It took Dahl more than a decade to find anyone in London who believed in him professionally as much as many people did in the United States. Despite the fact that he was an injured pilot, whose only civilian work experience was as a junior manager with Shell, he had immediately felt part of a literary milieu in New York and Washington. He hobnobbed with Hemingway and Lillian Hellman. He got to know C. S. Forester, Ben Travers and Noël Coward, and was welcomed in their Washington and Manhattan circles. The Americans took the handsome, uniformed, opinionated outsider to their hearts. In conformist Britain, and out of uniform, things were different. There, Dahl seemed peripheral rather than exotic, a “misfit,” as his niece Anna Corrie described him.84 He had not been to university. Yet he was neither working class nor an eccentric aristocrat. He was classless. He was political without a party affiliation. He loved good wine and glamorous company, yet he lived in a country cottage with his mother surrounded by a menagerie of animals. On top of that, he lacked a certain literary sophistication. And he knew it. Despite his apparent confidence, to his agents Ann Watkins and her successor Sheila St. Lawrence he would admit privately that, for many years, he saw himself as an apprentice to his craft. He felt comfortable revealing his vulnerability to them. And, in return, both women nurtured his talent with warmth and affection. Dahl repaid this handsomely. While he would change publishers regularly in future years, he remained loyal to the Watkins Agency—even after Watkins and St. Lawrence had retired and he felt the firm was being badly run. He never forgot his debt to the ancient dame with fuzzy gray hair, who supported him when times were tough and whom he celebrated as “the only one who has never been too busy to see me.”85
This susceptibility to criticism was probably the reason why, for a man whose opinions were usually forthright and fearless, Dahl rarely reviewed the work of others or contributed to literary debate. In Washington, he had dipped his toe in the water when the Saturday Review asked him to review Desert Episode, a novel by George Greenfield about the war in North Africa. Dahl did not like it. He told the editor that he had chosen to say “practically nothing” about the book in his review because he thought it was so bad. Instead, he offered a revealing aside on what he himself thought made a writer: “When I opened [the book],” he wrote, “I tried to forget what it had said on the cover about the author having won most of the school colours for games and how later he had won a Double First in English Literature. Especially I tried to forget about the Double First in English Literature because I can imagine how difficult it would be to write a novel after that.”86†† Matthew Arnold’s rustic ideal had encouraged his belief that university education blunted the sensibilities, and that his own autodidactic “gipsy” learning was far preferable to anything a university might offer. Making a fire-balloon, putting a penny on a railway line and letting the train flatten it, or chasing a fire engine to see what disaster lay in store at the end of the journey kept him alive and alert. He felt his responses were fresher, his ear quicker and his eye sharper as a result of his life outside the groves of academe. These were values he transferred to his own children—and at least two of them came somewhat to regret this. It was only shortly before her father died in 1990, for example, that Ophelia, aged twenty-six, began her degree. Her elder sister Tessa, whose own writing career stalled around the time of her father’s death, now wishes that her father had encouraged her to be more academic.87
What Dahl never fully acknowledged was that this “gipsy” learning made him feel vulnerable as well as strong. And the tension between those two extremes probably goes some way toward explaining his combative and often self-destructive need to be a literary outsider. Talking to him over lunch or dinner, he was usually more likely to discuss music, politics, wine, medicine, horticulture or painting than a novel he had just read. Music in particular was always a vital part of his existence. In 1947, a press release described his main hobby as “listening for hours to his favourite symphonies, played on an elaborate built-in recording machine.”88 Just after the war he may even have toyed with writing about music professionally. Peternip, his alter ego in Some Time Never, becomes a music critic after he is demobbed, while Roald’s own wartime copy of Cecil Gray’s History of Music is filled with the kind of scribbled marginalia that Peternip himself might have penned—thoughts about art, the soul, intellect and the future of Western music, jumbled in amongst a number of more schoolmasterly comments such as “Tosh,” “No” and “Wrong … Purely Provocative.” It was a love that would last for the rest of his life. A guest arriving for lunch or dinner in the 1980s would usually find Gipsy House echoing to Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Bach or Mozart. Roald happily enthused to me about his preferences for one composer over another, and Sir David Weatherall, the hematologist who looked after him in his final illness, was immensely impressed by his detailed knowledge of Mozart operas.89 But with books it was different.
His interest in other people’s writing could often seem halfhearted. I once asked him about other writers he admired and he responded in guarded generalities, praising the elegance and narrative flair of his heroes: Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene. He told me that he found John Le Carré’s style convoluted and explained how much he valued clarity and simplicity of expression.‡‡ But he was reluctant to go into details. I was disappointed at his evasiveness, but struck also by how detached he seemed from most contemporary fiction. He thought much of it too self-absorbed, declaring that he would far rather read a new thriller by Elmore Leonard than something nominated for the Booker Prize. In old age, Roald sometimes made exceptions. Long before it was famous, he celebrated Thomas Harris’s thriller The Silence of the Lambs, for example. Its morbid originality and craftsmanship fascinated him. He even broke his golden rule and offered a pre-publication quote for it—as a favor to Tessa’s old friend Amanda Conquy, who worked for Harris’s publishers and had sent him the book in the hope that he might endorse it. Notoriously, too, he would get into a tussle with Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses. But these were the exceptions. On literary matters, he usually kept his head well below the parapet.
When Some Time Never was eventually published in the United States in April 1948, it met with faint praise. Roald immediately distanced himself from the novel, telling Ann Watkins that he now thought it was “a bad book.” “No-one I’ve given it to so far likes it,” he complained, speculating that it might actually do his writing career more harm than good if it were to be published in Britain.90 In May, he wrote again telling her that every review of the book “stinks to high heaven” and he was now “depressed about this writing business.”91 He was exaggerating. For while the New York Times was critical of its repetitiousness and verbosity, and critics like Bergen Evans—who would later achieve fame as the question supervisor on The $64,000 Question on TV—found the “cumbrousness of his supernatural machinery” hard going, there was praise for the moral intent of the book, and also for its lyricism and humor. Evans in particular singled out for special praise the “unquaint realism” of many of its descriptive passages.92
But nothing could disguise the fact that Some Time Never was less of a glorious rocket than a damp squib. It did not sell, nor did it cause a great controversy. Dahl’s dream of being catapulted into the realm of Hemingway and Fitzgerald failed to materialize. It was a bitter disappointment. He had put himself on the line. He had tried to write a fantastical novel of ideas. He had dug deep into his psychology and neuroses, flexing his satirical muscles to the full and penning the first published novel about the atomic bomb. But no one seemed very interested. He agreed to let Collins publish the book in the United Kingdom the following year. His editor there, Peter Wyld, left some “acrid comments” accidentally in the margin of the manuscript, which upset him, but also suggested some judicious cuts. “I feel the book was written in a mood of exuberance,” he told Dahl, and consequently suggested that it be “edited in a mood of economy.”93
Wyld’s comment was on the mark, ye
t there is little evidence that he tried actively to help his young author turn the manuscript around. And when the book appeared in Britain, it was barely noticed. The reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement on March 12, 1949, summed up the response of his colleagues when he admitted that although “Mr. Dahl can write quite vividly,” he found “the whimsical Gremlins mythology … an irritating imposition.” In Roald’s mind, this review sealed the book’s fate. He was determined to continue writing, but Some Time Never was now something he would try to forget. When the wounds from the book’s poor reception healed, the scar tissue they left behind soon became dense and impenetrable. In 1960, after the successes of his third short story collection, Kiss Kiss, he would be approached to reprint Some Time Never in paperback. His response to Sheila St. Lawrence was withering: “Why in God’s world anybody should want to paperback that ghastly book I don’t know.”94 Later still he told Ophelia that he never wanted to read it again because he thought it would make him feel “vulnerable.”95 And when Liccy once asked if she could read it, he told her that he would rather she did not. In 1971, a fan from Michigan, Mrs. J. Goldstein, wrote to him, asking where she could get hold of a copy. “It’s not worth reading,” he told her bluntly.96
The critical rejection of Some Time Never marked a turning point. From that moment on, the sensitive author/narrator, so strong a presence in all Dahl’s early fiction, began to disappear, increasingly hidden behind a mask of artifice and plot, while his exuberant sense of satirical fantasy also melted into the background. For more than a decade his stories would be characterized by a wit that was hard, brutal and often cruel. At times it would even seem that the sensitive youthful voice which had moved so many of his early readers might be lost for good.
Some Time Never also severed the direct link between writing and flying in Dahl’s fiction. Early in 1945, when he sent the manuscript of Someone Like You to Ann Watkins, he had apologized for the fact that it was “still more or less on the same old theme. … If you have a little patience,” he continued, “I shall soon get that out of my system.”97 It had taken him three years, but now he had finally done so. Yet finding a new voice was not so easy. Needing money, he experimented in journalism, writing repeatedly to Watkins asking her help in getting him work as a foreign correspondent or as a “staff reporter anywhere in the world.”98 In October 1949, he proposed that he should go out and cover the Greek Civil War, doing “human interest stories on the fighting, the ruined villages, the ruined lives, the girl soldiers, and all such things as that.”99 But because she believed in him as a fiction writer, Watkins did not play ball. Aside from The Mildenhall Treasure, his only other attempts at journalism were a piece about Kuda Bux,100 a Hindu mystic who appeared to be able to see without using his eyes, and one about the two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who mysteriously disappeared in May 1951. It was later revealed that both had been spying for the Russians and had secretly defected to the Soviet Union. This piece is intriguing because it is one of the few places where Dahl attempted seriously to explore the English social milieu in which he himself was now functioning. Curiously, although he was critical of the two spies for their “weakness,” he was not unsympathetic to their predicament.
Roald had worked with Maclean at the British Embassy in Washington, and had recognized, where others had not, that he was unstable—a habitual drunkard, who was, as Dahl put it, unable “to resolve the problem of homosexuality versus normalcy.” His sex life, however, was not the most abnormal thing about Maclean. Roald sensed, probably from personal experience, that espionage had corrupted him; that he “would probably have given anything to stop his spying, but there is never any stopping in that business once you start.” Most revealing of all was his portrayal of Maclean’s colleagues in the Foreign Office. When Maclean drunkenly declared that he was a Soviet spy while drinking with them at the Gargoyle Club in Soho, Dahl celebrated the fact that none of them denounced him, because they assumed he was joking. It was, he wrote, “a refreshing change from the howls of the witch-hunters, and the Gestapo of Senator McCarthy and all other forms of Fascism—from which the good Lord deliver us please.” On the other hand, he was also critical of the lack of imagination he saw in these weak, overeducated men—“half-successful painters with long side-burns, intellectual writers, bad musicians, queer foreign office types … who speak with contempt about everything that is normal, and try to feel strong in each other’s company. But they are not strong at all.”101
Dahl probably sensed that he would always remain an outsider to these university-educated intellectuals. He despised them for their weakness, for their lack of imagination and for the fact that they could not see further than the environment in which they always functioned.
The Foreign Office type, like his colleague in the State Department across the water, is a peculiar bird. He is a hard worker, and he is grossly underpaid for what he does. He is a man of extreme caution, watching his own position and never taking a step which might spoil his chances of promotion. He is obsequious to his superiors and contemptuous of outsiders. He is very good at Latin. But apart from that, and most importantly of all, he seems to be completely out of touch with reality. He undoubtedly still hopes, deep in his heart, that the two culprits have not gone over to Russia at all, but have either joined the Foreign Legion, or slipped into a monastery in France.102
Aside from his journalism, Dahl also began a number of creepy short stories, exploring human vices and follies. The most contrived was Foreign Intelligence, in which a mysterious émigré medic tells the narrator that he has isolated “the centre of intelligence” within the human mind and succeeded in transplanting it into the brain of a rat. A hostile government, he tells the bemused narrator, is now breeding these rats “in regiments” so that they can invade England and kill many thousands of humans in their beds with a single bite to the jugular vein. This implausible story is rendered sinister by the fact that Dahl gives the strange scientist alarmingly rodentine qualities. His head is “large, long … with a whole lot of coarse, black hair,” and he has a “small, sunken mouth,” which continually opens and shuts “like a pair of scissors.” At the end, the narrator listens to the “quick click-click” of his footsteps as he disappears into the night.103
This hint of the gruesome was to become characteristic of a new phase in Dahl’s writing. It was manifested in the tale he had told Annabella in New York about the rich old man who enjoyed betting with impoverished young strangers—staking his expensive car against the little fingers of their left hand. Originally called The Menace, it was retitled The Slasher and then Collector’s Item before finally appearing as The Man from the South. But the best of these new tales is The Dogchild, a bleak wartime parable about human cruelty in which a vindictive German family during the war raises an abandoned Russian orphan as if he were a dog. The tale explores in microcosm the same misanthropic territory of Some Time Never. But this time there is no fantasy. The situation here is all too real and there are no sweeping authorial judgments. In their place is the cool eye for detail that had characterized Dahl’s flying stories and an understated but unerring sense of surefootedness about the evil he portrays. It is for the reader to witness that in this most savage of worlds, only the child and the dog with which he is kennelled behave with any kind of warmth or dignity. The tale is dark, bitter, brilliant—and still unpublished.
All of these stories were an attempt to find a new voice. The best of them provided a searing glimpse into the dark heart of human behavior. With others the contrivances of plot were more in the foreground. All of them were characterized by a sharp perception of human flaws and were self-consciously designed to shock. Peter Watt, who now read Roald’s manuscripts himself—an honor the author sarcastically commented was only granted to “Kipling, Hugh Walpole, Galsworthy and a woman called Hermione Hornswoggler”104—found himself profoundly disturbed by them. He told Dahl they were “the most horrific” tales he had ever read, and that for this reas
on, “our unenlightened editors” would never publish them.105 Even Ann Watkins was nonplussed, telling Roald bluntly that, though “beautifully written,” the stories were “not exactly what the doctor ordered.” She thought their only market would be “a horror magazine,” and simply refused to submit them for publication to mainstream magazines because she was quite certain they would be rejected. She encouraged him to try and lighten up, lest he scare the readers of Good Housekeeping to death. “That’s all I can say to you,” she concluded, “except to cheer up and not continue to feel the world is so terrible. Life is worth living, and there are a few good people in this world. By gosh there are.”106 Dahl replied forcefully that if the readers of Good Housekeeping continued to devour the “escapist nonsense” that was currently being “dished out to them,” they would soon be “scared to death much more violently and more literally.”107
Sadly, the delights of country living were beginning to wear thin. Despite being surrounded by his family, in the “Valley of the Dahls,” as Tessa would later describe it, Roald was dogged by something akin to depression. His contact with children leavened the gloom a little. Forays into the woods and fields with his model aeroplane and his nieces and nephew could not disguise the fact that his relationship with his mother, now in her early sixties, had deteriorated badly. While Roald was “great companions”108 with his sister Asta, his niece, Lou, remembered hearing from her mother that her uncle had been “unkind” to Sofie Magdalene while he was at Grange Farm and had treated her a bit like a landlady.109 Lou’s twin sister Anna concurred, but suggested that her grandmother, Mormor—“Mother’s Mother” in Norwegian—was struggling with her own demons as well.110 Their father, John Logsdail, had finally succeeded in breaking Harald’s trust, thereby releasing some income for her, but she was now suffering from chronic arthritis and often seemed lost in her own world. Increasingly she withdrew from her children, becoming “uncommunicative,” “undemonstrative” and “unaffectionate” toward them in a way that she was not with her animals.111
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