Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  Through the thick forests of anger and bitterness that often threaten to overwhelm the landscape of Some Time Never, a gentler comedy sometimes emerges—particularly when Dahl chooses to settle old scores. “Intelligent men do not take permanent jobs in the armed forces when they choose their careers,” he declares, lampooning the six incompetent Air Marshalls responsible for defending humanity against the Gremlin menace. And then, deftly, he shows us why.

  “The situation,” said the Chief of the Air Marshalls again, “is serious. What the hell are we going to do about it?”

  “About what?” said the one who was excavating his ear.

  “About Gremlins, of course.”

  “We must fix them,” said the one who was scratching his back.

  “We must take immediate action,” said the one who was cleaning his nails.

  “We must issue the necessary orders,” said the one who was rustling a bag of coughdrops.

  “Absolutely,” said the one who was looking out of the window and thinking of his lunch.

  “Agreed,” said the Chief. He was more intelligent than the others. “But what shall we do first, Sir Hubert,” he said, looking sternly at his deputy, “what do you suggest as the first step?”

  “Have lunch,” said Sir Hubert who was noted everywhere for his snap decisions.

  With that the conference broke up.52

  The novel had begun optimistically, with a quote from the Greek speechwriter Isocrates appealing for a political plan, “which will forever put an end to our hostilities and unite us by the lasting ties of mutual affection and fidelity.” It ends in a horrible conflagration of atomic and biological weaponry, as humanity is entirely extinguished.

  In his imagination’s eye he saw the white-hot flashes in the sky bursting in carefully calculated patterns, covering a continent, scorching the whole face of a continent. He saw the faces of continents scorched black and dry so that nothing lived or grew upon them. He saw the great wind which followed the heat coming down upon the cities, crushing them flat upon the ground, tumbling the towns and piling up the villages into small untidy mounds of stone. He saw salvo upon salvo of huge thin missiles shaped like tall trees shooting up from the surface of the earth in the Eastern Hemisphere, up into the stratosphere and across the world at five thousand miles an hour; he saw them falling vertically downward to burst one over every city of Europe; he saw them bursting and he saw appearing clouds of deadly Virus Mist which floated a while and fell slowly down upon the heads of those below.53

  There is one final, almost whimsical, apocalypse. As the Gremlins emerge from their millions of burrows to occupy the surface of the earth, they begin to disappear, to vanish like phantoms at dawn. The planet is left behind, poisoned and devastated. But life itself continues. “Millions and millions of minute living organisms” remain behind to offer some hope for the future. Yet it will be a future without men and women. Dahl’s vision of a “mighty monstrous Creature-Earth,” for whom mankind is “just a fleeting irritation … a great indestructible Creature-Earth, who woke one morning not so very long ago and felt the light touch of a million footsteps on its face and frowned and lay still and said ‘ah well, they’ll soon be gone,’ ”54 anticipates by at least thirty years James Lovelock’s “Gaia” theories of the planet as a vibrant, self-regulating organism of its own. It is just one of many original and arresting images that adorn this extraordinary, undervalued and visionary novel. Dahl’s daughter Ophelia certainly believed that the book revealed much of her father’s deepest, darkest feelings. “He was always very unconflicted about the fact that he felt that human beings were capable of really monstrous things,” she told me. “And I think in writing Some Time Never he was writing about the capacity that we as humans have to destroy ourselves. I think he was trying to say something about what he’d seen, about the futility of war.”55

  Writing it wore Roald down. His back pain aggravated his melancholy, and after only a month back in England, he told Ann Watkins that he was starting to feel “morose” and that he missed everyone in New York.56 In June 1946, he, his mother and Asta—who had just returned from her posting to Norway—moved to Grange Farm, a larger house on a hill in nearby Great Missenden. There, Roald converted a cottage in the grounds into a writing studio. Labor restrictions forced him to do most of the decorating himself. Mrs. Moore, another pet magpie, lightened the atmosphere somewhat by treading in a bucket of paint and following him around with “white boots,” but nevertheless he found the experience “very moribunding.”57 Often the book seemed close to crushing him. In October, he wrote gloomily to Ann Watkins that he was feeling “no love whatsoever” for this “bastard world,” and that he knew exactly who were responsible for this. “I loathe, despise and abhor everything to do with the phukking Gremlins,” he told her.58 He had become almost like his alter ego Peternip, whose brain was “clogged and saturated with the impossible and the fantastic.”59 On top of that, he was getting very little professional support either from friends or family. Asta, for example, who had been hired to type the manuscript, told her brother with relish that she thought the story “just didn’t work” and that Roald was writing “absolute baloney.”60 As he struggled to complete the novel that Ann Watkins, Maxwell Perkins and others believed was in him, Dahl must have felt he was looking deep into an abyss, wondering whether, like his hero Peternip, “no man can lose confidence and all his faith unless he lose all of himself as well.”61 He was on his own. Those who believed in him most were 3,000 miles away. Two things helped keep him sane. Listening to music. And his dogs.

  In December 1946, Dahl completed the “bastard book.”62 Later that day, he took one of his greyhound bitches to be inseminated and fantasized about the life of its canine mate. “What a lovely life it must be to be an expensive and well cared-for stud-dog,” he speculated to Ann Watkins, adding jokily that it would of course be nice “to have a say in the choice of bitches.”63 Of his own love life at this time it is hard to form a clear picture except that there was no strong emotional commitment to anyone. Other than the “girlfriend who types,” his letters to his transatlantic confidants, Charles Marsh, Claudia Haines and Ann Watkins, reveal nothing.§ Alfhild remembered her brother regularly going up to London to meet “call girls,” dating a pretty actress called Ann Darcy, and having “something quite serious” with the widow of a man who had won the VC during the war, to whom he gave the bracelet that had been a present to him from Millicent Rogers.64 But, as so often with affairs of the heart, Dahl played his emotional cards very close to his chest.

  His writing does, however, hold out one or two tantalizing clues. In the novel that followed Some Time Never, he attempted, unusually for him, to describe several realistic sexual encounters. The principal character in Fifty Thousand Frogskins, the swindler Gordon Hawes, is a postwar Don Juan, whose view of women is callous and functional. His attitude contrasts markedly with that of his dimwitted but well-meaning sidekick, Sidney Cubbage. The sex-starved Cubbage, who is desperate for some action with his sweetheart Clarice, thinks women exist on a higher dimension. The sophisticated Hawes disagrees. There’s “nothing respectable” about women, he bluntly tells his friend. “Every woman is a whore at heart.” Hawes talks about “sexwork” and “womanwork,” and keeps body hair from each of his conquests in a bureau, “like an egg-collector’s drawers, each in a cellophane envelope.” He is drawn to seduction, as he is drawn to making money, regarding “hunting down women” as his entertainment. Remove the exaggeration and the fetishism and this view may reflect something of Dahl’s own attitude to sex—at least at this period of his life. Hawes at one point criticizes Cubbage for “glorifying copulation,” arguing as Dahl himself might have done that in reality the act is “messy, slightly acrobatic and very undignified. It is indecent,” he continues, “even between a bishop and his wife. … You try doing it with your wife in a public park. You’ll soon find out whether it’s indecent or not.”65

  A few days after he had completed t
he manuscript of Some Time Never, Dahl was admitted into the Military Hospital for Head Injuries, near Wheatley, where he spent the Christmas of 1946, because his back pain was so intense that he could no longer walk. His doctors now recommended further surgery on the spine. He was not by nature a complaining patient, but the comparison between the austerity of a British military institution and the luxury of the Scott and White Clinic in Texas was shocking. No longer one of the lucky few, with private room and state-of-the-art service, now he was just one of the many whose new socialist health care, though free, was very far from luxurious. Moreover, Britain was facing the worst winter in living memory—with extreme cold and fuel shortages so severe that even the hospital could not get enough coal for its boilers.

  “Things not so bright here. … Been pretty ill,” Roald told Claudia Haines in a scrawled note that makes plain how painful even the act of writing had become. The hospital was grim—“a remote place, very hot and very cold, very close to mad people, very silent.”66 With Ann Watkins he attempted to make light of the situation. “Of all the godforsaken places in which to be, this is it. … There’s no heating because there’s no fuel, and the room is as cold as the tip of an Eskimo’s tool. I am flat on the back and floating on a haze of morphine and faraway pain and next week I think an operation on the spine. I do not give a bugger what they do so long as I can sit up in my right senses and get on with some work. … Pardon this illegible, unintelligible impossible scribble, but I’m sort of writing on the ceiling if you see what I mean.”67 Three days later, “angry” and “half-crazy with pain,”68 he got into a fight with the editor of the magazine that had published his first story.

  Before going into the hospital, and while trying to finish Some Time Never, Dahl had written an “interlude,”69 a piece of high-class reportage about Gordon Butcher, a humble farmworker, who had accidentally plowed up a vast hoard of Roman silver in the Suffolk village of Mildenhall, and his deceitful conniving boss, who secreted the silver away, telling Butcher that it was only pewter. It was a tale of avarice and innocence that, Dahl recalled, sent “shivers of electricity all the way down my legs to the soles of my feet”70 when he came across it in the newspapers. He went up to Suffolk to meet the protagonists, and a few days later the story was complete. Watkins sold it to the Saturday Evening Post, who paid $1,000 for it. However, as so often, the magazine found the article overlong and proposed a number of cuts and changes.

  Dahl wrote back furiously, arguing that a “clumsy editorial sausage-machine” was destroying many of his “carefully-planned little touches,” and reducing his own “individual style” to generic journalese.71 Ann Watkins, who knew how much Dahl needed the money, tried to smooth over the situation. “Darling,” she wrote, “what in the name of heaven, is the use of kicking over the traces and making enemies of editors?”72 But for once she was unable to change his mind. There was an impasse. Stuart Rose, the Post’s editor, refused to publish the piece without cuts and Dahl, notwithstanding his pain and discomfort, stubbornly refused to sanction them. Rose eventually asked Dahl to return the money he had been advanced. Watkins hoped she would be able to sell the piece elsewhere. But no one would take it. Then came another blow. Over to You, which had been published in Britain a month earlier, received disappointing reviews—at least by comparison to those it had received in the United States. Increasingly, Roald’s future seemed to be hanging on the fate of his ambitious new novel, which he despatched with trepidation to Watkins for her comments when he was discharged from hospital.

  A year earlier, Dahl had terminated his relationship with Reynal & Hitchcock, the publishers of Over to You. Irritated that publication had been postponed and that the book had consequently missed the lucrative Christmas market, he told Ann Watkins that he thought Curtice Hitchcock “a goddammed liar,” adding—with uncharacteristic diplomacy—that although he was through with the firm, there was “no point in being rude at this stage.”73 Hitchcock’s unexpected death five months later, aged only fifty-four, simply reinforced a decision Dahl had already made: Maxwell Perkins, and Scribner’s, would publish his novel.¶ He was profoundly flattered by the attention of the fiction editor who had discovered Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, and the dynamic Perkins’s confidence in his ability was a vital support to his own self-belief.

  Shortly after Roald left the hospital, in January 1947, Perkins sent the convalescing author a long letter, sympathizing over his spine operation, gossiping about their mutual friend “Old Hem,” and asking eagerly about the novel, which he had heard was almost complete.74 Dahl, still in great physical pain and smarting from the rejections of The Mildenhall Treasure, was slowly revising his manuscript in the light of Watkins’s comments and did not want to submit the book to Scribner’s until he felt it was ready. These changes took him another five months. The first person to read it at Scribner’s was Perkins’s close associate and contemporary, the poet John Hall Wheelock, whose protective, almost paternal attitude to Roald mirrored that of Perkins. Wheelock was immediately enthusiastic about the novel, agreeing with Ann Watkins that it was “an important piece of work,”75 and describing it as a contemporary satire in the mold of Jonathan Swift. He wrote to Dahl effusively, describing the “deep impression” the book had made on him, and concluding that it was “a difficult piece of work beautifully carried out.”76 Wheelock added that a copy had been sent to Perkins’s home in New Canaan, Connecticut, and that the great man was now in the middle of reading it. Dahl waited anxiously for his verdict.

  It never came. Two days after he had received the manuscript, Perkins contracted viral pneumonia and died. He was sixty-two years old. The manuscript of Some Time Never—possibly the last thing he ever read—was left on his desk with his notes by its side. Dahl was devastated when he heard the news. A week later, Wheelock wrote to him, thanking him for his letter of condolence and informing him that Max had been intending to tell Dahl of his “admiration for the Gremlin book.” Whee-lock added that he too had “the greatest confidence” in Dahl’s talent and assured him that Scribner’s were “very lucky to be your publishers.”77 Celebrating the novel’s “outrageous fantasy and wit,” he proposed one or two small changes, mostly where he felt the reader’s credulity had been strained too far. In doing so, he compared the complex balance of fantastical satire and earthy reality to blowing up a balloon to the point where it is just about to burst but has not yet done so. Still, Wheelock admitted that publishing the novel would be a gamble because it didn’t fit into any of Scribner’s “usual categories” and might be difficult to sell. “I don’t see how it can fail to get splendid press and real recognition from people who know the best when they see it,” he continued, but “its conclusions, which have terrifying conviction, will not make it perhaps popular reading.”78

  Dahl had wanted the book illustrated by Mervyn Peake, but was persuaded that it should be published without illustrations. Wheelock believed in the novel, and in the “freshness and vigor”79 of Dahl’s writing, but his conscientious, thoughtful support was no match for Perkins’s freewheeling energy and optimism. Moreover, Wheelock himself was overwhelmed, not only by grief at the loss of his closest friend, whom he had known since they were students together at Harvard forty years earlier, but by the volume of work that fell to him following Perkins’s death. He simply did not have time to give the manuscript the thorough editing it needed. Dahl may have sensed this, for the self-confidence he showed in dealing with The Mildenhall Treasure is entirely absent from his correspondence about Some Time Never. One senses uncertainty and nervousness at every turn. Indeed, many of his letters about the novel both to Wheelock and to Ann Watkins seem to invite comment and criticism that was not forthcoming from either of them. His anxieties were doubtless further heightened when, despite the relative commercial success of Over to You, which had just earned back its British advance, and had also narrowly missed winning the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Prize,** Hamish Hamilton wrote to him to say that they found the
novel “a disappointment”80 and informed him that they did not want to publish it in the United Kingdom.

  This reaction was probably not entirely unexpected. Dahl was acutely aware that he lacked a powerful advocate in London. No publisher there responded to him with anything like the warmth and support he received from Hitchcock, Perkins or Wheelock. Nor could he find a representative who really believed in him and wanted to launch his UK career. He had regarded his first UK agent, David Higham, as a “dirty old bastard,”81 and fired him within weeks of his return from the United States. Peter Watt, whom he hired as a replacement on Ann Watkins’s recommendation, was now proving to be equally disappointing. Watt was usually “too busy” to see him and Dahl was constantly made aware how low he stood in the agency’s pecking order. Eventually, his feelings boiled over into anger. “Do you know,” he told Watkins, “I sent Peter Watt the manuscript [of Some Time Never] and he didn’t read it. He wrote back and said ‘My reader reports …’ So I answered in a fury and said, ‘For God’s sake, man, don’t you read the stuff you get?’ And he replied, ‘No, I haven’t time.’ A bloody fine agent, Peter Watt.” Watt and “his entourage of decrepit and important old men,” Dahl concluded, were about as much use to him “as a group of matrons at a tea-party.”82

  It was a massive contrast to the way he was treated by Watkins and her team, who were prepared to do almost anything for him. For years they acted as an unofficial purchasing house for him, sending him everything he asked for—whether model aircraft for his young nephew Nicholas, chocolates for his family, outsize shoes for his six-foot-tall sister Asta, or regular supplies of his favorite Dixon Ticonderoga HB pencils and lined yellow legal pads. This last tradition began in 1946, when Dahl complained about having to write with postwar utility pencils: using them was “like writing with a piece of charcoal on a lump of gravel.”83 The pencils and yellow pads rapidly become talismanic for him. The costs of their purchase and shipping were simply deducted from his next royalty statements.