The Irregulars

by Jennet Conant

  Marsh never doubted his protégé’s potential. The American tycoon, who over the past three years had formed the habit of running Dahl’s life, decided to fully realize his role as mentor and loaned Roald the funds to help finance his beginnings as an author. “My father knew he didn’t have any money,” explained Antoinette. “He had complete faith in him, and wanted to help him get his start.” According to Ingersoll, Marsh also felt strongly that Dahl had been wronged, “when having served his bosses so conscientiously for so long, they dropped him without a pension or further interest.” In the end, Ingersoll observed, “It was Charles and not his own government that paid off Roald.”* Dahl put off his return to England until after the New Year so he could be present for the publication of his new book. He wanted to make the rounds and take his farewell bows before heading home for good. Over to You appeared in early January to great acclaim. Nona Balakian, a critic for the New York Times, hailed Dahl as an exceptionally promising short-story writer who captured the RAF pilots’ “mad abandon with marvelous subtle insight and genuine humor.” In his spare constructions, she continued, “One senses the touch of a craftsman who weighs the effects of his words and phrasing. He has, what is essential, an acute awareness of the narrow margin separating shadow and substance. He has not been afraid to venture into the realm of vision, where not only gremlins are born, but the very stuff of literature.”

  Wallace, who had received a copy as a Christmas gift, dropped Dahl a line at the Hay Adams Hotel, where he was staying, thanking him for the book and the personal dedication. He wrote that he had spent the holiday reading the book and “especially enjoyed the high, disinterested British courtesy which is employed by the officers of the RAF in faraway lands when they rescue damsels in distress.”

  Eager for approval, Dahl approached Hemingway, who he counted as one of his heroes and early influences, for an opinion of Over to You. As Hemingway had shown him a draft of his D-day article in London, Dahl thought it only appropriate to reciprocate by giving him an advance copy of the book. Hemingway kept it for two days, and then handed it back. When Dahl asked if he liked the stories, Hemingway replied, “I didn’t understand them,” and then strode down the corridor without looking back.

  Most of Dahl’s wartime colleagues found his fictionalized memoirs very moving. Noël Coward read the slim volume while on vacation in Jamaica and was powerfully reminded of the desperate times they all had been through—“in hospitals and messes and ships”—and barely survived. “These stories pieced the layers of my consciousness and stirred up the very deep feelings I had during the war and have since, almost deliberately, been in danger of losing,” he noted in his diary. “If I forget these feelings or allow them to be obscured because they are uncomfortable, I shall be lost.”

  They were all a little lost that first, unsteady year of peace. After his peculiar service to his country, Dahl knew he was bound to feel unsettled and unsatisfied. Leaving the BSC was like removing a heavy coat. It would be a while before he stopped missing it. Marsh understood this strange depression—or was it just the inverse of so much high excitement?—better than anyone. After seeing a glowing review of Over to You in the February 18 Herald Tribune, Marsh sent Dahl his congratulations, uncharacteristically compressing his unruly emotions into a single jubilant word: “Hurrah!” The thrust of his message, however, was sober and cautionary. There was a stubborn boyish streak in his flying friend that had Marsh worried. More than ever now he felt it was important that Dahl not become distracted or sidetracked by other whims and enthusiasms. He knew him far too well not to know the danger of his suddenly becoming bored with a project and abandoning it in favor of something new and exciting, to say nothing of the entanglements of his large, extended Norwegian family, which always threatened to drag him away from his desk and interfere with his sense of purpose. If Dahl truly wanted to be a writer, he would have to devote himself to it wholeheartedly, without reservation. “Work hard,” Marsh exhorted him. “Talk little. Be truly a miser of time. And then the novel when the Gremlins get an honest publishing job.”

  On February 7, Dahl headed home. He would be stopping off in London, at the Dorchester, while he tried to drum up some writing assignments and met with Hamish Hamilton, the publisher of the British edition of Over to You. Then it would be on to his mother’s house, where he planned to live and work. Marsh refused to say a final goodbye and instead threw himself into planning a joint trip to Scandinavia that spring, with Dahl serving as tour guide in his native land.

  In an earlier letter, tinged with melancholy, Marsh, in a sort of farewell salute, wrote with pride and affection of the deep bond they had forged during the war. His tone was warm, ruminative, and full of goodwill. With rare insight and understanding, he acknowledged that their relationship had altered in recent months and would inevitably change even more as their paths crossed less often in the years to come. He was resigned to the fact that they would be separated by work and distance. But their allegiance to each other would never end. They were too close for that, closer than any “mere papa” and son. Despite their occasional differences, and the disappointments of that last tumultuous year, nothing had ever happened to diminish his opinion of the young man who had entered his life in the winter of 1942. “Your presence struck me intensely as you first walked into the R Street house living room,” Marsh wrote. “In the wear and tear there has been some abrasion, as you have seen my clay feet and I have seen yours. But by measure, as the Eighth Symphony closes, and as I go into the beef stew, I know that your spirit is with me now, and tomorrow, and yesterday.”

  FULL LIVES

  Gamblers just before they die are often given a great golden streak of luck.

  —IAN FLEMING

  BY THE FALL of 1946 Dahl had settled at Grange Farm, his mother’s new house near Great Missenden, set up a makeshift office in the barn, and knuckled down to work. He had finished the first draft of his new novel over the summer, but he was not satisfied with it and knew it needed work. A painfully slow wordsmith for whom the pages did not come easily, he found it difficult to maintain his focus. He tried to write most mornings, but something always seemed to come up. Once interrupted, he would declare the working day ruined and abandon his desk. Moreover, the novel was a dramatic departure from anything he had attempted before and it felt long and unwieldy. Doubts crept up on him like the morning damp. Unlike his war stories, which had a detached, almost dreamlike quality, there was a distinct new bitterness to his tone.

  The war, and four years in Washington, had changed him. The bomb weighed heavily on his mind. He had little faith in the brokered peace and was dismayed by the growing divide between England and the United States. America’s return to isolationism filled him with despair: “YOU ARE STILL THE SAME OLD BUNCH OF INTERNATIONAL COWARDS YOU WERE IN ’39,” he cabled Marsh in a fit of anger over a pro-Russia speech Wallace had given at Madison Square Garden on September 10, which had received a great deal of attention in the London papers. Wallace had declared that Americans “must not let British balance of power manipulations determine whether and when the United States gets into war,” and while criticizing England’s continuing “imperialistic policy,” he had advocated flexible give-and-take” with Stalin’s Russia. “In this connection, I want one thing clearly understood. I am neither anti-British or pro-British—neither anti-Russian or pro-Russian.” As usual with Wallace, however, nothing was clearly understood, and his remarks were endlessly twisted and exaggerated and elicited a flood of criticism.

  To Dahl’s ears, it was exactly the same kind of naïve grandstanding that had led to the last war, and just as before, a complement of small European countries would fall while the United States postured. He told Marsh he was “through forever” with Wallace, whom he blasted as a “semi-sincere misinformed oaf.” (He took small comfort in the fact that ten days after his controversial Madison Square Garden remarks, Truman asked his commerce secretary to resign from the cabinet. Wallace went home to his farm in
South Salem, New York, and spent his days breeding corn and chickens and became editor of The New Republic.) Dahl’s anxieties about the future found expression in his writing and took the form of an antiwar fantasy for adults, in which his weird, foot-high cartoon characters impatiently wait for mankind to finish destroying what is left of their civilization so the gremlins can inherit the empty earth. This book would not be another benign Disney fable but a savage, postapocalyptic vision of life after World War III and IV, with the accompanying devastation and massive loss of life.

  His solid Norwegian family was not all sure they thought filling notepads with his mad scribbling was any kind of a proper career for a young man and clucked with disapproval. After Dahl persuaded his sister Asta to help with the typing, she pounded out some early pages of his manuscript. When she had finished, she gave him a piece of her mind. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Roald,” she told him, “but it’s absolute baloney.” He did not disagree and promised to do better.

  Dahl’s gloom was further aggravated by the recurrent problems caused by his debilitating war injuries. Although Dr. Arthur Scott had managed to fix his right leg, his left leg had been troubling him all fall and had now given out. He wrote Marsh that he was hobbled by the intense pain and was unable to walk. In December he went into the military hospital in Wheatley, Oxford, for yet another operation, followed by another long recuperation. After so many successive surgeries, it was difficult to summon up much hope in his chances for a full recovery. He was not the depressive type but was increasingly resigned to the fact that he would never be “cured.” He had nightmares that he would end up lame—or worse yet, a cripple. Charles and Claudia were so worried by his wretched state of mind over Christmas that they wrote they could not possibly enjoy the holidays and would not rest easy until “we hear that your body is improving or at least in intelligent hands.” They offered to “fly over at once” but realized they would be more of a burden than a help.

  Dahl’s homecoming did not have the expected salutary effect. With every cold, gray month of English winter, he grew more sullen and despondent. In some ways, he seemed to be suffering from the same kind of strain, both physical and emotional, that he had earlier discerned in battle-worn RAF pilots. In “Someone Like You,” a short story that was included in Over to You, he wrote of seeing a colleague he had known early in the war but who was almost unrecognizable after five years of fighting: “From being a young, bouncing boy, he had become someone old and wise and gentle. He had become gentle like a wounded child. He had become old like a tired man of seventy years. He had become so different and he had changed so much that at first it was embarrassing for both of us and it was not easy to know what to say.”

  It is clear from both his stories and his letters that he was wrestling not only with his sorrow and fatigue, but also with his grave doubts about war as a form of murder and his own complicity in the senseless killing. In “The Soldier,” which he wrote over the winter of 1947 and later rewrote, he described a returning veteran who is haunted by his combat experiences, reflexively ducking when planes fly overhead, and suffers from a progressive deadening of the senses—he can no longer feel the difference between hot and cold, or between the prick of a pin and the touch of a feather. The neurosurgeon who is treating him is baffled by his deterioration, and fails to realize it is the by-product of the young man’s deliberate exertion, an attempt to blot out “the noise of the gunfire” at dawn and “whistle-shriek of the bomb.” It does not occur to the doctor that his patient prefers to be numb.

  Dahl’s body slowly mended, but his outlook did not improve. After working hard on the final draft of the gremlins novel, he wrote Marsh in the fall of 1947 that it was finally finished and was to be published in a four months’ time under the title Some Time Never: A Fable for Supermen. He knew that the dark subject matter probably doomed its chances in the market, noting, “Not many will read it.” Nevertheless, it accurately reflected his grim assessment of the world, and the inevitability of another war in their lifetime, probably within the next twelve years. “I’m not frightened of Communism, I’m frightened of war,” he confided. “Not frightened of it, just appalled by it and its coming.” Some Time Never came out in early 1948 and as predicted was not well received and scarcely sold any copies. He later disowned it. The American critics thought it was disappointing, dull and wordy, and would have worked better had it been shorter. The reception in England was not any kinder. The bad reviews hurt him deeply, and he swore off novels for good.*

  He rededicated himself to short stories, but there was no money in it. At his laborious pace, the longer magazine pieces took at least four to six months. He was lucky to do two a year. Making matters worse, he grew short-tempered and difficult. He quarreled with editors who tried to cut his work, in one case ranting to Marsh that he had sent The Saturday Evening Post back their check and told them “what they could do with it.”

  The postwar climate in England was even less hospitable to short story writers than in America, and Dahl had trouble finding takers. Wounded RAF pilots were a dime a dozen, and the public had tired of their tales of derring-do. A reviewer in the London Observer, in the course of panning Hemingway’s latest war novel, Across the River, complained that his heroes familiar “posture”—“despair held bolt upright by courage and virility”—was overdone and out of vogue. As more than one critic had identified Dahl as following in Hemingway’s footsteps, it did not augur well for his future. While the BBC eventually bought “The Soldier,” it turned down several other pieces. The rejections rankled. Dahl, who had no university degree, and little or no cachet in London literary circles, began to question whether it made sense to continue trying to eke out a living as a writer. He blamed the country’s ongoing economic woes on the new prime minister and the bungling Labour government, telling Marsh scornfully, “I wish them dead.”

  Dahl retreated from the outside world and lost himself in the familiar, comforting rhythms of rural life. He managed his mother’s farm, tended the livestock, and loafed. To relieve the boredom, he fell back on his old habit of gambling, placing daily bets on the races. He became a dog-racing enthusiast, and started breeding and schooling his own greyhounds with help from the local butcher, Claud Taylor. He began spending his afternoons at the scruffy little local courses laid out with posts and cord in nearby fields, along which an accelerating dummy hare was pulled with the dogs in hot pursuit. He loved hanging out with the bookies and poachers and other rough customers who gathered at the track, claiming it was “cheap for the thrill [he got] out of it.” He was so enamored of Claud that he featured him in a number of gruesome stories about English country life, painting an anything but quaint picture of shifty-eyed neighbors, rat-infested farms, sewage-lined roads, and vicious gypsy dogs whose specialty was “to tear another one to pieces at the end of the race.” He could not resist biting parody, even when it came to his own personal haven.

  When Dahl squandered a modest inheritance on dog losses, his family grew concerned. After four years in England, he was brooding and lacked direction. More than a few of his friends wondered what the formerly freewheeling bachelor was doing buried in a sleepy village in Buckinghamshire, living back at home with his mother. Martha Gellhorn, who came for a visit, met the family matriarch (referred to in her native Norwegian as Mumu or Mormor) and what she later remembered as “a thousand sisters.” In her view, Dahl gave new meaning to the term “Mama’s boy.” Sofie Dahl was a formidable personality who kept a tight grip on her brood. Several daughters had already settled nearby, and she clearly intended to keep her son close to hand. It was quite clear that no woman could ever measure up to her exacting standards or be “good enough” for her precious Roald. Given the “suffocating atmosphere of adoration of him,” which struck Gellhorn as unhealthy in all its many implications, she came away thinking it was a miracle Dahl was not worse than he was.

  By the fall of 1950, Marsh had independently arrived at much the same conclu
sion. He decided it was time to pry Dahl loose from his mother’s clutches and persuaded him to return to New York for a brief stay, during which time he could drum up some work and catch up with old friends. Marsh still had his Manhattan town house on 92nd Street, and he lured Dahl with the promise of one of the apartments. It went without saying that he would happily underwrite most of his expenses. “It was Charles who picked up Dahl’s life,” recalled Ingersoll, who was party to Marsh’s plan to free Dahl from the “Lady Board of Managers” who had him under lock and key. “Roald’s establishmentary sisters, all establishmentarily married, had long since concluded that their brother had turned out to be hopelessly impractical and generally bewildering. Charlie Marsh, this strange American he had suddenly become so enthusiastic about after the war, I think they instinctively mistrusted as Roald’s latest folly. But Charles did set him free, psychologically.”