Knopf had told Roald in March of 1953 that the new short story collection was “about the best thing he’d ever handled,”81 and that he would give it special treatment. He was as good as his word. He pushed the book hard, with big adverts in The New Yorker and the New York Times. Even so, everyone was astonished by its sales. The first print run of 5,000 sold out within a week, and Knopf had to rush out a second printing. The reviews were almost universally positive. Time magazine was the least enthusiastic, calling Dahl an “adroit craftsman,” whose tales were “long on plot” and “short on character.”82 The New York Herald Tribune was probably the most perceptive when it described him as a conjurer, with “a macabre imagination” and a distinctively offbeat sense of humor—albeit with “a good deal of compassion.” The reviewer concluded shrewdly that Dahl had a remarkable ability “to manufacture his own brand of credibility.”83 It was a quality he was to manifest in almost everything he wrote and one that would often mystify critics and publishers alike. But the reading public responded warmly to it, and this word of mouth popularity encouraged further offers of television and movie adaptations. Before long, the book was into its fourth printing and had sold 20,000 copies. The Book-of-the-Month Club picked it up, guaranteeing further sales of 25,000. Not long afterwards, Roald received his first Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Dahl described the statuette of Edgar Allan Poe as a “ghastly thing … I gave it to our char-lady who thought it would be useful as a doorjam in her kitchen.”84
But if his writing career was blooming, Roald’s short but already storm-tossed marriage seemed to be heading straight for the rocks. He had not found living with Pat easy. He felt uncomfortable with a bride who shared few of his interests and he despised her need for constant applause. He found her family, particularly her mother, shallow and dull. It was not a good omen. “Look at the brood mare,” he would tell his children years later when they were uncertain whether to pursue a relationship. “The mother will tell you everything.” By 1955, Roald was nearly forty. He was accustomed to making his own decisions and, though he had lived as an adult under the same roof as his mother and Asta, he had always had a space there that was entirely his, where he could be secluded from others. He was quite unused to sharing all his living space and simply could not write if there was anyone else around him.
Pat understood this. She told her mother-in-law that she was trying to stay out of the apartment as much as possible in order to give him the “privacy and freedom” he wanted to write, but she admitted it was hard “to get the proper balance.”85 For his part, Roald was increasingly frustrated, not only by his lack of solitude but also by the fact that Pat was not yet pregnant. He found it hard to live with someone who was more famous than he was, and became irritated by the fact that when his name was mentioned in the press, it was often misspelled. Being described as Ronald, Raoul, or even Roger Dahl was bad enough. Worse still was when he was simply referred to as “the husband of Patricia Neal.” On top of this, his eyes started to wander toward other women—most notably the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt—while his return to Great Missenden had reminded him how much he missed the English countryside. So, shortly after Pat returned from Chicago, just after Christmas, he turned to her one evening in bed and told her, “nonchalantly,” as she remembered it, that the marriage was over and that he wanted a divorce. “ ‘Don’t worry about it now,” he said; “just go to sleep.’ ”86
Pat was devastated. But it was hard for her to talk through the situation, because Roald’s nervy brother-in-law, Leslie, was staying with them at the time as a house guest, prior to going for treatment to the Scott and White Clinic in Temple, Texas. Leslie’s mental state had only marginally improved since Roald left England, and it had taken a colossal effort to persuade him to cross the Atlantic. But Roald was convinced, as usual, that the best American doctors, under his supervision, would be able to solve, or at least mitigate, many of his brother-in-law’s problems. Characteristically, he paid for the air trip over—first-class—putting Leslie up in their apartment and paying all his medical costs, which included dental bills in New York as well as countless tests and investigations in Texas. Nothing gave Roald greater delight than giving presents to those who enjoyed receiving them, and he wrote excitedly to his family that Leslie was “having the time of his life” with them.87
Ingratitude, on the other hand, was a monstrous sin, as Ashley Miles, the husband of his half sister Ellen, would discover a few weeks later. Miles had first visited the United States in 1952, when Roald put him up in his apartment, loaned him money, and introduced him to many of his friends, including Lillian Hellman. Two years later, he returned and opted to stay with Hellman rather than with Roald, who felt his brother-in-law had snubbed him. Roald raged against being ignored, complaining to his mother that Ashley was a “small-minded twerp,”88 who had spent only fifteen minutes at their apartment and asked nothing about Pat’s career or his book. He even hinted that Miles and Hellman were now lovers.
Leslie was quite different. He was deeply appreciative of Roald’s generosity and brought out the caring, problem-solving side of his brother-in-law’s nature as well as his need to control. Roald had promised Alfhild he would accompany Leslie to Temple and stay there as long as he was needed. Pat, however, refused to go with them. This annoyed Roald and it seems her wilfulness was the immediate provocation for him to deliver his bedtime bombshell. The next day, Pat called the Marshes, briefly explained the situation, and Charles immediately invited her to come and stay with him and Claudia in Jamaica while Roald was in Texas with his troubled brother-in-law. Pat accepted the invitation with alacrity. In Temple, little progress was made in discovering a metabolic cause for Leslie’s mental instability and Roald was soon impatient at the lack of positive progress; but—much to his delight—Leslie did have all his teeth removed. They were, he told his mother, “floating in pus” and had “to come out at once.”89 Eventually, Roald bunked off back to New York. “I simply can’t wait around here forever,” he told his mother, assuring her that his brother-in-law would now “be quite alright alone.” When the doctors finally deemed that Leslie was well enough to travel on his own back up to New York, he and Roald made plans to travel to join Pat in Jamaica.
When Pat arrived in Jamaica, she was unsure how much Charles and Claudia knew of her marital problems. She found them remarkably well informed. From Texas, Roald had written them a long letter explaining what he thought had gone wrong and why he doubted the marriage was ever going to work. In a thoughtful and dispassionate analysis of his and Pat’s incompatibilities, Roald revealed how strong his powers of self-analysis could be:
Down here there has been a good deal of time to think, and that’s about all I’ve been doing these last six days. And whichever way I look at it and however hard I try to change my own mind, I still always come to the same conclusion—that I do not believe it is possible for us to live together in complete serenity. She is still far and away the nicest girl I know and is full of the two great qualities—courage and honesty. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we shall feel comfortable and as it were complete in each other’s company. It happens to be a fact that when we are alone together in the evenings I find myself feeling extremely uncomfortable because I keep wondering what she is going to do to amuse herself. I read. She doesn’t. We talk a little—about theatrical people and the stage, but not much more than that. I know that she longs for the company of her own group of theatrical friends, who I cannot (although I have tried very hard) stand. The two days she was in New York after I had left, she was with them all the time. And I do not blame her at all for this. The blame is equally mine. But I am afraid it only emphasises the point that we both like different people, and also different things.
Of course, there’s also the question of one’s mother. For years I’ve seen her (and indeed Claudia, or any other good wife) running a house, keeping it clean, and to a certain extent, serving the man. I don’t know how self-sufficient the ma
n is (and I am), yet when he has a woman in the house it is in his nature to expect a certain amount of service. Pat is not able to bring herself to do this. For the last five weeks I have been working. She has not. But I make the coffee in the morning. She stays in bed. I work till lunchtime. Then I get my own lunch out of a can of soup, while she is often still in her bed telephoning.
It seems horrid to be enumerating these little things, but they are the things that start the resentments building up inside one. She is naturally absorbed in herself because she is a fine and successful actress, but I do not believe it is possible to be a successful wife and to be absorbed in yourself at the same time unless you are very clever indeed.
To have a career and to be a wife at the same time is goddam hard work and I’ve noticed that the few who do it successfully (and it can be done), seem to double their efforts to be a wife in order to compensate for the other. A woman cannot get by saying to herself “I am a successful career person and therefore I do not have to be much of a normal wife. My husband will not expect me to be a normal wife because I have this great career to look after.” She can’t say that, because unfortunately, and although he makes allowances, he still expects her to be comparatively normal—certainly when she’s not working.
Now, Charles, I do not think it would be right for you to try to change Pat by talking to her. I wouldn’t want her to know, anyway, that I had told you these things. I am saying them to you simply to ask your advice, and whether you think it would now be a mistake for me to try to go back to her. I believe it would. I think we could run it on for several months, even a year; but it would not be perfectly comfortable, and would fail ultimately. For example, I think it wrong, at this stage to try to have a child (you know how much I want one) and to risk the poor little nipper being born to parents who are liable to separate, or who may even be separated before he is born. It is wrong. But Pat, and she may be right, will not live with me under those conditions, even temporarily. At least that’s what she said. Also, when she refused to come with us to Temple, that seemed to do something to me. I was all set to go to work and repair the whole business with her, or anyway to try, and I was so upset and ashamed and guilty that I would have done anything. It was, as I say the exact moment psychologically when we should have come together again. But she didn’t wish it, and now the mood has passed.
Please don’t let her know that I’ve written you about these things. But should I, now, in your opinion, come to Jamaica after Temple is over? I wish to give her the least possible hurt. And to do this, I’ll go anywhere. But it would be unkind and foolish to deceive, or to prolong something that must, so far as I can see, gradually fail in the end. It’s probably all my fault.
Love
Roald 90
Charles’s reply, although couched in his customary bizarre ethical generalities, was also perceptive and to the point. He blamed the problem on what he called “presumptive incompatibility.”
Your last line, it’s probably all my fault, is inaccurate. What you want is complete sincerity and you both have it. What she wants is complete serenity and neither of you have had it during the past weeks at least. So what is, and where does serenity start and how is it kept going? Why naturally by service to others. But if each of the two people in the marriage stake don’t put in a hell of a lot of service to one another they will go bankrupt with great rapidity as they think of their own affairs.
What you want in a wife is what I have right now. You want a woman to think of you 80% of the time and to work like hell on the 80% without asking you for direction. You and I as males are willing to admit it to each other but we will never tell any woman what we want. We want this service deluxe done so graciously that we think a conversation about it vulgar if not stupid.91
Charles encouraged Roald to join him in Jamaica, and Roald, thrilled with his friend’s “wonderful” advice, told him he would be there in four or five days, when Leslie’s treatment was completed. “Please persuade Pat to hang on there,” he begged.92 Meanwhile, Charles listened to Pat’s side of the story and returned to those subjects—money and status—that he had already discussed with her and that he felt to be at the heart of their marriage difficulties. “Work hard,” he told her, “do all the cooking. … You must not lie in bed.” He also recommended that the two of them pool all their money in a joint bank account. “You can’t have the balls in the family,” he told her. “Have one bank account and let him write the checks.” If she followed these simple rules, Charles assured her, the marriage would work out fine.93
Pat took his advice to heart. When Roald arrived, she told him her new plan at once and almost immediately sensed a thaw in his attitude to her. That evening the Marshes and the Dahls were invited to Firefly, Noël Coward’s house, for dinner. Roald and Pat woke next day to discover that Charles, already ill with diabetes,94 had contracted cerebral malaria from a mosquito bite. Despite round-the-clock care, the fever worsened, and he suffered a series of small strokes, which left his speech and mobility severely compromised. He would never be the same again. The resilient, reliable Marsh, whom Pat had come to think of as “Roald’s daddy, practically,”95 had been broken beyond repair.
Roald and Pat returned to New York, leaving Charles in Jamaica. He was, as yet, far too ill to return to the United States. His friend’s sudden and unexpected shift from strength to vulnerability caused Roald to reflect on his own life and provoked one of his most profound and revealing letters. In an attempt to console his bedridden mentor, he not only articulated the unremitting daily nature of his own physical pain, but also explained how he had mentally come to terms with that suffering and how it had driven his desire to be a writer.
I just want to tell you this: I am an expert on being very ill and having to lie in bed. You are not. Even after you get up and get well after this one, you still will be only an amateur at the game compared with us pros. Like any other business, or any unusual occupation, it’s a hell of a tough one to learn. But you know I’m convinced that it has its compensations—for someone like me it does anyway.
I doubt I would have written a line, or would have had the ability to write a line, unless some minor tragedy had sort of twisted my mind out of the normal rut. You of course were already a philosopher before you became ill. But I predict that you will emerge a double philosopher, and a super philosopher after all this is over. I emerged a tiny-philosopher, a fractional philosopher from nothing, so it stands to reason that you will advance from straight philosopher to super philosopher.
I mean this. I know that serious illness is a good thing for the mind. It is always worth it, afterwards. There’s something of the yogi about it, with all its self-disciplines and horrors. And it’s one of the few experiences that you’d never had up to now. So take my view and be kind of thankful that it came. And if afterwards, it leaves you with an ache, or a pain, or a slight disability, as it does me, it doesn’t matter a damn; at least not to anyone but yourself. And as you’ve taught me so well, that is the only unimportant person—oneself. 96
Charles’s predicament also reinforced Pat’s resolution to change her ways, and encouraged Roald to inject a necessary shot of positive energy into the troubled marriage. While Pat was on tour and away in Jamaica, Roald had continued his dalliance with Gloria Vanderbilt. Initially she, like so many, had found him lofty, opinionated and condescending. But his charms were powerful. Soon she was flattered by the attention he showed her and excited when he presented her with one of his handwritten manuscripts, held together by a thread, onto which was attached a tiny gold greyhound, “an antique key to wind a fob watch.”97 For Roald, a “stiff prick had no conscience”—so it was perhaps no surprise that even as he wrote to Charles about the crisis in his marriage, he was also trying to seduce Vanderbilt. Indeed, according to her memoirs, he almost consummated the relationship just before he went to Jamaica. Roald now put this affaire behind him. Equipped with a joint bank account and a more pliant, domesticated wife, he also took s
teps to deal with two other things that he felt had been disturbing the marriage. First, he sent Pat to a specialist to investigate why, after nine months of marriage, there was still no “bun in the oven.”98 The new gynecologist diagnosed blocked Fallopian tubes as the cause of her infertility and blew air through them to clean them out. Second, he wrote to his family in Buckinghamshire, and asked them to look for a house near the Logsdails in Great Missenden, which he and Pat could rent—or preferably purchase.
Despite his successes in New York, it was always Roald’s intention to return to England. City life held increasingly little excitement for him and he viewed Manhattan, as he pointedly told his friend Marian Goodman, simply as somewhere “to make money.”99 In early 1952 he said much the same to his mother, when he acknowledged that his only reason for being there was “to amass some capital.”100 In that context, the city had delivered for him. But now that he was solvent and successful, he was finding life there increasingly stressful. In an autobiographical fragment in one of his “Ideas Books,” he explained his feelings in typically comic terms:
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