The plan to be a bookie vanished as quickly as it appeared, but Roald’s work as a part-time dealer in antiques and painting was much longer lasting. He was not entirely impoverished. He still had some of his inheritance invested in the stock market and art was in his blood. It had fascinated him since childhood, while his wartime relationship with Millicent Rogers had begun to open his eyes to the way the art market worked. Soon he was buying works of art for Charles Marsh and his excitement at a picture that took his fancy could be overwhelming. It might be something by the French Expressionist Georges Rouault, whose “brilliant colour and savage satire” electrified him. Dahl bought four of his paintings in 1946. Cézanne had a similar effect. Recognizing a kindred spirit perhaps, he admired the combination of craftsmanship and expressive ambition, describing Cézanne to Charles Marsh as “the greatest of them all … a delicate and subtle giant … who reached out further towards unobtainable perfection than any other man in any form of art has ever done.”48 Dahl had not acquired these opinions entirely by himself. He had his own formidable tutor: Matthew Smith—one of the most important British painters of the twentieth century.
The two men met for the first time in the autumn of 1941, after Roald had been invalided home from Palestine. The Blitz had abated. Roald had gone up to London and begun to wander in the art galleries around Bond Street. Initially, he simply peered through the windows. Then, “spellbound” by one of Smith’s pictures, probably a lush and voluptuous portrait of a woman, he plucked up the courage to enter Tooth’s Gallery. He asked the gallery owner where he could see more of Mr. Smith’s work and was told that the artist had “disappeared.” Dahl eventually tracked him down, through a series of forwarding addresses, to a shabby hotel on Piccadilly, near Hyde Park Corner, where he knocked on his door unannounced. From within, one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos was playing on a tiny gramophone. After several minutes, the door opened and Smith peered out. He looked, as Dahl recalled, “like a small frightened animal coming out of its hole.” It was a remarkable first meeting.
“Mr. Smith?”
“Yes”
“Mr. Matthew Smith?”
“Yes”
“I … well … I really only came here to tell you how much I like your pictures,” I said, because that was all I had to say. I did not realize then that he had not long before lost both his sons in the RAF, and that the shock of suddenly seeing a young man standing outside his door in full RAF uniform with wings on his chest must have been tremendous. It bowled him over. “Come in,” he said, “Do come in.” He was in stocking feet and there were holes in both socks. He began talking very fast. The hands fluttered, the words tumbled out in such a nervous torrent. “I’m sorry it’s such a mess. Everything is in a mess. Oh, what an awful mess. Where you going to sit? I can’t do things properly. I can’t do anything probably these days. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. How nice to see you. How good of you to come …”49
Though Smith was more than forty years older, an instant rapport formed between them, and by the time Dahl was posted to Washington, the two men were firm friends. “There was nothing homosexual about it,” he told Alice Kadel, the daughter of Smith’s mistress and heir, Mary Keene, when she came to interview him shortly after the painter’s death in 1959. Kadel thought his statement was strange because that thought had never even crossed her mind. But she recalled that Dahl was not in a good mood that day and that at times he was “aggressive,” “unpleasant” and “cold.” She warmed to him, though, observing many similarities between Roald and her mother’s lover. “Both could seem very worried,” she observed, “which gave them enormous charm … they gave that impression of wanting to be looked after, and you longed to mother them. … They touched you somewhere.”50
When Dahl returned to London two years later for a couple of months in the summer of 1944, Smith invited him to sit for his portrait. Accustomed to painting what Cecil Beaton described as “meaty great nudes and sensuous still lives,”51 the painting was one of the few male portraits Smith ever attempted.‡ It is a vividly colorful piece, with Dahl’s blue RAF uniform almost overwhelmed by the surrounding scarlets and oranges. It captures well the “languid” quality that had struck Antoinette Haskell in Washington, as well as his sense of detached otherworldliness—qualities not apparent in contemporary photographs. At twenty-five, Roald had been able to access the £5,000 in his trust fund—equivalent to perhaps £175,000 in contemporary purchasing power and more than 38 times his annual salary—and with part of it he purchased two other Matthew Smiths, some watercolors by Smith’s great friend Jacob Epstein and a small portfolio of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. He took them all back to Washington with him, where he told his mother they were “greatly admired.”52 He gave one Epstein to Millicent Rogers and sold another at a good profit. But while he enjoyed dealing, he bought the paintings mostly for the pleasure of looking at them. “Each time I sold a short story,” he later wrote, “I would buy a picture. Then, because it took me so long to write another story, I would invariably have to sell the picture I had bought six months before. In those days, fine pictures were inexpensive. Many paintings that today could be acquired only by millionaires decorated my walls for brief periods in the late forties—Matisses, enormous Fauve Rouaults, Soutines, Cézanne watercolours, Bonnards, Boudins, a Renoir, a Sisley, a Degas seascape and God knows what else.”53
Just as he was fascinated by the deceit involved in greyhound racing, Roald was similarly intrigued by the tricks and ruses of the art world. He learned about restoration, for example, by trying it himself. “The first picture I cleaned was in 1946,” he recalled. “It was a Morland belonging to my brother-in-law [John Logsdail] and when I had finished with it, there was nothing left, so I had to paint it back on. I told him that the removal of the dark varnish had, alas, revealed a painting of poor quality and he was quite happy.” A blackened decorated mirror, purchased in Uxbridge in “one of the seediest and most dilapidated places you have ever seen,” produced greater success, revealing a “brilliantly painted frame full of grotesque heads and shells and fishes … almost certainly a Mathias Lock.”54 Fakery too fascinated him. His sister Alfhild recalled him attempting to paint “his own Matisses in five minutes using garden paints,”55 while his nephew, Nicholas—now one of London’s most respected dealers in contemporary art—still has one of his uncle’s “Monets” hanging in his bedroom.
All this knowledge helped Roald enormously when he started acting as an unofficial art and antiques buyer for Charles Marsh—a lucrative and enjoyable sideline, which helped keep him solvent during the immediate postwar period. The suspicion and cynicism that he had learned at the flapping-tracks came in useful, too. “The antique dealer is never a craftsman,” he would write years later. “He is incapable of screwing an ordinary brass handle into a drawer. The only thing he can screw is the customer.”56
Matthew Smith fed Dahl’s passion for painting, and in 1946, the two of them went on the first of several trips to Paris together. The devastated capital made a big impression on Roald, who was excited by its ravaged bohemianism, but also appalled by the poverty and destitution he witnessed there. Smith too loved the city and showed Roald his favorite haunts. Alice Kadel disagreed with those who, like Lesley O’Malley, felt that the relationship between the two men was “like father and son.”57 Knowing Matthew, she felt that, on the contrary, it was probably “quite laddish.”58 In France, Matthew certainly introduced Roald to prostitutes as well as painters and, despite the postwar deprivations, possibly gave his young friend a taste of the world Roald’s father Harald had enjoyed fifty years earlier. Dahl was impressed by Smith’s relentless sexual energy and told Claudia Marsh how much he enjoyed watching the old man on the prowl. A decade later Roald lamented that his newly knighted friend, at almost eighty, now “fornicates no more than five times a week,”59 while to Charles Marsh he described how, after dinner in London, Smith and he had walked “the full length of Bayswater Road conversi
ng with the whores.”
Matthew chased a black one six blocks, and when he caught up with her she said, “You want to come home with me?” Matthew said, “Have a cigarette.” “Let’s not fick about,” the woman said. “Do you or do you not want to come home with me? It’ll cost you two pounds.” Whereupon the celebrated painter peered closer at her in the darkness, lit a match, held it up to her face and exclaimed, “My God, no.” We talked to eleven more, and when I left him he was travelling fast towards an enormous woman with yellow hair—both hands in his pockets.60
Back in England, Roald tried to become Matthew’s fixer and to “organize” him as he organized his family. For a time, the artist was indeed almost absorbed into the Dahl clan as Roald encouraged him to rent a studio near Wistaria Cottage and took many of his canvases into his own care while it was being renovated. Dahl told Charles Marsh he had fifty-four of them,” “stacked in the spare bedroom. I spend hours in there looking at them.”61 But while Smith welcomed “people who would fix things,”62 he was at heart a very private man, who resented being managed, and that loss of control inclined him almost to paranoia. During the move, he became convinced that Roald had stolen one of his canvases—possibly to sell to Charles Marsh—and accused him of being a thief. The accusation shocked Roald to the core, even after he had assured his friend that the missing painting was only being framed. “I hope to hell I shall never be found either mean or cunning or greedy about money or possessions,” he told Matthew indignantly. “So far as I’m concerned people can always have what I’ve got and, if you want to know, that’s why I am broke at the moment.”63
The accusations had been “so horrible,”64 Roald claimed, that they gave him diarrhea for three days and forced him to go to the doctor. Smith eventually apologized for the “misunderstanding,” and the argument was settled. Nevertheless, he remained indignant at his friend’s sanctimonious tone, which he described as “damned bad psychology.” To some extent this was the pot calling the kettle black. For Smith also claimed that the incident had made him feel unwell—and not just for three days. He told Roald that, as a result of the incident, he had been ill for more than six weeks.65 Unsurprisingly, he soon relocated to a studio back in London.
Two of Dahl’s most famous short stories from this period of his life deal directly with painting and undoubtedly have their origins in his friendship with Matthew Smith. Nunc Dimittis is a fanciful tale of a famous portrait painter, who paints his subjects in the nude before adding their clothes, layer by layer. The narrator, a spoiled and wealthy dandy, takes revenge on an obese woman who has slighted him by commissioning a portrait of her from this painter. Once he has received it, like a restorer, he painstakingly removes the top layers of oil, “cautiously testing and teasing the paint, adding a drop or two more of alcohol to my mixture,” until the sitter is revealed in her formidable corsets and brassiere, of which the straps were “as skilfully and scientifically rigged as the supporting cables of a suspension bridge.”66 He then humiliates her by displaying the portrait in public. But it is she who ultimately takes the more extreme revenge.
The other, Skin, is set in Paris in 1946. It tells of an impoverished tattoo artist who, many years before, had persuaded the Russian painter Chaim Soutine to tattoo a portrait of his wife on his back. Now old and ill, the tattooist in Dahl’s story falls into the hands of a mysterious, soft-spoken art dealer, who is eager to obtain this extraordinary living work of art. A sinister hand, “encased in a canary-coloured glove,” falls on the tattooist’s shoulder as he is promised a life of leisure in exchange for the skin upon his back after he has died. The reader is left in little doubt that the tattooist will meet an unexpectedly early demise. The paintings of Soutine, who had died in France in 1943, mesmerized Roald. Soutine was the archetypal tormented artist. He never washed. His studio reeked unbearably of the rotting carcasses he loved to paint. A colony of bedbugs was once discovered living in his ear. He and Matthew Smith had briefly worked in the same building in Montparnasse and Smith doubtless provided Dahl with many of the narrative details that embellish Skin—the “studio with the single chair in it … the filthy red couch … the drunken parties, the cheap white wine, the furious quarrels, and always, always, the bitter sullen face of the boy brooding over his work.”67 But Dahl’s appreciation of Soutine’s work went beyond a delight in his extreme bohemian lifestyle in La Ruche and the Cité Falguière. The pinched sensuality of his choirboys and pastry chefs, his bloody studies of animal carcasses and his fascination with the flesh beneath the skin resonated with the misanthropy that currently suffused his own writing. Roald had responded strongly to the hedonistic intensity of Smith’s work, but Soutine’s viscous, bright oils were more darkly carnal. A decade later he would come to admire and collect the work of an artist whose work took Soutine’s decadent vision a league further into darkness: Francis Bacon.
Both of these painting stories were rejected by the magazines to which they were submitted and seemed to confirm Dahl’s belief that, while he could still hold his head up in New York, somehow he would never be part of the London club. His most influential ally in London at that time was probably Noël Coward, whom he had met socially in New York and Washington while working for William Stephenson and BSC. Coward was a big fan of Dahl’s flying stories and found him good company and “highly intelligent.”68 Dahl, for his part, was critical of Coward for exaggerating his involvement in spying—maintaining that he was “thrilled” by any “piddly little thing”69 Stephenson asked of him—but he cultivated the friendship because Coward was good company and because he was almost his lone British establishment fan. In the summer of 1946, for example, while Hamish Hamilton were preparing to publish Over to You, Coward had given him a huge ego boost in front of his publisher. Hamilton had taken Roald for lunch at the Ivy, when Coward rushed across to them and “gushed” for five minutes about how much he liked the book. “He knew each story almost by heart,” Roald told Ann Watkins, “and Ham was greatly impressed.”70
Intriguingly, Coward too would eventually conclude that Roald was something of a misfit—one whose literary persona no longer seemed to mesh with his outward personality. A few years later, when his next collection of stories, Someone Like You, was published, Coward wrote in his diaries that though he found the tales “brilliant” and his friend’s imagination “fabulous,” he noticed in all of them “an underlying streak of cruelty and macabre unpleasantness, and a curiously adolescent emphasis on sex,” which he found odd, because he knew Roald was at heart “a sensitive and gentle creature.” Perhaps, Coward wondered, “he has lived in America too long and caught some of the prevalent sex hysteria.”71
Aside from his family and Claud Taylor, almost all of Roald’s closest confidants were indeed Americans, and chief among them was Charles Marsh. For despite being 3,000 miles apart, the two men were in constant, almost interminable, correspondence. Shortly before Roald left the United States, Marsh had sent him a letter confirming the depth of their friendship. “I am so very fond of you that I refuse to be merely your papa,” he declared. “Your presence struck me intensely as you first walked into the R Street house living room. In the wear and tear there has been some abrasion as you have seen my clay feet and I have seen yours. But my measure … is that your spirit is with me now and tomorrow and yesterday.”72 Charles’s own situation had changed, too. Shortly after the end of the war, he had divorced his frosty wife Alice—Antoinette Haskell described her as “about as maternal as an ice-cube”73—when he discovered that she was having a number of affairs, including one with his own protégé, Lyndon Johnson. Alice acquired the estate at Longlea in the settlement and Charles purchased a new one in nearby Rappahannock County. Increasingly he came to rely on his secretary Claudia Haines, who became his constant companion and, in 1953, the third and last Mrs. Marsh.
Charles’s relationship with Roald had always been a mixture of the joker and the mentor. “Work hard. Talk little. Be truly a miser of time,”74 he had advised
within a week of Roald’s return to England in 1946, and he remained convinced that his friend was a man of great talent, who needed to follow his own distinctively iconoclastic path to secure his ends. To this end, Charles looked after Roald and opened his home to him. He loaned him money. He encouraged his ambition to be a writer and dissuaded him from going into politics. In return, Roald allowed Charles the unique liberty of addressing him openly, honestly and intimately. Charles’s advice could be portentous, even pompous, but it was always given with thought and affection. In 1943, he had urged his friend to seek for “the serene,” and to follow his destiny. Counseling him not to “weigh your acts either for self … or the demands of others,” he exhorted Roald to see his own way through his problems, assuring him that “these weights will lessen if the inside of your spirit, which has nothing to do with the particular, slowly becomes serene.” Even then, Marsh had understood the curious tension between toughness and tenderness that animated Dahl’s soul, and which very few appreciated. “To this date you have approached life with great sensitiveness,” he continued. “Not to hurt people is the first impulse of a generous and sensitive soul. But in the conscious being of not hurting—of not being cruel—comes the complexity of life.” He sensed that a crisis lay ahead and urged Roald to “make use” of him, “any time—any place—where you wish me alone in friendship.”75 It was an offer the young writer would not forget.
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