl paused, calmed down, then said, “Do you drink?” According to Sibley, it was ten in the morning, but two large Scotches were poured and the conversation continued until and through lunch. The mollified author signed Sibley’s first edition of The Gremlins for him, dating the autograph 1943, “so as to cause your executors hell when they come to sort your affairs out”5 (an unsigned copy at that time was already worth several hundred pounds).

  Such quirks made loyal allies, as well as enemies. Many people—Lynn Barber among them—liked the elderly Dahl for what they saw as admirable plain-speaking. Others simply found him enjoyable as a rather absurd performer. He could be depended on to enliven public events in Great Missenden. Once, taking part in a local charity show based on Going for a Song—the TV program in which panelists, supposedly talking impromptu, identify and value antiques and bric-a-brac put in front of them—he threatened to walk out when he learned that the professional auctioneers appearing with him had been allowed to examine the objects in advance. Though he was persuaded to stay, he vented his feelings by dismissing everything shown to him as “total crap” which he “wouldn’t have in the house.”6 To some of the audience, it was Dahl himself who should be kept out of the house. He was “insufferable,” according to one. “He could be a very nasty piece of work if he wanted to, yet he expected to be greatly admired and deferred to, like a very successful movie director. He had to show off.” This was certainly the impression he gave at a charity performance given by the actors Mic
hael Denison and Dulcie Gray at their home in Amersham, in aid of a naturalist trust. Dahl introduced the evening but, having done so, sat disgruntledly in a prominent seat, swigging from a hip flask, banging his stick on the floor, and growling that the whole thing was bloody boring. Eventually he stalked out, taking Felicity with him.7

  The knighthood he craved was still proving elusive. He was offered an OBE but turned it down.8 Nothing less than a knighthood would do: he wanted his wife to be Lady Dahl and was busy doing the things people said you had to do to secure this objective. Much consisted of philanthropy, of the kind he enjoyed and was good at, particularly dealing with troubles similar to those which his own family had experienced. He gave the £3,000 proceeds of the Whitbread Prize to an Oxford hospice for terminally ill children.9 He bought equipment for disabled children and for research programs into neurological disorders, supported hospital fund-raising schemes (on behalf of the Great Ormond Street Hospital, for example). He gave time and money to organizations concerned with learning difficulties, particularly the Dyslexia Institute, and backed anyone he heard of who was doing anything to encourage children to read. Dahl involved himself personally in all these projects, ringing up the organizers to find out exactly what they were doing and making personal visits to sick and injured children.

  In 1988, the then Education Minister, Kenneth Baker, invited Dahl to join the most recent of the Conservative Party’s ever-changing working committees on English teaching. This was his best chance of making a mark with the medal givers, but he was so alienated by the slow, collective procedures of the specialist committee that, after the first meeting, he never returned and was finally persuaded to resign. He told the chairman, Professor Brian Cox—perhaps with more wisdom than he realized—that circumstances had changed since he was at school in the 1920s.10 Later, he publicly disagreed with the panel about Enid Blyton, whose books the majority wanted to exclude from a list of approved texts, but which he backed because children liked them.11

  Dahl was beginning to think that his chances of becoming Sir Roald had been blown by the God Cried scandal.12 But even in the English-teaching debate, he wasn’t unequivocally on the same side as the Conservative powers-that-were. True, Dahl told the Daily Mail that he was a firm believer in the necessity of teaching “proper parsing and proper grammar.”13 Yet Matilda, which was published in the same year as Dahl’s resignation from the Baker-Cox committee, is among other things an onslaught on Gradgrindian teaching methods. Soon afterward, the cultural commentator Bryan Appleyard suggested that, in his authoritarian guise, Dahl “should disapprove of his own books” because they were subversive. The author admitted to Appleyard that he had no answer to this. “It’s a tightrope act and you’ve got me in a bit of a corner.”14

  It is such ambiguities, of course, which make the books both distinctive and underlyingly true to life. There was nothing uncertain, on the other hand, about his opinions when Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding, early in 1989, by the fundamentalist Islamic fatwa condemning him to death for the supposed blasphemy of The Satanic Verses. Many writers probably experienced a twinge of the envy Gore Vidal admitted to, that anyone could have written a book about which people cared so much. Dahl’s lack of sympathy for Rushdie’s plight may have been prompted also by personal dislike. Rushdie remembers their meeting one night, long before he wrote The Satanic Verses, at the home of a mutual acquaintance. Rushdie was lodging there at the time, but Dahl seemed bent on making him feel de trop, telling the Indian-born novelist how much he admired the anti-immigrant politician Enoch Powell.

  Now that Rushdie had written something that had given offense and was being bullied, Dahl might have been expected to support him. But in the London literary circles by which Dahl still felt himself excluded, everyone seemed to be on the younger author’s side. Dahl wrote to The Times saying he had not heard any non-Muslim voice raised in criticism of Rushdie, and accused him of being a “dangerous opportunist” who had brought his fate upon himself by a calculated pursuit of notoriety, prompted by greed for sales.15 Freedom of speech was “a very proper principle,” Dahl accepted, but all artists should censor themselves. As some readers pointed out, it was an odd line to be taken by the inventor of the Oompa-Loompas and the reviewer of God Cried.

  Somewhat to his surprise, Dahl found himself opposed on the issue by much of the Conservative political establishment. Despite the mutual dislike between it and the vociferously anti-Thatcherite Rushdie, the government defended not only Rushdie’s freedom of speech but his life, and with noticeably less hesitation than the Labour hierarchy. Dahl found some satisfaction, however, in being opposed by the overwhelming majority of his fellow writers, whom he derided for treating the novelist as “some sort of a hero.” A few members of the Society of Authors demanded that he be expelled from the society for his comments, but were reminded by wiser heads that this would have had bad connotations in an argument about freedom of speech.16 Dahl reveled in it all. Martin Amis, invited to Gipsy House one night for a game of snooker, argued about the case with his host and mentioned that he was about to have dinner with the hapless Rushdie, who was by now moving from house to house with an armed bodyguard of secret service men. “Tell him he’s a shit,” Dahl said amicably.17

  Among the things which grated about Rushdie was the fact that, as long ago as 1981, his Midnight’s Children had won the Booker Prize. The prize (begun in 1969) is restricted to novels, so Dahl’s only chance of winning—two years before Rushdie’s success—had been with My Uncle Oswald, which was panned by critics otherwise rarely found in agreement, from Peter Kemp to Auberon Waugh. Dahl later regretted having published the novel.18 But he took a swipe at the Booker Prize when, in 1989, he was chairman of a rival but less prestigious contest, the Sunday Express Book of the Year Prize. In a widely publicized speech he said—not entirely unjustly—that the Booker judges tend to choose what they call a beautifully crafted book, “which is often beautifully boring.” A great writer, Dahl went on, was one who pleased the marketplace: the only purpose of the novel was to entertain. “Balls,” shouted another popular writer present, Laurie Lee. More soberly, Publishers Weekly pointed out that if the Booker Prize judges were so misguided, it was strange that they had shortlisted the very book which Dahl’s panel had chosen to win, Rose Tremain’s Restoration.19

  There were many such flare-ups in his last years. His familiar dinner-party tetchiness, the private outbursts of a volatile, impatient man with a few drinks in him, had moved into a larger arena. Even his public attempts to defend people who needed defending (like the Palestinians) were liable to backfire. This quixotic trait was particularly evident to Dahl’s friend Peter Mayer, who was one of the publishers of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and, as a result, along with his colleagues at Viking Penguin, subjected to repeated death threats and bomb scares after the fatwa. Having, in the view of many at Viking Penguin, contributed to their problems—especially the controversy over paperback publication of the book—Dahl busied himself making numerous suggestions to Mayer about how the issue might be resolved.

  An earlier episode produced similarly confused results. One spring day in 1988, Roald and Felicity were driving through Hyde Park when they saw several policemen fighting with a black man.20 Shocked by the violence of the scene, and perhaps also aware that this was a chance to counteract the charges of racism which were now often made against him, Dahl told his friends that he had seen an unmotivated assault by six policemen on a victim whose face they had left “covered in blood.” The story was widely reported, but a taxi driver who had seen the fight and heard Dahl’s description of it on the radio came forward with a different version. The “six policemen” were in fact, he rightly said, three policemen and one policewoman, who were having difficulty arresting an extremely aggressive man much larger than any of them. The man did not seem to have been much hurt. This version was supported by another bystander. While Felicity and two other witnesses agreed with her husband that the police had acted rough
ly, only Dahl alleged that the man’s face was bleeding. These discrepancies, combined with the fact that the victim had been wanted for non-payment of a fine, made it easy for the Police Complaints Authority to dismiss a case which, if it had been put more moderately, might, on the balance of the rest of the evidence, have been upheld.

  Dahl was now more or less permanently in pain from his joints and his back, and it soon became clear that he was suffering from a form of leukemia. He took an optimistic, practical view of the situation, wanting to know exactly what was involved and saying that, as he had battled his way through so much, he would manage to do so again. Nothing kept him from his enjoyments. Whatever his doctors advised, he regarded Cartier cigarettes, gin, and sweets as indispensable. During one of his spells in hospital, he successfully bid at auction for a small Van Gogh drawing of a peasant woman, a study for The Potato Pickers, with which he was so pleased that when he went to the Isle of Wight to convalesce, he took it with him and hung it in his hotel room.21

  On occasion, he showed signs of having become a touch chastened. He spoke often about his difficulties with some of his grown-up daughters: only one of them had a nice boyfriend, he grumbled; the others, you didn’t know who they were with. When he was young, you had to take a girl out to dinner for six months before you got a kiss.22 He also spoke of making efforts to become a better person.23 He said he regretted that he couldn’t fully believe in Christianity. He thought that the preeminent value was kindness and, headline-seeking to the last, told an interviewer from the Guardian that this was a good argument for ordaining women as priests: if they want to be ordained, he said, it would be unkind not to let them be.24 He mentioned dying: the sad thought that he wouldn’t see his family anymore, but, against this, the fact that the world didn’t seem to be becoming a better place, and “the human is not a very nice animal.” No, fear did not come into his feelings about death. When Olivia had died, almost thirty years ago, he had decided, “If she can do it, I can do it.”25