Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  Throughout the late 1940s, Roald wrote to Charles and Claudia almost once a week. Their letters usually discussed political issues, like nuclear war and the food shortages, but the jokey raillery of close friendship was never far away. Dahl would tell Marsh about the antics of his flatulent goat, named after Marsh’s great friend the liberal Democratic senator Claude Pepper, and Marsh would tell him that he had taken up hen-racing. Writing under the pseudonym “Charlie Suet,” from the Bureau of British Bullshit, Roald reported on the results of his investigations into “the causes of bow-leggedness in women and other jockeys” as part of the researchers of his “Joy through Length” commission.76 Charles lampooned the biographical blurb on the back of Over to You, inventing scurrilous quotations, which he put into his friend’s mouth. Nothing was taboo. On one occasion, Roald recounted the exploits of the Queen’s exceedingly hairy “number one lady-in-waiting,” the Honorable Eurydice Hislop Pomfret Pomfret, a woman “of extreme age with bandy legs and a great pot-shaped belly,” describing luridly how the two of them had made love in Buckingham Palace while testing Her Majesty’s beds to make sure they were “ok for springiness and pneumatics.”77 On another, he claimed he had identified Marsh as a “vicious and notorious” rapist called Henry the Rubber. Marsh was then inundated with official letters from Investigator Fingerfucker in New York, and Detectives Slobgollion and Worms of Scotland Yard.78 On yet another, he drafted a letter to Sidney Rothman, the treasurer of the Stepney Jewish Girls Club, to whom Marsh was sending food parcels, warning Mr. Rothman to beware of his ostensible benefactor. Marsh, he advised, had “once bitten off the index finger of a Jewish waiter in a New York restaurant because the man served him salami when he asked for salad” and turned the East Side Club for Unmarried Yiddish Mothers into a hostel for Arab sailors.79 They joked about the Scandinavian secret agents Sonya and Yetsofa, and made exotic plans to travel to South America, Greece and Spain. However, in amongst the banter and gossip, which to an outside reader can verge on the tedious and incomprehensible, leap flashes of the profound warmth—the “bond,” as Marsh called it—that tied Charles, Claudia and Roald together. “We love you … we have been thinking much of you … we think more of you away than when you are here …”80 Evidence of it peppers almost every letter.

  Claudia adored Roald and sent regular parcels of food and clothing to the Dahl family, along with kitchen gadgets like electric mixers and pressure cookers, throughout these postwar years of austerity. During the winters that immediately followed the war Charles also responded to Roald’s impassioned pleas to do something about the “miserable and starving condition of Europe”81 by shipping food supplies, including vitamins and apples from his new estate at Jesamine Hill, to impoverished and undernourished Londoners in Rotherhithe and in Clement Attlee’s Limehouse constituency. Roald resented the complicated paperwork that was required to do this, and railed against the “incompetent, selfish, vindictive, humourless, complacent and ugly” cabinet ministers responsible. “I wish them dead,” he told Marsh.82 However, he agreed to write to the “fat but energetic wife of our prime minister” in the hope that “Mrs Atlee will arrange all the necessary permits etc for getting the apples into the country, for after all they are for the stomach of her husband’s constituents.” The destitution he had seen in Paris with Matthew Smith had moved him to genuine anger and he was shocked by the indifference of most Americans to European suffering. Their “overall attitude to continental starving (which believe me is frightful and frightening),” he told Charles, “is one that we cannot understand.”83 He imagined the luxurious dinner menus of New York’s top hotels being scattered from a plane over the capitals of war-ravaged Europe. What would the Americans’ “empty-bellied” allies think, he wondered bitterly, in the face of this excess? And, if they knew, “would the Americans be shamed into doing something?”84

  Both Marsh and Dahl were instinctive present givers. And Marsh’s pleas to his friend not to be cynical, not “to grow sour,” but rather to look at “the now,”85 resonated with Roald partly because Charles was such an active proponent of what he preached. In 1947, Marsh founded his Public Welfare Foundation (PWF). Its first grant, the following year, was to buy twenty-eight sewing machines for an organization of Jamaican women, near the hotel Marsh had acquired in Ocho Rios, so that poor children could be clothed and sent to school. Roald styled himself Charles’s “English agent and provocateur.”86 His brief was to look out for individual cases of need and hardship. Noël Coward was PWF’s agent in Jamaica, while its agents in India included a young Indira Gandhi and a nun in Calcutta called Mother Teresa. Charles also roped in many of Dahl’s family and friends as “sub-agents” too, typically giving them $100 to spend on others more needy than they were. Leslie Hansen and Claud Taylor were two of these other recruits. Charles commissioned new work from Matthew Smith’s friend the impoverished sculptor Jacob Epstein. He set up a $25,000 trust for Roald and his cousin, Finn, the son of Roald’s uncle Truls, who had inherited the family butcher’s shop in Oslo and was imprisoned in Sweden during the war for helping Norwegian airmen escape to Britain.87 Finn later devised a Norwegian forestry scheme to supply timber for the U.S. market, which would form the capital behind a Norwegian branch of the foundation.88 Jokingly, Roald asked for 10,000 gramophone records as his commission for brokering the deal.89 By the end of 1949, Marsh was filling out visa forms in an attempt to bring Roald to work for the foundation in New York. Charles and Claudia travelled to Europe several times while Roald was living with his mother and visited them twice in Amersham; but despite their generosity, the other members of the family did not take to the ostentatious Mr. Marsh. Perhaps they were too proud to feel comfortable accepting his gifts. Perhaps they regarded him as a dangerous outsider who might steal their brother away. Forty years later, Alfhild described him simply as patronizing and “pushy.” Asta said she did not care for the man. Else simply shook her head and said she did not want to talk about him. Her daughter Anna remembered hearing her mother complain that Marsh acted “like Jesus Christ,”90 while Lesley O’Malley dismissed him simply as a “terrible bully.”91 It was a strange attitude to adopt toward the man who had looked after Roald in America and from whom they had received an endless stream of gifts and presents during the hard years of shortages and rationing. But there was a good reason for their animosity. When he came to England in 1950, Marsh had almost driven Alfhild’s husband insane.

  Leslie Hansen, Roald’s brother-in-law, was highly intelligent and unconventional. He drew cartoons and caricatures, but he was also mentally unstable. Roald had known him well before the war because he lived in Bexley. He was, as Roald would later describe him, “even more eccentric” than Alf, “not very prepossessing,” and determined never to get a job. The couple spent most of their married life in the thatched cottage in Ludgershall that Alf had bought for her mother in the early days of the war, living “in great frugality on a tiny amount of capital” with their daughter Astri.92 Despite, or perhaps because of, his idiosyncrasies, Leslie had been completely absorbed into the Dahl family and they all felt protective of him. But he was quite unable to deal either with Charles Marsh’s quasi-religious philosophy or his overt generosity. As Roald put it, Charles “toppled an already wobbly brain clean over the precipice.”93 Hansen started to believe that Marsh was Jesus Christ returned to earth, and that he was his disciple. Roald was forced into the role of carer.

  Every day he collapsed and jabbered and searched the bible and saw portents and coincidences and said he was dying. … Well it would have been OK for Charles to be JC and for Leslie to be St. Paul if the idea of it hadn’t driven him stark staring mad. … It was as much as one could do to handle him and stop ourselves from being forced to send him to a lunatic asylum … I spent hours and hours with him forcing him to realise that Marsh was not Jesus Christ, that he was an ordinary man, rather a good ordinary man nevertheless, who fornicated and joked and made merry just like everyone else … I then encouraged him to draw
cartoons of Charles (a thing that would previously have been sacrilegious) and he became more cheerful. … Truly, Claudia, it was a near thing and all pretty awful. The most awful thing of all being to hear the small child Astrid saying repeatedly, don’t cry daddy, we won’t leave you. Most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard in my life. No-one of course cares very much about Leslie. But the terrors it reflected upon Alf and Astrid are very great.94

  After “some terrifying periods,”95 Leslie was eventually restored to something like his old self, but more than a month after he wrote that letter, Roald told Claudia that his brother-in-law was still “very bad” and that in some respects he felt he was the cause of the situation. “I blame myself more than anyone,” he confessed, “because it was I who encouraged Charles to go on seeing him.”96 He begged Charles not to return to Amersham and henceforth to drop his “mystic bullshit.”97 His brother-in-law’s breakdown added to the pressure of finishing his book, and contributed to the chronic stomach pains from which he now began to suffer.

  He confessed his anxieties to Claudia: “Someone who has written as little as I have finds that in writing one book, you have learned twice as much by the time you come to the end of it as you knew at the beginning. … One knows more now. It can all be improved.”98 A certain testiness began to creep into his manner. Amongst his papers for 1950 is a handwritten list entitled “Things I Hate”:

  All piddling spindly tables, specially the kind that slide into each other—six of them.

  Women who say “What are you thinking?”

  Bookshelves with an unread look.

  Men who wear rings that are not absolutely plain.

  The larger the ring the worse it is. A diamond worst of all.

  Men who wear bow ties, pointed shoes, shoes in two different leathers, tie clips, sock suspenders.

  Men who have four or five strands of hair and they let it grow long and paste it to their domes.

  Men or women who hold a cigarette between thumb and first finger.99

  A malevolent, acerbic quality certainly pervades some of the grotesques that populate Fifty Thousand Frogskins. Dahl’s portrait of the two Jewish crooks who sell Cubbage and Hawes the “ringer” is particularly extreme. Not only are they are the cruelest characters in the book; his descriptions of them—“small black eyes,” large noses, and “lips, wet and shiny like two small, uncooked chipolata sausages”—disturbed even the unflappable Ann Watkins when she read the manuscript.100 She told him she found the characters crude and that he should soften his anti-Jewish and anti-religious tone.101 But that was easier said than done. In his 1951 story, My Lady Love, My Dove, a wife confesses to her husband that she is “a nasty person.” So is he, she tells her spouse reassuringly, persuading him that they should both feel at ease with their nastiness. It was a distinctive aspect of Dahl’s own literary genius that he too now felt at ease with his dark side. “With me the ideas that come seem to represent a rather nasty side of my nature,” he once declared. “Nasty things happen to all sorts of people. I can’t help it. That’s the way they come. And yet in real life I’m a perfectly ordinary sort of fellow and I don’t usually do nasty things to other people. I don’t hunt foxes or shoot animals. I won’t even have mousetraps in the house.”102

  Dahl was not just kind to animals. During the war, RAF charities had been the beneficiary of his generosity. In 1946, a family friend who was temporarily unable to send money to a destitute woman he had been supporting in Canada told him about his plight. Dahl wrote to Ann Watkins at once and asked her to send the woman $65 from his own account in New York.103 He was also a loyal supporter of Marsh’s London food aid plans, despite the fact that he believed the poor “do not give a fuck for vitamins and do not understand them.”104 Here was a flash of the cynicism that so often colored his responses and that, he jokingly confessed to his adolescent audience at Repton, had even been in evidence there back in the 1930s. More than forty years earlier, his “lovely and gentle” contemporary, Denton Welch, had apparently told him this story: Mr. Snape, Welch’s housemaster and Dahl’s own English teacher, had been helping put up a stage for his house play. A boy asked where he could get a vise large enough to hold two big planks together. Without hesitation, Snape muttered to him that he should go to The Priory and look for Roald Dahl. “He’s got every vice in the world,” he told him.105

  As Fifty Thousand Frogskins neared its conclusion, Dahl’s sense of alienation from the British literary establishment was further exacerbated by his dealings with the BBC. Thanks to the patronage of Alfhild’s friend, the broadcaster Archie Gordon, Roald had given a “most un-BBC”106 talk about dog racing in 1948. Following this, the BBC broadcast three of his new stories—early drafts of The Soldier, Skin, and Man from the South. Now, after the failure of Some Time Never, his new submissions were increasingly being met with rejection and Roald began to rail against the “discriminating literary gentlemen” of the BBC’s Third Programme. Returning from a trip to Central Europe with Charles Marsh, where he had visited Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest and “gazed out upon the surrounding snowy peaks,” he quipped to Gordon that he had “dreamed dreams of glory and conquest—ridiculous, unattainable dreams, such as selling a story to the British Broadcasting Corporation, and sticking a needle through the eye of a camel.”107 He repeated these complaints to Martha Gellhorn, when she came to visit him in Amersham. She for her part was amazed at the “suffocating atmosphere of adoration” with which Roald was surrounded at Wistaria Cottage, recalling that his sisters directed “hatred” toward her, fearful lest she steal their brother away and take him back to America. Gellhorn, who knew how well Dahl had fit in to New York literary circles, was shocked at his isolation from London. She found the whole experience with his family “very boring and very heavy.”108

  On the other side of the Atlantic things were going a little better. Ann Watkins, “the only sane baby in the business,”109 as Dahl lovingly described her, had sold one of his recent short stories, Poison—the tale about the Indian doctor and the snake—to Collier’s. Within three months CBS bought the rights for both radio and television adaptation, while The Sound Machine was listed as one of the best short stories of the year. But the new collection had been refused by everyone. Even Watkins was becoming irritated by her client’s “slow and uneven”110 rate of writing. Grasping the nettle, she told Roald that she would not be able to sell the book unless he dropped the three nonfiction pieces it contained and replaced them with better quality fiction.111 She told him bluntly that Collier’s had wanted to commit to his next story, but were put off doing so because he produced new work too infrequently. “Which may, I hope,” she added, in a tone that she alone could get away with, “be a lesson to you, my child, on greater productivity.”112 Two months later, Watkins’s assistant confirmed the “depressing” news. “We’ve given that collection of stories a long run,” she told Roald, and “with the field covered, we must now admit that it would be best to await the publication of your novel and then bring forth this collection again.”113

  By Christmas 1950, the first draft of the new novel was complete. On Boxing Day, Roald wrote to Ann Watkins that he was doing some revisions, but that he was pleased with the book, which was filled with “stuff I know and have seen which is solid stuff that is true and dirty and sorrowful and amusing.” But, he warned her, it would be “very different from everything before.”114 A month later, it was “quite finished. … No-one has seen a word of it apart from the girl in the village who typed it, who was in turn disgusted, horrified, amused, then disgusted again.”115 He was obviously nervous, warning Watkins that though he liked the book, it was “not very classical,” and confessing that he trembled to send it to her. So he didn’t. He sent it instead straight to Peter Wyld at Collins, thinking perhaps that Wyld would understand its English subject matter better than she would. It was a mistake. A week later he got a “brief, curt, terrifying letter,” from Wyld and his colleague Milton Waldman informing him that the company would n
ot be exercising its option to publish. Dahl then sent the manuscript to Watkins for her opinion, pointing out that Wyld, a devout Christian, and Waldman, a Jew, had probably just been offended by some of the things he had written. “Would you be a sweetie and send me a cable as soon as you read it,” he begged, “saying whether it’s good or bad or ordinary to put me out of my misery.”116 Watkins took him at his word, sending him a telegram that was terse and unequivocal: FROGSKINS UNPUBLISHABLE PRESENT FORM. CONSTRUCTION UNSOUND. TOO MANY LOOSE ENDS. AIRMAILER UPCOMING.117

  Maternal and yet thoroughly professional, Watkins followed up her cable the next day with a detailed letter, explaining to Roald that she found the book “not dirty, but dull. … For you not nearly good enough.” With judicious cuts and edits, she thought he could probably salvage it.118 Dahl, however, did not read her letter. He did not even open it. He was too scared. He took a plane to Lebanon and from Beirut scribbled her a postcard, uncharacteristically in turquoise ink: