Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  In the summer of 1943, Dahl was more concerned by what he saw as the failure of British officials to protect the United Kingdom’s interests in a postwar aviation settlement than he was by Wallace’s political judgments. The politics of aviation itself held little interest for him. That summer he had reluctantly agreed to speak at the Convention of the Aviation Writers Association of America, and while he admitted that some of the delegates were “congenial,” he found many others “cantankerous,” and told his mother that he wished “they’d go and stuff themselves, each one separately and individually.”54 However, the fact that the British seemed to be acquiescing unnecessarily in the establishment of a U.S. hegemony in civil aviation annoyed him intensely. In a piece called Post War Air Lines, which he kept in his papers, he imagined a postwar scenario where a single American carrier became the “largest and most important airline” on the planet. He even invented an acronym for it, “LAMPA,” developing a hypothesis where this company eventually gained complete control of the commercial airways of the globe. Thus, he concluded, LAMPA’s president and directors would find themselves “controlling … the destinies of the world.”55 The paper was alarmist. It was also overtly critical of current British policy. And it irritated his superiors hugely.

  The top brass in the Air Ministry had little room for maneuver. In an agreement concluded shortly after the United States entered the war, America had guaranteed to supply all UK air transport requirements in return for an undertaking from the British government not to build any new cargo planes until Hitler was defeated.56 At that point it had seemed like a good idea—Britain was desperate for bombers and fighters. A year later, British air strategists were starting to look on the agreement with more jaundiced eyes. By then it was becoming clear that the United Kingdom was at the forefront of a development that would revolutionize civil aviation: the jet engine. Yet the agreement put a stranglehold on the United Kingdom’s ability to exploit this advantage and gave the Americans time to close the technological gap. The British lobbied hard to persuade Roosevelt to loosen its terms, but Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, who coordinated aviation planning, refused to let his transatlantic allies off the hook. As production of American transport aircraft soared, Dahl was aware that the American public were being bombarded with images of a future dominated by easy commercial air travel. Murals and installations such as Airways to Peace in New York’s Museum of Modern Art demonstrated how, under the hegemony of a benign U.S. carrier, the planet would be transformed into a single global community. It all appeared to confirm his fears that LAMPA was fast becoming a reality.57

  Dahl was probably unaware how tightly his superiors’ hands were tied. If so, their lack of response must have added to his frustrations. Moreover, these anxieties were exacerbated by personal ones of his own when, in 1943, he was unexpectedly thrown out of his home because its owners returned to Washington and summarily terminated his lease. Accommodation was in short supply and he struggled to find anywhere suitable as a replacement. Eventually he heard of an apartment that had just become vacant. A jealous lover had shot his girlfriend there, before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide. Both parties had worked for the combined British and American intelligence network, the Office of Strategic Services. The story fascinated Washington gossips, one of whom observed that, the day after the murder, Dahl was the first person in line to see if the dead girl’s apartment might now be available for rent.58

  “One can’t be fussy here,” Roald told his mother phlegmatically. “I signed the lease and took the house without ever having seen it.”59 However, within days, his superstitious nature began to play tricks on him. He told the Washington socialite Mary-Louise Patten that he had visited the house at twilight and seen ghosts there, confessing that, as a creative writer and someone who got up at six every morning “to think over the problems of the post-war world,” he would find that hard to live with.60 He gave his mother a lurid description of the apartment: “The last time I went to look at it,” he told her, “there was still quite a bit of blood and stuff about, plus bullet holes in the ceiling, and what with one thing and another I thought I’d rather not spend my evenings alone there!”61 Eventually he sublet the property to the pragmatic Isaiah Berlin, whose only reaction was to ask where he might find “a good cheap plasterer” and “an inexpensive rug of some darkish colour!”62

  Roald eventually chose alternative accommodation with another colleague at the embassy, but he found it almost impossible to write with anyone else in the house. His problems were mounting. He was suffering severe back pains and struggling with a movie script about the “Dam Busters” mission for the director Howard Hawks.** On the positive side he did get to spend time with the raid’s commander, Guy Gibson, and threw a cocktail party for him, to which he invited “all the pretty girls I could think of in town, just so he could take his pick.”63 But this was a rare diversion from the dislocation he felt from his work at the embassy. There he saw himself as an increasingly lone and strident dissenting voice: a muscular patriot, surrounded by opportunists and lazy, self-serving pen-pushers. He was critical of almost everyone around him, complaining to William Teeling, for example, that though the RAF was “on the crest of a wave,” the U.S. War Department always seemed to be able to get stories out to the press quicker than the British. Begging for photographs of bomb damage inflicted by the RAF on Germany, he concluded urgently that “to a country which is used to being humbugged by its press, and who knows that it is being humbugged by its press, only seeing is believing.”64

  In that summer of 1943, Dahl received a rare invitation to Hyde Park, the president’s country retreat up the Hudson, to spend a weekend with the Roosevelts. Other guests included the Norwegian crown prince Harald and his sisters, and Secretary to the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. Roald made light of the visit, telling his family that he would make sure to tell them whether the president “blows his nose in his fingers … eats with his mouth open … or laughs at my dirty jokes.”65 However, his closely typed ten-page report on what he found there made fascinating reading for analysts at the embassy, eager to get a private glimpse of how the president’s mind was working. His essay teems with details about his experiences there: the small baths in the guest rooms, the sulphurous smell that permeated the water supply, or the eccentric behavior of the Roosevelts’ Aberdeen terrier Fala. An eye for the comic is much in evidence. Examples of Roosevelt “regaling his guests with rather crude stories about dead men”66 are juxtaposed with a description of the president trying to outrun his bodyguards in his invalid car.

  Dahl’s charm was powerfully at work in this environment. He knowingly cast himself in the role of entertainer, reflecting later that he had behaved like a “clown.”67 Yet that clowning allowed him a glimpse of the elusive Roosevelt, relaxed and off his guard. This anecdote is typical:

  Mrs. Roosevelt said, “Well, Franklin used always to walk in his sleep when he was younger. Once, during the time when we used to own an old Ford in the early days of motoring, I wakened up and found him standing at the end of his bed turning an imaginary cranking wheel as hard as he could and saying, ‘The damn thing won’t start.’ ” “I said,” she went on, “Franklin, if you get into the car, I will help you start it. Whereupon he got back into bed and held an imaginary steering wheel, whilst I had to go out in front and pretend to do the cranking. Finally he went back to sleep. In the morning he remembered nothing about it.” 68

  Sometimes the conversation became a little more serious, but even then Dahl’s observation of peculiar detail is richly manifest. Discussing his pet subject, aviation policy, with Roosevelt and Secretary Morgenthau, Dahl could not help noticing that the latter’s trousers “were half unbuttoned.”69 Under the mask of joker, Dahl was also able to ask innocent and uninhibited questions of senior politicians that would have been impossible for the embassy grandees. He spoke directly to the president, for example, about the possibility of his standing for a fourth term of office and Roos
evelt told him straight that, if he was to do so, he seriously doubted his chances of winning. FDR must of course have been well aware that his comments would be reported back to British strategists and probably to Churchill himself. So he must have particularly enjoyed telling his house guest how ungrateful he felt Winston had been when he himself defied U.S. public opinion in 1940 and put his neck on the line to conclude the Lend-Lease agreement, without which Britain would probably have been unable to continue fighting the war.†† In this context, FDR was also remarkably unguarded about how he viewed the racial divide that still defined much of America:

  The talk drifted around to Winston Churchill again and he said, “You know, I was talking to Winston immediately after we had concluded the destroyers-bases deal, when you leased us certain bases in Newfoundland, Trinidad, British Guiana etc. and Winston said, ‘Now how in the heck am I going to explain all this to the British people? They will say the Americans are taking our territory.’ I said, ‘Listen Winston, those places are nothing but a headache to you, you know that. Together they cost the British Treasury five million pounds, twenty-five million dollars, a year. They are nothing but a headache. Do you think I want to have your headaches? Because I don’t. You can keep them; furthermore, these places are inhabited by some eight million dark-skinned gentlemen and I don’t want them coming to this country and adding to the problem which we already have with our thirteen million black men. I tell you Winston, it is just a headache and you can keep it.’ ”70

  Charles Marsh was mesmerized when Roald sent him a copy of his report. A few days later—in early August 1943—Roald wrote again, advising Charles how he might best get the president’s ear. For once the letter is almost entirely without frivolity and reveals what Roald himself most valued in his friend’s personality. It celebrates Marsh’s warmth, generosity, imagination and independence. Encouraging him to forget his relationship with Wallace and to “work on [his] own,” Roald told Marsh that the president was unused to dealing with “sincere men without personal ambition who ask for nothing in return for what they offer,” and exhorted him to trust in “the force of [his] own personality.” Interestingly for one who would later praise the virtues of exaggeration, he tells Marsh to speak to the president using colors that are not “too bright and vivid. Paint your picture fast and good,” he suggests, “but paint it gentle, as I know you can. … Don’t go on fiddling with your subject, just stop talking and see what he has to say.”71 In the end, this counsel did not do any good. Roosevelt still kept his distance from the eccentric press baron. But Marsh was full of admiration for the advice he had been given. “Considering your age,” he told Roald, “your wisdom passeth all understanding.”72

  Shortly after Dahl wrote his piece about Hyde Park, his Whitehall ally, William Teeling, wrote to congratulate him on being promoted to squadron leader. “You should have been one ages ago and from all I hear there is more work done in your office than anywhere else,”73 he enthused. But Teeling, who was shortly to be elected a Conservative MP for Brighton, was a lone voice in praise of Dahl’s activities. Most of the Air Ministry peacocks were convinced that the air attaché needed to be taken down a peg or two. And no one felt this more than Air Marshal William Welsh, who, early in 1943, had been sent from London to Washington as head of the RAF delegation. His animosity to Dahl seems to have been as profound as it was instantaneous. Almost at once, he attempted to bring him to heel, criticizing his “irregular” outside activities and telling Halifax that his young official needed some serious “military discipline.” He recommended that Dahl be transferred away from Washington altogether.74 It is possible Welsh had a personal motive for this hostility. He was nearing the end of his military career and seeking to make contacts with potential future employers in the world of civil aviation in the United States. He cannot have viewed Dahl’s continual outspokenness about the postwar situation as particularly helpful to his chances of securing a good appointment.‡‡ On July 14, Roald’s “cautious”75 admirer, J. B. Hogan, thanked him for his useful notes on the weekend at Hyde Park, as it had given him an opportunity “to throw a balanced opinion on your behalf” when faced with criticisms “such as from a quarter you can guess.”76 But Hogan’s good opinion was not enough. Welsh eventually prevailed upon the ambassador: at the end of October 1943, Dahl was, in his own words, “kicked out of the Embassy” and recalled to London.77

  What happened exactly is unclear. Dahl later claimed that the RAF had “sacked” him, but that Bill Stephenson “had me back again in Washington within a week, promoted to Wing Commander.”78 This was an exaggeration. From the papers in his own archive, it seems he left Washington shortly after October 27 and returned on November 21. Ten days or so before he departed for London, however, it seems his position was still uncertain. He told his mother that he was looking for a new appointment and hinted that he might already have been approached to work directly with BSC. “I was offered a Staff College Course the other day,” he wrote, “but I said I would rather not, because I may be given a more interesting (from my point of view) job, about which I’m afraid I can tell you nothing.”79 When he returned to Washington, little seemed to have changed. It appears he was in a kind of limbo—neither employed formally by the RAF nor by BSC. In December, his ally Hogan wrote to the man he had once affectionately called his “Mr. Gremlin,”80 wishing Dahl a Happy New Year, “especially if you leave our sphere of activity for other climes,” and adding darkly: “We were right in our surmise that your criticism of the Civil Aviation Appreciation did not altogether find favour in some quarters.”81 Dahl thanked Hogan for his confidential note, adding: “it is a great help to me personally to receive information such as this.”82

  Roald was now well aware that his outspokenness could win him enemies as well as friends. Despite his attempts to do the right thing for his country, his lack of reserve, the passionate zeal with which he held his views, and his inability to keep a low profile and be a team player had proved an Achilles’ heel. He was, he later admitted, “a tactless sort of fellow and that’s the one thing a diplomat mustn’t be.”83 It was a problem that seemed to affect him more with the English than with any other nationality. Canadians, in the persons of Stephenson and Max Aitken, now Lord Beaverbrook, for example, responded much more positively to his straight talking and his ability to think for himself. So did Americans like Henry Wallace and Charles Marsh. This lack of connection with the nation whose respect he most craved must have puzzled and perhaps pained him. In a letter written to his agent Ann Watkins’s husband, Roger Burlingame, Dahl reflected on this English “indifference to everything” and explored the idea that this was perhaps what made British pilots different from American ones. Their detachment seemed intense because it was brought on by sudden exposure to the reality of violent death. British indifference, he concluded, was quite different. “It is not intense at all because it is always there.”84

  Dahl himself was seldom indifferent. In the early weeks of 1944, even as his destiny hung in the balance, he remained unrepentantly blunt and unguarded in his attitude toward his superiors. He later claimed he was finally “booted out by the big boys” because he had uncovered a “crooked racket” going on with Sir Richard Fairey, the boss of the British private aircraft manufacturer Fairey Aviation, who was being given illicit permission to run a special airplane across the Atlantic for his own personal use.85 He may well have even hinted that Air Marshal Welsh, who later that year resigned his commission and joined the British commercial airline, BOAC, was turning a blind eye to this corruption.

  Dahl was probably working loosely for BSC during the first four months of 1944, but the formal change of his role did not happen until April, when he was replaced as assistant air attaché, and left Washington “on completion of his tour of duty.”86 He flew back for two months to London, at Beaverbrook and Stephenson’s request, “to report personally to [them] on the political situation in America.”87 While in London, Dahl also acted as minder for Ernest Heming
way, prior to his departure as a war reporter on the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Dahl had met his hero in New York a few weeks earlier, sparring in a boxing ring with him, before the two men and the boxing coach, George Brown, joined Hemingway’s wife Martha Gellhorn at the Gladstone Hotel, where Dahl recalled that they drank champagne and ate caviar from a 2-kilo tin. Subsequently, he had arranged Hemingway’s passage over from the United States by contriving to get him hired as a correspondent for the RAF.88 In London, however, some of Old Hem’s luster began to wear off as Dahl saw that the hard-drinking adventurer, this “strange and secret man” for whom he felt “overwhelming love and respect,” was also unexpectedly vain. One day he walked into Hemingway’s room at the Dorchester Hotel, to discover him meticulously dripping hair-restorer onto his thinning pate with an eyedropper. Dahl was made to wait while the great author laboriously massaged the tonic into his scalp.

  In July, Dahl returned to America, where he was free at last from the petty constraints of the embassy and of RAF officialdom, and he revelled in the company of his buccaneering new colleagues, particularly Max Beaverbrook, whom he would later describe as “the most dynamic man in the world,” with “superhuman” intellectual powers.89

  Although he was now an official employee of BSC, Dahl’s official job title remained “Assistant Air Attaché.” A note from Beaverbrook’s office, addressed to “Wing Commander R. Dahl, c/o W. L. Stephenson Esq., New York City,” thanking him for his advice and help on postwar air policy, which was still “in a state of turmoil,” confirmed a rank that was never officially noted in his RAF records.90§§