Two months later, Murray Pollinger wrote to Gottlieb to complain that, despite his “repeated enquiries,” Mr. Schlaeppi had still not received any money. Dahl was now irritated by everything that Random House did. In January 1981, he wrote to Gottlieb complaining about the print size of his name on the front cover of The Twits. Gottlieb agreed that his name should indeed be bigger, but otherwise his response was decidedly testy. “I had nothing to do with the making of the book,” he reminded him. “When I’m through with my ‘editing,’ it all gets passed along to our friends on the 6th floor where I believe Frances Foster looks after you. Remember: I have nothing whatsoever to do with Knopf’s juvenile division. My single function with them has been as a volunteer editor for you. I’m not the publisher, designer, boss or anything. Which is why the various disagreeablenesses of the past several years have been particularly disagreeable for me: I’ve had the unpleasant role of messenger boy between or among conflicting parties, without the authority to resolve things as I would here on the 21st floor. I’ll pass along your strictures to Frances, and no doubt you’ll be hearing from her.”97 To Roald, this must have read like a put-down; he would certainly have been stung by this reminder that, despite his successes, he was still merely part of the “juvenile division,” and that the brilliant Gottlieb was only dealing with him on sufferance.
When Frances Foster innocently followed up the next day to defend her jacket design, she did her best to be conciliatory. “I wish we could keep you happy! I can’t tell how much it distresses me to have you disappointed. … For me, it goes without saying that you are THE author on the list we most want to please—and it seems we don’t do a very good job of it. Maybe we can do something about that? I think we might come closer to keeping you happy with your juvenile books if we were in closer and more direct touch with you—at the same time freeing Bob Gottlieb from his spot in the middle?”98 For Dahl, this was the last straw. With Tom Maschler in London assiduously “looking after him,” supervising “every detail” of his books “including illustrations and lay-out,”99 Random House’s attitude by contrast seemed offhand and dismissive.
Dahl wrote to the Legal Department complaining again about the “monstrously unfair contract” that “had been foisted” upon him and objecting to the fact that Bob Gottlieb had declined to intervene personally on his behalf. “He refuses to take sides or to protect me,” he complained, and the result was that—now he was a “free man” again—Dahl was considering moving to another publisher. “These words are not spoken lightly,” he concluded. “I have served your house well since 1943 and am still a close friend and regular correspondent of Alfred Knopf. How I wish he were still in his office so that he could bang a few heads together. I suggest you let me hear from you pretty quickly otherwise I shall tell Bob [Gottlieb] to call it a day.”100 That same day Dahl also wrote to Gottlieb himself, accusing him of failing to “protect” him from “the slings and arrows” of the Random House legal team, and accusing them of having “pulled the wool” over his eyes over the “thorny matter of the four-book contract.” He concluded by reiterating his threat to leave Knopf after the publication of Dirty Beasts. “I damn well mean it.”101
Gottlieb turned the tables on him. Complaining that over the last two years Roald’s comments had been “unmatched” in his experience for “overbearingness and lack of civility,” he complained that recently Roald had begun “to address others here—who are less well placed to answer you back—with the same degree of abusiveness. For a while I put your behavior down to the physical pain you were in and so managed to excuse it. Now I’ve come to believe that you’re just enjoying a prolonged tantrum and are bullying us.” This was how his letter concluded:
Your threat to leave Knopf after this current contract is fulfilled leaves us far from intimidated. Bernstein and I will be sorry to see you depart, for business reasons, but these are not strong enough to make us put up with your manner to us any longer. I’ve worked hard for you editorially but had already decided to stop doing so; indeed, you’ve managed to make the entire experience of publishing you unappealing for all of us—counter-productive behavior, I would have thought.
To be perfectly clear, let me reverse your threat: unless you start acting civilly to us, there is no possibility of our agreeing to publish you. Nor will I—or any of us—answer any future letter that we consider to be as rude as those we’ve been receiving.
Regretfully,
Bob.102
Gottlieb told me he had applied what he called his “fuck-you” principle. “You take any amount of shit [from writers] because it’s their book, they’re the ones who are tense and sensitive and then there comes a moment when you can’t do it any more and then you’re free to say, ‘Go Fuck Yourself,’ because with very few exceptions there is no one writer who is crucial to your enterprise.”103 He maintained that when he sent the letter, everyone at Random House “stood on their desks and cheered.”104
At Gipsy House, the letter was read with astonishment. Two days later, Dahl sadly wrote to the eighty-nine-year-old Alfred Knopf, enclosing photocopies of his correspondence with Gottlieb and explaining why he was leaving the firm. “I am, as I hope you know, a very easy man to get on with,” he maintained. “And in my thirty-seven years of writing have never before had a row with a single publisher. I live quietly in the country and get on with my business. It is only when someone really does behave badly to me that I become aroused. I certainly would not try to bully a publisher or throw my weight around. I will spare you the gory details of this fracas but I just wanted to let you know. Our friendship will continue always.…”105
In hindsight, Gottlieb thought “something snapped” in Dahl. His “big problems” were with Bernstein, he recalled. “At one point it became clear that he thought we were just a bunch of blood-sucking Jews. … We were Jews, but very generous. … Everyone had gone out of his way to keep Roald happy and give him what he wanted. He was clearly out of control.”106 Roald disagreed. Ignoring the fact that he had got himself into this pickle only because he wanted to avoid paying income tax, he still felt swindled by Random House. His amour propre had been dented. Badly. Five years later he would still be complaining sharply about how Random House had “done the dirty” on him.107 His next U.S. publisher, Roger Straus, recalled vividly how bitter Dahl was about the affair, while Roald himself would later assert that Random House had treated him not as the author of “six semi-classics” but as “a kind of excrescence who got in the way of the publisher’s grand design.”108
However, Gottlieb and Bernstein’s opinion that there was anything overtly anti-Semitic in Roald’s attitude toward them is hard to prove. In all the correspondence surrounding the furor that I examined, the fact that both were Jewish was never mentioned. More than twenty-five years on, neither of them could recall a specific incident. They simply recollected a general sense that this was the case. Possibly Roald said something to either of them over the telephone. Yet this is unlikely. All of the negotiations took place at a time when he hardly ever made a transatlantic call. In any event, many of the closest people around him and on his side of the argument—from Alcan Copisarow and Murray Pollinger’s wife Gina, to Tom Maschler at Cape and his new American publisher, Roger Straus, were Jewish. So, of course, was Alfred Knopf, whom Roald tried to protect from the worst of the row, “for fear it would shorten his life.”109 Perhaps Gottlieb and Bernstein’s memory was colored by their former client’s most notorious foray into contemporary politics, which occurred two years later, when Dahl reviewed a book about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
God Cried was a 140-page, large-format book of reportage about the atrocities committed against the people of Beirut by the invading Israeli Army. It was written by an Australian war reporter, Tony Clifton, and focused on the large number of civilian casualties sustained in the conflict. A series of graphic photographs, mainly showing the innocent victims of the warfare—including a number of severely mutilated and dead childre
n—illustrated the text.110 Tessa suggested to the editor, Naim Attallah, that her father, who had in the past donated money to Palestinian educational charities through International Help for Children,† might want to review it for another of his publications, The Literary Review. She knew also that Roald had recently met and been impressed by the British surgeon Pauline Cutting, who had worked in Beirut’s hospitals during the invasion.111
Roald refused at first. He hated reviewing. But once he got the book, his sense of injustice was stirred. His response to both the text and the “heartrending” images was overwhelming. He changed his mind. The result was a two-and-a-half-page article entitled “Not a Chivalrous Affair.” It began:
In June 1941, I happened to be in, of all places, Palestine, flying with the RAF against the Vichy French and the Nazis. Hitler happened to be in Germany and the gas-chambers were being built and the mass slaughter of Jews was beginning. Our hearts bled for the Jewish men, women and children, and we hated the Germans.
Exactly forty-one years later, in June 1982, the Israeli forces were streaming northwards out of what used to be Palestine into Lebanon, and the mass slaughter of the inhabitants began. Our hearts bled for the Lebanese and Palestinian men, women and children, and we all started hating the Israelis.112
Referring frequently to his own “glowing memory” of the beauties of the Palestinian landscape and “the kindness of its people,” Dahl condemned the Israeli government, using the kind of inflammatory rhetoric he had practiced over many a dinner, but seldom in print. Marian Goodman felt he was using his desire to shock in order to defend what he perceived as the victims in this particular conflict. “If anybody was a big loudmouth, he’d hit him right back with the same treatment,” she told me. “But if somebody couldn’t defend themselves, he never attacked. He was protective.”113 In this instance his rhetoric, though sympathetic to the Palestinians, got the better of him, and some of the article reads as if it was written deliberately to irritate Jewish readers. Most inflammatory was the repeated comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany. Menachem Begin, and his minister of defense, Ariel Sharon, were branded as war criminals, whose actions condemned the whole nation. “Must Israel, like Germany, be brought to her knees before she learns how to behave in this world?” Dahl concluded.114 He despatched the review as soon as he had written it, with a note to the editor: “If I have said anything inaccurate or injudicious, do let me know.”115
When Liccy saw what he had written, she was horrified. Amazed that he had not shown it to her before he sent it off, she sensed immediately that his unrestrained anger was certain to offend Jews in ways he had not begun to imagine. She urged him to change it. But he refused. His response to her was the equivalent of the Duke of Wellington’s “publish and be damned.” He went away with her on holiday. Upon their return, he found that an enormous row had indeed ignited in his absence. Years of press releases about Dahl’s “macabre imagination” and his “nasty mind” had caught up with him: all over the media he was branded as an anti-Semite. He was bombarded with angry letters and phone calls. He even received death threats. He tried to put the record straight in a letter to The Times, claiming that to call him anti-Jewish was as foolish as to call him anti-Arab simply because he was critical of Colonel Qaddafi. “I am not anti-Semitic,” he declared. “I am anti-Israel.”116 But it was too late. He made matters much worse when, over the phone to Mike Coren of The New Statesman a few days later, he confided that he felt there was “a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke a certain animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. … Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”117
The comment was significant in many ways. It showed that, even in public, when his back was against the wall, Dahl was likely to become antagonistic rather than conciliatory. It manifested the bluntness that had been apparent since his plane crash in the desert and made clear how little he now cared about what other people—particularly in the literary establishment—now thought of him. So, in another context—in this case a quarrel with an American film producer—he did not think twice about describing the man, in a private letter to Dirk Bogarde, as “the wrong sort of Jew,” and exaggerating his faults accordingly. He simply applied the principle he used in his writing for children. He told Ophelia’s friend Todd McCormack, the son of the author and agent Mark McCormack, who came to film an interview with him: “I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty and very bad and very cruel. And if they’re ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That I think is fun and makes an impact.”118 In this spirit, the offending producer’s faults were catalogued to Bogarde, almost as if he were a character in one of Dahl’s children’s books. “His face is matted with dirty, black hair. He is disgustingly overweight and flaccid though only forty-something, garrulous, egocentric, arrogant, complacent, ruthless, dishonourable, lascivious, slippery.”119 Doubtless, Bogarde felt Dahl had made his point.
This kind of invective, quoted out of the frame of reference of its author’s frequently explosive tongue, sounds extreme. But for Roald it was simply par for the course. His adult correspondence, over more than fifty years, had been peppered with rude generalizations about people and nationalities that, at one time or other, had irritated him. The English, French, Dutch, Germans, Swedes, Irish, Iraqis and Americans joined the Israelis—or the Jews—in being victims. Nor were friends or family members exempt. Neisha Crosland recalled how Roald had “absolutely crucified” one boyfriend she brought over to dinner at Gipsy House because he had been to university and fancied himself an intellectual.120 Her sister Charlotte concurred. “He used to squash him like a fly,” she told me.121 Ophelia had realized as a child that, when he got involved in an argument, whether public or private, her father was always inclined to exaggeration and hyperbole to get his way: “I learned early on that he wasn’t interested in the matter of the argument. He simply wanted to cause a stir.”122
At the dinner table those who knew him best understood that the onslaught would soon blow over. In a more public forum, things were not so simple. And when he ventured into that territory, Ophelia, for one, was less tolerant of her father’s behavior. “I wasn’t as keen on his rather more controversial public side,” she told me. “And I still try and think about why he needed to do that. Some of it was about very strongly held opinions and some of that I respect a lot because he really didn’t do things in order to be popular and he didn’t say things so that he could gain public approval. In fact, if he felt strongly about something, he would say it often really without thinking about the consequences very much or who he might be hurting by doing such a thing.”123 Murray Pollinger too felt that, in this context, because Roald was “not a broad intellectual,” he would often simply say things that were “badly prepared and not well expressed.” Nevertheless, Pollinger believed, it was his client’s need to outrage convention, to “be a provocateur … to say outrageous things just to get a reaction,” that was the principal motivation behind his most notorious foray into the media limelight. “In the whole of my thirty years with Roald,” he assured me, “I could never perceive a crack or a peek at any anti-Semitism on his part. Not once.”124‡ For others, of course, that point of view was more difficult to appreciate.
By the end of his life, Roald had grown into an accomplished performer and distinctive public speaker. This evolution was a slow and gradual one. Always comfortable with being shocking over dinner, during the war he was a nervous and reluctant speechmaker, who needed a stiff drink to get him onto the platform. Though he had presented Way Out in 1961 with some style and panache, for much of the 1960s and 1970s he eschewed public appearances. “My trouble is that I am not a performer in any way,” he told the audience at a children’s book festival in 1971. “Short of reading from my books, which I presume have already been read, I am really no good at speaking t
o anyone, let alone a group of children. I would gladly come and do my ‘thing’ as you call it if only I had a ‘thing’ to do, but I don’t. I cannot believe that my presence alone drifting among the children would create much pleasure or give much enlightenment.”125 Four months later, in similar vein, he turned down an invitation to speak to the Round Table of Uxbridge: “Firstly, I am a rotten speaker, and secondly, I would rather stick to my own trade. If once I started going round making speeches I would become that awful creature which we see quite often around the place—’the writer-speech maker.’”126
But a decade later he was appearing regularly on television chat shows, introducing Tales of the Unexpected, and entertaining sales representatives, master carvers, medical foundations and university debating societies with subversive and risqué perorations. At some point in his speech he would usually stretch the limits of what was expected, and inject a frisson of danger—the dodgy practices of antique dealers, the perils of masturbation, the attraction of a pert bottom in tight jeans, the filthy natures of men with beards, or the antics of “randy” television presenter Bruce Forsyth: all were grist to the mill of a man who had now become a skilled and subversive humorist. But the primal desire to annoy was never far away. At Oxford University, prior to arguing that romance was bunk, he managed to irritate Rupert Soames, then the president of the Union, by gratuitously declaring over dinner that his grandmother, Winston Churchill’s wife Clementine, was a “boring non-entity.”127 It was typical of his need to cause a stir.
A couple of months after he had written the review of God Cried, Roald Dahl was profiled by Peter Lennon for The Times. There Dahl acknowledged that, because that piece was “written so fast and so emotionally,” he had perhaps somewhat overplayed his hand. Lennon concluded that it seemed Dahl had simply “refused to accept the conventions of international political debate.”128 This was true. He would do the same when, in 1989, he was almost a lone voice in the British media criticizing the novelist Salman Rushdie, when a fatwa (an Islamic death sentence) was issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, after Rushdie had supposedly slurred the Prophet Mohammed in his novel The Satanic Verses. It was ironic that Roald, who called Rushdie a “dangerous opportunist”129 because he had put the lives of his publishers and their employees at risk, also attacked Rushdie for not having exercised self-censorship before he published his book.
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