Storyteller
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The issue of the Saturday Evening Post that carried Shot Down Over Libya was typical of the potpourri of eclectic wartime journalism that now characterized its copy. The tale appeared among articles about the training methods of U.S. Marines, the wartime rubber shortage, the building of the Trans-Alaskan Highway, and human interest stories about a fencing schoolmistress called Beulah Bunny, and a girl called Effie who found satisfaction working as a female riveter. Yet, as Matson and Forester observed, there was something more to A Piece of Cake than just journalism. Roald Dahl had made his literary debut.
Dahl was generous in his praise of Forester, not only crediting him with his “lucky break” as a writer but also attributing to him his own awareness of the importance of precise observation in establishing a story’s plausibility and atmosphere.37 He uses this technique frequently in Shot Down Over Libya and it is a feature of almost all his early writing. Whether it was the shining steel glimpsed beneath the flaking paint of the aeroplanes, or the exact sound of the Browning guns being fired—“a quick, muffled sort of rattle”—his judicious use of circumstantial detail is usually telling. Dahl heightens this effect by his self-conscious use of RAF slang and technical jargon, which he presents with a simplicity, almost a naïveté, that stemmed perhaps from his own admiration of the prose of Ernest Hemingway, but was also distinctively his own.
Outside, the Hurricanes were waiting, looking very dirty in their desert camouflage, which was just a coat of light-brown paint the color of sand. At a distance they merged into their surroundings. They looked a little thin and underfed, but very elegant. Under the wings of each, in the shade, sat a fitter and rigger playing noughts and crosses in the hot sand, waiting to help start up.
“All clear.”
“All clear, sir.” I pressed the button; she coughed once or twice, as though clearing the sand from her throat, and started. Check the oxygen, check the petrol, brakes off, taxi into position behind Shorty, airscrew into fine pitch, mixture control to “rich,” adjust tail trimmer; and now Shorty’s holding his thumb up in the air. Yes, O.K. O.K. Thumb up, and everyone else does the same.38
Despite Dahl’s sharp eye for this sort of detail, he was always very open about his essential lack of interest in factual accuracy—particularly in any sort of autobiographical memoir. “I enjoy least of all writing about my own experiences,” he noted in Lucky Break. “For me the pleasure of writing comes with inventing stories.”39 Sometimes, that delight in invention would show a flagrant disregard for the truth. The crash in the desert was a good example. Until he was almost seventy, he would often claim that he had been shot down by enemy action. He did so most strikingly in Lucky Break, where he maintained that Shot Down Over Libya was a piece of pure factual journalism, and quoted in full a letter from Forester to himself which in reality was completely fake.¶ The fiction occurs again in various letters,40 interviews,41 magazine articles, and once more in his memoir, Boy.42 It was only in Going Solo that he attempted to put the record straight. Yet he did so with almost childish reluctance, admitting only “an implication” that he had been shot down in earlier stories, and blaming this false impression entirely on his wartime editors.43
In May 1942, Dahl moved out of the Willard Hotel and into a small rented house in Georgetown, with pale blue front door and window shutters. There he settled into a comfortable routine, rising just after eight o’clock, breakfasting on grapefruit and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice which his “half-time negro servant” Annie had prepared for him the previous evening.44 He listened to some music—usually Sibelius or Bach—before going upstairs to shave and dress. Then he drove to work in his chief luxury: a large olive green Buick, which he had purchased for $550 from a rich cigarette manufacturer and family friend, who lived in Bexley and frequently travelled to the United States on business.45 He generally arrived at his office shortly after ten o’clock. Most of his day was spent writing speeches, dictating letters to his Canadian secretary or making phone calls. In the evening, if he was not required for “official stuff,”46 or the thing he dreaded most, “boring dinner invitations from social hostesses,”47 he would come home around seven and start writing. Sometimes he would prepare a meal for friends, boasting on several occasions that he had become a “very fine cook indeed.”48 He was not so good at clearing up afterwards, admitting that after one particular evening, his maid left him a note saying: “Mr. Dahl—I am exaspated [sic] woman—have never, never, never seen such mess!” Once, just before Christmas, he and his guests acted out his sketch Double Exposure and Roald dressed up in leopard skins to play the part of Mr. Keep M. Clean.49 Few of his dinner guests seem to have been British. Aside from his RAF colleague, the playwright and farceur Ben Travers, who worked in security and had a similarly earthy sense of humor,50 Dahl made few friends at the embassy, confessing to his mother that his “main pals” were Swiss, Poles and Americans.51
It was a comfortable existence—especially when compared to wartime London—and Roald relished many of his diplomatic perks, particularly the tax exemptions and immunities from prosecution for parking offenses.52 Nevertheless, some of the values that prevailed in Washington upset him and exacerbated his sense of dislocation from a familiar world. He despaired of the standards of American radio broadcasting, for example, describing the programs as “all advertisements,” where every thirty seconds some “smooth-voiced bastard” interrupted even the most serious broadcasts to sing the praises of chewing gum, toothpaste or laxatives. He was also critical of a culture where film stars autographed the wings of fighter planes, and where tank manufacturers paid an actor like Clark Gable to “ride one of their trucks out of the factory” simply for the benefit of a “battery of press reporters.”53
But this was the world with which his job demanded he engage: a world of people, both inside and outside the embassy, who lacked any experience of fighting on the front line and for whom the war itself was often a very distant reality. He found this stressful and sometimes resorted to alcohol in order to stiffen his resolve before stepping out to address his “po-faced, cod-eyed” American audiences. Over the months he spent regularly travelling around the east coast speaking about the RAF, he became an accomplished speaker, although he usually felt his speeches went better if he got “a little pissed”54 before he started talking. By and large his audiences seem to have liked the former pilot’s blunt, straightforward manner, which was mercifully free of English reserve. For his part, Dahl found Americans peculiar—“about as different from us as the Chinese,” he declared. “Everything is done in terms of publicity and money.”55
His first months in Washington put him in a familiar position—that of being an alien. He felt at home neither among the English at the embassy nor with his American audiences. His own company and his imagination offered him much-needed sanctuary. When he returned from the embassy in the evening, he would water the tiny garden, pour himself a whiskey, listen to some music and start to write.56 Almost immediately he turned to gremlins. “The gremlins,” he wrote to the editor of Collier’s magazine, “comprise a very real and considerable part of the conversation of every RAF pilot in the world. … Every pilot knows what a gremlin is and every one of them talks about gremlins every day of their lives.”57 These “little types with horns and a long tail, who walk about on the wings of your aircraft boring holes in the fuselage and urinating in your fuse-box,”58 would launch Dahl’s literary career. Their antics would eventually take him both to Hollywood and to the White House.
* An inventory dated May 22, 1934, now in the possession of Astri Newman, showed that their possessions were valued at over £6,400. They included a Bechstein 3/4 grand piano, and paintings by Daubigny, Samuel John “Lamorna” Birch, Frank Brangwyn, Laura Knight and their relative René Billotte.
† Dahl told a slight variant of this story to another interviewer, the Australian journalist Terry Lane, in which he claimed the man he impressed was the secretary of state himself, Sir Archibald Sinclair.
&n
bsp; ‡ Dahl later recreated this character in his short story Someone Like You.
§ This contemporary expression, widely used at the time for something that could be done with ease, was often ironically used by RAF pilots to signify particularly difficult or dangerous missions.
¶ Dahl had created it by paraphrasing Matson’s letter to Forester’s secretary and then exaggerating all the details wildly.
CHAPTER NINE
A Sort of Fairy Story
ALL THROUGH THE HOT and humid Washington summer of 1942, Dahl was plagued by headaches caused by the injuries he had suffered in his plane crash. Writing was almost his only consolation, and in this he felt particularly sustained and supported by his imaginary horned friends, the gremlins. He described his new tale to his mother as “a sort of fairy story,” and for much of that year, the little creatures with their “wives called Fifinellas, and children which are Widgets or Flipperty-Gibbets, according to their sex,”1 diverted him greatly from both the daily drudgery of his job and his persistent health problems. He wrote the story swiftly, digging deep into his memories of Norse folklore and his love of the countryside, as well as into the fund of RAF gremlin detail he and Douglas Bisgood had compiled on the boat from England. Initially entitled Gremlin Lore, his fable chronicled a “tribe of funny little people,” who lived happily in a “beautiful green wood far up in the North,” walking up and down the trees in their special suction boots, until human beings, “huge ugly monsters,” started to chop down their forest and build factories and airstrips on it.2 Seeking revenge, the gremlins turn on their tormentors, the airmen, and their “big tin birds,” causing innumerable inexplicable air accidents, even going so far as to move entire mountains to deceive RAF pilots and make their planes crash. The story combined fantasy, flying and a dash of malice. It was ideal literary territory for Dahl, and the little sprites may even have offered him some kind of psychological absolution for any lingering guilt he felt about wrecking his Gloster Gladiator in the Libyan Desert.
In Dahl’s story, a Battle of Britain pilot called Gus—whose exploits bear some resemblance to those of both Dahl himself in Libya and Pat Pattle in Greece*
—becomes a victim of gremlin mischief, when a group of these tiny saboteurs bore holes in his Hurricane’s wings, making it crash-land and causing him serious injury. Eventually, Gus tames the destructive tendencies of the gremlins through a curious and rather contrived combination of bribery (feeding them used transatlantic postage stamps) and aversion therapy (playing unpleasant tricks on them when they attack aircraft). Brought to heel, the reformed gremlins assist the earthbound pilot to pass his medical examination and so return to his flying. Though subsequently marketed as a children’s story, there is little evidence that Dahl felt he was writing a self-consciously juvenile piece. It was simply the story he needed to tell at that time. And he threw himself into it with obsessive energy. It contained many of the elements that would animate future stories: an eye for dark comedy, a misanthropic gaze on human activity, as well as the creation of a race of little creatures who remain invisible to most humans. The relationship between pilot and elf also contained a curious psychological twist: the gremlin with whom Gus communicates bears his own name. He is Gremlin Gus—almost as if the gremlin is an imaginary dark alter ego of the pilot who has first seen him.
When Dahl finished his first draft, he sent it to his bosses for approval on both sides of the Atlantic. It was part of his agreement with the Air Ministry that anything he wrote needed to be vetted by them. In the grand staterooms of the British Embassy and the dingy corridors of wartime Whitehall, earnest British civil servants studied the forty pages of closely typed manuscript and puzzled over how they could use it to Britain’s advantage. Many were completely baffled. The convivial Aubrey Morgan, who ran British Information Services in New York, struggled manfully to find meaning in the little creatures, writing a gloriously convoluted internal memo in which he compared them to the “little man who isn’t there” or the “noise of butterflies in an adjacent meadow which put a gentleman off his putt.” He concluded that he was “somewhat puzzled as to what the purpose of telling such a story can be.”3 But others rapidly realized how gremlins had the potential to raise American public interest in the RAF and the British war effort. In London, the Conservative member of Parliament Ronald Tree, now working for the Ministry of Information, described the piece as “one of the best literary efforts that has appeared on this side [of the Atlantic] since the war began,”4 while the young British movie producer and entrepreneur Sidney Bernstein, who had founded the Granada group of cinemas in 1934, and was now working under Morgan in New York City, swiftly forwarded the story to Walt Disney. Disney cabled back by return expressing his interest in turning it into a movie.5
Disney believed the tale had “great possibilities,”6 and wanted to acquire rights in the project. Dahl, however, though greatly flattered by the studio’s interest, was cautious and highly protective of his material. He demanded strict controls on how the idea was developed. This was not just because he naturally felt a powerful sense of ownership but also because he believed that in some strange way fate had made him the guardian of this piece of contemporary folklore, and that he owed it both to the Royal Air Force and to his fellow pilots to ensure that their gremlin tormentors were properly looked after. In this context he had already decided that any money he made from the story would be donated to the RAF Benevolent Fund.† His purpose, as he expressed it to his colleague, the Irish writer William Teeling, was “to persuade [Disney] and everyone else in the studio not to misuse the Gremlins at all, to treat them with considerable seriousness, and to confine their exploits entirely to air matters.”7 This watchful, almost obsessive, need to control gremlin destiny made him unpopular with Disney’s Washington-based sales representative, Chester Feitel. Feitel had initially taken a liking to Dahl, reporting back to Disney that the author was a “young fellow” who did “not regard himself as a professional writer” and “would probably accept any reasonable deal on our usual basis.”8 He had misjudged his man. Soon he was complaining bitterly about the author’s stubborn lack of cooperation. For his part, Dahl took an immediate dislike to Disney’s man in Washington, writing to Jim Bodrero, one of the studio’s chief illustrators, that he “used to love gremlins very much,” until Feitel “damped [his] ardour” for the movie project by accusing him of making all sorts of “complicated demands.” Denying that he was being difficult, Dahl continued: “My own Number One Gremlin climbed on my shoulder just as Feitel left the room and whispered, ‘That man does not like us much, shall I fix him?’ But I told him to lay off.”9 The remark was both humorous and slightly threatening—a combination that he was starting to make his own.
Encouraged by Disney’s interest, Dahl was also trying to sell a shortened version of the story to a magazine. He had decided to do so without using an agent, believing he could cut out the middlemen and do their job perfectly well himself. His first choices, American Magazine, Liberty and Collier’s Weekly, all showed interest in the piece, as much for Disney’s potential involvement as for the story’s own intrinsic merits. In his negotiations, Dahl was disarmingly self-assured. Writing to Thomas Beck, the editor of Collier’s Weekly, he boasted that Disney had offered him “unusually favourable terms. … Amongst other things he is going to give me all profits on books, etc. and all profits on merchandise and, in exchange for film rights, all profits on the sale of an article to a magazine.”10 In the end, each magazine prevaricated, perplexed perhaps both by the oddness of the story and by the dogged cockiness of its uniformed young author. There was an impasse. Beck proposed cutting the story in half. Roald refused to countenance this. Vernon MacKenzie, the fiction editor of American Magazine, wanted to ask a more experienced writer to work on it with him. MacKenzie admitted to Aubrey Morgan however that he was nervous of proposing this to Dahl because the writer had “so much confidence in his own ability … that he might resent the suggestion of collaboration,�
�� and then the magazine would lose the story altogether.11
Dahl’s immediate boss, the air attaché, Commodore William Thornton, was eventually presented with the dilemma. Should he take the project off his obsessive young assistant and hand it to someone else? Dahl had not invented gremlins. He was simply the first to try and build a coherent story around them. A more experienced writer might do something equally interesting and ruffle fewer feathers. It must have been a tempting option. Providentially for Roald, Thornton cared little for gremlins and did not regard the problem as a priority. Uncertain what to do, he hesitated. And, by this time, Roald had wisely sensed he was in trouble. Aware that Disney’s interest was a key card in his hand, he picked up the phone to the only person he trusted to help him, C. S. Forester’s agent, Harold Matson.
Matson moved swiftly, cutting out Collier’s and American Magazine completely and concluding a deal instead with the general interest monthly magazine Cosmopolitan, with Dahl guaranteed as sole author, albeit writing under the pseudonym “Pegasus.”12 So, when Thornton finally raised the issue with his assistant, Dahl could confidently inform his superior that the publication rights were sorted and that the RAF Benevolent Fund would be benefitting to the tune of over $2,000. Only the agreement with Disney remained to be concluded. However, much to Matson’s irritation, Dahl did not ask for his help here, deciding once again to go it alone. This was partly to maximize the revenue for the RAF Benevolent Fund by saving the agent’s 10 percent commission, but also because Dahl sensed that he alone had the means to secure exactly the terms he wanted. He was a canny negotiator, applying himself to the role with energy as well as charm, often acting as if he were not an author but an agent for the gremlins themselves. “My gremlins have been clustering around the contract ever since I received it,” he wrote to the senior Disney lawyer, John Rose, “wrinkling their brows, scratching their bald little heads and chanting the words, ‘Give, grant, bargain, sell, assign, transfer and set’ over and over, and every now and then looking up and saying that, ‘It’s very complicated.’ ”13