Roald Dahl

by Jeremy Treglown

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  Roald Dahl

  A Biography

  Jeremy Treglown

  To Fleur, Grace, and Sam

  Contents

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  1 Almost Anything You Could Say About Him Would Be True

  2 The Apple

  3 Flying

  4 Disney

  5 In the Valley of the Dahls

  6 Yakety Parties

  7 A Very Maternal Daddy

  8 Punishment and Pain, Unhappiness and Despair

  9 Center Stage

  10 Credits

  11 Businessman of Letters

  12 Wham!

  13 Pencils

  14 Three Cheers for Stephen Roxburgh

  15 You’re Absolutely Wrong and I Am Right

  Image Gallery

  Notes

  Index

  Further Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  In the mid-1980s, Roald Dahl published two autobiographical books for children: Boy, about his childhood, and Going Solo, which takes the story up to his departure for Washington at the end of 1941. He was helped with them by his most recent American editor, Stephen Roxburgh, whom he subsequently authorized to write a full biography. Later, Dahl fell out with Roxburgh over his editing of Matilda,1 and the project was abandoned.

  After Dahl’s death in November 1990, responsibility for choosing a new biographer fell to the third of his four surviving children, Ophelia.2 She decided that she would in due course write the book herself, and her stepmother, Felicity Dahl (the author’s widow by his second marriage), asked close relatives not to cooperate in any similar project. They are a tightly knit family, centered around Dahl’s old home, Gipsy House, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, where Mrs. Dahl still lives and from which she runs both her husband’s literary estate and a charitable foundation named after him. Readers may ask the question I often put to myself when I began researching the book: should I have given up and gone away?

  Morally, I reckoned that quite apart from his interest as a hugely successful writer, Dahl was so active in encouraging his own, often controversial, public myth that it would not be wrong for an outsider to look into it. I have tried to be tactful in various ways, while assuming that the family and friends of so quarrelsome a man are used to the fact that not all that is said about him is admiring. And I have respected the stipulations of those I have interviewed. Most of the people who spoke to me did so unconditionally, but some asked me to leave certain of their remarks unattributed, and a few—not the most critical of Dahl—wanted to remain anonymous.

  In practical terms, the fact that the book was “unauthorized” wasn’t as much an obstacle to research as I feared it might be when I started. Most of Dahl’s acquaintances whom I approached agreed to talk to me, from people who were at school with him to those who edited his last books. One interview led to another, and as time went by, some members of the family decided to meet me, after all. I had, of course, read the autobiography of Dahl’s wife of thirty years, Patricia Neal, As I Am (1988), and the moving fictionalized memoir, Working for Love, published in the same year by their oldest surviving daughter, Tessa Dahl. Early in 1992, Patricia Neal allowed me to interview her at her Manhattan apartment, and about a year later we spent time together in London and Great Missenden. Soon afterward, I talked at some length to both Tessa Dahl and her younger sister, Lucy. I also interviewed, among the many other people listed below, the actress Annabella (Suzanne Charpentier), whom Dahl met in 1944 and to whom he remained close for the rest of his life, and Dennis Pearl, a friend for even longer, and eventually a relative by marriage.

  There was another route to Roald Dahl, or set of routes: his letters. He was a voluble correspondent, and because he lived and worked in both the United States and Britain, his friendships, as well as his dealings with his publishers, were often carried on by mail. In the 1940s and ’50s, he was one of the protégés of an American newspaper owner and philanthropist, Charles Marsh, whose secretary, now his widow, Claudia, kept both sides of their substantial correspondence and gave me access to it. And for thirty years from the day when the publisher Alfred Knopf first read Dahl’s New Yorker story “Taste” and signed him up for a book, Knopf’s staff kept their letters, memos, readers’ reports, legal agreements, and other files, which are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I read Dahl’s exchanges with some other publishers, too (particularly Farrar Straus Giroux), and those with Walt Disney and the BBC. I was fortunate in being able to discuss some of this correspondence with people who were involved, especially Claudia Marsh and Dahl’s most important editors: Virginie Fowler Elbert, Robert Gottlieb, and Stephen Roxburgh.

  On pages 305–7, I make many other acknowledgments both to individuals and to institutions: people who had met Dahl and who wrote to me or spoke to me on the phone, editors at magazines in which his work appeared, libraries which hold materials about him, his foreign publishers, and so on—an alarming number of debts for so small a book. I also acknowledge there the owners of copyrights in materials from which I have quoted. My warmest thanks, however, go to those who knew Dahl or an aspect of his life well, and who agreed to be interviewed—in some cases more than once. Apart from those already mentioned, they are: Liz Attenborough, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Robert and Helen Bernstein, Quentin Blake, Harold Jack Bloom, John Bradburn, Amanda Conquy, Camilla Corbin, Betsy Drake, Creekmore Fath, Colin Fox, Martha Gellhorn, Brough Girling, Edmund and Marian Goodman, Maria Tucci Gottlieb, Valerie Eaton Griffith, Antoinette Haskell, Douglas Highton, Angela Kirwan Hogg, Robin Hogg, Ken Hughes, Alice Keene, Tony Lacey, Tom Maschler, Peter Mayer, David Ogilvy, Antony Pegg, Charles Pick, Ian Rankin, Alastair Reid, Gerald Savory, Sir David Sells, Roger Straus, Mel Stuart, Kenneth Till, Rayner Unwin, and Kaye Webb.

  Several of these people also spent time reading and commenting on drafts—of the whole book in the cases of Patricia Neal and Dennis Pearl, and of individual sections in those of Sir Isaiah Berlin, Quentin Blake, Robert Gottlieb, Valerie Eaton Griffith, and Alice Keene. I am grateful for their suggestions and factual corrections. Any mistakes which remain are, of course, my own.

  One of the book’s subjects is the creative role of publishers’ editors. So I am even more aware than I would have been anyway of my debt to Susanne McDadd and Julian Loose at Faber & Faber, who suggested that I write it and, along with Stephen Roxburgh and John Glusman at Farrar Straus Giroux and my agent, Deborah Rogers, made useful criticisms of successive drafts. My friend and former TLS colleague, Alan Hollinghurst, also read and commented helpfully on the typescript.

  Among the best editors I know is my wife, Holly, but that is the least I have to thank her for.

  1

  Almost Anything You Could Say About Him Would Be True

  Diplomats often receive odd propositions, so on the face of things there was nothing unusually unusual about the contents of a letter sent to the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1944, with the request that it should be passed on to the ambassador, then Lord Halifax. The correspondent said he thought that Halifax might like to help him write a school textbook. Its aim would be “to improve the sex stance of American male juvenility which grows in the dense New England area called the Preparatory School district.”1 Its model was to be the mores of the English public school. This was where the fourth Viscount Halifax (Eton and Christ Church) came in. The author claimed to regard him as a perfect example of English virility.

  A reply came a week later, under the thick wax Embassy seal, with a covering
note from a junior Embassy official who said he had passed the letter to Lord Halifax that morning. The ambassador had read it more than once, the official claimed, and the correspondent would doubtless find his answer very satisfactory.

  The enclosure was long and enthusiastic. It could have been written by a schoolboy. It spoke of Halifax’s excitement at this opportunity to communicate to others his deep experience of the subject. Halifax was widely traveled, the letter said, and had even been accused of libertinism. Admittedly, that was in his younger days, “when I was in the habit of pleasuring others (not to mention myself) at least once every fourteen days.” Even so, he had maintained what he regarded as an unusually vigorous sex life and would be delighted to communicate the secrets of his success to the young. “As you say, I would improve their stance. I would teach them to slice and to hook, to play a low ball into wind and a backspin onto the green right beside the hole.”

  April 1944 might not have seemed the best time for such a project. The Allied invasion of France was only six weeks away. Day and night, the U.S. Air Force and the RAF were bombing German cities and Italian ports. In the Pacific, there were many more islands to fight over before the atom bomb would bring Japan to surrender in August 1945. And while human beings were killing each other in the tens of thousands, there was the question of what would happen once they stopped. The Allies were by now confident of victory, and in Washington, London, and Moscow, politicians were drawing provisional maps of the postwar world. Then, too, this was election year in the United States. Roosevelt, already in his unprecedented third term of office, was standing for a fourth that autumn. But his policies, and particularly his support for Britain, were far from universally popular with voters. In the Wisconsin primary, early in April, the internationalist presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, whose support of military loans to Britain had earned him the nickname “the American Beaverbrook,” was sensationally defeated. These were among the matters which the British ambassador, Lord Halifax, formerly Foreign Secretary and before that Viceroy of India, was occupied in analyzing, together with his staff, and reporting back to London.2

  Meanwhile, the correspondence about sex education went in and out of the Embassy. When Halifax told Whitehall on April 16 that Willkie’s downfall was widely seen in the United States as a victory for isolationism, he also sent news of other matters: American opinion about the imminent betrayal of Poland and the Vice President’s forthcoming trip to China.3 The following day, a long-suffering secretary turned to the matter of “male juvenility.”

  Except, of course, that Halifax’s correspondence wasn’t entirely—if even at all—his own. His official dispatches, like those of any senior diplomat, were for the most part put together by his staff: the “weekly summaries,” for example, by the young Oxford political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who had been seconded from the Ministry of Information. The ambassador added some finishing touches and sent them on. As for the inquiry about English public-school sexuality, it was part of an extended joke of which Halifax was completely unaware, and in which his own part was played by a young member of the Embassy staff. Readers of My Uncle Oswald will have recognized him as Roald Dahl.

  Dahl had been invalided out of active service as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot after surviving the desperate lost battle for Greece. He had come to Washington as assistant air attaché two years before, at the beginning of 1942, when he was twenty-five. Six-foot-six-inch, handsome, articulate, battle-hardened heroes were rare at that time in the United States, which had only recently entered the war. Later, they were in plentiful supply—so much so that by 1944, Dahl’s practical joking may have been prompted by a sense both that he was excluded from the main action and that he was no longer as special as he had once seemed, a feeling he disliked even more. But there was anyway something in him which made him continually look for ways of regressing to the carefree childhood he had enjoyed until he was four, when both his older sister and his father had suddenly died.4

  His partner in the joke, as in many other exploits, frivolous and otherwise, was a man who had become his surrogate father—one of several such figures in his life but the most important of them. Charles Marsh was in his mid-fifties when Dahl met him in Washington: a self-made multimillionaire oil tycoon, newspaper owner, art collector, and power broker. Almost as tall as Dahl, he was—according to the observer’s standpoint—a man of deep charm or a philandering opportunist, an idealist or a fantasist, a fascinating talker or a self-regarding bore. Dahl had been told by the Embassy to cultivate him, partly because Marsh was powerful and partly because he was a friend of the radical—and therefore to many eyes suspect—American Vice President, Henry Wallace. They took an instant liking to each other, and Marsh became a lasting role model for the younger man.

  Another protégé of Marsh’s was the future President Lyndon Johnson. In his biography of Johnson, Robert Caro describes how Marsh, who was “addicted to the grandiose gesture,”5 had offered to bankroll the young politician by selling him a million-dollar share in his oil business, to be paid for by an interest-free loan on which there was to be no down payment, and which could easily be repaid out of the profits. (Johnson refused, knowing that if the public learned about the arrangement, his chances of becoming President would be damaged.) On an earlier occasion, Marsh had rewarded a reporter he liked by giving him a newspaper. “The dividends [Marsh] wanted from his munificence,” Caro harshly continues, “were gratitude and deference: he wanted to be not only the patron, but the seer.”6 Someone who knew him well said, “He always had to be the pontificator, the center of attention. He was the most arrogant man I ever met.”

  In this respect Dahl, like LBJ, was close to being his match. To Marsh, this was part of Dahl’s attraction. As the war progressed, they saw each other continually, both in Washington and at Longlea, the country house in Virginia where Marsh entertained at weekends with his beautiful mistress, Alice Glass. Sometimes alone together, sometimes with other friends such as Creekmore Fath, a young Roosevelt aide, the men would sit up late two or three nights a week, arguing, joking, plotting, and gossiping about the recently departed guests: politicians, journalists, businessmen. “Washington was a sieve,” Fath says now. “You could sit at Charles’s house and hear more of what was going on than you’d hear in practically anyplace in town. I’m afraid that we weren’t brought up properly as to how to keep secrets.”

  It was a heady time for the provincial but ambitious young RAF officer, and as Dahl and Marsh came to know each other better, they fed one another’s involvement in a fiction of power, increasingly removed from real people and situations. In June 1943, for example, Marsh wrote to Dahl:

  You have weight on your spirit. Your duty to your country … is one weight. The demands of superiors and colleagues which do not coincide with your judgment or your spirit is another.

  But these weights will lessen if the inside of your spirit, which has nothing to do with the particular, slowly becomes serene. This illusive [sic] quality can never be possessed in immaturity. But the embryo is there at birth. You have it in the potential.…

  You have had the wisdom already to refuse to tie yourself to a personal ambition such as becoming a Member of Parliament. Another side of you tells you that you are twenty-seven; that the future is uncertain; that you have certain responsibilities of family and country.7

  Soon, Marsh continued, the spirit would show Dahl what it was that he had to do. Then, “I may be of service to you.”

  Dahl was quick to imitate Marsh’s semimystical brand of personal encouragement, with its high gibberish quotient (“the embryo is there at birth”). Soon he was urging the older man to go to Roosevelt and impress his world-view on him.8 It requires a little courage, Dahl dramatically concluded: “I do not know whether you have it; you might like to find out.”

  Not all of this was impracticable. Marsh would have had little difficulty in seeing Roosevelt, and Dahl gave him the sensible, if uncharacteristic, advice that in conjurin
g up a picture before the eyes of the man he called “the big white chief,” he should remember that “sometimes your colours are too bright and vivid, and the picture which you paint, although at first fantastic and alive, becomes upon second thoughts merely fantastic.” But observers of the relationship were generally unimpressed. Marsh’s two sons, John and Charles, who were about Dahl’s age, were particularly cool about it. And a later acquaintance recalls, “Roald and Charles both did a job on each other. It was very extraordinary. I used to wonder what was the purpose of it all. The bullshit that washed across the table!”9

  Part of the purpose was sheer fun, the boyish antiauthoritarianism that led to the joke-correspondence about Lord Halifax. In one of Dahl’s more straightforwardly young-serviceman-hits-town pranks, as Marsh’s stepdaughter relates, “he painted the balls of the bison on the Q Street bridge.”10 Yet there was a serious side to the relationship. Dahl was, among other things, trying to resolve an intractable personal conflict. How could he satisfy his ambition to be like Marsh—rich, dominant, a public figure—while appeasing his equally strong desire to return to childhood?

  The answer—by becoming one of the world’s most successful writers of children’s books—may seem clear to readers now, but it certainly wasn’t to Dahl at the time. True, he was drawn to children, and one of his first professional pieces of writing was a children’s story, which he produced in wartime Washington.11 But it wasn’t until he was in his forties that he properly—although even then, as we shall see, reluctantly—began the career which made him famous and wealthy.

  Powerful, too, because Dahl’s readers would number in the millions. His work is a common point of reference all over the world, popular not only throughout Europe and the United States but in Brazil, Thailand, Japan, even—despite what is politely called his anti-Zionism—Israel. Famously, the initial Chinese print run for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was two million copies. In Britain alone, between 1980 and 1990, over eleven million of his children’s books were sold in paperback form—considerably more than the total number of children born there in the same period. By the end of his life, every third British child, on average, bought or was given a book by him each year.12