In contrast, Pat could see that Roald was “a very maternal daddy,”133 who happily took on the burden of child care while she was away filming and seemed relatively content that his paternal duties were leaving him little time to write. “There’s no doubt that babies are charming,” Roald admitted to Sheila, “but they do bugger up the quiet and routine necessary for work.”134 As he told Claudia Marsh, “between you and me I can do without the little buggers until they are six months old. Until then they are nothing but a great whirling blur of wet nappies and vomit and milk and belching and farting.”135 He took measures to deal with the problem, employing a nurse to help, and constructing an isolated work hut in his orchard, where he could write undisturbed. Even so, it was difficult—particularly when Else and her children were away. The following summer, he compared notes with Sheila St. Lawrence, who had also recently had her first baby.
I don’t go for this rushing about at all. And with my sisters away on holiday, the nurse’s day off here gives me a very arduous day. I have the nipper solid from 8 am to bedtime, all meals for her and me, pramming, bathing, everything. And now, by God, the nurse has to have a WEEKEND to go and see her mother. That may finish me. Certainly it won’t finish anything else—like a story, for instance … I am going out into the orchard to eat apples.136
Baby problems aside, Roald was blissfully happy in Little Whitefield. He loved his new work hut, describing it to Charles and Claudia as “marvellous … only Claud’s heifers licking the windowpanes from time to time and eating the curtains if I leave the windows open.”137 If Pat was home, in the evening there might be dinners with American actors and writers who were passing through the United Kingdom. Or, if Pat was away, he might go out to play poker locally or amuse himself on a midnight adventure with Claud Taylor. Now that he had his own small herd, Claud was eager to mate his cows illicitly with a huge Black Angus bull in a nearby field. Achieving this involved stealthy and sometimes hilarious nocturnal escapades, some of which Roald would later recreate in his novel My Uncle Oswald. It made wonderful entertainment for Charles and Claudia.
Then the fun really started. The bull started jumping them one after the other in quick rotation and the cows got so excited they started jumping the bull as well. Claud had a torch and he would shine it in a bright yellow beam on the bull’s prick just as it was entering the cow, then afterwards he would shine it on again, crying out, “Look at her! Look at her tail all curling up! She’s had it alright! Boy, he really creamed her up that time! Look at it dribbling out.” Then we successfully returned the bull to his herd and made the long journey back over the fields. “Just look at them,” Claud kept saying proudly as we walked along. “They’re so bloody tired they can ’ardly stand!” 138
Roald had been disappointed when Pat, now pregnant again, accepted a part in the Elia Kazan film A Face in the Crowd and had to leave their rural idyll for twenty weeks’ filming in the United States. But he was philosophical. “I tell you,” he complained to Claudia, “a career and motherhood, (or wifehood) do not go together. To hell with the money she will earn. Who wants that? On the other hand, it would have been madness for me to stop her from doing the film, because to make a Kazan movie is the big ambition, and she would never have forgiven me. I wish I could feed her some magic pills that would rid her of this fierce driving ambition that all actresses seem to have.”139 He longed to settle down in Buckinghamshire and abandon the New York element of their existence.
For a period of five years—1955–60—Roald and Pat commuted between Great Missenden and New York, with occasional sojourns in Los Angeles if Pat was working there. In Manhattan, they moved into a bigger apartment on the Upper East Side, between Madison Avenue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth. Pat fitted her stage, television and movie work around two more pregnancies, which resulted in the births of a second daughter, Chantal Sophia, in Oxford in April 1957, and a son, Theo, in July 1960. A few days after Chantal had been christened, Roald realized her name rhymed with Dahl and renamed her Tessa. Pat described her to Claudia Marsh as “really cunning … with a longer thinner jaw than our moonfaced Olivia. … She has all her buttons and is a bright little bird.”140 To escape the inevitable hurly-burly generated by young children and the live-in nanny, Roald rented a room in an apartment directly above theirs, which belonged to the playwright Clifford Odets. It looked out onto Campbell’s Funeral Chapel and Roald later enthralled his offspring with stories of how he used to watch dead bodies being unloaded there at night. Once he told them he could occasionally still see the corpses twitching.141 But he found the city itself ever more objectionable: “The merchants are impolite, the bus drivers are truculent, the cab drivers are crazy, and the cops are not to be trifled with,”142 he wrote. He worried about raising a family there, and about the speed with which taxis careened across the streets.
Yet the option to leave New York remained a financial impossibility. Pat was now the significant earner in the family and much of her work was coming from American film and television. Her return to the big screen as the female lead in A Face in the Crowd was a huge critical success. The film explored both the U.S. public’s susceptibility to being manipulated by television and the emptiness of celebrity. Her character, a radio presenter who picks up a young no-hoper and turns him into a television star, returned her to the movie mainstream. While Pat’s career was going from strength to strength, however, Roald’s productivity declined markedly as he got bogged down in The Honeys and found himself increasingly involved in looking after the children. Repeated rejections from The New Yorker were also depressing him. They seemed now to follow a consistent pattern: initial interest, leading to cuts and rewrites, then an “unpleasant exchange”143 with the new fiction editor, Roger Angell, which culminated in a refusal. Sheila St. Lawrence had some success selling them to Playboy, but this strained relations with Alfred Knopf, who disapproved of the magazine and told Roald he thought he “ought not to appear in such company under any circumstances.”144 Dahl replied bluntly that he was not rich enough to turn Playboy down simply because he disliked the magazine.145 Alfred Hitchcock’s popular television adaptations of earlier stories made up the bulk of his earnings, as Sheila St. Lawrence struck a series of lucrative deals with Hitchcock’s company for them. “Up to that time Hitch had never paid anyone half the price we got out of him,” Ann Watkins’s son Mike later told Murray Pollinger in London, “and up to that time he had never agreed to the price we were able to pry out for theatrical exhibits and remakes.”146
The short stories were taking him ever longer to complete—his next collection, Kiss Kiss, took him six years to compile—and they were also becoming ever stranger and more grisly. Alfred Knopf found most of them excessively grim. One in particular—William and Mary—about a man whose brain and single eye are kept alive after his death by a surgeon, who leaves them floating in a bowl while a life support machine keeps the brain supplied with oxygenated blood, had made him almost “physically ill” when he read it. He preferred the more sophisticated tales, like his favorite, Taste, and wrote a long letter explaining why he did not think the new stories were up to the standard of those in Someone Like You. “Your numerous admirers will, for the most part, experience a feeling of let down,” he warned.147 Roald himself was increasingly grumpy and beginning to contemplate the end of his career as a short story writer. “Work is going very slowly,” he told Sheila St. Lawrence. “It always does, I’m afraid, when I don’t sell anything.”148 Five months later, he wrote again, telling her that he was “not so much depressed now as puzzled” by the situation, and concluding: “I shall not write any more stories.”149 Sheila responded by once again prodding him to consider writing a children’s book: “The more I think about it the more appealing it becomes. It seems to me here is the chance for you to get away from the short story formula, which is imprisoning you at the moment and reindulge yourself in the realm of fantasy writing at which you are so very good. I think you could come up with a book with
tremendous appeal to both adults and children.”150 It was a shrewd suggestion and at last, third time around, Dahl took the bait.
For much of his adult life he had enjoyed telling stories to children. During the war, in Grendon Underwood, he had enthralled the young Jeremy Lang with his gremlin tales; on his honeymoon he had visited friends in the South of France and entranced their two young boys with his storytelling. Pat recalled that they followed him as if he were the Pied Piper,151 mesmerizing the children with his rich voice, his glittering eyes, his sense of fun and his wild, subversive imagination. Now Roald was spending a lot of time with his own children—particularly when Pat was away on movie shoots. “He worked his head off,” recalled Marian Goodman. “He raised those kids. He was the mother and the father. … Pat was wonderful with them when she saw them. … But when it came to the routine and the drudgery, I think he did more than she did.”152 And it was not all drudgery. A story was never far away. Roald read them traditional fairy tales from Norway or from the Brothers Grimm, Beatrix Potter stories, and absurdist fables such as Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses. He also began concocting narratives of his own.
Slowly, blindly, he was edging toward his destiny as a children’s writer. Three of his recent adult stories had children as central characters. Two of them, Royal Jelly and Genesis and Catastrophe, were creepy narratives constructed out of the kind of one-liners that filled his Ideas Books. The third, Pig, was more complex and had reflected all of Dahl’s darkest fears about city life. By mid-1959, with his new short story collection completed, he began seriously to consider some plots for a children’s story and jotted down a few thoughts. A “Turtle Boy,” “the cold-cure inventor (tiny insects in soil?),” “the magic tape-recorder,” “the child who could move objects,” “tiny humans in hollow tree,” and “the child who dreamed of the future, which always came true,” were some of the ideas that initially intrigued him.153 But none seemed quite right. He continued to hesitate despite the fact that increasingly there was no obvious other option. He confessed to Knopf that six years was “too long a time between books even for a slow worker like me. I am longing to do a short novel,” he added, “but I don’t have a single idea in my head.”154
Gradually, one or two of his potential children’s stories began to acquire a little more flesh in his imagination. The idea of a novel that featured insects, in particular, intrigued him. He had noticed that his own children were always fascinated by animals, but felt that Beatrix Potter and others had slightly cramped his ability to do something original with dogs, cats, rabbits, mice and ducks. “I searched around,” he recalled, “but there seemed to be jolly little that had not been written about, except maybe little things like earthworms and centipedes and spiders.”155 It was these tiny, insignificant arthropods he fastened upon. He had also started to speculate what it was that stopped the fruit in his garden from growing endlessly. Slowly, the two ideas began to gel, as he realized that in order to relate his animals to a child protagonist, the child would either have to become very small or the creatures themselves very large. In this case, after considering enormous apples, outsize pears and a gigantic cherry as a possible focus for their adventures, he opted instead for a peach because he thought its flesh and flavors were more exciting and more sensual.156
In August 1959, the whole family along with Susan Denson, the nanny, went on holiday to Hankø in Norway, and there the story that would become James and the Giant Peach began to germinate. Denson was nineteen years old. She came from a farming family in the Midlands and had possessed very little experience when Pat had hired her the previous summer. But the two women bonded immediately and within hours of her arrival, she was taken away with the family to the Isle of Wight. Now, after a year in New York and Little Whitefield, she seemed like part of the furniture. In Hankø, Roald started to “walk around [his new story] and look at it and sniff it,” evaluating it carefully, “because once you start you’re embarked on a year’s work.”157 And the more he smelled it, the more he liked it. Not long after his return to England, a first draft was underway. Then Alfred Knopf suddenly dropped Kiss Kiss from his 1959 autumn publication list. Knopf had made his disappointment with the manuscript of the book only too apparent and Roald felt this postponement advertised his publisher’s lack of confidence. He felt betrayed, and as a result his enthusiasm for the new story evaporated. “I think he has behaved very badly,” he told Sheila St. Lawrence, “especially after being so chummy all these years. And as far as getting a children’s book out of me now, he can stuff that one up his arse.”158
Dahl put the children’s story aside and instead spent the rest of that summer buying antiques and researching a U.S. television proposal he had been asked to develop. The aim was to create a drama series out of classic ghost stories and Roald’s initial task was to choose the tales. This involved a great amount of enjoyable reading and started promisingly enough when a pilot episode was commissioned after Roald had presented his producer, Alfred Knopf’s half brother Edwin, with what he considered to be the twenty-four finest stories. The tale selected for this trailblazer was The Hanging of Arthur Wadham, by E. F. Benson. Dahl wrote the adaptation himself, and the show was duly shot and edited. By all accounts it was an excellent piece of work. However, its plot hinged on whether a priest should break the sanctity of the confessional or let an innocent man hang, and no one had considered the power of the Catholic lobby on this issue. Concerns about negative Catholic audience reactions conspired to ensure that no network would take it and eventually the series itself was abandoned. For Roald, it was yet another screenwriting disappointment. But it forced him to return to James and the Giant Peach.
The story was to some extent a reworking of themes he had explored in his recent adult stories, only in a lighter, more fantastical vein. A newly orphaned boy is sent to live with a relative in the countryside—only in this case the kindly Aunt Glosspan of his parable Pig is replaced by two vicious monsters, Aunts Sponge and Spiker. From their first appearance, it was clear that these were villains of a different order from most found in existing children’s literature. They were cruel, selfish, greedy, lazy and violent—comic grotesques, whose vices were described with a relish for crude and disgusting detail that was already distinctively Dahl’s own.
Aunt Sponge was enormously fat and very short. She had small piggy eyes, a sunken mouth, and one of those white flabby faces that looked exactly as though it had been boiled. She was like a great white, soggy overboiled cabbage. Aunt Spiker, on the other hand, was lean and tall and bony, and she wore steel-rimmed spectacles that fixed on to the end of her nose with a clip. She had a screeching voice and long, wet, narrow lips, and whenever she got angry or excited, little flecks of spit would come shooting out of her mouth as she talked.159
The two aunts starve James, beat him mercilessly and work him until he drops. But whereas in his adult tales these “ghastly hags” would almost certainly have prevailed over the young innocent, Roald now felt free to abandon his misanthropy and give his sense of justice and fair play full rein instead. The giant peach, swollen magically, and with James and his outsize animal friends on board, breaks loose from the tree, rolls down the hill, and symbolically crushes the two women, leaving them “ironed out upon the grass as flat and thin and lifeless as a couple of paper dolls cut out from a picture book.”160 One senses the lifting of a weight, an abandonment of the dark energy of the short stories, as the lyrical aspect of his writing sensibility was released from the wraps in which he had stifled it after the failure of Some Time Never. No longer is the child a victim. Now he is a resourceful and shrewd problem solver, who takes control of his own destiny and those of his new friends in a series of wonderfully fanciful adventures. At one point, the peach tumbles off a cliff and into the sea, where James saves it from a shark attack by attaching it to a flock of seagulls using threads that have been spun by a giant silkworm. It rises out of the ocean and into the safety of the sky. Returning to the theme of flying libe
rated Dahl’s sense of the rhapsodic as the peach’s aerial journey across the ocean is illuminated by euphoric evocations of clouds, nature and stillness. Even New York is redeemed when, after crossing the Atlantic Ocean, the peach eventually lands upon the needle of the Empire State Building. A glorious celebration ensues.
By the time he returned to England in the spring of 1960, James and the Giant Peach was already in its second revision. Roald showed it first to Pat and then to Sheila St. Lawrence, who both responded with enormous enthusiasm. But Sheila was facing problems of her own. She was a young mother, with three small children. Her husband was often away on business. The previous autumn, her father had fallen ill and now needed her attention. The result was that she had become semidetached from the Watkins Agency, working part time at home. In doing so, she abandoned many of her clients. But not Roald. As her new boss, Ann Watkins’s son, Armitage (“Mike”) Watkins, put it in a letter to the London agent Laurence Pollinger: “Dahl has been and is her friend and her most special client. … She knows the minutiae of the Dahl complex—and it is a complex indeed—better than anyone else.”161 James and the Giant Peach, on whose evolution she had exerted such an influence, was her main focus of interest. She had prompted and pestered him to write it. Now she was a sympathetic and imaginative editorial critic, to whose suggestions Roald was responding with gusto. In the peach’s encounter with the sinister hairy cloudmen, for example (the cloudmen were a reworking of his gremlin “spandules” from 1942), Sheila suggested a number of additional details, including the idea that the shaggy monsters should bombard the peach with gigantic hailstones. In the margin of her letter, Dahl excitedly scribbled “Yes! Yes!” to this and other ideas, which he then incorporated into his next draft.
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