Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  Dahl did not like looking backwards, but in this case he soon came to regret what he had done.108 After the movie was over, he wrote to Hodshire, admitting that he had made a mistake and acknowledging that the deal he had struck left him with little control over the picture’s destiny. The letter was a litany of complaints that focused mostly on the director, a “very nasty little man” who had eroded his wife’s fragile confidence.109 Pat too confirmed that she felt undermined by the experience.110 After the shoot was over, she told a journalist that she was tired of acting. “I don’t really care about making films now,” she admitted. “I was so ambitious once. But I don’t really want to work. I would not care a lot if I don’t do another film.”111 Touchingly, she added that she was “just pleased I am married to the man who is my husband.”

  Dahl, who remained profoundly uninterested in the detail of making films, quickly tired of the project. He seldom turned up on location and never saw any of the rushes. He did not notice that Reid had taken significant liberties with his script until he saw a rough cut of the movie, and then it was too late to do anything. “It was unbelievable,” he told Hodshire. “All Pat’s big scenes had been cut and the entire film was a mess of pornographic junk with men and women copulating all over the place. We were aghast.”112 When The Night Digger opened in America, it received dismal reviews. The Hollywood Reporter described it as “lethargic” and Variety found it clichéd. The movie was never even released in the United Kingdom. Roald and Pat ironically ended up in the same position as Allen Hodshire because they had agreed to terms that only gave them a share in the profits. There were no up-front performance or writing fees so neither of them ever received a penny from it. Yet such was Dahl’s desire to create roles for Pat and keep her working that he acquired the rights to two further properties: Donald Harington’s thriller The Lightning Bug and Rumer Godden’s award-winning children’s story about an orphan gypsy girl, The Diddakoi. He wrote screen versions of both stories, and hawked them around for a while, but neither ever made it into production. He was eventually forced to concede defeat.

  After a five-year gap, he returned to writing children’s fiction. The Roald Dahl who began a story called Mr. Fox in the spring of 1968 was a different man to the one who had finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory four years earlier. He was tougher, stronger, even more empowered and determined than before. He had emerged “a little tired” from his “long siege,”113 but also wealthier and more successful. The bank balances in the children’s trust funds looked healthy, and paintings by Francis Bacon and the Russian avant-garde Suprematists now hung on his walls alongside the Matthew Smiths. Roald had discovered Bacon in 1958, when the artist shared an exhibition with Matthew Smith, and had seen at once that he was a “giant of his time.”114 Later, he would tell his stepdaughter Neisha Crosland how much he admired the “blend of economy and profound emotion” in his painting.115 Between 1964 and 1967, Dahl bought four Bacon canvases—none of which cost him more than £6,000.* During the same period, he also purchased a shop on Great Missenden High Street, where one day he hoped to sell antiques.116 The paintings and the shop were concrete evidence of his success in defeating adversity and gave him considerable satisfaction.

  One frosty winter evening in 1965, as Roald went out to check that his aviary was safely locked up, Barry Farrell got an insight into what had kept him going. Roald told him the story of Lady Rachel MacRobert, the American widow of a Scottish baronet, whose three sons had all been pilots. In 1938, the eldest was killed in an air crash. In 1941, the second was shot down and killed in Iraq. The third perished a month later when his Wellington bomber ditched over the North Sea. Lady MacRobert was griefstricken. But she did not dwell on her sorrow. Instead, she calmly took out a pen and made out a check to the Air Ministry for £25,000 to pay for the cost of a new bomber. “I have no more sons to wear the MacRobert badge or carry it in the fight,” she told the air minister, “but if I had ten sons, I know they would all have followed that line of duty.” The RAF bought the bomber and painted two words on its side: “MacRobert’s Reply.” This determination to fight on, this refusal to be beaten—Roald told Farrell—had inspired his own tenacity when all seemed set against him. “I can remember being very moved by that,” he said. “It was something really dauntless, really indomitable. You simply cannot defeat such people.”117

  By 1970, Dahl’s years of extreme adversity were almost over. One sadness remained. His career as an adult fiction writer was in its death throes. Both of his most recent short stories, The Visitor and The Last Act, had been rejected by The New Yorker. Roger Angell told Mike Watkins he had turned them down with particular reluctance, because he knew Mr. Dahl “always feels a rejection very deeply.”118 As a result, Dahl had decided to return the $100 a year the magazine paid him for the first reading of all his adult short stories. He told Angell sadly that he thought it wrong “to continue to accept this money each year when the stories I am writing are so clearly not to your liking,” adding as a wistful coda that he still remembered “with immense pleasure the times when the magazine used to buy my work.”119 Playboy finally published The Visitor, but with unsanctioned cuts, which infuriated Dahl and provoked more outraged letters accusing the literary editor, A. C. Spectorsky, of artistic “murder.”120

  The slow end of Dahl’s career as an adult writer was painful, just as the abandonment of his dreams of being a novelist had been twenty years earlier, although he admitted that, as time went by, he found good adult plots harder and harder to come by. And, while the decline of his short story writing might have hurt his pride, it did not dent his wallet. For it was not just the movie scripts that had begun to earn him money. His children’s books had taken off as popular bestsellers. By March 1968, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had sold over 600,000 copies in the United States, while James and the Giant Peach had topped 250,000. Knopf found they owed their author almost $1 million in royalties.121

  From today’s perspective, it is very hard to believe that it took Dahl almost seven years to find a UK publisher for both these titles. Yet despite their success in the United States, at least eleven major UK publishers rejected them, forcing him once again to take matters into his own hands.122 “I refuse to peddle these two nice children’s books all over London at random, to get one rejection after another,” he told Mike Watkins in December 1964. “Merely to flog the books round indiscriminately until they have been rejected by all of London is absurd.”123 To Blanche Knopf, he wrote that he was determined no longer to go “cap in hand” to establishment publishers, who would only “reject him right and left.” He wanted instead to do his own thing and “break through” their “priggish, obtuse stuffiness.”124 Ignoring the advice of Laurence Pollinger’s younger son, Murray, who was now handling his affairs in London and thought his client should continue to try to sell the books to an established name, Roald began to work out his own strategy for publication. A week later he explained it to Mike Watkins.

  I am digging my toes in hard re James and Charlie over here, refusing to offer them any more to top-rate English publishers. I want to get them printed and colour plated in Czechoslovakia and sold here for a very cheap price through the kind of publisher Murray virtually refuses to deal with—“second-rate fellows.” But these “second-rate fellows” are producing over here now the most wonderful books on wildflowers, fungi, butterflies, birds etc. each with 50 lovely plates selling for 15/- and selling well—all printed in Czechoslovakia. I want to do it too. Murray is conventional and hates the idea. “You go for a second-rate house and your books will be regarded as second-rate,” he says. To which I reply “Balls. NO mother who buys children’s books has the faintest idea who publishes them. The only first-rate things one wants are distribution, marketing and printing.”125

  Pat’s stroke had forced him to put the problem to the back of his mind. Then, out of the blue, he had a stroke of luck. His daughter Tessa gave a copy of James and the Giant Peach to a school friend of hers, Cam
illa Unwin. She just happened to be the daughter of Rayner Unwin, one of the grandees of English publishing, who—as a ten-year-old—had recommended the manuscript of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for publication to his own father, Sir Stanley Unwin, the major shareholder in the publishing firm George Allen & Unwin. Rayner Unwin, who lived nearby in the village of Little Missenden, noticed that his daughter seemed particularly gripped by the story she was reading and that the book had not been published in the United Kingdom. A few days later, he called Mike Watkins and asked for official reading copies of both James and Charlie.126 After he had received them, he wrote to Dahl asking whether he would be interested in doing a deal. In response, he received “one of Roald’s most direct and not entirely flattering letters,” pointing out bluntly that no UK publisher had yet been prepared to make a “proper commitment” to the books.127

  However, Roald had also spoken to Murray Pollinger, who confirmed that though Allen & Unwin had a list that was “largely made up of psychology, sociology, anthropology, all the -ologies really,” Unwin himself was “the best Indian in the tribe.”128 The two men met and Roald proposed his deal. Unwin was enthusiastic about Dahl’s plan to have the books published in cheap editions, proposing to publish James and Charlie at the same time and have them printed, not in Czechoslovakia but in another “iron curtain” country, East Germany. Together, the two men drew up an unusual agreement, whereby Dahl would receive nothing until the publishers had recouped all their printing costs, but thereafter he would receive 50 percent of all receipts.129 It was a gamble. If the books did badly, Roald would receive nothing. But if they did well, he would get far more per copy than the 10 to 20 percent most authors normally received.

  Roald liked gambling. Despite all the rejections, he believed that his books would be successful. And his faith paid off. Both books were published in the United Kingdom in 1967, and within weeks they had both sold out. They were reprinted and the reprints soon sold out, too. The following year, George Allen & Unwin published The Magic Finger, and although sales did not match the earlier two titles, it too soon went into profit. And so it was in an atmosphere of ebullient self-confidence that Dahl began work on a “beginner’s book” that would become the most autobiographical of all his children’s stories: Fantastic Mr. Fox.

  The tale of a wily and incorrigible fox, who ingeniously leads his starving family and friends out of danger when they are pursued by three evil farmers—Boggis, Bunce and Bean—reads in many respects like an allegory of its author’s own recent history. Mr. Fox is resilient, resourceful and never defeated by his troubles. So impressive is he that all his wife can do is look deep into his eyes and tell him, just as Pat had done: “ ‘My darling … You are a fantastic fox.’ ”130 In other respects, too, its central character shared many of his creator’s qualities—most notably perhaps his poacher’s mentality. In the initial draft of the book, Mr. Fox’s victory over his adversaries is achieved by a piece of simple theft. He digs his way out of trouble by burrowing a secret tunnel into the local supermarket, where his family can help themselves to whatever food they desire.

  “From now on we’ve got it made” said Mr. Fox. “Every night we can go shopping on Main Street! We can have anything we want! Isn’t it fantastic!” And that is just what they did. They are still doing it today. Every night, Mrs. Fox makes out a shopping-list. Every night, they all go shopping on Main Street. They get anything they want. And the store-keepers are still wondering where all the stuff goes. The cops are still looking for the robbers.131

  When the manuscript arrived at the publishers, Bob Bernstein, now president and CEO of Random House—the company that had acquired the Knopf imprint in 1960—faced a dilemma. He and his editors felt the book was weak. “The writing is poor, the fantasy is unbelievable and the plot is badly worked out,” was one internal reader’s verdict. Also, while Dahl was perfectly prepared to celebrate petty larceny if the caper was sufficiently resourceful and cunning, the editorial staff at Random House were much more nervous. They were concerned that the book’s apparent glorification of theft would not “go down well with teachers, librarians and parents.”132 And there was another issue. The draft contained a passage in which Mr. Fox compared the conflict between the animals and the farmers to human warfare, which he condemned in terms that almost evoked passages of Some Time Never. The fact that U.S. military involvement in Vietnam was escalating and that the book was intended for readers as young as four made some of the staff at Knopf very uneasy.

  “Boggis and Bunce and Bean are out to kill us. You realise that don’t you? They have declared war on us. And in a war there is no such thing as stealing. When one country is fighting another country, as they always seem to be doing up there, does the general say to his soldiers, ‘You mustn’t steal from the enemy?’ ” “Of course not,” said Badger. “They do worse than steal,” said Mr. Fox. “They bomb and blast and kill and do everything they possibly can to destroy what the enemy has. But you and I are not going to stoop to that level. We are not going to burn Boggis’s Chicken House or Bunce’s Store House. We could if we wanted to. But we won’t. We wouldn’t dream of it.…” 133

  Bernstein was uncertain how to address this issue with an author who not only had a reputation for being touchy but whose books were now making the company significant sums of money. Moreover Dahl had shown with The Magic Finger that he was quite prepared to take his work to another publisher if he felt rejected. Bernstein was uncomfortable with this unfamiliar role as a children’s editor and very aware of the fact that Roald could react badly to adverse editorial comment. So he trod with extreme caution. It took him almost a month to respond to the manuscript and gently articulate his editors’ concerns. “Am I being too prissy?” he asked about the stealing issue, adding in reassurance that “if we can’t convince you to change, in the end we will do it your way.”134 He had left it just a little too long to reply and his letter crossed with a testy telegram from Roald complaining about his “dispiriting and discourteous” delay in acknowledging receipt of the draft.135 When Roald got Bernstein’s letter, his reply was surprisingly measured, but he did not budge on the issue of theft. “Firstly, foxes live by stealing,” he argued, adding that if Beatrix Potter had been worried about this issue, half her stories would never have been published. He told Bernstein that the letter had been a “splash of cold water”—and one that had put him “slightly in the doldrums.”136

  For almost four months, nothing happened. There appeared to be a complete impasse. Then the problematic manuscript found itself on the desk of an enterprising young editor at Random House named Fabio Coen. He seized the nettle. To the first problem, he put forward a compromise: the foxes should continue to steal, but instead of raiding a supermarket, Coen proposed they should pilfer the farmyards of their tormentors instead. “If they steal from the farmers,” he explained, “it would also hold something of a moral, namely that you cannot prevent others from securing sustenance without yourself paying a penalty.”137 It was a clever solution, and one that involved only a small amount of rewriting. Roald was delighted and his enthusiasm at a good solution to the stalemate bubbled over. “You have come up with suggestions so good that I feel almost as though I am committing plagiarism in accepting them,” he told Coen. “So I won’t accept them. I’ll grab them with both hands. … No editor with whom I have dealt has ever before produced such a constructive and acceptable idea. I thank you.”138 As if to reward him, when Coen followed up by raising the issue of the “inappropriate” war references, Roald agreed to modify the contentious paragraph. He also agreed to change the title from The Fantastic Fox to Fantastic Mr. Fox.139 The book was published in the fall of 1970. Once again—despite gloomy predictions from experts in the juvenile division of Knopf—it quickly became a bestseller.

  The 1960s were a period of misfortune and triumph for Dahl, a decade in which he emerged out of relative obscurity and into the limelight. He had overcome two dreadful medical emergencies, and though both
wife and son were still neurologically damaged, they were both doing far better than most doctors had thought possible. Tessa was still disturbed and unsettled; but his two youngest children, Ophelia and Lucy, seemed mercifully unharmed. The loss of Olivia was a scar that would never heal, and Fantastic Mr. Fox was dedicated to her memory, but fortitude and hard work were beginning to blunt at least some of this pain. The Last Act, published in 1966, is one of Dahl’s final adult short stories—a shocking tale about a vengeful gynecologist that Dahl once described as an attempt to describe “murder by fucking.”† Yet its sympathetic central character, Anna Cooper, shared one huge similarity with her creator. She has been devastated by the death of a family member—in this case the husband she adored. Her salvation comes from working in an adoption agency, looking after unhappy children, and it is not hard to see Dahl’s own sensibility, which had been transformed after Olivia’s death by his work with Italian orphans, animating his description of Anna’s fading memories of her husband: “The exact sound of his voice was becoming less easy to recall and even the face itself, unless she glanced at a photograph, was no longer sharply etched in the memory. She still thought about him constantly, but she discovered she could do so now without bursting into tears.…” It seemed, Dahl added, that all Anna had needed was “a good hard job of work to do, and plenty of problems to solve—other people’s problems instead of her own.”140