What gave Dahl the most pleasure, however, was a congratulatory letter he received from Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. Perkins was a living legend in the American publishing world—“the king of all the editors,” as Dahl would later describe him. A diminutive figure, who “invariably wore his trilby hat on in the office,”17 Perkins was revered by the authors he published, who included Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. His letter concentrated on one of Dahl’s most lyrical stories, Death of an Old, Old Man, which describes an elaborate aerial combat in which a young pilot is killed. Perkins admired its economy, its precision, and declared that “as for the fight, nothing I ever read gave me a better sense of how it is done, and what it is like.”18 He expressed great interest in publishing a novel, should Dahl ever write one.
Before leaving the United States, Dahl had already decided that his next project would indeed be a novel and that it would be based on his beloved gremlins. But this would not be a book for children; it would be something “very different,”19 much darker and more apocalyptic: a critique of the savage nature of humanity and the first novel to address the destructive power of the atom bomb. His own antiwar stance had been slowly evolving throughout 1944–45. Two of his short stories, Death of an Old, Old Man and They Shall Not Grow Old, were considered so negative that they could not be published until the war was formally over, while his final flying story, Someone Like You, was a biting meditation on the consequences of killing for the psychology of the flyer. “I keep thinking to myself, shall I jink a little,” says the prematurely aged protagonist. “Shall I swerve a fraction to one side, then my bombs will fall on someone else. I keep thinking, whom shall I make them fall on; whom shall I kill tonight.”20 The solution for this guilt-stricken pilot is the melancholy oblivion of alcohol. Dahl had tried that himself as a means of dealing with some of his wartime demons. Now he tried something else. He turned his angst, which Ann Watkins was describing as increasingly “melodramatic and bloody,”21 into rage and satire.
The gremlins were transformed. No longer creatures of whimsy, they metamorphosed into something altogether more sinister and evil: twisted, deformed versions of the trolls of Dahl’s childhood, living underground, and possessing faces that were “weird and frightening with a deathless, ageless expression in the small black, lidless eyes, with a cunning twist about the small, thick-lipped mouth.” The female gremlins, or Fifinellas, liberated from the bland insouciance with which Disney had characterized them, evolved from pert doe-eyed minxes into grotesque fiends, “bald-headed and ugly as hell … worse, far worse than the male because the female of any type is always more scheming, cunning, jealous and relentless than the male.”22 As they gleefully willed the human race to destroy itself so that they could take the planet over, Dahl confessed to his agent that the world he had created was “horrifying adult.”23
World War III was more quick and sudden than either of its predecessors. It lasted only a few months. But the new weapon worked beautifully and the destruction was great. … The population of the world was cut considerably during that short time. And deep down below the ground the Gremlins heard the distant whoof and roar of huge explosions; they felt the earth tremble. … A wave of excitement rippled through the whole community. “There they go again!” they shouted exultantly to one another as they listened to the faraway roar of the bombings overhead. … “But it’s better this time. It’s quicker this time. Better and quicker, better and quicker, better and quicker.” … Impatiently they waited to see how great the destruction had been and whether the killing was complete.24
While he was writing the book, Dahl’s misanthropy seemed to grow exponentially. His view of the atomic bomb as a terrifying agent of destruction was reinforced when, at the end of August 1946, he read John Hersey’s article on Hiroshima, which took over almost an entire issue of The New Yorker. Hersey’s pared-down factual description of the effects of the bomb—which killed 100,000 people—on the lives of just six individuals made a deep impression on Dahl.25 However, instead of the cool, detached reserve that had characterized his short story writing, he was determined instead to unleash a grand rhetorical tirade against the ordinary man, the “ground person” and “the bullshit in which he wallows.”26 It was dangerous territory. Dahl’s ability to see himself as a detached, sometimes godlike figure, wandering the imaginative territory of the skies, and critical of those less free-thinking than he was, had been exacerbated both by his crash and by his combat experiences as a pilot. Both made him feel set apart—liberated from the earthbound existence of most of his fellow mortals. In an unpublished short story from 1945 called World Leaders, he had God send Zail, a dead airman, back to earth to remind a congress of presidents and prime ministers of their ultimate insignificance. The airman is arrested and brought to the leaders.
It was then that they saw his eyes. When they looked at him it was impossible for them to see anything except his eyes. They were deep blue, the color of the sky in summer, and behind each one there was a small white flame which burned steadily and with great brightness, for they were the eyes of a thousand men who had been killed in the air. The courage, the truth and the suffering of each of those men and the strength which this gave to him was reflected in his eyes. … They saw in those eyes a strength which was so great that it was beyond their understanding; then as they looked there was a pale shining around the place where Zail stood and his face was like the face of an angel.
Zail takes the world leaders on a ride in a supernatural plane, “made entirely of glass.”27 It makes no noise. They fly higher and higher and the world beneath them becomes smaller and smaller until its minuscule scale in the universe is apparent. This perception of himself as “superman” had been one of the motors that drove Dahl’s need to write, and his early short stories had often engaged with such detachment, but in a fragmentary, allusive manner. Much was left unsaid as his eye focused on tiny details and minutiae. Now he was moving beyond the cameo and painting his stories on a bigger canvas—a canvas where his sentiments and judgments would be more overt, where his feelings could not so easily be controlled, and where his readers were likely to be less forgiving.
His own politics at the time were complex. Like many from his background, combat had turned him from an instinctive conservative into someone who felt that the suffering of war demanded a more just and transformative peace. It is not clear which way he cast his vote—if he voted at all—in the May 1945 General Election, which swept Winston Churchill’s Conservatives from office and brought Clement Attlee’s reforming Socialists to power, but it is more than likely Dahl was initially a supporter of the new government. His friend Dennis Pearl remembered how far he had moved from the politics of his schooldays at Repton, where every single boy in the class supported the Conservatives,28 and where he wrote to his mother that the school had invited a “horrible Labour Man” down for the annual speech day.29 The time spent with Henry Wallace and Charles Marsh had changed him. He had drunk deep from their cup of idealistic reform, and believed that the time was right for a new world order. Writing his paper Post War Air Lines in 1943, Dahl had concluded that “the more that can be done on an international basis after the war, the more likelihood there will be of obtaining a lasting peace.”30
This internationalism inclined him toward the left, and, as his friend Lesley Pares, her married name now O’Malley, remembered, his views at that time were “really quite socialist.”31 But in reality Dahl was a radical, advocating world government along with Wallace, Einstein, and his hero, Winston Churchill, whose chilling vision of an iron curtain descending over Europe dividing West from East was now becoming reality.‡ Dahl’s attitude to Soviet Russia remained hawkish. It was not the Marxist ideology that appalled him so much as its brutal, violent reality. “I’m not frightened of communism,” he declared. “I’m frightened of war. Not frightened of it. Just appalled by it and its coming.”32 As he watched the international situation develop from his home in the Buckinghamshire countryside, th
e thought of nuclear holocaust preoccupied him to the point of obsession. He discussed the subject at length with Dennis Pearl when he returned home on leave from the army, and he frequently wrote to Charles Marsh about it. However, he was not about to abandon his decision to come home. “I am not yet restless to return to America,” he told Claudia Haines. “I think Europe is the place to be right now. The turmoil is bewildering, but there seems to be a centre to the whirlpool and if you watch it you can see where things are going.”33 Writing to Marsh three months later, it was only a question of when, not if, the inevitable hostilities would break out. “Informed London opinion predicts war in the spring of 1949 or spring of 1950—not this year,” he concluded.34 This deepening fatalism about world affairs was reflected too in a heightened pessimism about human nature itself. “Oh dear the world is really a thick thing,” he lamented. “There always has been war before in the world and I suppose there always will be. To try and stop one nation among many from misbehaving periodically is just as difficult as trying to stop crime in a country. You can have policemen and prisons and electrocutions, but still there will always be a crime.”35
Charles Marsh tried to reassure him. “I am sorry you are so sad,” he wrote, urging Roald not to be indignant or pessimistic but to “fight for harmony world wide.” Marsh deplored the fact that the statesmen of the world wanted to “step up in front of the picture with atomic bombs in both hands,” but he argued that the best policy was to face the coming storm with “intelligent gaiety.”36 That, he maintained, was Henry Wallace’s approach. Roald had recently told Claudia and Charles that he too was uncertain whether to be “gloomy or gay,”37 but this time his response was scathing in the extreme. He likened Wallace to Neville Chamberlain, “his equally good-natured and well-meaning English colleague, who went to Munich with his umbrella,”38 and told the Marshes that the former vice president had been making such “a fool of himself” that he had not bothered to contact him on Wallace’s recent visit to London.39 If Charles went on kissing the Russians like Wallace, Roald told his friend, sooner or later they would bite off his tongue.40
This cynicism could lead him to perceptions that were prophetic. He anticipated, for example, a form of contemporary urban terrorism in his short story Nineteen Fifty What? about two shadowy diplomats, who arrive in Washington to inform the president that they have planted atom bombs in fifty-three American cities and will detonate them unless the United States withdraws its troops from Japan.41 But much of his indignation was based on what he perceived as the injustice of the immediate postwar situation. In a letter to Marsh, admitting that communism might “ultimately be good for the Russian people”—if not for those of America and England—he contrasted the “noble men,” Marsh and Wallace, with the “ruthless men,” who will always make sure the former “get kicked in the teeth.”42 It was this situation that made the loss of life in the recent war so poignant and that appeared to be leading to the imminent destruction of all he loved. The inevitability of nuclear war, he told Marsh, was “the saddest goddam thought, the saddest, and craziest thought that it is possible to think.”43
Some Time Never, as his gremlins novel was eventually titled, was Dahl’s response to this situation: an attempt not only to write a grand, significant satire about the burning issues of the time, but also a novel that engaged with his own existential struggles. Subtitled “A Fable for Supermen,” it begins in familiar territory—in 1940, with a lyrical evocation of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. It opens, like so many of his early stories, with a controlled description of pilot apprehension, which moves “like the point of a cold needle … slowly over the skin of the solar plexus,” and evolves into an anxiety that is “deep and dreadful … as though everything, all the warmth and the blood and the entrails had been pumped out of your stomach, leaving it empty and ice-cold.”44 This time, however, the apprehension turns out to be more than a prelude to a dogfight or a bombing raid, but a symptom of the terminal distress that flying itself has wrought on one pilot’s soul. It is manifested in a battle between caring and indifference, involvement and detachment, connection and isolation: the conflict, as Dahl put it, “between the wish to care and love, and the desire to disbelieve and to forget.” The struggle between these two opposing forces—which “fought and clattered in the hollow of your skull,” in a battle which “neither won, yet both won all the time”—is the recurrent theme of the novel, and it is clear from early on that nihilism will predominate.45
Then it was that you pressed forward against your harness-straps and wanted to jump up in the cockpit and shout at the top of your voice at all those little people on the world below, to tell them all you knew and felt, a hundred true and terrifying things about themselves; to tell them first, to tell them quickly how you loved them all, oh how you loved them all and how you hate them because of that; how you loved them and hated them, each single one of them and especially the tight packed crowds of sallow faces in the Undergrounds and the patient mournful faces of the women in the queues and the vacant empty faces of the soldiers in the streets; to tell them that, and then, to tell them all the other things that seemed so suddenly to come to you; to tell them—and this became the burden of your song—that nothing mattered, nothing, nothing, nothing, not fire nor plague nor murder nor any of the million little things that rule their lives; that henceforth they must not care about the price of gin, the smell of onions, the dying of a wife, a pimple on the cheek, the blast of bombs or sudden death; they must not care … simply because such matters did not count … nothing counted … that was the simple truth; for the sum total of all things, of living, loving, hating, dying, adds up, when the sum is carefully done, to nothing, to precisely nothing.46
The tortured protagonist of the first part of the book is Peternip, a pilot with many of Dahl’s own characteristics, including a face that is “long and pointed, shaped like an egg, domed on top, pointed at the base,” a limping gait that “reminded one somehow of the swing of a maladjusted pendulum,” and a passion for the music of Bach and Palestrina.47 His wartime experience directly mirrored Dahl’s own, as did the nature of his psychological scars. Both felt prematurely aged. Both felt emotionally blunted. Both felt crippled because they could no longer fly. Roald expressed his own anxieties about this in the letter to Ann Watkins’s writer husband, Roger Burlingame, where he suggested that his indifference (which he was trying desperately to overcome) was probably “something to do with flying and the speed at which you fly, and the taking of your danger in small concentrated doses, and the height at which you fly, and the movement, particularly the movement.…”48 Now, robbed of this life-giving ecstatic motion, Peternip is sadder and more silent. His reasonable exterior disguises “a black despair, a deep and certain fatalism which made him impatient with the great importance which all men attached to their own individual lives.” Loathing politicians and “idealists with their oppressive sincerity,” he now “despised all human beings, himself included.” And this despair, this loss of rapture and fantasy, will remain uncured. “A solemn person, whose quick and distant eyes told of a mind behind the eyes which travelled often in remote outlandish places far away,”49 Peternip is killed suddenly, halfway through the book, outside the Queen’s Hall after a performance of Brahms’s Violin Concerto, when the bomb that launches World War Three hits Central London.
That first atomic war passes swiftly as the novel transforms itself into a futuristic parable about the destruction of humanity. The reader sees the destruction of the human race only from the gremlins’ point of view and particularly from that of their “Leader”—a comic distortion of a wartime dictator, whose passion for oratory leads him to study the collected speeches of Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln, which he keeps alongside a copy of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, whose dysfunctional utopia shares certain similarities with Dahl’s Gremlin kingdom—most notably a loathing of machines. Here, satire takes hold. Much of the second half of the book is written in the form of a speech, made
by the Leader, on the objectionable moral condition of the human world above him. The principal object of his (and no doubt Dahl’s) scorn is not the political system but humanity itself, which has collectively willed this situation into existence. “No single group of individuals was responsible for making lasting peace impossible upon the earth,” the Leader declares. “The blame lay only in the nature of the human being himself.”50
In a tirade of almost Swiftian comic ire, the Leader gleefully enumerates his catalogue of humanity’s follies and vices. Mankind is “a mountain of conceit and selfishness … a creature who possesses more than any other living creature, wisdom, but more than any other creature he also possesses greed and avarice and a love of power.” At the heart of humankind’s problems is an obsession with money—the Gremlins describe it as “coin-collecting”—and a fixation on national self-interest, which the Leader likens to a plague. “Nationalifilis,” as he comically dubs the epidemic, is “by far the most serious and unpleasant disease from which the human suffers.” To prevent it, one would have to make every child in the world blind and deaf, so that “the passages through which the germs enter the body would be blocked.” All manner of other human activities are scrutinized and found wanting. Even the physician is stung, leaping from the page as a sanctimonious demon, “pompous and patronising. … One can almost see the drops of self-adulation dripping from the corners of his mouth. He is the greatest hypocrite of all time.”51
Storyteller Page 31