Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  Now if you are self-employed, as I am, and if you are exceptionally indolent, as I am, then you will discover no finer cure for your indolence than to go and stay for a while in New York City. It costs so much money simply to exist in the place that you find yourself living in a state of perpetual panic. You begin to work feverishly, trying to earn enough money to pay the bills. You dare not stop. You dare not take a day off, not even Sunday. Yesterday, I was reading the paper for a few moments after breakfast, and all of a sudden I leaped out of my chair and cried, “My God, what am I doing! I shall be ruined.” 101

  The lure of the English countryside was once again becoming overwhelming. So “slowly and insidiously,”102 Roald began trying to persuade Pat that they should spend half the year there. Eventually she agreed that they should spend the winters (eight months) in Manhattan and the summers in England. In mid-March 1954, Sofie Magdalene sent her son details of a tiny cottage that had come on the market on the outskirts of Great Missenden. It was less than an hour’s train journey from London, and a stone’s throw from the Logsdails’ house, with six acres of land, including an orchard filled with apple and pear trees and two functioning water wells. It was owned by the Stewart-Liberty family, who owned Liberty’s in Regent Street, and had been inhabited mostly by tenant farmers and latterly by a solicitor and his young family who had fallen on hard times.103 Situated on an ancient drove road, which ran from an old medieval abbey up the hill to a mighty beechwood, the property was to be sold at auction on April 8. Both Roald and Pat went “crazy” about the idea of Whitefield Cottage and decided immediately that they wanted to buy it. Sofie Magdalene offered to put up half the money—although she had to persuade her trustees that it was a sound investment.§ Else and John went with her to bid for it. They were successful. Roald and Pat were now the owners of a house they had never actually seen. It had cost just over £4,000.

  Almost six weeks later, they arrived in England to supervise building work on the primitive cottage and “remodel, redecorate and completely furnish” it.104 Electricity needed to be installed, walls knocked down and doorways raised, so Roald and Pat lived with Mormor in the Logsdails’ annex until the work was completed. There they took many a glorious walk in the Buckinghamshire countryside, and it was on one of these—after a bout of open-air sex in one of the nearby fields, where Pat had laid down on an ant’s nest and got her bottom badly bitten—that Pat was convinced she finally got her “bun in the oven.” Above her, she remembered, nature seemed to suggest omens of fertility. “The bright blue sky was skirted with low-hanging clouds.” It reminded her, strangely, of “ladies removing their panties.”105 A few days later, on July 27, 1954, the Dahls moved into Little Whitefield, as they had named it, to avoid confusion with the Logsdails’ house, which was also called Whitefields. Roald was in Arcadia once again.

  There are pheasants to be poached up in the woods across the valley. There are exciting furniture auctions to go to in vast decaying country houses all around us. There are wine auctions up in London. There are horse races to bet on, and small secret greyhound races out in the fields. There are roses to be budded onto the wild briars in the hedges around the orchard, and outhouses to be painted, and cherries to be picked, and the donkey’s hooves to be pared, and an old carved frame to be re-gilded, and a tree-house to be built, and there are mushrooms to be gathered in the dew-drenched grass of someone else’s pasture in the very early mornings. There are in fact so many things to be done all the time that it becomes impossible on any single day between April and September to find a moment for doing what a publisher would call serious work.106

  Roald’s relations with his British publishers continued to be problematic. His new collection, Someone Like You, had been published in England by George Orwell’s publisher, Secker & Warburg, just before his return. The reviews were generally excellent, and shortly after its initial print run, the book went into a second printing. But Dahl, who described Fredric Warburg as “a desiccated, rather constipated old fart, who reads about eight books a year,”107 was dissatisfied. Once again, he found himself comparing London unfavorably with New York. “My book does nothing here,” he told Sheila St. Lawrence angrily. “No contact from Warburg. No advertising. No books in shops.”108 He was equally uncomplimentary about his UK agent, Peter Watt, who might be “charming,” but had “about as much drive as a pair of stilts.”109 The press were generous with their accolades for the book. Improbable, witty, malicious, sophisticated, fresh, horrifying, extravagant, cruel and prescient were some of the many adjectives bandied about, but the most popular of all was “macabre.” Punch described the best of the stories as “attractively horrible,” noting that “the chuckle is not completely separated from the scream,” while the Manchester Evening News noted that Dahl’s view of humanity was neither kindly nor genial, but that he had “a genuine ability for grotesque comic invention.” The Times Literary Supplement was more reserved, concluding that “the general effect of his work is unpleasant.” The critic for Time and Tide was perhaps the most perceptive of all when he observed that Mr. Dahl “behaves in his work like the mad inventor of a book for boys.”110

  Roald had already shown his remarkable ability to connect with children in many contexts. Within his own family, it was perhaps most striking in the relationship he had developed with his nephew, Nicholas Logsdail, who described him as “the best uncle a boy could wish for.”111 Nicky was the recipient of a stream of presents from his uncle in New York—mechanical guns, model aeroplanes, train sets—mostly the kind of things that fascinated Roald himself. He wrote to him at school every two or three weeks. He also encouraged the young boy’s talents as an artist, paying him ten shillings for his painting of the burning elm tree, which he then framed and hung on the wall of his study. He took his nephew poaching and travelled to antique sales with him. He helped him build a huge tree house in the garden, and backed him when he decided he wanted to live in it. He left him on his own in Matthew Smith’s studio for a weekend, so he could paint with the great man. And he was quite uninterested in his school exam results.

  This led to a situation where Nicholas felt he had a closer relationship with his uncle than he did with his father, for whom—in the words of one of the Dahl nannies—“those girls [Anna and Louise] and their mother were the apple of his eye.”112 “Roald took over my brother, he influenced him utterly,” remembered Nicholas’s sister, Anna, recalling that this sometimes irritated her father, who would describe his interfering brother-in-law as lazy and unsuccessful.113 Behind his back, he would often refer to him as “the oaf.” Roald encouraged Nicky’s sexual adventures. He gave him a gramophone and introduced him to classical music, rhapsodizing about an artist’s existence in much the same way he would later celebrate the life of a writer. “It’s not work for him,” Nicky recalled his uncle saying. “He [Matthew Smith] gets up when he wants to, he goes to bed when he wants to, he doesn’t have any obligations to anybody.”114 It was the gypsy ideal all over again: the apparent absence of dreary, day-to-day responsibilities that was almost an extension of the delights of childhood.

  The ease with which Dahl could enter a child’s mind had been apparent too in his recent story, The Wish, in which a young boy, left on his own in a room with a multicolored carpet, persuades himself that he must cross it only by treading on its yellow portions. If he steps on the wrong colors, he will either disappear into a black void or be killed by venomous snakes. The boy’s wild imagination takes such hold of him that the reader is left uncertain of his fate when, inevitably, his foot does slip into the danger zone. It is a startling effective piece of prose, and it led Sheila St. Lawrence to suggest that Roald should consider writing a book for children. It was a typically sensible suggestion from the woman who was taking over as his literary rock. Ten years younger than he was, Sheila was strong, clever and unintimidated by her client’s sometimes eccentric manner. She came from a medical family. Her father was a doctor and her mother had been a Red Cross nurse in th
e Great War. She had studied mathematics at Columbia University in New York before joining Ann Watkins in 1947 as the office assistant. She had first written to Roald in 1950. “Dear S. S. Lawrence,” he had replied. “If you don’t mind me saying so that’s the damnedest name I ever heard. It’s either a ravishing film star or a negro missionary. Henceforth I shall imagine you in the former.…”115 She took his frivolity in her stride, responded in kind, and their correspondence was soon characterized by a gossipy, bantering repartee. When Roald returned to New York in 1951, he invited Sheila out one evening to watch an indoor tennis match. The date, she recalled with a grin, went no further than that. As the aging Ann Watkins ventured into the office less frequently, St. Lawrence gradually took over dealing with Dahl’s literary affairs. Her self-reliant, practical and inventive mind was perfectly suited to Roald’s, as was her directness of expression. In the future, he would come to rely as heavily on her judgment as he had relied upon Watkins’s. However, it was to be a number of years before he responded to her prescient suggestion about writing for children.

  The summer of 1954 saw him working on two new projects—a movie script of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and a theater project based on three of the most macabre short stories in Someone Like You. The film-work was short, intense and unsatisfying. A first draft had already been written by Ray Bradbury, but the director John Huston was unhappy with it and asked Roald to inject something of “the feeling and philosophy of Melville”116 into the dialogue. Remembering his unsatisfactory movie experiences with Gabriel Pascal, Roald was unsure whether to take up the offer, but eventually decided to do so because the money earned would help pay for the rebuilding and furnishing of Little Whitefield. Yet he did not take to Huston at all. Impressed neither by the director’s showy eelskin jacket nor his way of dealing with people, Dahl summed him up as “a queer guy,” and one whom he found difficult to read. “I cannot tell whether H is really pleased with what I’ve done or not,” he told Sheila St. Lawrence. “I believe what he’s actually doing is taking my ideas and my sentences and fiddling around with them himself. He tells you nothing of the final version and won’t show it. Really a strange sort of egomaniac, and I feel he could gobble you up if you don’t take care.”117 He was not far off the mark. The project ended with Huston refusing to pay Dahl for all his work, and crediting himself as Bradbury’s co-writer. The experience reinforced all Roald’s suspicious attitudes toward “movie types.”

  Fortunately, his irritation with the Moby-Dick project was swept away by the enticing prospect of becoming a father. Pat noticed with some relief that Roald began calling her “old girl” and “old sausage” as soon as she started to get larger. At the outset of their relationship, she had loathed these endearments, finding them neither affectionate nor sexy, but recently their withholding had come to cause her pain. It consoled her to hear them again. Roald began to anticipate the birth of his child almost as soon as it was conceived, and—with Pat barely six weeks pregnant—he lightheartedly imagined himself into the role of father. “Parenthood is a great strain,” he declared. “I can see it all. Nursery books for Knopf. Once upon a time there was a dear little bunny.…”118 It was a year since Sheila had suggested he might consider writing for children. Again he skirted by the waters of his destiny, but did not stop to drink.

  For the next two years his professional life would be consumed by his one and only stage play, The Honeys. Based on three of the short stories in Someone Like You, it seemed initially like a good idea. Many of these tales had already adapted well to television and there seemed no reason why they should not work well in the theater, too. But the reality of the show’s production would be fraught with pitfalls and problems. In August 1954, he wrote to Sheila summarizing the plot. It was a typical mixture of the macabre, the moral and the comic.

  The general idea is to follow a woman (in three acts) through three marriages with three different men. … In each case the husband is murdered because he deserves it. … The woman is not really the murdering sort, but is driven to it by intolerable provocation. Actually she’s rather a sweet little thing—small, kind, gentle, passionately in search of a cosy little home, a good husband, and domesticity. A woman in search of a decent mate. The fact that she kills them off instead of divorcing them should not obscure the principle moral of the play, which is that a bad husband deserves all he gets. Many women in this world would gladly murder their husbands if they thought they could get away with it (and vice versa), but they are afraid. Crime (in the form of murder) pays all the way through. And good luck to it. Because at the same time, crime (in the form of naughtiness and infidelity) does not pay. Which is interesting, because who is to say which of the two crimes is the worse. The police, society, the church hold one view. Our little woman holds another.119

  The excitement of conquering a new genre—and particularly one that was his wife’s metier—was probably Roald’s primary motivation for spending so much time on the project. His little sketch, Double Exposure, written in Bexley before the war, had, until then, been his only other foray into theatrical writing. Perhaps he also hoped writing the play would bring him closer to Pat. He had certainly enjoyed watching the rehearsals of The Children’s Hour and liked the collegial nature of the process. “Never seen professional rehearsal before,” he told his mother then. “Liked it. Going again.”120

  Unfortunately, when he returned to New York in the autumn of 1954, The Honeys turned out to be a horrible experience for everyone involved. Roald quarrelled with Cheryl Crawford and Carmel Myers, the American producers. He was unhappy with the casting, particularly Jessica Tandy in the lead role, and he fought constantly with the director, Frank Corsaro. And when his “farce comedy” opened on Broadway in the spring of 1955, it was panned. The New Yorker, for example, described it as “tedious” and “unpleasant.” It closed early. Crawford herself seems curiously not to have grasped what the play was about, describing it in her memoirs as “a story of insidious evil”121 rather than a dark comedy, but she did tell Roald that it was “the most miserable experience” she had ever had in the theater.122 He felt much the same way, having had “a perfectly dreadful time”123 with the project and becoming “profoundly disillusioned” by it.124 He told Sheila St. Lawrence that he was considering having a machine gun mounted on the roof of his house in Great Missenden to defend himself in case Carmel Myers came to visit.125 Yet the project refused to die. Despite the failure in New York, a British producer, Emile Littler, picked the play up and persuaded Roald to rewrite some of it for a UK production.

  So, more than a year after its New York debacle, under the new title Your Loving Wife, Roald had to go through the humiliation of failure all over again. The year 1956 was an inauspicious time to be premiering a tightly constructed, essentially artificial piece of drama. London had just witnessed the premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which had been hailed as the beginning of the “new wave” of British theater. Gritty realism was all the rage, and even in the provinces, Dahl’s clever escapist satire failed to synchronize with the popular critical pulse. Roald was quick to pin the blame for its lack of success on others. “The first night was very bad indeed,” he told Sheila St. Lawrence after the opening in Oxford. “I don’t think there was anything much wrong with the play, but the acting was simply atrocious. No style, no speed, no fun. In addition, our male actor is, I’m afraid, no good at all. … The whole thing is a bit of a bloody bore, isn’t it?”126 The budding poet and playwright Adrian Mitchell, criticizing the play’s construction, described it in the Oxford Mail as “a piece of jerry building,” though in Bournemouth audiences seemed to enjoy its sauciness, sophistication and madcap humor. Sheila St. Lawrence, however, was horrified at the trajectory the project was taking and the amount of her author’s time it was consuming. Eventually she wrote to Roald suggesting that he abandon it. “You’ve been working constantly for almost two years on this vehicle to the detriment of everything and anything else. It seems perhaps th
e time has come to divorce yourself from it and start afresh with the stories that we as well as your reading public are clamoring for.”127

  Dahl himself was initially unsure what to do. He was tired of the play, but desperate not to squander the time he had already invested in it. Emile Littler eventually settled the issue when he cancelled the London run and asked for yet more rewrites.

  Conference with that prick Littler yesterday. He wants to close the play at the end of the run. Rewrite and recast. … I said I didn’t feel like doing any more at the moment. I’d given him six months work for free after he’d bought the property. He said he wanted someone else to do it. “Who?” He didn’t know. “Who would pay this man?” “You would,” he said to me. I said, “Will I? Hell.” He said, “I won’t.” I said, “I can’t.” There it ended. The next move is up to him. I’m leaving him to stew. Will he lose the play by not bringing it to London? I know he doesn’t want to lose it. He’s going to lose me soon. I’m off to NY as soon as our nurse’s entry permit comes through.128

  Dahl did indeed leave as soon as he could and, in his absence, the play was finally put to rest. Apart from one or two amateur revivals, it has never been professionally produced again.

  He returned to New York in October 1956, with his eighteen-month-old daughter Olivia, but without Pat, who had gone to star in a movie produced and directed by Elia Kazan. Olivia Twenty was born in New York on April 20, 1955, and named after her mother’s favorite Shakespearean heroine, the date of her birth, and the fact that Roald had $20 in his pocket when he came to visit Pat in hospital. He had been in Boston on tour with The Honeys and, much to Pat’s disappointment, not present at the birth. She described her new baby to Claudia as “rare and beautiful. I love her and am terrified of her.” She longed for Roald to be able to hold her and for him to finish with his other baby, his play. “I want to be married to a short-story writer who has recovered from the theatre,” she told Claudia regretfully.129 The next month they travelled to England to spend the summer there. In Great Missenden, Pat found the demands of motherhood hugely stressful. Though her niece Anna Corrie acknowledged that Pat was “the most wonderful aunt,” she also described her as “the most lousy mother.”130 Pat struggled to deal with Olivia, who she believed was almost “at war” with her, “lying in wait” for her mother and screaming loudly whenever she came close.131 In desperation she handed the child over to her sister-in-law, Else Logsdail, who returned her a few weeks later, quite transformed.132