Soon everyone knew about the project. The New York Times announced that the new film would be based on the “philosophy” of the vice president and would “carry an inspirational message to all people from an American angle.”85 The Washington Times-Herald interviewed Pascal, who told a reporter that the film would “have its roots in the soil and will treat with the problems facing all humanity in the reconstruction of a postwar world.” The paper described Dahl as “a great new writing talent,” and revealed that “hundreds of children and youths” would take part in the drama. The cynical correspondent doubted that much would come of it. He thought the project was simply “political propaganda”86—designed to help Wallace’s bid for the presidency in 1944. But he was intrigued by the involvement of Flight Lieutenant Dahl on the project and by the fact that Pascal had declared that no part of the film would be shot in a studio. It would, he claimed, be filmed entirely in England and the United States. One of the principal locations would be Longlea, the 800-acre Virginia estate of Charles Marsh, a wealthy Democratic newspaper proprietor, who had introduced Pascal to Wallace. At that point, Marsh had not yet met the project’s young screenwriter, but their first encounter was imminent. It would be auspicious: the eccentric press baron would become both friend and father figure to the young Dahl and hugely influence the course of his life.
Initially, Roald was almost too overwhelmed with work to realize what was happening. On top of his official duties, the Gremlins movie, and the Wallace project, Pascal had asked him to write a movie adaptation of Paul Gallico’s novella The Snow Goose (1940). This redemptive, almost sentimental parable, set around an abandoned East Anglian lighthouse during the Dunkirk evacuation, tells of a crippled artist’s friendship with a wild and mysterious young girl, and how the two of them nurse an injured snow goose back to health. Its depiction of the relationship, both real and symbolic, between the man and the bird affected Dahl deeply. Many years later he would evoke its mood and subject matter in his own short story The Swan, and his final book, The Minpins. Now, as winter snow-flakes fell on the capital, he plunged into writing his screenplay, avoiding all social invitations where possible, and working on it at home in the evenings between eight and midnight while listening to symphonies on his gramophone and drinking French or Californian brandy.87
Sitting at his writing table, lost in the world of the imagination, Dahl must have felt destiny was calling him. His short career as a writer had already taken him to Hollywood. Now he was socializing with movie stars and politicians. Exciting projects seemed to be rolling in one after the other. First Disney, now Pascal. Soon it would be the director Howard Hawks asking him to write yet another screenplay.88 And then there were the short stories, which had begun pouring out of him with prodigious intensity. Dahl sent his second one, The Sword, about his Tanganyikan houseboy’s murder of a wealthy German farmer, to the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, which immediately accepted it for publication. His next, also set in Tanganyika, about the snake who suckled milk from a cow, was scribbled down on a five-hour train journey back from New York to Washington. That was slightly harder to sell.89 However, before long, publishers like Alfred A. Knopf and Simon & Schuster were beating at his door, asking if he had any longer fiction available. But the answer, for the moment, was no. He only had time for his screenplays and short stories.
Apart from those two African tales, most of Dahl’s other early stories were concerned with wartime and flying. Some were ingeniously plotted; others were spiritual elegiac meditations on the business of killing or being killed. Many dealt with fear, anxiety and dread, usually from the pilots’ point of view, but sometimes also from the viewpoint of a noncombatant. Most were semi-autobiographical and written in the first person. All were constructed in tight, spare, controlled prose. Only This is typical—most notably in its simplicity, its imaginative force and the intensity of the feelings evoked. The subject was immensely close to Dahl’s heart: a mother whose only son is a bomber pilot. One winter night, alone in her home in the Kent countryside, she hears a vast squadron of planes flying over her house. She climbs out of bed and sits by the window, shrouded in blankets, watching the swarm of dark machines progressing through the night sky. “Now, as she sat there by the open window she did not feel the cold; she felt only loneliness and a great fear. … She did not see the fields or the hedges or the carpet of frost upon the countryside; she saw only the depths of the sky and the danger that was there.”90 Her mind’s eye takes her up to her son’s side, where she stays happily for some hours until the raid begins and the plane is hit. As her son struggles to control his machine, she is powerless to help him and ultimately she is left to watch him die. But there is a twist. At the end of the story we realize that it is not the pilot who has died—but his anguished mother. Her imagination has destroyed her.
Dahl never wrote another story in which the mother/child relationship would figure so prominently. The orphaned child, however, who appears in another early story, Katina (first published in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1944), would become a familiar figure in his future fiction. Katina tells of a young Greek girl, orphaned in a German bombing raid, who is adopted by an RAF squadron and witnesses the final days of the Greek campaign, including the fiasco in the olive groves at Argos. Here the landscape of the tale itself becomes human, as the implacable mountains and their ancient deities creep toward the British airmen, as if to crush them with the weight of their history. Pentelikon, one of these “grim and forbidding” peaks, articulates the bleak and misanthropic truth Dahl had perceived there: “Men were foolish and were made only so that they should die.” The story closes with a transcendent image of Katina, the angry, innocent child, shaking her fist defiantly at the German bombers who have been ground-strafing the British and Greek aeroplanes.
As I stared, the brightness diffused and became soft and yellow like sunlight, and through it, beyond it, I saw a young child standing in the middle of a field with the sunlight shining in her hair. For a moment she stood looking up into the sky, which was clear and blue and without any clouds; then she turned and looked at me, and as she turned I saw that the front of her white print dress was stained deep red, the colour of blood.91
The melodrama, the simple vocabulary, the rhythmic repetition that is almost poetic, the precise yet mystical evocation of place and mood, and the sharp articulation of finely nuanced human feelings were all classic early Dahl ingredients. Most arresting perhaps is that lurking sense of the magical: a characteristic feeling that a very real drama is taking place in a hyperreal, almost ghostly context. Another unpublished early flying story, also set in Greece, explored this fantastical dimension more fully. In The Ginger Cat, a German bomber unexpectedly lands on the airfield at Elevsis. The commanding officer, Monkey, “a big fine man with a black moustache,” rather like “Tap” Jones, Dahl’s own CO, cautiously approaches the “huge glass face” of the machine, while around him a hundred or so airmen nervously finger their rifles. Monkey looks up at the cockpit and opens the hatch. As he does so, a ginger cat jumps out, startling him. Casually the animal strolls across the airfield, “taking no notice of him, walking slowly away, soft pawed and very dignified, with its tail in the air and its eyes on the ground.”
Monkey and the narrator nervously enter the bomber. It has “a sweet, dusty smell like the smell of a church.” There they discover that the wireless operator, pilot and bomb aimer are dead. But the rear gunner is still just alive. They take him out of the Dornier and lay him on the ground. Suddenly he groans. Hearing his cry, the cat stops. It turns and starts walking back toward him, “slowly, delicately, picking its feet up and putting them down.” The atmosphere is profoundly sinister. As the animal approaches, the rear gunner starts to writhe and scream. The cat never takes its eyes off him. When it is about two yards away, it stops once more. There the animal stares, “crouched down on the ground, four legs tucked underneath its body, its tail flicking and twitching and its eyes … upon the German all the time.” Like some
kind of supernatural executioner, the cat brings death to the terrified rear gunner. “I saw his face,” Dahl writes. “It was turning white, white like the faces of the other three, and his eyes were open, looking up at the sky. … One moment this man had been a writhing, screaming maniac, and the next he was white and rigid and dead as a stone.”92
These early war stories contain many of the elements that would make him so famous later on, but the juxtaposition of fantasy and realism is perhaps their most striking quality. It was the hallmark of a style he would pursue for almost twenty years in adult fiction, before returning to writing for children. The immediate reaction of his contemporaries to these tales was almost unanimously positive. The professionals like Harold Matson were struck by their sophistication and confidence of expression. They sensed immediately an individual voice, though Matson wondered if Dahl would last. He thought A Piece of Cake “remarkable,” but that many of its most striking stylistic aspects might be closely linked to the power of its subject matter. For there were very few writers around in the United States in the early forties with Dahl’s experience of aerial combat, a subject for which his spare elegant lyricism was perfectly suited.
Edward Weeks, who edited Atlantic Monthly for nearly thirty years between 1938 and 1966, and who published several of Dahl’s early stories, praised the care with which he used his words, commenting on the “vividness and beauty”93 of his storytelling: “Your sense of balance, your economy and your selection are just right. The sentences have a color and an apparent ‘naturalness,’ which is a credit to your craftsmanship. Even the old master Maugham would be pleased.”94 Noël Coward too was deeply moved, noting in his diary after reading Over to You that the stories “pierced 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.”95
Dahl was initially reluctant to take money for his writing. And when he did, false teeth apart, any rewards went straight to the RAF Benevolent Fund or his own airmen’s charities. Despite Pascal’s repeated offers, he refused to take any payment for the filmwork he did for him. His innate decency was undoubtedly the main reason for this, but it is also possible that he feared making money for himself, lest his bosses in Whitehall try to prevent his writing altogether. Yet the absence of commercial gain seems to add to the strange innocent power of these early tales. In November 1943, for example, he sold a story called Bedtime to the Ladies’ Home Journal and donated his $1,000 fee to the widow of an RAF colleague in Washington who had been killed the previous week in a car crash.96 By then, however, the prospect of having to survive as a professional writer after the war was looming and he was beginning to contemplate changing the status quo. Later that month he posed a situation to his superiors, where one day Flight Lieutenant Dahl might “find himself broke or getting tired of giving all his money away.”97 In that context, he also began looking for alternative representation. Harold Matson had failed to get the proofs of the Cosmopolitan article to him in time to make alterations, and Dahl had accused him of failing to “look after his interests” properly.98 Matson halfheartedly attempted to woo Dahl back, and went on representing him informally for story sales until September 1943, but in Dahl’s mind he was already history. A visiting Conservative MP, Victor Cazalet, who was staying with Lord Halifax, took a shine to the embassy’s young writer-in-residence, and introduced Dahl to some other potential agents. Eventually, Dahl settled on a woman—“an ancient dame with fuzzy grey hair and a coarse laugh” by the name of Ann Watkins.99 He would stay with her agency for over thirty years.
Watkins had founded her agency in 1910, and by 1940 she had a small but exclusive list of fiction and nonfiction writers that included Frances Hodgson Burnett, Theodore Dreiser, Carson McCullers, Ezra Pound, Ayn Rand, Dorothy Sayers, Gertrude Stein, and two of Dahl’s own literary heroes, Ernest Hemingway and Dylan Thomas. Watkins was an eccentric, equally at home in city and country, who dressed flamboyantly in waistcoats and large hats, often with several feathers in them, and came in to work accompanied by two enormous Airedale dogs. She had a sharp, witty sense of humor and a feisty yet maternal attitude toward her clients that could stretch to buying the less successful of them a new pair of shoes, if she felt they needed it. She was, as her former assistant Sheila St. Lawrence recalled, “a very emotional person with a lot of empathy … very interested in [Roald] as a young man starting out and knowing he had a road to go down.”100
When Dahl became a client of the agency, Watkins was already sixty and working only part time, coming into New York for two or three days a week from her country home in Darien, Connecticut. But her influence on Roald was to be significant. She and her successor, Sheila St. Lawrence, would become the solid rocks of support, advice and friendship on which his literary career was grounded. Right from the beginning Dahl sensed he had made the right decision, describing his new agent proudly to his mother as “very famous … I’m told I’m very lucky to have her.”101 He liked her energy, her sense of fun and the fact that she had called the American Museum of Natural History to check the facts on his African snake story. Subsequently, Watkins and St. Lawrence would negotiate film contracts, sell stories to magazines, and act as intermediary, when necessary, between Dahl and his publishers. Watkins and her—almost exclusively female—staff also became Dahl’s New York family. He would come to rely on them for everything from literary advice to shopping. At one point he even used them as a temporary storehouse for works of art he was importing. He relished the relaxed professionalism of the Park Avenue office and the lack of snobbery that pervaded the atmosphere there. Most unusually, he often signed letters to the staff there: “Love, Roald.”
By the time Dahl became a Watkins client, almost all his filmwork had dried up. Both Pascal projects had been put on ice, partly because two of his producers, Alfred Chenhalls and Leslie Howard, had been shot down and killed by a squadron of eight Luftwaffe fighters over the Bay of Biscay on June 1, 1943. They were passengers in the “Ibis”—one of the tiny number of commercial airliners deliberately downed during the war. Both men may have also been part of the reason the plane was targeted. Initial rumors were that the bon viveur Chenhalls had been mistaken for Winston Churchill, and Churchill himself seems to have believed this was the case. He described the incident characteristically as evidence both of the stupidity of German secret agents and of the “inscrutable workings of fate.”102 Recent research, however, has suggested that the target may actually have been Howard himself, a Jew, who had been a ferocious and prominent critic of Nazism and a particularly irritating thorn in the flesh of Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.103 Both he and Chenhalls, it appears, may well have been British agents, returning from a mission to Spain where, under the guise of conducting a Shakespeare Seminar for the British Institute, Howard had actually delivered a secret message from Churchill to the Spanish leader, General Franco, encouraging him to remain neutral.104
Back in New York, Pascal took the news of their deaths with apparent equanimity. Now he turned his attention toward a new Shaw project, Caesar and Cleopatra, for which he intended to hire the eighty-seven-year-old playwright as screenwriter. Dahl drifted out of his life and it is not clear they ever met again. But the eccentric Transylvanian had already played a significant role in the young writer’s story. He had given him a unique introduction to the corridors of U.S. power—and Dahl had seized the opportunity with both hands. By mid-1943, his relationship with Vice President Wallace had moved onto the level of friendship. “One of the most serious minded, fascinating figures in national public life,”105 as David McCullough would describe Wallace, was now his regular tennis partner. He and the ambidextrous vice president usually played twice a week. “He’s very good and luckily I’m a bit better than I used to be,” Roald told his mother, “so we both get a lot of exercise and very hot. But it’s the only exercise I get.”106 Despite the demise of the film project, Wallace took a paternal interest in the y
oung RAF officer, discussing political ideals with him and recommending vitamin pills for his back and sinus ailments. And charmed by The Gremlins, Mrs. Roosevelt herself had become a Roald Dahl fan and invited him to dinner at the White House.
All this activity did not go unnoticed by those in Washington whose job it was to further British interests by more unconventional means than those of the press release and the off-the-record briefing. If some senior personnel in the Air Ministry, irritated by Dahl’s assertiveness and his brash charm, were plotting to get rid of him, others were quick to realize that a young man in his situation was likely to see and hear things that could be extremely useful to the British war effort. So, inevitably, all through 1943 Dahl moved ever further into the blurry area that separates the worlds of newspapers, propaganda, parties and public meetings from that of intelligence and covert operations. Soon he would be almost entirely lost from view in its murky, swirling fog.
* Most of the similarities are with Dahl himself. The most striking similarity to Pattle is the fact that Gus flies with a high temperature against doctor’s orders, as Pattle did in Athens. Like Pattle, Gus “never had a chance” against the German plane that shot him down. Unlike Pattle, however, he survives.
† A charity established in 1919 to give financial support to airmen and their families who had been injured or killed in the line of duty.
‡ Later he became more forgetful, claiming in Lucky Break that he “believed” he was the first to use the word, and in 1989 in a radio interview with Terry Lane that he had “invented the word … I don’t know anyone else who did.”
§ Charles Graves, the author of an account of seven young men who joined the RAF in 1939 called The Thin Blue Line, did argue that he had been the first to use the name in print and that, as such, he deserved compensation. But officials from the Air Ministry bullied him into dropping his claim. Bisgood, who died shortly after the war ended, never wrote his book.
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