Dahl told his mother that on the trip they would be sharing all the expenses, including those associated with the car. Then, ever the tease, he added casually, almost as a postscript, that he would try and send his mother a photograph of his new girlfriend—that was if he could find one. A few days later, he sent several. He was much more enthusiastic to Matthew Smith, writing to say that he had just hung one of his paintings in “my girl Pat’s flat” and suggesting that Matthew join them on their upcoming trip through France. “You will be crazy about this Pat,” he told him.39
That trip turned out to be a honeymoon. Pat and Roald were married on July 2, only six weeks after he had written that letter to his mother, in a small church in downtown New York near Wall Street. Despite several warnings against the match from friends like Dashiell Hammett, who thought Dahl “a very silly, dull fellow,”40 and Leonard Bernstein, who thought she was “making the biggest mistake of her life,”41 Pat went ahead—partly one senses because she did not feel strong enough to pull away, and also because she needed to make a commitment to the future rather than continue to dwell on her fractured love affair with Gary Cooper.
Roald too was far from enthusiastic about the wedding. His letters home during the weeks that led up to it were far more preoccupied with his work than with any excitement about the imminent marriage. Charles Marsh once again provided the crucial impetus, presenting Roald with a “huge yellow sapphire ring”42 to give his bride and offering to host the reception afterwards in his apartment.‡ Claudia Haines, who was herself scheduled to marry Charles in Paris two weeks later, wrote to Sofie Magdalene some ten days before the wedding, expressing her personal pleasure at the engagement. She told Mrs. Dahl that Roald and Pat were “as happy as two people can be,” while conceding, rather disingenuously, that she and Charles had been very careful to be “enthusiastic without trying to become matchmakers.”43
Yet even before the knot was tied, the arguments were beginning. Dahl’s high-handed behavior toward Neal’s friends provoked a row one evening where she told Roald that he was “rude, arrogant and nasty”44 and that she wanted to call off the wedding. Roald did not apologize. It was Pat who relented and backed down. She did manage to persuade him to have a church wedding, but he made her agree that it would be small and simple. Under no circumstances was it to be a “showbusiness” event, he told her. He wrote to Pat’s mother, Eura, politely explaining that they wanted “to be a bit secret about it,”45 and informing her that no members of either family would be attending. Charles would be best man and there would be just a tiny handful of friends at the ceremony. He took the same line with his own family, telling them that he wanted to get the thing over with the minimum of fuss, and reassuring them that they would all meet his new bride less than a month later. However, the reporter of The Buckinghamshire Advertiser back in England did not miss the opportunity to paint a melancholy picture of the sixty-eight-year-old Sofie Magdalene, sitting alone in her cottage, while 3,000 miles away her playboy son was wedding a Hollywood glamour girl.46
The ceremony itself took place in the middle of a heat wave, with the temperature over 100°F. So intense was the heat that, as he was preparing to go to the church, Roald ripped out the silk lining of the new suit he had been persuaded to buy. It was a practical measure, typical of his pragmatic approach to life, but the whiff of brutality shocked Pat, who also later confessed that when they were in bed that night and Roald switched off the light and told her he loved her, she began to cry. Her tears were not tears of relief or delight, but tears of pain. She still longed to be married to Gary Cooper.
Neal would later claim with some bitterness that when she married Dahl, she was the breadwinner. “It was my money when we were married,” she declared vehemently when I spoke to her in New York in the spring of 2007. “Roald didn’t have any money at all.”47 This was not entirely fair. The writer she had married was by no means the impoverished failure that Charles Marsh had picked up from the floor two years earlier. As Marsh had predicted, returning to the United States had kick-started Roald’s writing career. He had abandoned Fifty Thousand Frogskins, but Sheila St. Lawrence had persuaded him to salvage some of the episodes and turn them into the four Claud’s Dog short stories, which eventually appeared in his next collection, Someone Like You. In response to the energy he felt around him, his productivity also increased markedly. Then The New Yorker bought another of his tales: Taste, about an acquisitive father who stakes his eighteen-year-old daughter’s hand in marriage in a bet against a lecherous middle-aged wine connoisseur. Her fate hinges on whether the wine buff can identify the exact vineyard and vintage of an obscure Bordeaux wine by taste alone. After he has won the bet, the expert is revealed as a cheat.
It was more than two years since The New Yorker had published The Sound Machine and the news of this new sale filled Roald with “almost unbearable pleasure.”48 Shortly afterwards the magazine bought another new tale, My Lady Love, My Dove, about the “nasty” suburban couple who bug their guests’ bedroom and listen to their conversations. It also published Skin, the final version of his story A Picture for Drioli about the man with the Soutine masterpiece tattooed on his back. Each was typical of the short stories that would make Dahl’s name during the 1950s—nuanced, suspenseful, devious, fantastical and often grisly. Sometimes Gus Lobrano, The New Yorker’s new fiction editor, turned them down because he found them simply “a little too unpleasant for our general readers.”49
Taste, however, had found a powerful admirer in Alfred Knopf. Knopf was another maverick with a big ego. A future colleague, Bob Gottlieb, later described him to me as “a monster … a true horror,” who indulged in “little boy tantrums” and was a notorious office bully.50 But Knopf thought Dahl wrote “like an angel”51 and found the story “stunning.” “Please look him up and see what he is and what he has done,” he noted to his editor-in-chief, Harold Straus. “I don’t know how we missed this one.”52 One night Alfred read the tale out loud to his shrewd and opinionated wife Blanche. She too thought the story was a winner.
Spurred on by his wife, Knopf contacted Watkins personally to ask if his company could publish a new collection of Dahl’s short stories. It was the beginning of a strong mutual admiration between the two men. Roald was flattered by the publisher’s praise, and when the deal was eventually signed, Knopf wrote to Ann Watkins to tell her that he was “tickled pink”53 to have Mr. Dahl on his list. Later that year The New Yorker offered Dahl a “first reading deal” on any new story he might write in the coming year. His career as a short story writer was back on track. Dahl was therefore not being disingenuous when he claimed to Pat’s mother that although it was going to be “a bit strange” to have a wife who earned more money than he did, he was confident he would “always be able to support her.”54
His letters home in this period are among the most prosaic he ever wrote, possibly because so much of his creative energy was being channelled into his writing. One senses too that, after six years of relative failure in England, he had a point to prove to his family about his commercial successes in America. Money indeed became something of an obsession. No longer were his letters filled with amusing incidents and anecdotes; instead, they were packed with details of his short story sales and of their burgeoning radio, television and film adaptations. There is a distinctly childish pride, as well as a need to prove that he was not just Charles Marsh’s poodle, in Roald’s boast to his mother that, after only a few months in the United States, he had accumulated the equivalent of £2,000 in the bank—“all made since I arrived, by writing.”55 Marsh offered him advice too about stocks and shares, and his letters home are filled with investment tips and suggestions for his mother and sisters.
Roald would always be grateful for the safety net Charles had provided him, but as soon as he felt financially able, he moved out of Marsh’s apartment, renting two small but comfy56 rooms on the fifth floor above Ralph Ingersoll’s apartment on East 62nd Street. Ingersoll was another of Charles
’s protégés, who would make his fortune working for his mentor, and he and Dahl were in a similar position. Claudia recognized that Roald would “enjoy having a place of his own, where he can work without the many interruptions he is bound to have in a place such as this.”57 Charles owned both apartments and initially charged him only 60 percent of its market rental value, before Roald insisted on paying the full amount. As he had told his friend two years earlier, “I rather like trying to pay my own way.”58
There, he reestablished the pattern he had evolved in England, working in the mornings, breaking for lunch—usually with Charles and Claudia—entertaining himself, perhaps at the races, in the afternoon, before returning to write again for a couple of hours before dinner. Content again with being a short story writer, his novelistic ambitions were now entirely behind him. When John Selby of Rinehart Publishers wrote to him in May 1952, praising his story Skin and asking politely whether Dahl might have “a novel in [his] system,”59 Roald scrawled on the top of the letter in bold capitals: “NO.” Having his own front door meant also that he could listen to music again. So he bought himself a new gramophone, “because I can’t do without one.” The new machine played LPs so now Roald had “a whole symphony on one disc.”60 Claudia, who knew that Roald’s mother found his absence painful and was aware how little he told her of his personal life, sometimes wrote to give her news about her son’s life; gossip, which she reckoned Roald “would probably not think of telling” her.61 In one of these letters, Claudia told Sofie Magdalene that she thought her son’s new autonomy was crucial to his improving mental and physical health. “I think he is enjoying having his own apartment where he can work uninterrupted and be independent. It is not far away and we see him almost every day. Physically I’m sure he is well. He seems to have plenty of energy. Also his work is splendid. That is a great satisfaction naturally to him and I’m sure has some bearings on his physical well-being.”62
Sofie Magdalene had problems of her own. For nearly a year now she had been trying to sell Wistaria Cottage, and move into the annex of her daughter Else’s house in Great Missenden, but she had so far failed to find a buyer—despite the fact that she kept dropping the asking price. Roald encouraged her not to worry about the money, and to move in with the Logsdails anyway, where he felt she would be safer, happier and better cared for. But Sofie Magdalene was stubborn and continued on in Amersham, despite the fact that intruders ventured into her back garden at night and frightened her. Her failing eyesight was also making her liable to trip and fall and, in hindsight, many of her family are now convinced she had become an alcoholic. But she was not lonely. She had her dogs; Claud Taylor and his family were just over the garden wall; and her daughters all lived within half an hour’s drive of her house. The indomitable young woman who had abandoned her own family in Norway to come to Wales, who had survived the early death of her husband and eldest child to raise a family on her own in a foreign land, had evolved into “Mormor”—the ancient, eccentric matriarch.
When she finally moved out of Wistaria Cottage and into the Logsdails’ annex, she arrived, perched on a large armchair in the back of the removal van, surrounded by her dogs.63 In the thirteen years that remained to her, she came to occupy this new personality completely: still stubborn, still unconventional, still full of stories—mostly about Norway and the past—but now metamorphosed into a strange, hunched, troll-like hermit, usually dressed in black, with her long gray hair, which had been cut only twice in her life, wound up into a rather scruffy bun. She walked at first with two canes, like a curious black beetle; but after an unsuccessful hip replacement she was confined to a wheelchair with a housekeeper, Mrs. Newland, to look after her. Her granddaughter Lou remembered that “everybody was frightened of her.”64 Yet despite her disabilities, Sofie Magdalene’s mind was always active. She held court in the glassed-in conservatory at the back of the annex, tending to her plants and reading books and newspapers with a large magnifying glass. Increasingly she became mystical, making predictions about family and friends—many of which came true. Though trapped in her chair, she still radiated a restless, powerful energy. Her grandson Theo later recalled that her large bony hands were “always twitching and her long, spindly fingers, tapping.”65
Her son’s honeymoon was not a success. Alfred Knopf had loaned Roald at least $3,000 to pay for it, but the car that Roald had had shipped over from America at great expense turned out to be unreliable and frequently broke down, while his attempt to show his new wife the great cultural sights of Italy and France went largely unappreciated. He later told his second wife, Liccy, that Pat had spent most of the time in the car asleep, totally uninterested in the paintings, architecture and ancient monuments he had lined up for her to see.66 She was more intrigued by the tropical fish that swam behind the glass at one end of the tub in the bathroom of the luxurious hotel in which they stayed in Positano. Pat later acknowledged that she had indeed been “very bad” on that honeymoon and that she had spent much of the time inwardly regretting her decision to marry.67 When she arrived in England, however, things started to look up. The Dahls as a family took her to their hearts immediately. To Else’s five-year-old daughter, Anna, Pat seemed like a fairy, “scented and beautiful.”68 Her twin sister Lou agreed. Pat hugged the children, and lavished physical affection on them in a way that was unfamiliar to the more restrained Dahls. They were all “charmed” by her.69 After she and Roald had returned to New York, Sofie Magdalene wrote to Claudia declaring: “We all love her, and think that she couldn’t possibly be nicer and hope that she and Roald will be happy together. We all missed them when they went. Nicky missed Roald so much that he sat in Roald’s car all the next morning and the twins were very lost when they did not have Pat here any more. She completely spoiled them.”70
The reality was not quite so straightforward. Both the twins remembered that Mormor was initially far from impressed when her new daughter-in-law drifted down from her bedroom into the kitchen of Wistaria Cottage each day, almost at lunchtime, wearing a pink chiffon negligée and matching feathered dressing gown. She expected a wife to be able to cook and make a home for her husband and was scornful when she discovered that Pat could scarcely boil an egg. After a few days of quiet resentment, she lost her temper, provoking Roald to exclaim that if his mother was not kinder to his new wife, she would never see her son again.71 Pat recalled with some distaste the coldness with which Roald had spoken to Mormor and the fact that he had made her cry. Shortly afterwards, the newlyweds moved into the annex at the Logsdails, which Sofie Magdalene herself was about to occupy. Pat and Mormor soon patched up their differences, and when Sofie Magdalene wrote to Claudia Marsh a few weeks after they left, it was Pat’s welfare and not her son’s that concerned Sofie Magdalene. “I do hope Roald will be nice to her. He is not easy to live with, as he is not always feeling very fit. She said she was glad she had met us as it helped her understand him. … I do hope they have a child soon,” she concluded, “as they are both longing for one.” It is a sign of the intimacy she now felt with Claudia that she signed her letter “Mama.”72
Pat, for her part, had tasted something of what made the Dahl family “out of the ordinary.” She had warmed to their closeness and been stung by their tempers. She had seen how they “bitched and complained about each another,” but perceived as well how deeply bonded they were. She had also become accustomed to what Nicholas Logsdail would describe as the “strange kind of sexual innuendo, almost lavatorial humor” that characterized their conversation.73 She had even experienced one of Leslie Hansen’s “performances,” put on for her benefit the day she arrived. Shortly after dinner, he got up from the table and took a box of matches out of his pocket. He dimmed the lights and the room fell silent. Then he lay down on the floor and struck a match. Carefully raising both legs in the air, he put the flame near his bottom and farted loudly. The match burned with a spectacular and explosive blaze that provoked applause and merriment from everyone in the room. Pat was both
“impressed and dismayed.” But Leslie was not the only one who surprised her. She had been amazed to discover that Roald preferred to make love in the dark and that he disliked her walking around naked. She could not understand why. She also found that his confidence and that his way of demanding admiration from those around him could sometimes disturb, even frighten her.74
These qualities were much in evidence when the Dahls travelled back to New York, via Georgia, where they spent three days with Pat’s family. Roald found the Neals boring and parochial. “They’re all very pleasant,” he reported to his mother, “but pretty dull … I wasn’t sorry to leave.”75 For Pat, too, it was a miserable visit. After only a few hours, she recalled, Roald retired to his room to read, appearing afterwards only for meals. He annoyed Eura by making plain his distaste for her Southern cooking and by encouraging her only son, Pete, to quit school, abandon his plans to go to college, and go run a filling station instead. For Roald, of course, the latter was a splendidly romantic Arnoldian notion. But the Neals were appalled. “Mother and Nini [Pat’s sister] thought he was the rudest thing alive,”76 Pat remembered. Roald was indifferent to their criticism. He had other things on his mind. He was planning their move to a larger but less expensive apartment on West 77th Street, near Central Park and the Museum of Natural History. He was also deeply concerned about the health of the sixty-six-year-old Charles Marsh who, on the day of his wedding to Claudia, had been taken ill and diagnosed with a cerebral hemorrhage.
Roald was shocked when he saw Charles in New York. “All one side of his face has dropped,” he told his mother, adding that Marsh’s doctors had informed him that “if he has any excitement … that will be the end.”77 Marsh in fact made an unexpectedly swift recovery, and was left just with a slight “crookedness of the mouth and eye.”78 He had not had a stroke at all but an attack of Bell’s palsy, a virus that attacks the facial nerve. Nevertheless, his energy and strength were noticeably diminished. Pat meanwhile was occupied with rehearsals for the tour of The Children’s Hour, which “bored her to death,”79 as she told her mother-in-law, because she was the only significant member of the original cast staying on for the revival. Despite disappointing audiences that led to an early close in Chicago, it was a critical success for Pat. Roald visited her several times during the run, staying for a few days on each occasion. On his first visit, Pat admitted that she had missed him enormously and that it had been a “terrible shock” suddenly to find herself in a series of lonely hotel rooms.80 She told him she had stayed up all night once in Wilmington crying. But when Roald arrived in Chicago at the end of the tour, he was ecstatic. Alfred Knopf had just published his new collection of stories, Someone Like You, and it seemed the book was fast becoming a runaway success.
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