Roald Dahl

by Jeremy Treglown

  So the scheme fizzled out. In the words of Richard Shale, one of the Disney Studio’s historians, it was “by no means the only wartime project which failed to reach the screen, though it was surely the costliest.” Eventually, in 1943, Walt Disney: The Gremlins (A Royal Air Force Story by Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl) was turned into a Disney picture book, published by Random House in the United States and by Collins in Australia and Great Britain. It was Dahl’s first book.

  Among all the obstacles which Disney had met, the question of ownership was the biggest. One claimant was Charles Graves, author of a history of the RAF, The Thin Blue Line, published in 1941. He said he was the first to have mentioned gremlins in print and that he had subsequently been researching the subject for a book.30 Disney ought to pay him something, he argued, so that he could in turn pay those he had talked to. He wanted 500 guineas (then, $2,100), but was headed off by a tough letter from the Air Ministry, pointing out that the film’s proceeds were earmarked for the RAF Benevolent Fund.31

  This was also Disney’s reply to another, more credible and angrier-seeming claimant. As early as the autumn of 1942, newspaper stories about the project reached Dahl’s recent traveling companion, Douglas Bisgood.32 As they crossed the Atlantic together, Bisgood had entertained Dahl with his own version of the gremlin story. The Fifinellas, the Widgets, and the rest were, he now claimed in a strong letter to Disney,33 “family names which I claim as being my originals” and which he was putting into a book of his own. Bisgood wrote to Dahl, too,34 reminding him of all this. He took the opportunity to joke sourly about the contrast between Dahl’s “pleasant appointment in America” and his own recent return to England, “ferrying a bomber over, which necessitated the risk of running into bands of hostile ‘Gremlins.’” He had tired of training new pilots in Canada, he said, and had volunteered to return to his fighter squadron, which was stationed near Aylesbury, close to Dahl’s mother’s new home. Bisgood didn’t mention that while making a meteorological flight in bad weather, he had run into and single-handedly attacked three German bombers, sending one, burning, into the sea, an exploit for which he had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

  Dahl brushed aside Bisgood’s letter, telling Disney that while “Bissie … is without doubt an eminent Gremlinologist … I am quite sure that he will not cause any trouble.”35 (He didn’t. Still flying for the RAF, he died soon after the end of the war.) Dahl had in any case always made it clear that the myth wasn’t his own invention. Around the time that his book was published, at least two others like it appeared: Sh! Gremlins by “H.W.” and Gremlins on the Job by Judy Varga. But it was Dahl’s version that Disney made famous, and to Dahl that the popular credit soon went for having dreamed up not only the story but the very word “gremlins”—a claim he became increasingly willing to adopt.36 Isaiah Berlin remembers, “He initiated gremlins. That is to say, they were already there, in the Air Force, but he put them on the map. He was extremely conceited, saw himself as a creative artist of a high order, and therefore entitled to respect and very special treatment.”

  Certainly, Dahl not only wrote down the gremlins legend but gave it the beginnings of his own style. There is the hint of autobiography in the pilot Gus, shot down, injured, but determined to get back into action. There is the buttonholing, direct manner, with its assumption that the storyteller and his audience are in the same room. And there is the confidence—however glibly rhetorical—of the opening phrases:

  It was some time during the Battle of Britain, when Hurricanes and Spitfires were up from dawn to dark and the noise of battle was heard all day in the sky; when the English countryside from Thanet to Severn was dotted with the wreckage of planes. It was in the early autumn, when the chestnuts were ripening and the apples were beginning to drop off the trees—it was then that the first gremlins were seen by the Royal Air Force.37

  If The Gremlins never reached the screen, the project was enough to make Dahl “bankable” as a writer, and in 1943 he was taken on by a literary agent, Ann Watkins. By the autumn of the following year, he had published “Shot Down over Libya” in The Saturday Evening Post, “The Gremlins” both in Cosmopolitan and in book form, “The Sword” in The Atlantic Monthly, “Katina” and “Only This” in the Ladies’ Home Journal, and “Beware of the Dog” in Harper’s. Like any young writer, he was trying out styles. “The Sword” is in the manner of a florid nineteenth-century Orientalist yarn:

  In September the northeast monsoon begins to blow across the Indian Ocean, and the Arabs in the Persian Gulf turn towards Mecca and give thanks to the Prophet for his goodness. Then they load up their dhows and, trusting to the wind and to the stars, they sail down the Gulf of Oman, around the Cape of Ras el Hadd, and westwards to the coast of Africa.

  They come from Muscat and Shinas and Sohar, and they carry in their ships great bundles of carpets from Khuzistan.…

  This appeared in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly in August 1943. (Dahl never reprinted the story, but more than forty years later, with his usual frugality, worked much of it almost verbatim into the second of his books of memoirs for children, Going Solo.) A few months later, the Ladies’ Home Journal published “Katina,” written in his Hemingway mode. It begins:

  Peter saw her first.

  She was sitting on a stone, quite still, with her hands resting on her lap. She was staring vacantly ahead, seeing nothing, and all around, up and down the little street, people were running backward and forward with buckets of water, emptying them through the windows of the burning houses.

  While the styles are not original, they show Dahl’s verve and fluency, and it is easy to see why editors noticed his stories. Wartime conditions had greatly expanded the market for fiction. Magazines were greedy for propaganda. Headline writers such as those at The Saturday Evening Post, where “Shot Down over Libya” appeared, were enjoying a particularly easy time: “Hitler Has You Card-Indexed”; “Specialists in Sudden Death. The Fighting Marines in Full Color.” Editorials were similarly self-confident in tone (“Nazism isn’t an ideology but just a skillfully contrived program for conquest”). And contributors delivered accordingly. In The Atlantic Monthly, under the title “Cracking the German Dam,” Guy Gibson first tried out the story which was to become The Dam Busters, John Pudney contributed “Missing” and other poems, and John Buxton his sonnets from the prison camp Oflag VIB. In the Ladies’ Home Journal, Eleanor Roosevelt tackled readers’ questions about the war, while romantic fiction supplied answers of its own: “The Sarge whistled, 12,000 miles away, and a red-haired girl in Georgia heard the music in her heart.”

  Each of Dahl’s stories which found a publisher during the years most dangerous for the Allies contained some overt propaganda. In the case of The Gremlins, it is true, the objections of Disney’s lawyer Gunther Lessing led to the removal of an episode in which Hitler, “sputtering a flood of unintelligible German,” complains to Goebbels and Goering that British newspapers have been crediting the gremlins with all the good work done by the Luftwaffe. (The scene was to have been interrupted by the entry of Mussolini, “looking pretty battered [and] holding his hands up sort of like an Italian chef describing a dish of spaghetti.”) But the story kept its main theme: that nothing would stop our boys from getting back at Jerry. “The Sword” delivers the same message. In Dar es Salaam in 1939, the English narrator’s servant, a bellicose Mwanumwezi tribesman, hears that his master is at war with the Germans. Taking a prized Arab sword from the wall, he slips out of the house and decapitates a local sisal farmer who has unwisely stayed on in what used to be German East Africa. Again, in “Katina,” set during the British evacuation of Greece in 1941, there are two moments of defiance: one, when a fleeing RAF pilot unexpectedly makes telephone contact with a German and tells him he’ll be back; the other at the story’s climax, when Katina runs across the air strip, shaking her fists at a squadron of Messerschmitts, and is killed.

  Like several other stories Dahl wrote at this time, “Katina” h
as a throb of adolescent mysticism: the Greek mountains silently take part in actions which, to them, are of no more importance than the battle of Thermopylae. There is, too, a straightforward human warmth in his war fiction which would soon disappear, although not (as the religiosity does) forever. These semiautobiographical fictions are full of naïve camaraderie and a protective, if sentimentalized, affection for the people whose countries have been caught up in the fighting.

  In part, this represents Dahl’s response to the last bars of the British imperial symphony: tunes which he had learned at school and at Shell. But there is also a humanitarian revulsion against war, which comes through most strongly in some stories, such as “They Shall Not Grow Old” and “Death of an Old Old Man,” which he was unable to publish until the war in Europe had ended.38 Among the earliest pieces put out by the young man, however, what is most noticeable—apart from their energy as narratives—is the fact that one, The Gremlins, takes the form of a children’s story and another, “Katina,” is centered on a child. The Greek episode, in particular, has a strong vein of romance in the men’s relationship with the little girl—for example, when she enters the mess tent and they all automatically stand up. Already, there was more than a hint of paternalism in his makeup.

  Outside his published fiction, he was becoming in person a kind of walking magazine of stories, a conduit of rumors and revelations. Whenever the British intelligence services wanted to weaken somebody’s credit in Washington, they had only to dig out a little scandal from the ample supply made available by the mail censors and slip it to the gregarious assistant air attaché. By the next morning, it would be in circulation.39 Dahl in turn secretly relayed back whatever he picked up on his social rounds.

  His former diplomatic colleagues tend now to play down this aspect of their work, and the details are inevitably murky. As far as they concern Dahl, the official story is that he was in Washington to represent British air interests and to liaise with representatives of Allied air forces. Dahl’s own version was that he was sacked from the official Embassy staff, and immediately taken under Sir William Stephenson’s wing at British Security Coordination.

  Stephenson was a figure of legend, to Dahl as to others. A pilot in the First World War, he had traveled widely in the 1920s and ’30s on various business projects, particularly involving steel. Among the uses of his journeys was that they enabled him to keep Churchill informed about the rearming of Nazi Germany. Once Britain was at war, Stephenson was sent to collect information about anti-British activities in the United States. After Pearl Harbor, he organized British collaboration with the American secret services and superintended a vast number of independent British activities ranging from covert propaganda to more dangerous operations. Stephenson’s staff identified and (sometimes fabricating the evidence) discredited German agents and businesses collaborating with Germany. They used a woman agent on a Mata Hari–type mission to infiltrate the Vichy French Embassy in Washington, which was passing military information to the Germans. They manned the colorful, somewhat uncontrollable training and supply center at Ottawa, where Ian Fleming, among others, learned the technical tricks of spying. It was Stephenson’s “outfit” which arranged the escape of the Danish nuclear scientist Niels Bohr on a torpedo boat. More fantastically, it came up with the idea of using Hitler’s former astrologer to make damaging public predictions about him which, it was hoped, would both alarm the Führer and give comfort to his opponents.40 Under these excitingly novelistic auspices, Roald Dahl, according to his own account, was promoted to wing commander, made discoveries which set Downing Street alight, and at the end of the war was “commissioned to write the official history of the Strategic Intelligence Service.”41

  For the idea that he was sacked, it may be in the nature of things that we have only Dahl’s later word. His friends, including some at the heart of the Embassy, say that they heard nothing of the sort at the time.42 Nor can the Ministry of Defence find any indication of his having served even in the acting rank of wing commander. This may have been an improvisation of Stephenson’s, to help Dahl impress the Americans.43 Friends remember his having been an acting squadron leader, which is consistent with the lower, “substantive” rank of flight lieutenant recorded as his final position in both the Air Force List and his personal RAF file.44 As for his role in writing the official history, like most such projects it was a collaborative venture. It was based in Oshinawa, Ontario, and was run by Tom Hill, director of Section One of British Security Coordination. Three others worked on it with Hill during the summer of 1945: the head of Stephenson’s secretariat, Grace Garner; Hill’s colleague Helen Lillie; and “Wing Commander” Dahl.45

  There is no doubt, though, that Dahl had been recruited as one of Sir William Stephenson’s thousand or more regular informants in the proliferating network of BSC.

  A familiar problem of intelligence gathering is that in some cases what is discovered turns out to have been a secret to no one except the discoverer. This seems to have been true of at least one of Dahl’s exploits as a spy. According to his own story,46 he was at Charles Marsh’s house one evening in the summer of 1943 when Marsh gave him a “sheaf of cabinet papers” to read which had been left behind by the Vice President, Henry Wallace. Wallace was a radical socialist, and there were many who wanted Roosevelt to ditch him—as, in fact, he soon did, in Truman’s favor. Dahl saw that the papers mentioned both the British Empire and American plans, after the war had ended, “to take over Europe’s commercial airlines.” He excitedly summoned a colleague and passed him the material, which was taken away, photographed, and speedily returned, Dahl cunningly skulking by the lavatory all the while, in case he needed an excuse for his delay. The copy, Dahl later boasted, was given to Bill Stephenson, who sent it to “C” in London, who passed it straight on to Churchill. The Prime Minister, Dahl claimed, “could hardly believe what he was reading” and was stirred to “cataclysms of wrath.”47

  Wallace’s document certainly didn’t favor British interests. Among other proposals for the postwar world, it urged the decolonization of large parts of the Empire, including India. But none of this was either secret or a statement of U.S. government policy. It was the draft of a polemical pamphlet written for the Vice President by two State Department experts and published the following spring by the Institute of Pacific Relations.48 While its appearance did elicit an official British protest about Wallace’s “regrettable” comments on the internal affairs of an ally, everything in it had been a matter of public discussion by American politicians and other commentators throughout the war. British rule in India (where Dahl’s ambassador, Lord Halifax, was Viceroy from 1925 to 1931) had been under attack for decades and was a topic of widespread criticism in the United States,49 not least when Gandhi was locked up in 1942. As for the postwar airlines, even if it might never have independently occurred to the British that Pan American Airways hoped to dominate the world, plenty of warning was given. PanAm’s own advertisements at the time emphasized the need for American supremacy in civil aviation, and in February 1943 Dahl’s friend Clare Boothe Luce had caused a stir by supporting this line in her maiden speech in Congress.50 Her remarks—which were, of course, summarized in the British Embassy’s weekly report to London—were generally seen as countering criticisms of the industry’s expansionism made much earlier by none other than Henry Wallace. In fact, the Foreign Office had not only already identified the problem but had been urging Churchill to act on it (he finally turned it over to Beaverbrook) since the autumn of 194251—almost a year before Dahl “discovered” these dangerous notions in the draft of Wallace’s pamphlet so recklessly left in the home of Charles Marsh.

  Still, it made an exciting evening. In Dahl’s friendship with Charles Marsh, both during the war and after, work was mixed up with a theatrical kind of pleasure—theatrical in that you had to suspend disbelief in order to enjoy it, and that it used up a lot of surplus energy. Sometimes, as in the case of the imaginary correspondence with
Halifax, the whole thing was a big practical joke. At others, whatever anyone else thought they were doing, both men took themselves more seriously.

  Important matters could be at stake, after all, and although neither Dahl nor Marsh was a key player, they were close to people who were very close to people with power. Marsh’s newspaper empire, in particular, gave him a degree of personal influence on public opinion, especially in Texas, as well as firsthand knowledge of the personalities, ambitions, and activities of individual politicians. He could be useful to the British, and the pragmatism of their approach to him through Dahl was well calculated to flatter his already well-developed sense of his own political value. In March 1943, for example, shortly after a visit to the United States by the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, Dahl sent Marsh eleven precise questions.52 Some asked for detailed information relevant to minute aspects of Roosevelt’s chances of re-election in 1944. Others were more far-reaching. The Allies were beginning their long-term preparations for the Yalta summit, which would decide the shape of postwar Europe. Preliminary meetings were being planned, and the British wanted to know which of the Americans involved had most influence in this area, what their relations with each other were, and who was likely to be leading the side at what everyone called “the semi-final.”