Love,
Roald 20
Roald and Pat had indeed taken in a destitute local family of strangers and allowed them, with characteristic generosity, to stay as house guests until, in Alan Higgin’s words, they “got themselves a bit sorted out.”21 Nevertheless, despite this unexpected domestic disruption, next day Roald wrote again to Sheila. His letter began in a conciliatory manner. Once again he told her how important she was to him, how much both he and Pat valued her. But after a few lines the strident, self-righteous tone returned. It is a uniquely emotional professional letter, revealing just how much Sheila meant to him, how loyal he felt to her, and how much he valued her friendship and judgment.
Dear Sheila,
I am enormously worried that my small request about these translation rights should have upset you so much. Did you, one wonders, as you hinted in your letter, read into it a general loss of faith in you and the beginning of a slow, sly slide towards Pollinger. One simply has to assume that you did. And that is so ridiculous that I don’t even want to talk about it—except to say no-one could have had a better, a more successful, more clever and also a more marvellous agent and friend than me. I should be lost with anyone else as far as important business goes.
I’m concerned because I have from the start made it absolutely clear how much I rely upon you professionally and personally. Godammit—you are even talked about in my will … to the effect that your personal advice should be taken in all matters relating to my literary properties and that you should continue to handle them etc. etc. … You should not require a declaration of faith from me any more than I should or would want one from you. Balls to that. And don’t get so bloody emotional. I am not a SHIT. You are not a SHIT. Charles Pick is not a SHIT. It is just possible that Pollinger is a little bit of a shit …
I would never have put it up to you if it had meant the loss of any considerable commission to you—although I know this is not what you are concerned about. You are obstinate, that is why you are such a good trader. I am also obstinate, but not quite so obstinate as you. I am ready to give in. But I don’t want to. And I think I should tell you I don’t want to. I believe we should give it a try….
But for God’s sake don’t fly off the handle. It upsets me as much as it upsets you, and it upsets Pat as much as it upsets me, and if you do it again you might be responsible for her having the baby in the kitchen, and although that would probably make a nice story of sorts, it wouldn’t be worth it.
We love you,
Roald 22
Sheila eventually backed down, proposing a compromise by which she retained the translation rights on Kiss Kiss and Dahl’s back titles but handed the rights over to Pollinger for James and the Giant Peach. But she was still upset. She pointed out to Roald that losing James particularly pained her because she felt “like a foster mother” to the story. “Do you recall my letters in 1950–51–52 hounding you to do just such a book?” she asked pointedly, concluding: “I am sorry about my Irish temper. Is this the first you’ve seen of it?”23
Her attitude took the heat out of the situation and provoked Roald to a form of jocular apology:
Dear Sheila,
It is time that we both stopped sulking and feeling injured—and got down to work. I myself haven’t done a stroke, not one line, since this “great translation rights affair” came up, and I have been terribly unhappy (though not guilty) about the whole thing. You too have been unhappy. And also angry. But now it is over and it is time to forget it. I think I was right. You think I was wrong. And whenever a situation like that comes up, the best thing to do is to let it ride for a while and allow time to demonstrate who was wrong—if anyone cares.
PLEASE FORGET IT. But what about James? Should I try to do another children’s book? Or a play? Or a short novel?
Love,
Roald 24
The explosion was over, but the poisonous fallout remained. Sheila, whose husband Miran’s work was taking him increasingly often to Ireland, began to wonder if she should abandon her career as a literary agent and leave America to join him there. Within a year, she had taken the decision to do so. She would go on to make a permanent new home for herself there. Her choice cost Dahl his most constant, shrewd and loyal adviser—and one he found impossible to replace. Had her resolution to leave New York been affected by her argument with Roald? I asked her this question in 2008, when she was eighty-four and I had tracked her down to a tiny cottage nestling by the edge of Strangford Loch. Absolutely not, she assured me. It was entirely a family matter. And did their quarrel sour the relationship? Time had evidently been a great healer for, despite her quick wits and ready recall of detail, she had no recollection at all of the intensity of the “tornado” that had whirled so fiercely almost half a century before. “Wow. Boy, oh boy. I didn’t know I could do it,” she exclaimed, her eyes glittering, as I read her the letter she had written nearly fifty years earlier. “Gosh, gracious, snakes alive! I was spitting at him in the same way he was spitting at me. I must have been upset,” adding, as if in reassurance to her guest, “I’m not usually like that!”
Surprisingly, her boss, Mike Watkins, played no public part in the contretemps. He offered Sheila no support and clandestinely seems indeed to have taken Pollinger’s side in the affair. It was almost as if he wanted her to leave. In a private letter to Pollinger, Watkins offered him the rights he wanted and blamed Sheila for the whole dispute, describing it disdainfully as “somewhat of a tempest, which has been transferred from a small pot labelled Vanity, to a larger one marked Pride, to its present container, marked larger, PRINCIPLE.”25 His attitude was puzzling. Sheila St. Lawrence still worked for his agency. The rights for which she was fighting were shared between the two of them. He could have been backing her against his London rivals. So, why was he quietly encouraging Pollinger? Perhaps he was threatened by the very closeness of Sheila’s relationship with his client. Perhaps he sensed that if her semidetached status from his company ever evolved into full independence, Dahl might well decide to leave him and go with her, so he engineered the wedge that drove Roald and her apart.
There’s no doubt Watkins set up Pick and Pollinger, ceding valuable rights of his own to them and making no attempt whatsoever to intercede between Dahl and St. Lawrence when the storm blew up. When Sheila decided to go to Ireland, he made little attempt to persuade her to stay on and even discouraged Roald from communicating with her. If so, Watkins probably underestimated his author’s own sense of commitment to the agency where he had made his name—although Dahl was increasingly contemptuous of Watkins himself. “I know he is a twerp,” he wrote to his publishers at Knopf in 1969, apologizing for his agent’s behavior over Fantastic Mr. Fox. “He drinks too many martinis at midday and these are beginning to pickle the brain, not that there was a lot of it there to begin with. But his mother was a good agent and a fine friend and I cannot bring myself to leave the firm after twenty-six years. I put up with his nonsense. You should not have to. I shall try and bypass him in future as much as possible.”26 Twelve years later, his verdict was even more damning. “After thirty-nine years experience with this gentleman,” he told Anne McCormick, “I can assure you that he understands nothing.”27
As the row with Sheila began to blow over, Roald found solace going to house sales, like that of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, ostensibly in search of furniture but more often, Sue Denson felt, out of sheer curiosity. He also began restoring a huge antique mirror he had recently bought—“a real beauty,” he told Sheila, “a seven foot high carved Chippendale one with delicate leaves and branches and birds on it and I am presently and patiently scraping 1/8 of an inch of plaster off it to reveal the gold leaf underneath. Five hundred hours work. But worth it. In fact that’s all the work I am doing at the moment.”28 He was also investigating the idea of setting up a company in Portugal to own his new copyrights and minimize his UK income tax obligations. It might sound “perfectly ridiculous,” he admitted, but he had been encour
aged to do so by a “terrific expert.” Most significant of all, he had become the father of a strapping young son. Theo Matthew Roald was born on July 30, 1960, and the arrival of an exotic new male in this family of women was the cause of both excitement and fascination. “He has a pair of testicles the size of walnuts and a sharp wicked penis,”29 Roald informed Sheila a fortnight after his birth. Another progress report was despatched three days afterwards: “He’s a fine nipper, and his circumcised tool (now healed) glows with promise, like the small unopened bud of some exotic flower.”30
Six weeks later, the Dahl family’s summer idyll was over. On October 1, they boarded a “ghastly Boeing jet” to spend another winter in New York. Roald’s love affair with Manhattan was becoming ever more jaundiced. He now viewed it as a violent place, filled with threats and danger. The cab drivers gave him “the willies”; they were “the enemies of the people.” One day from his window he watched a tall boy with a “tense white face” running through traffic. Roald identified with the youth. It seemed he was a kind of prophet, warning him that catastrophe was around the corner.31 Like the child in his short story The Wish, terrified of stepping on the cracks in pavements or treading on the wrong color in the carpet, Roald had a premonition of disaster. He had seen the omens, and, as he confessed to himself, “we crack-dodgers always take notice of omens.”32
His short story Pig—the masterpiece of Kiss Kiss and perhaps the most misanthropic tale he ever penned—had explored his disillusion with the city. Doffing a bloodstained cap to Voltaire’s Candide, Dahl tells the tale of Lexington, a naive orphan who is raised by his kindly vegetarian relative, Aunt Glosspan, in the Virginia countryside. When she too dies, Lexington is forced to return to the grim dystopia of Manhattan—a city populated by moronic Irish policemen, who have killed the boy’s innocent parents, and corrupt Jewish lawyers, who will swindle the young child out of his rightful inheritance. Finally, around the tale’s bitter last corner, lurks the slaughterhouse. There the unsuspecting young lad must come face to face with the true brutality of humanity. Dangling by his ankle from a chain, the confused Lexington meets his end at the hands of a “benevolent … wistful … cheerful” pig-sticker in rubber boots, who takes him “gently by the ear,” before deftly slitting open his jugular vein, thereby conveying him from this, “the best possible of all worlds,” into the next.33 Lexington was the same “white-faced boy” he had recently seen from his window. He had tried to dodge life’s dangerous cracks and failed. Soon, this instinct that New York was no place to raise a young family would seem cruelly prophetic. On December 5, 1960, just a few months after Pig was published, the pram carrying Roald’s sleeping four-month-old baby, Theo, was hit by a cab on the corner of a New York street and crushed against the side of a bus.
Susan Denson had just collected Tessa from nursery school and was bringing her home for lunch. She was pushing Theo in his pram and trying to manage Stormy, one of Ivar Bryce’s dogs, at the same time. It was her third winter in New York with the Dahls, and she fitted so well into their family that they had made her one of Theo’s godparents. The weather was bitterly cold. They were walking down Madison Avenue and when they reached 85th Street, waited at the crossing for the light to change. When it did, Sue pushed Theo’s pram off the sidewalk and out into the road. At that point a cab careened around the corner and crashed into it. The driver panicked. Instead of braking, he stepped on the accelerator, ripping the pram out of the nanny’s hands and propelling it 40 feet through the air, before it smashed into the side of a parked bus. Theo’s head took the full force of the impact and his skull shattered.*
Both Roald and Pat were within earshot of the accident, but neither saw it. Roald was in Clifford Odets’s apartment, writing. Pat, who had only recently finished shooting Breakfast at Tiffany’s, was in a local shop. She heard the police sirens, but did not initially realize her own son had been injured. An ambulance rushed the tiny child to the nearby Lenox Hill Hospital, along with Susan, Tessa, and the dog. There, Marian Goodman’s physician husband Ed recalled, Theo was diagnosed with a “terrific neurological deficit.”34 Almost everyone thought he was going to die.
When Roald and Pat arrived in the emergency room, they faced a dreadful situation. Not only was their tiny child horribly injured, but the doctors were disagreeing publicly about what should be done. It was a challenge to which Roald responded with a sang-froid and clearheadedness that again recalled his ancestor Pastor Hesselberg’s actions in the church fire at Grue. Several days later, he wrote the whole experience down on paper in one of his Ideas Books. He did this neither for the lawyers nor for an insurance claim, but for himself. It was a private affair, the reflex action of a writer, an observer, who needed to record every detail of the trauma. This was the flip side of the hyperbolic fantasist. Now the analytical eye of the reporter was at work. I have extracted it at some length because—even in this note form—its cumulative power is remarkable. He called it simply A Note on Theo’s Accident.
I was working on the 7th floor, my phone turned off. I did not get the incoming call from Susan. But I heard a police siren. Then Pat was in the apartment calling to me. We went out, got a cab drove to Lenox Hill Hospital Emergency. Cab driver didn’t know entrance, dropped us a block away. Theo was in examination room with two doctors. Susan, Tessa, Stormy were in small waiting room with policeman who drove squad car and policeman in charge of school crossing. Things looked grim. They were giving plasma to Theo. Pat called Dr. Zipser. He arrived quickly. They admitted Theo upstairs to paediatric section, in charge of the senior paediatrician, Dr. O’Regan. They called in Dr. Echelin, senior orthopaedic surgeon, who interrupted an operation to come down and look at Theo. He was in a state of deep shock, colourless, high pulse, temp 102 degrees. They didn’t dare move him for x-ray. I suggested portable x-ray. They did this. Also arranged round-the-clock special nurses. But this was general paediatric ward, and none of the nurses nor the floor-doctors were trained in neuro-surgery.
It is now about 3 PM. We called Ed Goodman and Bill Watson for advice. … They both examined baby, Ed going in with Dr. Echelin. Multiple skull fractures were revealed by x-ray. But there were no signs of other bodily injury. Around 8 PM Theo began coming out of shock. Colour in cheeks. Temp down a little. Bill Watson called and suggested we call in Dr. Milton Singer as consultant. I checked with O’Regan, who grudgingly acquiesced. Called Milton at home 9/10 PM. He came at once. There now ensued a one-hour argument around bedside between Drs. O’Regan, Echelin, Singer (and Watson). Singer said it was essential to do a subdural tap immediately to relieve the pressure on the brain. Drs. Echelin and O’Regan said no. It was too early to tamper. Singer refused to budge. In the end, they did the tap, drew off 10 and 8 cc of fluid and blood. O’Regan came bustling out, said to me: “I did not approve of this, and I do not know what the consequences will be.” Echelin said the same. I said, “Why did you allow it, then?” They said because Singer was so insistent.
I stayed all night in hospital watching the baby. At 1 AM his temperature went down to 101. At 2 AM it went to 99 and stayed there. He was still having blood and intravenous feeding. His blood count was low, indicating a big loss of blood somewhere. He was also in an oxygen tent. I had a row with nurses about fixing a catheter tube. First she strapped it to his kicking leg! Then she strapped it upwards to the side of his cot. I said “Lay it on the mattress!” Eventually she did.
Next morning, O’Regan came in and called me aside. Saying he couldn’t have outside men like Dr. Goodman and Watson interfering and examining baby. He was very unpleasant about it. I said I would tell them. I did.
Theo improved slightly through day. They x-rayed him. Found no fracture of cervical spine. I requested O’Regan to make no decisions without Singer’s agreement. Echelin said, “I’m not going to ask Dr. Singer’s permission for what I do!” I said, “You must all work together.” This was Tuesday. I stayed most of the day. So did Pat. The doctors came and went. … I stayed Tuesday night, watching
the inefficient antics of the nurses, trying to advise them as best I could.
Wednesday morning, Singer came in. Theo had had two seizures in the afternoon. Singer prescribed 1/2 cc of Dilantin as sedative. Checked with Echelin. I watched the nurse giving it by dropper. She had 1/2 a small cardboard cup full of the stuff. I protested. Made her check and re-check the order book. She said it was correct. (She should not have given it, only hospital nurse may dispense medicines) Ten minutes later (Anne Bancroft and Harvey† are there) O’Regan enters. The nurse checks dosage. O’Regan says she’s given 1/2 oz instead of 1/2 cc. He immediately aspirates it out with a tube. (This is a fifteen times overdose). He then rushes out and proceeds to blame Dr. Singer to me. I call in Pat to hear it. We protest. “It would not have happened had I written the order,” he says. “Why not?” we say. This was a nurse’s error. His general attitude is too much to stand. I call Singer. He arranges for an immediate removal of baby to neurological wing of Presbyterian Hospital. Bill Watson rushes round to help. O’Regan finally (1 hour) turns up, has to give release, which I sign. Bill has blanket to carry baby. O’Regan says “Hey, wait! Who are you?” He then delays still further by doing a complete medical examination of Theo in front of two other doctors. Echelin comes in. He behaves well. I explain to him the reasons for move. Bill Watson carries Theo out in his arms. Harvey is waiting in Bill’s car. Bill and Theo, Pat and I get in. Harvey drives to Presbyterian. There Drs Singer and Ransahoff are waiting and efficiency reigns. This is Wednesday evening 9 PM.35
It was the beginning of several weeks of horrible uncertainty for the family. New York had been hit by a particularly icy winter and the snow made getting anywhere difficult. Roald slipped and broke his ankle. Pat caught flu and was confined to bed. Sue Denson sat for hours in her “horrible bedroom that faced the brick wall of the next block,” wondering if she should return home.36 But at least under the supervision of Drs. Singer and Goodman at Presbyterian, Theo’s medical care was consistent. Housed in an oxygen tent for two weeks, he underwent several operations to drain fluid from his head. The surgery was successful and the doctors became increasingly confident that he would pull through, but no one was sure how badly his brain had been damaged. As there were no serious internal injuries and his head wounds seemed to be healing, Theo came back home to convalesce just before Christmas. Then, a week later, something about his condition began to disturb his parents. He went quiet; he no longer smiled; his reactions seemed dull. Pat and Roald spent New Year’s Eve with their neighbor the psychiatrist Sonia Austrian and her husband, Jeffrey. It was they who realized what had happened.37 Cerebro-spinal fluid had built up in Theo’s cranial cavity and was pressing on his brain, causing him to go blind.
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