To Pat herself, her mother-in-law came across as critical and forbidding, but one thing they had in common was a liking for babies. Roald was unusually devoted to children, and good with them, Sofie thought.44 Pat had wanted a child ever since she began her affair with Gary Cooper, and when she told Dashiell Hammett about her forthcoming marriage, her main concern seemed to be not with her prospective husband but over what to call her first child, whether Neal Dashiell or Dashiell Neal. Hammett wrote to his daughter that it had better hurry up and be born, “regardless of which sex it picks out … or she’ll go out and adopt one because this waiting around nine months might be well enough for some folks but it’s a long time if you really want to play at motherhood.”45
As it turned out, she had to wait almost two years, and the couple’s frustration and anxiety on this score may have contributed to their difficulties in settling down together. There was also the problem of Roald’s need to dominate. Friends of Pat’s were horrified by how demanding, perfectionist, and intolerant he was with her, and how he always seemed to be putting her down.46 Measured by show-business levels of kissing and embracing, he, like the rest of his family, could also seem cold. But there was what seemed to Pat a harsh vein of prudishness which revealed itself on the honeymoon, when Dahl saw her looking at herself naked in the mirror, and, in a reaction that would have left many yearning moviegoers aghast if they could have been there, shouted, “My God, will you stop that! Put some clothes on.”
As soon as they got back to New York, they set about moving from their separate apartments into 44 West Seventy-seventh Street, a fantastical gothic block next to Central Park and overlooking the American Museum of Natural History. Rents were lower on that side of the city, so they could afford a small extra bedroom for Dahl to use as a study. The move was an opportunity for clearing out, and he urged Neal to sell her pictures, which he disliked, as well as jewels she had been given by Gary Cooper. Her past relationships were more of a trouble to him than his to her. She says that she was still hankering after Cooper, and that Dahl was also jealous of, or simply disliked and was bored by, many of her confidants, particularly her loyal future agent, Harvey Orkin, a close friend of Cooper’s, of whom Dahl complained that he was both loud-mouthed and Jewish.47
Nor did he have much time for her family, whom they visited together for the first time that Christmas, almost six months after the wedding. Pat’s mother was an unadventurous Southerner, limited in her interests and irritated by the social changes around her—particularly black emancipation. Dahl simply couldn’t get along with her. A friend who later saw them together excuses him: “He was no snob. He loved the famous and he loved earls and all that kind of thing, but he was just as fond of village people. What he did mind was if people were intolerant and parochial.” Relations weren’t eased, on this first meeting, when Dahl suggested that his young brother-in-law, Pete, instead of going to university should leave school and start up a gas station. No one could have been expected to understand that to Dahl, this represented a romantic ideal.48 But the Neals may have been right to have suspected another motive. Ever since her father died, Pat had paid for her brother’s education. She continued to do so until he finished university and became a teacher.49
Dahl was feeling bloody-minded anyway. Soon after their stay with her family, he suddenly told Pat that he wanted a divorce and wrote a long letter to the Marshes explaining what was wrong.50 He liked Pat for her courage and frankness, he told them, but they had different friends, no interests in common, and little to talk about. Beyond that, of course, there was also “the question of one’s mother.” All his life, Dahl said, he had watched Sofie—like Claudia Marsh or “any other good wife”—organizing the household, making sure it was kept clean and tidy, and, up to a point, acting as what he called her husband’s servant. However capable and self-reliant the husband was, Dahl said, it was natural to a man to be waited upon. But Pat “is not able to bring herself to this.”
One difference, of course, was that Neal was the main money-earner. Dahl’s mother had never gone out to work, and no one would have expected her to. As for Claudia Marsh, Pat saw her as a kind of geisha—which is indeed how Mrs. Marsh herself, from the perspective of the 1990s, now amusedly describes her role at that time.51 But from Dahl’s point of view, among the things which annoyed him was that when he was writing, Neal seemed to think he wasn’t doing anything. So she stayed in bed, talking on the phone, while he made the coffee and got his own lunch out of a can. He accepted, he said, that it was hard to be both a wife and a career woman, but he supposed that those who managed it did so by doubling their efforts.
Some of Pat’s friends believe that his expectations were at bottom more complex than this. According to one, Dahl made conflicting demands, with the unconscious but powerful hope that the person at the other end would fail at least one of them, thereby guaranteeing his own supremacy. “One message was, you must go out and be an actress and be a success, and the other was, you must stay at home and be a good mother.” And in this, there was another double bind. They wanted a child—but was the marriage fit to support one? Dahl said that it wasn’t, and used the danger of pregnancy as a reason for them to separate.52
Naturally enough, when he relented and asked Pat to go on holiday with him, she refused. But she had agreed to join the Marshes in Jamaica, and Dahl asked their advice about whether he should come, too. It would, he said, be cruel and stupid to draw out a process which he thought was bound, sooner or later, to end in failure. Charles told him that both he and Pat were thinking too much about themselves and too little about each other.53 Yes, Roald should certainly come to Jamaica—but for a vacation, not to “wash emotional dishes.” Charles himself was not well enough, he hinted, to stand for that. But he told Dahl that “service” was a mutual matter and that he was in danger of turning into a martinet.
Patricia Neal didn’t know about the exchange of letters, or that Marsh had given Dahl any advice.54 A shrewd arbitrator, the older man encouraged each side to think that the other was probably right, after all. Certainly his advice to her couldn’t have been more favorable to her husband. Dahl should handle all the money, Marsh told her, even if it was she who was earning most of it. And she should do all the cooking and housework. She accepted what he said, and for a while the formula worked, more or less.
Within a year of suggesting it, Marsh contracted cerebral malaria as the result of a mosquito bite in Jamaica.55 For the remaining nine years of his life, he was in effect speechless. His collapse would have been a worse blow to the couple but for the fact that he had helped them to give each other more support. Patricia went back to New York with Roald. He seemed more easygoing, she more house proud. A new gynecologist diagnosed blocked fallopian tubes and cleaned them out. By the summer of 1954, Pat was pregnant. Meanwhile, in the Valley of the Dahls, Roald’s family had been busy on their behalf. A house was found on the edge of Great Missenden, where Roald had suggested that he and Pat might spend their summers.56 Little Whitefield, as Gipsy House was then called, stands on its own in a country lane, an ancient drove road which runs from a medieval abbey turned country mansion, under the railway bridge, uphill into a beech wood. The house had three bedrooms and five acres of land, full of old fruit trees: apples, pears, cherries, plums. The price was £4,500, of which Sofie Dahl supplied one half, Pat, according to her own account, the other.
7
A Very Maternal Daddy
Someone Like You was published in the United States in the autumn of 1953. (In Britain, Secker & Warburg brought it out the following year.) Dahl’s recent marriage added to the plentiful publicity material the Knopf team already had to work on. He asked them to tone down the jacket blurb which they had drafted (he was beginning to be nervous of the phrase “wounded in action”), but he provided an impressive list of people to whom complimentary copies should be sent. An internal memo observed that he was well connected.
The sales reps liked the book, and so did most o
f the influential reviewers. The New York Times critic James Kelly rhapsodized:
At disconcertingly long intervals, the compleat short-story writer comes along who knows how to blend and season four notable talents: an antic imagination, an eye for the anecdotal predicament with a twist at the end, a savage sense of humor suitable for stabbing or cutting, and an economical, precise writing style. No worshiper of Chekhov, he. You’ll find him marching with solid plotters like Saki and O. Henry, Maupassant and Maugham.… The reader looking for sweetness, light, and subtle characterization will have to try another address. Tension is his business; give him a surprise denouement, and he’ll give you a story leading up to it. His name in this instance is Roald Dahl.1
Other critics compared his black humor with that of the gothic New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams and his plot situations with those of the now-neglected expatriate English writer John Collier, whose pungent seriocomic tales of bizarre marriages and trick revenges had taken him to Hollywood in the mid-1930s. There was a dissenting voice in the Buffalo News, whose reviewer argued that such resemblances were being exaggerated and that “Dahl’s art … is not very likely to develop further for the sufficient reason that it is already in full flower.”2 The tales, he said, “are sardonic specimens of pure story, devoid of all social significance.” For the most part, though, the reviewers, of whom there were a lot, settled for variations on a theme of “never a dull moment.” They all assumed that readers would know who Dahl was—he was Patricia Neal’s husband.
By Christmas, 7,500 copies had been sold, which Alfred Knopf told Dahl was probably some kind of a record for short stories. The book was in its third printing, and Dahl was still doing promotional appearances and interviews. He was a natural subject for journalists—self-confident-seeming, opinionated, cantankerous, unpredictable. He lectured them about his ambition to remake the short story as an art form and compared himself with Picasso breaking away from Corot and Monet.3 When an interviewer from the Post of Houston, Texas, asked if he was writing a novel, he silenced her with a fierce glare: “‘No hovels.’ Mr. Dahl looked grim. ‘It’s a mistake to try to do both.’”4 She was either too unnerved or too ill prepared to remind him of Sometime Never, and when he went on to speak enthusiastically about D. H. Lawrence—one of many authors who have successfully written both short stories and novels (and, in his case, poetry, too)—she didn’t pick up on the point but simply asked who his favorite British author was. Loyally, or perhaps just to bamboozle her further, he named a great friend of Matthew Smith’s, the avant-garde novelist Henry Green, then having a success in New York. What did she think of him? he demanded.
One-upmanship and turning the tables were favorite techniques. Another was a glib kind of dogmatism. “A short story has to be two things,” he told the audience at a book-signing session in Dallas. “It has to be short, and it has to be a story.” Too many fictions in the better magazines were disguised essays or mood pieces. “I think the short story ought to entertain.”
By February 1954, Someone Like You was in its fourth U.S. printing and was being offered by the Book-of-the-Month Club, which paid a $4,000 advance for it. In April, it won a Mystery Writers of America award (an “Edgar,” to chime with Oscar, but also to avoid its being known as a Poe). There were plans for a play to be based on three of the stories. There was even talk of an opera. But Dahl was most pleased by the fact that a Norwegian publisher had expressed interest in the book. Gyldendal, who brought it out in 1955, are still Dahl’s publishers in Norway—the longest continuous association of his literary career.
Norway was quickly followed by other Scandinavian countries: Sweden, Denmark, Finland. Meanwhile, Secker & Warburg published the collection in England, although without much success. The Times Literary Supplement complained about its “morbidity and a certain irresponsible cruelty.” Dahl had a gift for suspense, the journal acknowledged, “but the after-impression is one of heartlessness and distortion.”5
Nowhere were these ambiguous qualities put to more effective use by Dahl than in two stories he wrote around the time of his temporary split with Patricia Neal—too late for publication in the book. Like all his best writing for adults, they suggest a bleak, if comical, kind of self-awareness. Both are about tyrannical husbands, and both give memorable victories to the downtrodden wives.
“The Way Up to Heaven,” published in The New Yorker in January 1954, is about a woman with a pathological fear of lateness. Her husband tortures her by procrastination. At last she finds proof that his delays are intentional. In the course of one of them, he accidentally gets stuck in a lift, as had recently happened to Charles Marsh in his house on East Ninety-second Street. Unlike the tolerant Claudia, Dahl’s heroine leaves her husband there to die.
The second story, “William and Mary,” has lasted no less well. It can be seen as a counterblast against political correctness avant la lettre—but in its fascination with the minutiae of brain surgery it also turned out to have a grim element of prophecy in relation to Dahl’s own family. The tale was, he told the Marshes, “a stinker,” both in itself and to write. As early as October 1953, he was on his third complete draft, working every day until midnight and “slightly dotty with it all.” He didn’t finish it until the following summer.6
The plot concerns a philosopher who is encouraged by a neurosurgeon to let him preserve his brain. (There is an element of sadism in the doctor’s description of the process to William, and this echoes William’s own cruelty to his wife.) By the time the story opens, the philosopher has died and the experiment has been successfully carried out. All that is left of William is his living brain, floating in a bowl of fluid, still attached to one active eyeball, which gazes tetchily at the ceiling. Mary is at home, reading a long letter he has left for her, setting out the situation and telling her how she should comport herself in her widowhood: no drinking cocktails, eating pastries, watching television, using the telephone, or, particularly, smoking cigarettes. But Mary has notions of her own. She goes to the laboratory to visit the ex-William, lights a cigarette, and pleasurably blows a thick cloud of smoke into his enraged eye. “Isn’t he sweet?” she says to the surgeon in the story’s closing words. “Isn’t he heaven? I just can’t wait to get him home.”7
“William and Mary” (which Dahl first called “Abide with Me”) was later successfully adapted for television and is now one of his best-known stories. He had no success with it at the time. The New Yorker rejected it in 1954, and again in 1957. It may have been thought too close to Curt Siodmak’s novel Donovan’s Brain, first published in book form by Knopf in 1943, which is about a scientist who successfully keeps a brain alive, using methods very like those described in Dahl’s story. The resemblance ends there, but Donovan’s Brain was well known, having been often reprinted (including in Britain) and twice filmed. The second movie version, with Lew Ayres and Nancy (Reagan) Davis, was released shortly before Dahl began writing his story. If he knew Siodmak’s book or the film, he had forgotten that he did. In 1954, Pat Neal wrote to the Marshes, “Roald finished his difficult story. Then horrors! He discovered that this strange story had already been written. It was done in 1943 & called Donovans Brain.”
Whatever the reason for its rejection, “William and Mary” was part of a new run of failures with The New Yorker, where Dahl’s editor, Gustave Lobrano, had fallen ill and was replaced by the woman who had been his predecessor, the formidable Katharine S. White. Dahl seems not to have known about the changeover. He wrote to Alfred Knopf complaining that he was no longer seeing eye to eye with The New Yorker. “The last polite letter to the chief fiction editor, whom I’ve known well, didn’t even get an answer. So regretfully I’m having to move away and just put the stories in a drawer.”
He had never in fact had as smooth a run with the magazine as he later remembered. And as his complaint to Alfred Knopf implies, he was meeting resistance elsewhere, too. New values had been creeping into Anglo-American fiction, as into other aspects of the cultur
e, and Dahl found the kind of stories he was now writing increasingly hard to place, even in the men’s magazines—especially Playboy—which from now on would be their chief outlets. To earn money, he took on work of a kind which, however estimable by comparison with the average contents of Playboy, he, like many writers, affected to despise: movie writing—at this time helping with the preliminary screenplay for the John Huston/Ray Bradbury film, Moby Dick. It was the beginning of what would for a time become his major source of income.
It didn’t help that a play he had written, The Honeys, was a flop. Dahl had tried to combine several of his stories in a plot which involved irascible twin brothers and their long-suffering but eventually murderous wives. Disposing of the men required, as Time magazine described, “a stalled elevator, tainted oyster juice, a skull-bopping with a frozen leg of lamb, and a medicinal drink containing tiger’s whiskers.” The play, Time said, was “happier in its details than its fundamental design.” It suffered by comparison with its obvious rival, the venerable Arsenic and Old Lace, because its murderers weren’t so lovable and its plot complications weren’t so insane. In Dahl’s play, “when people aren’t actually attempting murder, they are making good, bad and indifferent jokes about it.”
The tryout tour—New Haven, Boston, and Philadelphia—was a disaster, with one director being fired and another bringing in new writers to doctor the script. Neal, however, sitting on an unfamiliar side of the footlights, wrote loyally to the Marshes that she would rather be married to a poor but happy short-story writer than to a rich playwright who was in misery.9 She was well into her pregnancy and, after some false alarms, feeling good. The baby, a girl, was born in New York on April 20, 1955. Dahl flew to the hospital from Boston, where The Honeys was running. They called the child Olivia, after Pat’s first stage role at Northwestern. For her second name, Roald suggested Twenty, because of the coincidence of the date and the number of dollars per day he was getting in expenses on tour.
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