Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  None of these encounters seems to have involved him in any serious emotional commitment. They were more lighthearted diversions. But whereas it was said of Ian Fleming that he got off with girls because he could not get on with them, this was not true of Dahl, who truly delighted in female company. Yet, while he enjoyed being with sophisticated and glamorous women, Roald was not disposed to fall in love. In a revealing article for Ladies’ Home Journal about the nature of desire, which he wrote in 1949, he tried to analyze what made relationships work, speculating that most were built 70 percent on sexual attraction and only 30 percent on mutual respect. Consequently, he argued, short-lived affairs, not marriage, formed the best “basis for such activity.”130 To some, this cold-blooded, rather reductive view of human relations was an unattractive aspect of his personality. His friend David Ogilvy, for example, observed that while he may have enjoyed putting notches on his bedpost, his partners were often hurt by his behavior. “When they fell in love with him, as a lot did, I don’t think he was nice to them,”131 he commented.

  One person saw through Dahl’s rakish, confident exterior and won his lasting affection. She was the French actress Annabella. Rich, sophisticated and sexually experienced, superficially she might have seemed yet another trophy conquest. But Suzanne Charpentier, as she had been christened, was different. Born in the first decade of the twentieth century, she was the daughter of the man who had brought scouting to France, and she valued courage and loyalty quite as much as glamour. Not that she was any stranger to celebrity. She had been a teenage star, appearing in Abel Gance’s famous silent epic Napoléon at sixteen, before embarking on movie careers in Paris, London and New York. It was in New York, in 1939, that she married her third husband, the American actor Tyrone Power. Subsequently, she became a U.S. citizen and patriotically toured the country, giving propaganda speeches and boosting the Allied war effort. Her marriage was unconventional. Both parties felt free to indulge in outside relationships. Power was already in love with Judy Garland and, since his death, a number of stories have emerged suggesting that he was also bisexual. Annabella certainly had no reservations about embarking on an affair with Roald.

  They first met at one of Evalyn Walsh McLean’s parties, where Annabella made an immediate impression. “I thought Annabella (the film star) was fine,” he told his mother, “and concentrated in that direction. I’ve seen her many times since. She’s an intelligent dame and much fun.”132 Annabella herself later recalled meeting Roald at a first-night party, where he told her a creepy story about a rich man with a penchant for gruesome bets. He liked to wager his expensive Cadillac against the little finger of impoverished and impressionable younger men and women. When he had finished it, Dahl was delighted that, instead of praising his ingenuity or being shocked at its sinister subject matter, she simply asked him: “What happened next?” Their affair began shortly afterwards. It was, she recalled, a “crazy thing,” which “came back from time to time when we were thrown into each other’s arms.” Her conclusion: “It was like we were twin brothers. Romantic? Not really. Physical? Sometimes. But most important, we had a complete understanding and he trusted me.”133 It was an intense and passionate relationship, from which Roald learned a lot about sex, as he admitted to his second wife, Liccy.134 Their friendship lasted until his death. But would Annabella herself ever have contemplated marrying him? “Certainly not,” was the answer she gave Dahl’s first biographer, Jeremy Treglown. Her reason: “Because—he was kind of impossible.”135

  Ironically, as 1944 drew to a close and a successful outcome of the war began to seem inevitable, Dahl’s sense of ennui and disillusion returned. His letters home lost their vitality. Few things, other than his writing, seemed to offer him amusement and satisfaction. Partly this was to do with his health, which had once again deteriorated. One senses too that his professional double-dealing was beginning to catch up with him emotionally; that the world of secrecy and legitimized betrayal, which had initially intrigued him, had begun to seem repellant. And the deceitful manner in which Roosevelt dropped Wallace as vice president in 1944 must have been painful to observe. Dahl liked Wallace. He did not agree with him on many issues, but he admired his idealism, his love of agriculture, and his honesty. He had drafted speeches for him.136 He celebrated him as a prophet of a truly democratic America. Yet he had schemed against his friend, this “lovely man,” who was “just too innocent and idealistic for the world,”137 and he must have felt some complicity in Wallace’s dramatic fall from high political office.138

  It was not just the vice presidency Wallace lost. Dahl was well aware that the British were also machinating to ensure that if Roosevelt were reelected, Wallace would not get his consolation prize: the State Department job.139 It was a betrayal of the sort that—until then—was quite alien to Dahl’s nature. And it must have disillusioned him. In September, a few days after his twenty-eighth birthday, he visited Wallace and confessed to his friend that he personally had helped undermine him, even admitting that the British had been “scared to death” that he would be offered the job at the State Department. Wallace characteristically took the news on the chin, noting in his diary that he still thought Dahl “an awfully nice boy, of whom I am very fond.”140 It was perhaps a harder blow for Charles Marsh. When Wallace lost the nomination, Marsh’s daughter Antoinette Haskell recalled, “it broke Dad’s heart.”141

  Whether the mental strain of this deceit and chicanery exacerbated Dahl’s back injury is hard to tell, but in August 1944 he told his mother that he was “hobbling … like an old man”142 and that he was visiting a variety of osteopaths and doctors to see what they could do to help. The following week he told her that one particular spine specialist had “muttered something about an operation.” However, he continued, “I’m buggered if I am going to allow that. As it is I still limp about the place rather slowly and it hurts quite a lot.”143 For a month or two he tried to fight the pain, joking to one of his doctors that he was “still a little lop-sided,”144 but he remained hopeful that things would get better. Then Washington was hit by the tail end of a hurricane and Roald found himself “shovelling out”145 a foot of water from his flooded basement. His back pain returned with a vengeance and by October he was in hospital in New York having a lumbar puncture and spinal X-rays. The procedure did not go well. “Unfortunately I had a very severe reaction from it all,” he wrote, “with great headaches and pains all over the body, especially in the neck. … At one point my fingers stood out straight and couldn’t move.”146 He felt “too lousy” even to read or write.147

  In November, events took a turn for the better. Roosevelt won the election, while Wallace appeared to be “in fine form, and going very strong”148 as secretary of state for commerce. Roald’s own health seemed to be improving and on November 18 he was invited to a small private dinner at the White House to celebrate the reelection. There, he noted that Roosevelt too looked “fit and very hearty,”149 despite the fact that he ate almost nothing. However, by December, Roald himself was feeling ill again. He spent a miserable Christmas in Virginia at Longlea with the Marsh family, where Antoinette remembered that he was drinking half a bottle of brandy every morning just to dull the pain. Charles insisted that in the New Year he should go down to Temple, in Texas, where a great friend of his, Dr. Arthur Scott, would be able to examine him. Two weeks later, Roald travelled south to the Scott and White Clinic, a huge hospital, set in a landscape filled with “cowpunchers and cattle ranchers and hillbillies and steers and bulls and cows and cowpunchers with piles because they’ve lived too long on horses and miles and bloody miles of prairie and cowpunchers and cattle ranchers and hillbillies and steers and bulls and cows.”150

  In mid-January 1945, Dahl underwent spinal surgery there to remove a disc. It left him flat on his back for almost four weeks. Marsh paid all his medical bills and insisted he recuperate in Virginia. He spent most of February living at Longlea “in solitary splendour,” while working on the proofs of a collection o
f his short stories. But the surgery had been only partially successful. He found he still could not walk without considerable pain, and complained to his mother that getting better was “a bloody slow business.”151

  In March, he returned to Texas for further surgery. A six-inch needle was inserted into his spine prior to his X-ray examination, after which he was confined once more to bed—this time with 11-pound weights attached to his legs. He was “treated like a king”152 there for eighteen days, reading Dickens, Shakespeare and the Brontës—“a lot of that old stuff, which I’d never read before.”153 But he was still in great pain, although the doctors kept assuring him that the operations had been successful. Finally, puzzled by his apparent failure to respond to treatment, they decided that he had had a particularly violent reaction to an oil they had injected into his spinal cavity in order to make the X-ray images clearer. They decided that they needed to remove the oil. The procedure was a grisly one:

  It had to be done in the x-ray room under the fluoroscope, so they can watch what they were doing. The first time they tried under local anaesthetic they failed to get the needle in—they had to use a very thick one, because the oil is thick. Three doctors tried for one and a half hours but without success, and I personally did not enjoy it at all. Then, the day before yesterday, they took me up again, and gave me Pentathol, an intravenous anaesthetic, and kept me under two hours while they did the job. Apparently they had quite a time, because I had to be tilted first this way then back so [as] to get the column of oil onto the point of the needle in the spinal column. Anyway they got it all out, and then I had a fairly rough night of it. My breathing when I came back to my room was apparently six to the minute. But I was given lots of glucose intravenously and also penicillin shots all through the night. The next morning—yesterday, I more or less came to and tested my legs and back and found everything cured—so in a day or two I’ll be getting up and probably will be back in Washington quite fit and well in about 10 days. It was the first time that they had removed the Lapiadol in this hospital.*** They said that it’s very rare for people to get such a reaction from having it in the spine as I had.154

  After a week’s further recuperation at Longlea, wearing a “sort of bullet proof waistcoat such as Al Capone used to wear. Anyone can shoot at me …,”155 Roald returned to Washington, where shortly afterwards he went to have supper at the home of Drew Pearson. One of Pearson’s idiosyncrasies was to keep a few head of cattle for his own personal consumption. Each was named after a prominent contemporary political figure. That evening, much to Roald’s delight, Wallace’s great rival, Cordell Hull, was served for dinner. But halfway through the meal Roald began to feel unwell and left early. When he got home he was violently ill, with vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pains. After a few hours contemplating the half-digested remains of the former secretary of state disappearing “down the lavatory,” he took himself down to the emergency room in Georgetown University Hospital, where he was diagnosed with acute appendicitis and operated upon immediately. He came out of the anesthetic to find himself in a ward with two old men who did nothing but “fart all day and have enemas and talk bullshit and then fart some more.”156 He also learned that Franklin Roosevelt had died and that Harry Truman was now President of the United States.

  After Roald was discharged from hospital, Marsh again took on the role of his protector, whisking his surrogate son away with him to convalesce for three weeks in California. In La Jolla and Palm Springs, Roald sat by the swimming pool getting a tan, before driving on to Arizona, where the RAF laid on a plane for him to fly back to Los Angeles. On the journey, he celebrated V-E Day with the flight crew, listening to the King’s speech on the plane’s headphones while high over the Rocky Mountains. In Los Angeles, after two days at the Beverly Hills Hotel discussing gremlin rights with Walt Disney, he went to stay with Hoagy Carmichael, where he spent some more time poolside, before heading back to Palm Springs for a few days with Howard Hawks. He returned to Washington “fine and brown and fit,”157 but also psychologically ready to go back to England.

  A chapter of his life was coming to a close. Roosevelt was dead. Wallace was still secretary for commerce, but Dahl had played poker at the University Club several times with the hawkish Harry Truman, and probably suspected that the gentle Wallace would not last long in his administration. Marsh, too, was profoundly suspicious of the new regime. He thought Roosevelt’s successor second-rate, accusing him of having grown up in the “political sewers” and castigating his “poor mental equipment, his plotting political life,” and his “unattractive personality.”158 He cannot have been surprised when, in 1946, Wallace was fired, as Anthony Cave Brown notes, for “no great crime except his political innocence.”159 Dahl was now desperate to concentrate on writing. In June 1945, he had finally signed an agreement with the publisher Curtice Hitchcock to publish his collection of short stories, Over to You. Moreover, he was longing to rejoin his family in England. His half brother Louis had a baby, and now his younger sister Else was also pregnant—“expectorating,” as he jokingly called it. Roald felt left out. He might have returned home that summer had Stephenson not thrown him one final surprise and asked him to help write the official history of BSC. For this, Dahl had to go to Canada—to a remote base on the shore of Lake Ontario with the theatrical name of “Camp X.”

  Now lost in a maze of amorphous industrial estates that have encroached onto what was once fertile farmland, the site of Camp X today is marked only by two nondescript plaques. Commemorating respectively the location of the camp and the career of William Stephenson, they are set into a curving concrete monument, which squats uncomfortably on a small patch of grass in “Intrepid Park” by the shadow of a monolithic warehouse, containing over 3 million cases of wine, and owned by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. Four flags flutter forlornly there in celebration of the shoreline’s more unconventional wartime history. Then, this strange encampment, established in December 1941, teemed with all manner of secret activities, serving both as a sophisticated signals center and also, more notoriously, as the first training school for spies on North American soil. Techniques of sabotage, of how to kill with a single blow of the knife or blind a man with a box of matches, were all part of the syllabus of Camp X recruits, who also learned how to use codes, write with secret ink, and interrogate prisoners.160 There, so legend has it, Ian Fleming learned many of the tricks he would later use in his James Bond books.†††

  By the time Dahl arrived, the exploding rats and the cyanide pills had all been put away because, although it still functioned as a signals center, Camp X no longer dealt in espionage training. Now it was little more than a secure storage location for the BSC records. As the war in Europe had begun to draw to its close, Stephenson had decided that it was too risky for his papers, with their incriminating evidence of illegal British operations in America, to remain on U.S. soil, so in 1944, the entire archive had been packed up from Rockefeller Center and shipped up to Oshawa, by dead of night and under armed convoy, in “some sort of wonderful security truck with an escort,”161 as Dahl later recalled.

  Initially, Stephenson had asked an academic historian to write the book, but he found this version too pedantic. He wanted a more glamorous celebration of his achievements left to posterity, so he asked two other of his employees—Dahl and a journalist called Tom Hill—to make the history more racy and readable. It was not an easy task and Dahl’s heart was not in it. He spent about three months there avoiding his task, playing the odd round of golf and getting “quite sunburned”162 walking along the shore of the lake. Wading through a mass of signals and summaries was not Roald’s idea of how to celebrate the defeat of Germany. And the run-down Genosha Hotel in Oshawa was a long way from the glamour of Hollywood, New York and Washington. An occasional evening of luxury in Parkwood as a guest of Robert Samuel McLaughlin, the local grandee who was the first president of General Motors of Canada, may have done something to alleviate his ennui and restlessness, but Dahl
found Oshawa provincial and the atmosphere of excessive secrecy at Camp X irritated him hugely. Evelyn Davis, one of the office secretaries, recalled that even when her husband Les came over to repair a broken typewriter, the writers all had to cover up all their work and stop talking.163 Dahl was also fed up with the Ontario liquor laws, which allowed him only one bottle of spirits a month. “It is very disheartening,” he complained to his mother, “and bad for one’s health.”164

  In August 1945, the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soon afterwards, Japan surrendered and the war in the Pacific came to an end. Isolated by Lake Ontario, Dahl continued to work on the BSC history. But despite the good weather and the fact that he was “browner than [he’d] ever been before, really nut brown”—he was desperate to get back to the big city. His book was due out in a few months and he was looking for fresh challenges. His sister Asta wrote to him that she had been posted to Norway with the WAAFs and he considered going out to join her—particularly when he saw a job advertised for an assistant air attaché in Oslo. In the end he decided not to apply because he “couldn’t face being in uniform all my life.”165 So he “copped out”166 of Camp X and returned to New York. Dahl was later dismissive of his three months in Oshawa. “I wrote a little bit of crap,” he told Bill Macdonald, “and then thought, ‘Christ, I’m not going to do this, it’s an historian’s job.’ And I called Bill [Stephenson] and I said, ‘I’m packing this in, I can’t write.’ And he said, ‘Okay, come on back.’ And that was it.”167

  Or was it? There remains a slight possibility that other factors influenced Dahl in his decision to abandon his work in Canada. In early 1993, Dahl’s daughter Ophelia was contacted by Liz Drake, the wife of a former Canadian soldier. She claimed to have evidence of sinister activities carried out on behalf of BSC in Scotland, which involved the torture of returning Canadian raiders from Occupied France. This torture, she alleged, had been carried out by British marines so that Britain would have “toughened troops ready should Germany occupy the UK.” Drake believed that, while writing the history, Dahl had stumbled across the evidence of this “Black War” and had been so “revolted and appalled”168 by what he read that he asked to be released from his duties. But while she was able to produce evidence that these alleged brutalities had indeed taken place, and circumstantial detail relating them to BSC, Drake was unable to produce anything concrete that directly linked Dahl’s withdrawal from writing the Camp X history to this aspect of BSC’s work. Nevertheless, it was an intriguing conjecture. BSC’s brief was to break rules, to fight a “dirty war,” and that is what they did. There was almost certainly a great deal of unpleasant and depressing material in those archives that might well have contributed to Roald’s reluctance to complete his task, while the stories he would write after Over to You would be darker, more cynical and far less lyrical in tone than their predecessors.