Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  Sheila understood how much Roald needed this kind of constructive critical response. It was quite different from the syntactical nitpicking that had so irritated him with The New Yorker. She knew that he valued his own writing style and was confident of its quality, appreciating how important the “rhythms and patterns” of his prose were to him, and she was aware that they often took many weeks of careful honing before he was satisfied. “He was pleased with himself in a nice way, not a haughty way,” she told me. “But he was a clever bloke … and one had to be cautious in making comments.”162 Fortunately, she also believed strongly in his talent and simply could not contain her own passion for the new book, which bubbled over with a zesty energy that matched Roald’s own. As she liaised deftly between Roald and Virginie Fowler, his old-fashioned and somewhat prickly editor in Alfred Knopf’s children’s division, she continually reassured him that she knew she was reading a winner. Convinced the book was even better than the two most recent juvenile publishing successes, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, Sheila told Roald she was certain that James and the Giant Peach would be “a runaway best seller.” “Really, honestly, truly,” she wrote when she got the second draft, “it is unbelievably better than ever, and better than ever I thought it could be. I think you’ve done the undoable, crossed the border between adult and juvenile.”163

  * Suzanne seems to have disappeared from Roald’s life soon after he broke up with her. The last reference I could find for her was an address in Reno, Nevada, scribbled in pencil in his address book.

  † Dahl had maintained his friendship with Hellman throughout his postwar years in England. She came to visit him in Amersham and they also met in London when her lover, Dashiell Hammett, was in prison for his political views. “She is now a very unhappy, ill-at-ease woman,” Roald wrote to Claudia Marsh, “and I must say I felt sorry for her because she is really so nice. She talked of ‘Dash’ much of the time and doesn’t like the idea of him being in jail. Am afraid that his being there will turn Lillian automatically more and more against her own country”—Roald Dahl, Letter to Claudia Marsh, 10/09/51—CMP.

  ‡ Dahl took the ring as a gift, but Neal later claimed Marsh had expected him eventually to pay back its cost. In her memoirs Neal also claimed that the stone was not a sapphire but a marquise diamond.

  § Ashley Miles, one of the trustees, seems to have objected to her doing so, but was overruled by the others.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A Tornado of Troubles

  THE YEAR 1960 BEGAN calmly enough, but it would prove to be tumultuous in many ways. Kiss Kiss was published in the United States in March and, despite all Alfred Knopf’s reservations, it stormed into the New York Times bestseller lists. As Roald and Pat, who was more than five months pregnant, boarded the boat back from New York to England in early April, Roald was pleasantly surprised to find that many of his fellow passengers, including C. S. Forester—the man who had first encouraged him to begin writing almost twenty years earlier—were reading it. Nor had this escaped the notice of two other passengers in the publishing business who were also making the crossing on the Queen Mary—the London literary agent Laurence Pollinger and the publisher Charles Pick. The fifty-eight-year-old Pollinger had recently parted from David Higham to set up his own company and was now aggressively looking for new clients. His friend Charles Pick was five years younger, a senior editor at Michael Joseph, and a charismatic bon viveur, whom Pollinger’s son, Murray, would describe as “shrewd, cruel, a salesman, utterly through and through.” Both were self-made men, who had risen up through the ranks of the publishing business. They were ambitious entrepreneurs—close colleagues, who “fed off each other” professionally.1 And they had Roald Dahl in their sights.

  Behind the scenes there was also the shadowy figure of Armitage Watkins, who had taken over the business from his mother when she formally retired in 1957. The day before Dahl left Manhattan in 1960, Watkins had taken Pick out to lunch to let him know that Dahl had yet to conclude a UK publishing deal for Kiss Kiss. He told Pick that Roald had parted company with his UK agent Peter Watt six years earlier after the publication of Someone Like You, and that he had subsequently joined up with Raymond Chandler’s agent, Helga Greene. He also hinted that his client’s low public profile in the United Kingdom annoyed him and that Dahl was quietly on the lookout for a new British agent.

  Armed with this information, Pick and Pollinger seized the opportunity to persuade Roald that they were the team to revitalize his British career. Having “run the gauntlet of the snooty purser,” Pick found the Dahls in their cabin. Pat was hunting for a valuable diamond she had mislaid, he later recalled, while Roald was telling her not to bother looking for it.2 Pick’s flattery worked a treat. “I have never been so assiduously and pleasantly wooed and wined and dined as I (and Pat) were on board ship by Messrs Charles Pick and Laurence Pollinger,”3 Roald wrote excitedly to Sheila on his arrival in England, informing her that from now on he intended Pollinger to represent him in Britain and Michael Joseph to publish both Kiss Kiss and the incomplete James and the Giant Peach. He also confessed that, although he had already agreed to the terms of the new arrangement, he had not yet informed Helga Greene, admitting that he did feel “a bit embarrassed,” as he knew she was already in negotiations with Heinemann and Cape about publishing Kiss Kiss. He asked Sheila to do the dirty work and extricate him from his commitment to Greene. “Please guide me in this,” he concluded. “I don’t want to cross any wires.”4

  Dahl had put St. Lawrence in a difficult position. She understood completely why Pick and Pollinger’s enthusiasm had been such a tonic to him. She knew how much he wanted to be accepted as a writer in the United Kingdom, and that he longed to spend more time in England with his young family, but that he did not want to do so as long as his own career there was effectively stalled. In that context, his behavior was understandable. Yet it was also ruthless. Roald had asked her to “ease Helga out very quickly and gently,”5 but this was easier said than done. Greene was almost certain to object. She had been working hard on placing Kiss Kiss with a British publisher and would surely feel she was due some compensation. In the event, St. Lawrence’s letter to Greene was a model of honest diplomacy. “Roald has been restive about his representation in Great Britain for some time,” she began.

  He is, as you must know, very anxious to establish himself to the same extent at home as he has in the States, and he was beginning to feel the need for more aggressive exploitation of his work in England. Before his departure last month, we had discussed his remaining with you. We were both well aware that you had to date very little to work with as far as material was concerned, that you had expended a great deal of time and effort untangling knots made by others; and had done much to prepare the way for launching Kiss Kiss. … Apparently something has gone wrong. This morning I received a frantic cable and letter from Roald asking to be released from his agency commitments immediately.6

  Greene responded with quiet dignity, saying that she was neither “upset nor even surprised” to get St. Lawrence’s letter. “It has seemed to me always,” she concluded, “that you were the only person really able to handle him, and therefore his work.”7 The matter was sorted with remarkably little fuss. Roald, delighted that he had got exactly what he wanted, basked in the sunlit honeymoon of his relationship with Pick and Pollinger, enthusing to Sheila about the “real action” they were bringing to his career in Britain.8 In May 1960, Penguin bought the paperback rights to Kiss Kiss and the Sunday Times in London published a complete story from the collection. Roald meanwhile relaxed with his family, tinkering with James and the Giant Peach, considering potential illustrators, gardening and buying antiques. It was a golden period, as Sue Denson remembered, with Pat doting on Olivia and Tessa, and Roald content and at ease. They seemed, she recalled, a “wonderful team.”9 His nieces, particularly the twins Anna and Lou Logsdail, were on hand most days to help with looking after the children, while Mor
mor, now in her mid-seventies, was always only five minutes away in the Logsdails’ annex. She had installed an elevator so that she could move around the house more easily and Roald visited her almost every day. Sue Denson recalled her sitting “dour and uncommunicative” in her conservatory, listening rather than talking, surrounded by dogs and looking “a bit like a troll.” In Little Whitefield, too, animals roamed everywhere, bringing back for Roald fond childhood memories of Radyr, Cumberland Lodge and Bexley. “Pat seems very well. Olivia is learning to read,” he told Sheila the following month. “We have two ducks wandering about the lawn, and a nine weeks puppy pissing on the carpets in the house.”10

  By the end of the decade, Roald would demand privacy in his hut and make it clear that he was only to be disturbed there if something important had happened. But in the early days, it seems he was more relaxed—particularly when Pat was away. He struck up a friendship with Alan Higgin, a local teenager, who kept two ancient cars in the orchard. Not only did he let Alan race around the field in his cars, he picked apples with him, often cooked him meals, and sometimes let him sit in the hut and chat with him. Higgin remembered Roald as “just a big kid really.”11 Nearby, a traditional gypsy caravan loitered amongst the trees in gaily painted splendor. Alfhild and Leslie had originally bought it, with some of Charles Marsh’s PWF money, for Bert Edmonds, a gypsy neighbor of theirs, who had fallen on hard times and had nowhere to live.12 When Edmonds died, they sold it to Roald. Now it served not only as a playhouse for the children, who ran naked around it on the long summer days, but also a private tribute to that gypsy ideal which continued to inspire him. A family of gypsies regularly camped each year at the top of the lane. Alan Higgin recalled them as “kind, nature-loving people who had chosen that existence. … You weren’t afraid of them.”13 Roald loved that. Shortly afterwards, he renamed Little Whitefield “Gipsy House.”14

  Raising children had brought Roald closer to Pat, while Gipsy House was turning into the haven of which he had always dreamed. Not only was he back in the countryside within the bosom of his family, but now he finally seemed to have found an energized and positive agent and publisher working for him an hour away in London, who would complement Sheila St. Lawrence, his professional rock in New York. But storm clouds were starting to gather. Laurence Pollinger, for one, was not content with the status quo. He harbored ambitions to poach some of St. Lawrence’s responsibilities. Perhaps he even sensed that if Roald were to settle permanently in England, he might one day replace her as his principal agent. Roald’s own judgment about all this was blurred by the fact that his ego, starved of praise from the London establishment for so many years, was now swollen with regular doses of adulation from Charles Pick and Pollinger himself. The latter was daily at the end of the telephone, plotting, planning, pestering, urging him to move forward. Sheila, by contrast, was 3,000 miles away and distracted by her own domestic problems. In their ten years working together there had never been an angry word between them. Now Dahl was beginning to rock the boat. A destructive row was about to ensue.

  It all began with the question of who should handle Dahl’s translation rights. Pollinger persuaded Roald that because of his own proximity to European territories, he was in a much better position to handle them. Roald wrote to Sheila explaining his simple geographical logic. But if he thought that, like Helga Greene, she would simply give up her rights without a fight, he was wrong. Irish blood ran in Sheila’s veins and she was a combative and feisty negotiator. She believed she could handle these rights just as well as Laurence Pollinger and she resented the potential loss of income and influence involved. She was also stung by the implication that Roald believed Pollinger could do this part of her job better than she could. So she objected. She told him that she wanted to continue to act as his agent for foreign translations and asked him politely to stay out of the discussion, arguing that the author should not be involved in these issues, and that the matter should be decided directly between herself and Pollinger, the UK subagent.

  Roald was uncertain how to respond. At first he pretended he did not care how the issue was resolved. “None of it is anything to do with me,” he told her, “so must keep out of it. It’s up to you to handle as you wish.”15 Two days later, he repeated that line. “You square it with him [Pollinger]. There’s no question of taking anything away from you.”16 He was being disingenuous. If he had meant what he said, the matter would have ended there. But he was in a quandary. He believed Pollinger was the right man to maximize his foreign sales. On the other hand, he did not want to hurt Sheila.

  In the middle of all this uncertainty, Sheila’s father died and she had to go away for a few days to organize the funeral. While she was out of town, Roald decided he must get off the fence and tell her directly what he felt about the situation. So, when Sheila returned to New York, tired and emotional, having just cancelled a long-planned holiday to Greece with her husband and children, she found awaiting her a letter from Roald, which tried to browbeat her into giving up the rights. Its content—a mixture of bullying, pleading, hectoring and childish flippancy—was unlikely ever to achieve the effect he desired. “I know quite well that Laurence P. is a pushing little businessman who wants to get in on everything, but in this case he is not pushing so much as I am … PLEASE let Laurence have a go at this in Europe, sharing his commission with you in the usual way. It doesn’t really amount to all that much anyway, so I am not really taking hamburgers out of your children’s mouths. Will you be nice and write him a letter at once telling him I’ve asked you to ask him to go ahead?”17

  Sheila was devastated. She knew her client’s reputation for self-righteous grumpiness and had seen it in action on many occasions. Roger Angell at The New Yorker was not the only person who dreaded the “unpleasant altercations” that often ensued in dealings with Roald Dahl. However, she had never experienced this self-righteousness used against her. Now, just when she was most vulnerable, he had turned on her—presumably in the hope that she would crumple. She didn’t. She felt a profound sense of injustice, almost of betrayal. In her mind, having assured her that he would not interfere, that he would not take anything from her, Roald had now made it quite plain he wanted her to give up her translation rights to a man who had known him for barely three months. She wrote back, initially criticizing Laurence Pollinger for not behaving like a gentleman. But it was not long before the fact that she was wounded was all too clear. Her first instinct had been to resign completely, she told Roald, “to bow out immediately as your agent in order to avoid any further unpleasantness.” But her sense of fair play would simply not allow her to do it.

  Roald, I don’t know what to do or where to begin. I, unlike Laurence, haven’t got you here to persuade or influence or bamboozle.

  You have put me in one hell of a position. … I don’t know whether you have lost confidence in my ability or whether the songs of praise from a new voice have gone to your head. … I should bow to his [Pollinger’s] wishes in order to maintain harmony … but I refuse to be trampled underfoot after all these years without putting up a fight. Either you have faith in your wildlife or you don’t.

  I have much to lose by taking this stand and nothing to gain. You as a client, you as a friend, and you and your family’s warm and close association over the past thirteen years. These things are important to me. They mean a great deal to me and I value them highly. I don’t want to lose them. But I value ethics and fair play too and I do not believe I deserve this display of fair weather sailing.

  I will not reread this letter. I cannot. … It is the principle that has caused me such splitting headaches and sleepless nights.

  My love to you,

  Sheila18

  Shocked by what he described as the “tornado of troubles” he had stirred up in her breast,19 Roald should probably have called Sheila and tried to reason it out. He thought she had overreacted. She probably had. And perhaps some reassurance and sympathy was all the recently bereaved Sheila needed. Yet,
although he discussed it with Pat, his eventual response was wheedling, argumentative, and ultimately unfeeling:

  Dear Sheila,

  … Now if you were the one who is pregnant, I could understand the whole thing, but as it is, I thought I was almost doing you a favour, taking this troublesome and unremunerative business to someone else. But see what happened. Pat says you are a woman and what the hell did I expect. Resign as my agent? You must be mad. Pollinger doesn’t mean anything to me. He is brisk and smooth. I have noticed that he sometimes has a little dandruff in the hairs on the side of his head and how could one turn everything over to someone like that?

  But I still want to talk about it a bit more (if you will keep absolutely calm) and as it’s now seven pm and as we have a poor derelict woman and two children in the house (she was evicted in the rain this morning by her landlord and her husband has run away). I must now go down and lend a hand in the house.