Roald of course was also bluffing. Very early on in the negotiations he had told his agent, “I do not under any circumstances wish to leave Random House. They have been extremely good with Charlie and James and I have a good personal relationship with Bob Bernstein.”27 Two months later, he confirmed that position. “I do not want to leave Knopf,” he repeated. “I have a sort of feeling that if I do, they might lose enthusiasm for Charlie and James and let the sales fall off.”28 His brinkmanship, however, was gradually poisoning the relationship between himself and Bernstein, who called Mike Watkins and told him that his client had been “foolish,” “unreasonable,” and that he had been personally offended by Dahl’s lack of faith in his figures.29
Roald did not want to push Random House “to the limit,” so he asked his agent “to compromise and be friends” instead.30 But Watkins failed to take control of this delicate situation. All he had to do was advise Bernstein to back off a bit. He didn’t. The deal was almost agreed when, on July 2, Bernstein wrote to Roald, in jocular mode, urging him to stick with being an author rather than trying to be a publisher. He had no idea that he was waving a red rag at a bull. Roald flew into a rage. He told Watkins that Bernstein’s attitude was all “bollocks.” “I am a seller,” he continued, “and as a seller, I have the right to ask any damn price I like. He, as the buyer, has the right to say no thanks. What he has not got the right to do is to tell me to keep out of the price-talk business. Publishers would all be happy if writers did that. Frankly I am a bit narked with BB. Those enormous professions of friendship and behind it all the mailed fist and the ruthless business man.”31 A few days later, in a huff, Roald went off on holiday with his family to Norway. The deal remained unconcluded.
It was Bob Gottlieb who settled the impasse when Roald returned to England. In the first flood of admiration for the clever young editor, Roald told Watkins he was convinced that Gottlieb was “a fine friend and staunch ally,” who was not interested in finance, but in writers. “Having appointed himself as the official go-between,” he continued, “I think he has put a stop once and for all to the semi-acrimonious exchanges that have been taking place between Bernstein and myself.”32 Gottlieb’s success was achieved largely as a result of his own personal charisma and also because he was able to convince Roald that his own agent had handled the negotiations badly. Making Mike Watkins the fall guy was an effective ploy. Roald never had much respect for him and increasingly did not even bother to consult him—even on important decisions. On October 20, Roald wrote telling him that it was time to “stop wrangling” over the contract. “I want to sign it,” he continued. “I trust Bob Gottlieb. He is not in the business of doing dirt to writers. Just the opposite. For this reason I am prepared to sign whatever contract he puts before me … I will take his word for it.”33 For the moment, the relationship with Random House was still functioning, although Gottlieb berated Watkins for making “a complex set-piece for Roald’s official gaze what could have been settled between us on the phone in ten seconds.”34 From now on, however, the focus of Roald’s literary affairs would move to London.
Throughout this period, Dahl was also starting to emerge out of the shadows into the London limelight that he both craved and detested. But it was a difficult transition. His reputation as a dangerous oddball was enhanced by the growing success of his children’s books, but it also ensured that he remained removed from the respectable literary mainstream, for whose respect he still vestigially hankered. Even in 1981, he was still pondering how his first novel Some Time Never might have succeeded and how its failure could be ascribed to Max Perkins’s premature death. He confessed his feelings to Alfred Knopf in a letter which revealed how—after more than thirty years—the old wound still smarted: “My faith in [Perkins] was absolute. It was going to be a good book, thanks to Max. But one week after I delivered the manuscript, he died. … Without Max, I felt lost, and somehow drifted into short-story writing.”35
At some level, short stories and children’s writing made Dahl feel like a second-class literary citizen, and increasingly, both in the United States and Britain, he felt like an outsider to the writing community. Yet he openly disparaged English literary intellectuals, preferring the company of actors, artists or artisans—perhaps because these university-educated literati in some way intimidated him. Liccy recalled going with him once to a dinner hosted by the octogenarian aesthete Peter Quennell, where the conversation was so erudite that Roald felt entirely excluded. He departed early, tense and irritated. It had been the same thirty years before when, in 1956, Sheila St. Lawrence asked him to deliver a present to a client of hers, the left-wing novelist and radio personality Marghanita Laski. Roald prevaricated for weeks about going, but eventually—months after he was supposed to take the gift over—he and Pat drove down to her “lovely little house” on Hampstead Heath for dinner. “The woman scares the daylights out of me,” Dahl later told Sheila. “She also bores one a bit. She’s too bloody intellectual for words. Everything is translated into social theories and she uses words I’ve never heard of and asks questions which take two hundred and fifty words to speak. She’s deadly earnest all the time, not gay at all, and I’m afraid has little sense of humour. But quite a character, as you said.”36 It was a rare admission of insecurity.
This vulnerability had consequences. Roald felt that he needed to make his mark, to strike back against the consensus and be radical, shocking, abrasive. However, until the early 1970s, he had had no forum in which to do so. His reputation—at least in the United Kingdom—was as an eccentric rural maverick, who had married a glamorous actress and was now a highly commercial author. His writing itself had courted no controversy until Charlie and the Chocolate Factory became a bestseller. That success, at least in England, was achieved largely by word of mouth. For many years, almost all serious children’s publishers continued to look down their noses at it and consider it vulgar. Even today, some still do. One publisher confessed that she was proud to have turned the book down—twice. In America, too, its success was achieved despite the hostility of many librarians, who similarly found it brash and tasteless and refused to put it on their shelves. In 1961, the influential Library Journal gave even James and the Giant Peach a decidedly sniffy critique. Despite acknowledging “some interesting and original elements” in the book, the reviewer, Ethel L. Heins, complained about its violent language and the grotesque characterizations of Aunts Sponge and Spiker. “Not recommended,” was her considered conclusion.37 “May the Lord protect me from Madame Ethel L. Heins,”38 Roald commented ruefully in response, deciding wisely that to be placatory was the most sensible course of action. When asked by the New York Times in 1968 to write a piece that was critical of librarians, Dahl circumspectly refused. He told Mike Watkins that he did not wish “to complain in public about the attitude of librarians towards my books. I am well aware of this attitude. I also believe it to be quite misguided. But anything I write in the Times will only serve to aggravate it. One cannot make a zebra change its slippers.…”39
That cautious approach was not to last. For, the following year, quite unexpectedly, and largely through no fault of his own, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory became something of a cause célèbre. Soon after news leaked out that there were plans to turn the book into a film, the producer David Wolper received a letter from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) objecting to the project on the grounds that the book was racist. This thinking stemmed from the fact that Wonka’s factory workers, the Oompa-Loompas, had been portrayed as African Pygmies “from the very deepest and darkest part of the jungle where no white man had ever been before.”40 For Roald, this conclusion came as a complete shock. Not only had he never intended this fanciful detail to cause offense, he had also quite failed to appreciate fully the ferocity of the social tide that eddied around almost every public project within the United States at that time. Civil rights were a burning issue, the Black Panther movement was at its height, and Mart
in Luther King, Jr., had recently been assassinated. For the NAACP, the Oompa-Loompas seemed clearly to reinforce a stereotype of slavery that American blacks were trying to overcome. Exaggerated rumors quickly spread that the organization would picket any movie theater which screened the movie and that even the use of the word “chocolate” in the title had implied racist overtones. The producers were put under pressure to change both the nature of the Oompa-Loompas and the title of the film.
Lillian Hellman waded in to support Roald, writing to the NAACP on his behalf, but the reply she received was unequivocal. “The objection to the title ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ is simply that the NAACP doesn’t approve of the book, and therefore doesn’t want the film to encourage sales of the book. The solution is to make the Oompa Loompas white and to make the film under a different title.”41 Roald was only too willing to change the color of the Oompa-Loompas and did so with alacrity, but the people at the NAACP were adamant that the title of the movie also had to change because they did not want it to promote the book. Roald told Bob Bernstein he was “shattered” by this unreasonable attitude, complaining that he could not understand why the NAACP viewed his story as a “terrible dastardly anti-negro book.” Angrily, he described their attitude as “real Nazi stuff.”42 To Alfred Knopf he wrote more sadly: “The book is banned by the NAACP. They thought I was writing a subtle anti-negro manual. But such a thing had never crossed my mind.”43 Curiously, he seems to have forgotten that he had initially wanted to make Charlie a black boy, because he failed to mention it in any of the correspondence that surrounded the furor. Eventually a compromise was reached. Roald agreed to “de-negro”44 the Oompa-Loompas in both book and movie, transforming them in the latter into dwarves with green hair and orange skin. The movie’s title was altered to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Roald eventually came to tolerate the film, acknowledging that there were “many good things” in it.45 But he never liked it. Even after it was acknowledged as a classic, he would dismiss it as “crummy.”46 He found the music trashy, attempting to cut the song “The Candyman” when the movie opened in the United Kingdom, and he loathed the director, Mel Stuart, who he felt had “no talent or flair whatsoever.”47 He also disliked many of the small changes to his script that had been made by David Seltzer, the young screenwriter Stuart had hired to do rewrites, believing these had watered down “a good deal of the bite” in his own original draft.48 He had serious reservations about Gene Wilder’s performance as Wonka, which he thought “pretentious”49 and insufficiently “gay [in the old-fashioned sense of the word] and bouncy.”50 He regretted that the producers had chosen neither Spike Milligan nor Peter Sellers to play the role. At Roald’s request, Milligan had shaved off his beard to audition for the director, while Sellers had called Dahl personally “begging to play the part.”51 Both were rejected in favor of Wilder. Roald was so annoyed that, despite his own $300,000 writing fee, he considered disassociating himself entirely from the movie and “campaigning against it on TV and magazines in the US.”52 That was the high watermark of his rage. Eventually, as its popularity helped boost his book sales, his disapproval mellowed, but he remained “enormously depressed”53 by the experience. It would prove his final foray into movies as a writer. From then on, as Murray Pollinger recalled, “he had no interest in working for the movies. He hated working for the movies, he hated people in the movies. Always.”54
The racism rumpus gained him notoriety—something Rayner Unwin thought was good for book sales, because it was clear to him that there was nothing intentionally racist in Dahl’s writing and because he knew that books that “irritated librarians” generally entertained children.55 However, it provoked a period of intense—and with hindsight, almost comic—anxiety at Knopf. There, editors went through all Dahl’s new material, scrutinizing it for anything that might unintentionally cause offense. Fabio Coen became concerned about using the word “spades” in Fantastic Mr. Fox. When he told Roald, the latter responded unexpectedly with a zeal worthy of Dr. Bowdler. “I will try to think of another word for spade. Shovel will not do because that is used in the story for mechanical shovels. Black with rage will certainly change.”56 But within two years his attitudes had relaxed somewhat and a more familiar ironic detachment had returned. In an early draft of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Dahl had depicted the President of China using a yellow telephone and speaking on it in a silly accent. Coen was concerned about the racist implications of this, too. Although the offending passage was indeed eventually excised, Roald’s first reaction now was that his editor had overreacted. “Re the Boxer rebellion in Fabioland,” he bantered to Bob Gottlieb, “I am polling Mike [Watkins’s] office … to see if there is a chink in my armour.”57
Strangely, perhaps, it was not until the NAACP controversy that librarians began to complain about racism in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It seems none of them had noticed it until then. The letter that Dahl received from four of them who lived in Madison, Wisconsin, was typical. They informed him “with great dismay” that they had found the book to contain “passages with racist implications.” This was especially unfortunate, they added, “as there are too few really fine authors writing for children, and you are certainly one of the best.” However, the book had robbed the “little black creatures … of all humanity” and this was now forcing them “to question its place” on their shelves.58 Dahl replied that he was “flabbergasted to learn how much unwitting offense I had given to some people,” and assured them that the situation was being put right as soon as possible.59 It was. Future editions of the book contained no references to African Pygmies, only to dwarves with “golden-brown hair” and “rosy white” skin.60 Then, confident that his reputation was now restored among the juvenile literature intelligentsia, Roald sent a discarded section of the book about Marvin Prune—one of the characters he had eventually dropped from it—to the distinguished children’s literature journal, The Horn Book Magazine. He thought that they might want to publish it.
The extract provoked a completely unexpected backlash from the editor, Paul Heins, who commissioned the Canadian children’s writer Eleanor Cameron to write an article entitled “McLuhan, Youth and Literature.” The piece was an attack on the ideas of her fellow Canadian, the media theorist and critic Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan of course was an apostle of the television age, who had coined such phrases as “the global village” and the “medium is the message.” A professional academic, a self-conscious intellectual, a creature of university campuses, drawn to jargon and theory, who argued that television had shown itself to be an extension of the human body’s nervous system, he was about as far away from the values of Roald Dahl as it was possible to imagine. Dahl almost certainly had no idea who McLuhan was and would have despised his ideas as much as he detested the effect that television was having on his own children. He had certainly given the “goggle-box” short shrift in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—most notably when the Oompa Loompas beg all parents to throw their “nauseating, foul, unclean, repulsive” television sets away and replace them instead with a “lovely bookshelf.” Television “kills imagination dead,” Dahl had declared, by hypnotizing kids with a stream of “shocking, ghastly junk.”61
Not for the first time, he was destined to be misunderstood. Cameron ignored all this common ground between them and chose to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory instead as a herald of a terrible new age of post-television juvenile fiction. Admitting that teachers across the United States found that the book held pupils spellbound whenever it was read out loud in class, she nevertheless derided it as “the very worst” of contemporary children’s fiction. “The book is like candy,” she argued, “in that it is delectable and soothing … but leaves us poorly nourished with our taste dulled for better fare.” She contrasted it unsympathetically with one of Dahl’s own favorite books, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, and—warming to her task—bizarrely asserted that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had �
�overtones of sadism.” Everything about it was “phony.” Comparing it to “one of the more specious television shows,” or a biblical epic of Cecil B. DeMille’s—“with plenty of blood and orgies and tortures to titillate the masses”—Cameron declared that Willy Wonka was nothing but “the perfect type of TV showman with his gags and screechings. The exclamation mark is the extent of his individuality.” She found the book cheap, tasteless, ugly, and sadistic; and, quoting T. S. Eliot, she wondered whether it might actually harm children.62
It was a ferocious and unexpected attack. Not surprisingly, Roald felt personally wounded by it. And his response was predictable. Forgetting about zebras and their slippers, he decided to pick up his pencil and reply to Cameron’s “vicious” comments with a piece that was equally inflammatory. How could she suggest that he would ever want to write a book that would harm children, he enquired, when he had fought such a long battle to restore his son’s health? It was “an insensitive and monstrous implication.” He resented the “subtle insinuations” she had made about his character and the “patronizing attitude” she was adopting toward the teachers of America. She was “completely out of touch with reality.” He added pointedly that he had been telling bedtime stories to his own children every day for fifteen years and that he thought these 5,000 stories had helped make them “marvelous and gay and happy.”63 It was not perhaps his best defense, but then cool, rational argument was not his way when he was both hurt and angry. He would probably have been much better off telling the magazine’s readership how his stories were encouraging children the world over to read books and that many of them loved his stories so much that they felt impelled to write and tell him so. “The current rate of letters from children in the US is between fifty and sixty a week,” he had written to Mike Watkins in 1966. “I try to answer them all with a postcard.”64
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