Almost thirty years later, this history suddenly acquired a new piquancy when the fifty-three-year-old Dennis, now separated from his first wife, fell in love with Else’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Lou. Once he could see that their affections were genuine, Roald was one of the first members of the family to give the couple his support, and in 1972—just as Roald was beginning his affair with Liccy—Dennis and Lou married. Roald, so Lou felt, was pleased that the relationship “entwined” his old friend back into the Dahl family, but for Pat it only seemed to reinforce their unconventional sexual mores. At first she too had chimed in with this unbuttoned attitude. Once, after dinner with a few guests at Gipsy House, Roald had felt tired and gone to bed early. He left a note on the door: “If you want to fuck, wake me up.” Pat went upstairs later, read the note and tried unsuccessfully to wake him. The following night, it was she who went to bed early. She too left a note for everyone to see. It read simply: “If you want to fuck, go fuck yourself!”50
Since her stroke, however, she had felt increasingly powerless to deal with this strong centripetal family dynamic. So it was Liccy who broke the deadlock, deciding to take matters into her own hands and break off the relationship with Roald. “Because of my respect and affection for you,” she wrote to Pat, “I am getting away from you both. In the clear light of day I realised that there is, at the moment, no happiness for any of us. … I feel very sad at the unhappiness which I have caused you, and hope that in the fullness of time, life will sort itself out.”51 It was a sensible, generous move, but it did not solve anything. Roald was still miserable. He missed Liccy’s company and, in his frustration, railed ever more fiercely against Pat. He told Marjorie Clipstone that his wife was “lazy, stupid, a rotten housekeeper, a rotten mother, a rotten everything and he didn’t know why he put up with this rotten marriage.”52 Later in 1975, while Pat was in America shooting Little House on the Prairie, he wrote to her more calmly in an attempt to explain his position. He told her that he loved her, that he would never think of leaving her, that he had not seen Liccy while she had been away and would not do so until she returned from shooting. However, he wanted her blessing to see Liccy again:
I shall probably look occasionally for her companionship. It is not sex. You think it is. I promise you it isn’t. I am very happy right now without sex of any sort. In that respect I somehow feel utterly tired. I feel whacked out. You don’t. But you are a bit younger than me. Also I am a huge fellow physically, and I believe that huge fellows, I mean really huge ones of six foot five or six inches, grow physically tired earlier than others. Certainly I feel pretty tired a lot of the times these days. … So what I would like to do … is go on living with you and having you return this love without feeling the least bit jealous of the fact that, now and again, but not very often, I meet Liccy and have lunch with her. … All of this is obviously a rotten deal for Liccy, and I sort of hope she won’t put up with it for long. There is no future in it for her. … I have told her long ago that there is no chance of me ever leaving you. She knows it. So there is no future for her with me. For her sake though, as well as for mine, the thing should be allowed to tick over until it comes to a natural end. And the best thing you can do to encourage that ending is to be non-jealous and normal. And, at all times, feel absolutely secure in the knowledge that this family will go on as long as I live.53
The affair went into abeyance for two years, but the reality of the broken marriage was there for all involved to see. Ophelia remembered that Liccy was “full of sadness and remorse” and that her father was “empty without her.”54 In 1975, the family went on a joyless holiday to Norway. It would be the last time they were there together. Roald’s friends were concerned for him. “He was so miserable in that marriage, and so were the children,” remembered Marian Goodman. “Pat would come back after an assignment over here and talk about nothing other than herself and the accolades she had received. I think with Felicity it was the first time he was in love.”55 Dennis Pearl knew that at that point, his friend was so in love that “nothing would have persuaded Roald to give up Felicity.”56 Yet the deadlock continued, and his frustrations made him even more cantankerous and argumentative. Tessa, stressed by the tension at home, embarked on a series of affairs herself, mostly with older men, including the fifty-year-old Peter Sellers. Roald bought her a house in Wandsworth, so she could have her own space. By the age of nineteen she was living with another actor, Julian Holloway. And by the age of twenty she was the mother of their baby, Sophie.
Roald was thrilled to have his first grandchild, but Tessa’s rackety lifestyle irritated him. In 1980, he wrote to his youngest daughter Lucy, then fifteen, complaining that Tessa had let her small garden go to seed. “Yesterday Wally and I loaded up our Renault with the motor mower (whizzer), spades, forks, rakes, brooms, and drove to five Rose Hill Road. There we worked for four hours tidying up the mess in Tessa’s garden. We trimmed the edges of the beds, cut back the shrubs and trees, mowed the grass both back and front and made the place look respectable. Why on earth Tessa and Maureen [Tessa’s nanny] can’t do it, I don’t know? It’s really silly to let a garden go to pot, especially a small one. It’s so easy to keep nice. There were dog turds everywhere. She must shovel those up every day.”57 Tessa’s godmother Marian Goodman believed Roald had been too indulgent toward her. She thought he should have stood up to her and made her go back to school after she walked out, rather than letting her drift into modeling and acting. When Marian articulated these criticisms to Roald, she was shocked when he admitted to her that he was “afraid of alienating his kids” and “afraid Tess would hate him for the rest of her life.”58
Throughout the late 1970s, Roald sought solace in the company of his two younger children, Ophelia and Lucy, who seemed mercifully unscarred by the family disasters. Even today, the two sisters, neither of whom was old enough to remember their mother before she had her stroke, talk about themselves as having quite a different sense of family to Tessa and Theo. Lucy described the situation as if there were “two portions” of the family’s life. “There was a tragic era … and there was my era, which was calm and lovely.”59 With them, Roald escaped from his own anxieties into a world of youthful innocence and fantasy. He amused himself by playing games with them and telling them stories. The Big Friendly Giant, who lived in the orchard, had legs as long as aeroplane wings and blew happy dreams into their bedroom window through a long pipe, quickly became a favorite. When the two girls were almost asleep one evening, Roald climbed up a ladder and pretended he was the giant, inserting a bamboo cane through the curtains and making a deep guttural whooshing sound. Neither Lucy nor Ophelia were fooled by his antics, but both also felt they did not want to disappoint him by telling him so the next morning. They sensed that he too needed “happy dreams” and that these games were possibly more important to their father than they were to them. “He seemed to me, even then,” reflected Ophelia, “to have a vulnerable core. So I said nothing.”60 This giant, though later to feature as the main character in The BFG, made his first appearance in 1975 in Danny The Champion of the World.
Danny, as the original story was called, is perhaps Dahl’s most straightforward and lyrical children’s book—a touching tale of the relationship between a nine-year-old boy and his single-parent father, which harks back to Roald’s beloved gypsy ideals. Danny’s father is a benign version of the car dealer Gordon Hawes from Fifty Thousand Frogskins. He keeps the same filling station, repairs the same motors, and lives in the same gypsy caravan. Only this time the character is no swindler, but the boy’s best friend. Usually Dahl preferred his child protagonists to have more unusual friends—an eccentric giant, a quirky owner of a chocolate factory, a gang of gigantic insects, a schoolteacher, or a pipe-smoking grandmother perhaps—but Danny’s father is a thinly disguised portrait of how Roald saw himself. He flies kites, he poaches pheasants with raisins and sleeping pills, he invents fire-balloons that fly high up into the night sky and he smiles with his eyes
. He is untrammelled by normal codes and conventions and prepared to break a law if it seems unjust or absurd. Roald had taught ten-year-old Ophelia to drive an ancient Morris Minor around the Gipsy House orchard and scarcely batted an eye when he discovered that, a year later, she was secretly driving it around the lanes of Buckinghamshire to visit her friends. Danny’s father too tolerates his son driving his clients’ cars while they are being repaired at the garage—although only in an emergency. Like Roald, he was “sparky” rather than “stodgy,” nor was he “what you would call an educated man.” But, Danny tells his readers, instead he was “a marvellous storyteller.”61
It is not hard to imagine Roald taking refuge from the strains and stresses of his family life in this idealized world of heroes, villains, and nocturnal adventures in the woods. But hidden within Danny—which was optimistically dedicated to “the whole family”—is a kind of apologia to his own younger children, Ophelia and Lucy, about the impending breakup of his marriage. The parallels are all too clear. Danny’s mother dies when he is four months old, leaving his father to raise him alone. He washes his son, feeds him and changes his nappies—“not an easy task for a man,” he adds, “especially when he has to earn his living at the same time.” Danny knows his father adores him and would do anything for him. Yet he also knows that there are things about his father he cannot understand. He has secrets, needs, “powerful yearnings” that cause him to abandon his sleeping son and go off into the woods in the middle of the night—yearnings that a child cannot appreciate. Danny learns during the tale that his father is not perfect. “Grown-ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets,” he concludes. “Some have quirkier quirks and deeper secrets than others, but all of them, including one’s own parents, have two or three private habits hidden in their sleeves that would probably make you gasp if you knew about them.”62 Danny’s father’s secret was the lure of the woods at nighttime and the love of poaching—something he eventually felt able to share with his son. Roald’s yearnings were more complex and troubling, and they would be infinitely more painful to explain.
Sexual anxiety, dysfunction and frustration haunt his last collection of adult short stories, Switch Bitch. In an interview with the British writer and journalist Justin Wintle recorded in 1974, the same year the book was published, Roald observed—apparently with some puzzlement—that his writing was now “absorbed with sex.” It was a theme, he commented, “which didn’t appear at all in the early stories.”63 It was true that it had played no part in the early flying tales, but—as Noël Coward had observed—since the publication of Someone Like You in the early 1950s, sex had figured prominently in Dahl’s fiction. Mostly this had been in the context of comedy with men portrayed as self-obsessed dupes—hapless victims of cunning, manipulative female predators. Dahl’s satirical eye was Swiftian in its observation of the humorous grotesquerie of sex. He wrote to Charles Marsh that in Kiss Kiss, he had tried “to show up all women for the brutal lascivious creatures that they really are. The poor man is really nothing but a little body of skin and bones growing inconspicuously out of the base of an enormous prick which he can’t even call his own.”64 Only one thing prevented most men from perceiving this, he thought: their own self-importance. In one of his introductions to his 1961 television series Way Out, Dahl compared men to frogs, always “blowing out their dewlaps” to attract a mate. “Along comes the female, hoppity hop-hop … but the male frog is such a colossal egotist that he quickly forgets about the female.”65 In another, he introduced his audience to a female spider—“a half-blind savage carnivore who will eat any insect she can get hold of including the male of the species.”66 The four tales of Switch Bitch, however, were of a different order to these comic parables. Though two are ostensibly comedies and feature one of his favorite creations, the buccaneering sexual athlete Uncle Oswald, the others are infused with a bitter tang that mirrored his own personal frustrations and tensions.
With the exception of the sardonic Two Fables published for his seventieth birthday, Switch Bitch was the last of Dahl’s adult story collections. He mourned the end of that part of his career and shared his sense of loss with his great champion, Alfred Knopf. Despite their occasional disagreements, Roald retained a deep personal affection for Knopf, a man whom he believed to be “the best publisher in the world,” and whose “personal comradeship” he claimed had meant more to him than that of anyone else in publishing.67 Knopf certainly returned the compliment. He held his author in great regard. His personal enthusiasm for Roald’s short stories had led directly to the publication of Someone Like You, and he soon became something of a confessor figure. Roald had confided to him, for example, in 1963, that he felt there was only “a bit of sediment”68 left at the bottom of his short stories bottle and that he doubted he could prepare another collection in the next two years. Knopf continued to encourage him, praising Roald’s “sophistication and intelligence” and urging him not to compromise his “tremendously high standard.”69
Three years later, despite Pat’s stroke, Roald promised his publisher again that he would “come back” with another volume of stories.70 Knopf, who by then had just abandoned editorial control of his own imprint, responded that he hoped he would live long enough to see it.71 He did. Yet Roald’s belief in himself as a short story writer was failing rapidly, and he no longer had the confidence “to start a story with just the bare bones of a beginning of a plot without knowing the end.”72 Fortunately for him, just as his faith in his talents as an adult writer was waning, his belief in himself as a children’s writer began to burgeon.
Shortly after he had finished Danny The Champion of the World, Roald wrote Alfred Knopf a letter in which he articulated the joy he got from writing for children. Like a great tree that had taken years to bloom, he was starting to revel in his late-flowering blossom:
I’m feeling a bit old myself—now in my sixtieth year. And I can tell you this: that it gets harder and harder to generate the momentum that is necessary for making a new book or a story. I finished the last children’s book nine months ago and I’ve been gardening ever since. But I can also tell you something else: I do not believe that any writer of adult books, however successful or celebrated he may be, has ever gotten one half the pleasure I have got from my children’s books. The readers are so incredibly responsive and enthusiastic and excited, it’s a real joy to know that this is one’s own doing.73
That satisfaction was to grow year by year, throughout the remaining fifteen years of his life. Yet the lingering desire to write adult fiction never entirely went away. The late 1970s saw him contemplating a comic novel for adults, based on the Uncle Oswald character, and working on a collection of short stories designed for older children, which would eventually be published under the title of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. The last and longest of these concerned a wealthy playboy, Henry Sugar, who—like the Indian mystic Kuda Bux, whom Dahl had seen and written about in 1948—had trained himself to see through playing cards and consequently make millions at the gaming tables. All of these stories were suffused with a warmth and emotional empathy that was reminiscent of some of his earliest writing. Henry Sugar, for example, ends up travelling round the world in a host of disguises with his friend Max Engelman, “the very best make-up man in the business,” making enough money from defrauding casinos to fund orphanages all over the planet. Sugar was like Charles Marsh in that he was a man who had shown himself adept at making money, but also felt an “acute revulsion” toward it.74 He was also like his creator in that he knew that money could not buy love.
Roald was still desperately in love with Liccy, but opportunities to see her during this period of separation were few and far between. All through 1976, he communicated furtively with her, using the same public telephone box about ten minutes’ drive from Gipsy House. Their unwanted estrangement only made his feelings for her stronger and more intense, and when he was deprived of those phone conversations, he became as melancholy
as a teenager.
My darling—
The drive to Chesham and back this morning was bleak. There was no phone call to look forward to. As I passed the little red telephone box on the return journey I very nearly stopped. I wanted to go in and dial 01 720 6313 to make the bell jangle all around your flat and tell your ghost that I was still here and longing for you.
That phone box is well-known to me now. When I stand inside it I can see out over the hedge into a small garden where someone is growing vegetables with intense pride and care. Two months ago, he dug it. Then he began to plant it. I have watched his two rows of potatoes poking up through the soil, and one row of onion seedlings and one of lettuce and one of shallots and a very fine show of early radishes. Every time I go in, I can see a change from the day before. But I’ve never seen the owner.
Are you lying in the sun and browning those long lovely legs of yours? I am sitting in my orchard hut drinking coffee from my thermos and telling myself I must start the third short story for children. This one will be about a boy who discovered he could make objects across the room move ever so slightly by staring at them. And last night I dreamed of a marvellous chicken that grew beautiful flowers on itself instead of feathers.
I rather like that. I rather like you too.
I more than rather like you.
I love you
R75
The three love letters that Liccy allowed me to see bespeak the tender intensity of Roald’s love for her. This was immediately apparent to almost all who saw them together. It struck me instantly that first day I met them in 1985. At that moment I was quite unaware of the complicated back story, but the power of their relationship was instantly perceptible. As I got to know them better, I understood that apart from being proud of both her beauty and her background—he would often embarrass Liccy by talking about her aristocratic lineage—Roald relished simply being near her. Though he could still be a dominant and towering force in Gipsy House—his friend Leonard Figg described him, with a smile, as “imperious”—Liccy was his match. She radiated physical energy and strength. She was someone on whom he could rely completely. This was increasingly important to him as he began to come to terms with the fact that he could no longer do everything on his own. As early as 1953, Claudia Marsh had written to Roald’s mother from Jamaica to tell her that, because of his injuries, she thought her son needed more rest than other people: “He simply cannot do as much as he wants to and thinks he can.”76 Rest, however, was something that had been in short supply for Roald since then. Yet few were aware of the toll his responsibilities had taken on him, because he hid it so well.
Storyteller Page 56