Storyteller
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In an interview conducted shortly before he died, Dahl refused to comment on this incident, because it stirred up such passions in people. “The only thing I want to say is that every writer should be his own censor—up to a point. I don’t hold with all this ‘I’m a member of the Society of Authors’ stuff. They seem to think that unlike other people they have a God-given right to publish exactly what they want. All of us should exercise a degree of censorship. In my children’s books there’s a wild degree of censorship. I eschew all sexual matters. And violence as well.”130 Here again, of course, the pot was calling the kettle black. In most contexts almost everyone who knew him agreed that he had precious little capacity for self-censorship. Nor was he interested in consistency. Making a point with force was much more important.
There were other strong inner conflicts that lay behind these outbursts. “Roald had a great sense of justice,” his nephew Nicholas told me. “But he just couldn’t get his head round it in relation to himself.” Logsdail thought in this respect his uncle was like many of the great painters he had represented as a gallery owner. “They’re so insightful, they’re so clever, but when they reflect upon themselves they don’t get it, because they can’t apply the same things to themselves that they see in the world. They see themselves apart … Roald was so black and white. What he really wanted was the middle ground. Yet he never found it.”131 Logsdail felt strongly too that the family’s sense of not belonging to the English middle classes was tied into this conundrum, that his uncle was perhaps so fearless of public opinion because he did not feel he truly fitted in.
But something more fundamental may have lurked behind this need to stir. Murray Pollinger thought that Roald would float an opinion he did not hold—“Isn’t Beethoven a crummy musician?”—just to get conversation going. Ophelia however thought that, at some level, this perverse trait was tied into the misanthropy that had developed in her father during the war. “He felt that everybody was capable of great acts of cruelty,” she told me, sensing that this was somehow linked to his need to shock. “That was important because he felt life was shocking … and I think he felt there was something truthful and real about shocking people.”132 During his interview with Peter Lennon, too, Dahl admitted that, in his view, adults were “not likeable people,”133 adding that he usually felt happier with children. They were more straightforward and easier to handle.
Roald had, in any event, long celebrated the need to become irate. In an article written for the New York Times in December 1983, he had praised Alfred Knopf for possessing this quality, describing him as “a terrible wrathful man with a slow fuse burning in one end of his belly and a stick of dynamite in the other. This is nice,” he concluded, “because explosions are exciting.”134 D. H. Lawrence was another of his literary heroes, whose polemical writing appealed to him greatly. “Any article that is worth anything at all is almost certain to be contentious,” he once wrote in a letter to Mike Watkins. “Lawrence, who was the best of all critics, never wrote an uncontentious piece in his life. Everything he said boiled and bubbled with wrath and contempt.”135 Nevertheless, Liccy was frequently frustrated that Roald seldom, if ever, slept on a decision.136 He liked to act spontaneously and his responses were, as Neisha recalled, more often “from the heart than from the head.”137 Moreover, because he was unaccustomed to being challenged, he found it almost impossible ever to back down gracefully. His niece Astri recalled that Roald “always made important decisions within the family and no one questioned them.”138 Nicky Logsdail was far from being alone when he told me that he could not ever remember his uncle apologizing about anything.
In 1971, Roald quarrelled with the headmistress of Ophelia and Lucy’s junior school, Godstowe. He had contributed some money to rebuild one of the classrooms and wrote to Patricia Fitzmaurice-Kelly, complaining bitterly that now he had seen the work, he felt “cheated” and “conned.” His language was intemperate and characteristically inflammatory—the classroom was no more than a “hole” that would “never be tolerated in any village school in England today.”139 Miss Fitzmaurice-Kelly, however, held her own. Claiming she was “shattered” by his letter, she calmly answered his criticisms, offered to return his money and suggested that, if he felt so strongly, perhaps he should make other arrangements for his children’s education.140 It was a situation reminiscent of the great “tornado of troubles” with Sheila St. Lawrence a decade before. This time, however, Roald reflected upon his own temperament before responding. “I agree that the tone of my letter, and indeed some of the phrases I used, were unforgivable. But my trouble is I get so carried away by it all, I forget completely the impact these things may have upon the reader.” Interestingly, he then backed down completely. “I simply must repair this quarrel, and with you of all people, for whom I have a massive admiration. I wouldn’t dream of annulling my deed of covenant whatever happened, and I don’t want my daughters to go to another school. So if you accept my apologies for having said the things I said and if you come with us to the premiere of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I will in future try to write only books and stories, not letters.”141
But neither Olympian detachment nor standing on the sidelines was part of his nature. He was too impulsive, too spontaneous. In 1988, he and Liccy were driving through Hyde Park when they saw several policemen beating up a black man who was resisting arrest. Roald filed a formal complaint against the police for brutality. “He was really appalled by this, almost in a naive kind of way,” his daughter Ophelia recalled, “and he was not, by any stretch of the imagination, anti-police. But I think he had a well-honed, if simplistic sense of fairness and he thought he had seen something unjust.”142 The case went to court. There, the police used the fact that Dahl was a fiction writer against him, and although he claimed that, on the contrary, this made him “adept at observing situations and noting details,”143 other witnesses contradicted his account of events. The defense implied that he had exaggerated reality and the case was dropped. Once again, it seemed, his need for hyperbole, which served him so well as a writer of fiction, had become counterproductive in a public context. The fact that, once committed to a position, he was seldom able to find a neutral, let alone reverse, gear could make him seem unreasonable, insensitive and oddly inconsistent. This made him easily misunderstood. Like one of his favorite characters, the Big Friendly Giant, it seemed his words often came out not quite as he intended. When accused of not making sense, the Giant’s response was childishly simple and might have been appropriate too for his creator: “What I mean and what I say is something different.”144
* Curiously, Dahl was adamant that Uncle Oswald was not about sex. “It is a monstrous thing for a serious writer to write explicit sex,” he declared. “My Uncle Oswald is a parody of all those awful books. … Look at John Updike and Couples. That’s rubbish, just rubbish!”—Roald Dahl interviewed in Publisher’s Weekly, June 6, 1980.
† Some of the money from the premiere of Hud, for example, was used to educate Palestinian refugees in Ramallah.
‡ Curiously, in a letter to The Times on September 15, 1983, Roald claimed that he had “quite a few pints of Jewish blood in [his] own veins through [his] Norwegian grandmother Hesselberg, and [his] great grand-great-grandfather, who was called Preuss.” The Preuss connection to the Dahl ancestry remains obscure. Ellen Wallace (b. 1856) was his “grandmother Hesselberg,” and she was primarily of Scottish descent. Her father was George Wallace and her mother Sophie Bergithe Maria Huun (b. 1835). That either the Huuns or the Preusses were Jewish was extremely unlikely, because—apart from a tiny number of Sephardi Portuguese—Jews were banned from entering Norway until 1851. Even in 1892, there were only 214 Jews in the whole of the country—See Ingrid Muller, The Jewish Community of Oslo, www.dmt.oslo.no/english/jews-in-norway.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Wizard and the Wonderman
THROUGHOUT THE 1970S AND 1980s, Roald’s confidence in his ability to penetrate a child’s mind b
ecame increasingly profound. As he himself aged, and his body became ever more painful and unreliable—by the mid-1980s he was almost two inches shorter than he had been in his twenties—his perceptions about childhood and about how children think became ever more certain. Even as he approached seventy, this naive eye remained startlingly undimmed: “The mind of a child is a dark wood. It is full of secret half-civilized thoughts that are forgotten like dreams a short time afterwards,” he wrote. “And it is no easy matter for the adult to recall totally and with absolute clarity some forty or fifty years later just what it was like to be a little boy, or a little girl. I can do it. I am certain I can.”1 The daily pile of fan mail from young readers bore out his conviction and fed a sense of certainty about his destiny and stature as a children’s author that was some consolation for any disappointment he felt about his exclusion from the inner citadel of literary London. Critics and librarians might still disparage his work, but a powerful constituency of young fans, devoted to him and his books, offered an alternative, constant source of gratification and fodder for his self-esteem. This perception empowered him. He began to talk about himself as their representative and spokesman. The misanthrope, who his daughter Ophelia recalled had “never really trusted adults,” was becoming the “geriatric child” redeemed by the youth of his adoring readers.
In January 1982, Roald wrote a letter to the thirty-two-year-old Stephen Roxburgh at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, introducing himself to his new editor. “I must warn you,” he told Roxburgh, “that you are not, alas, taking on a sprightly young writer of thirty, with years and years of work before him. I am sixty-five and a half. I have two steel hips and a spine that has suffered no less than six laminectomies (from war injury). So how much more there is in me I simply do not know. I doubt there is an adult novel or even a new collection of short stories. But I would like to go on writing books for children as long as the old fire keeps smouldering. I love work and am unhappy if I am not at it seven days a week.”2 Although illness would stalk him throughout the 1980s, and death would eventually claim him late in 1990, this last decade of his life would be by far the most productive of his career—despite the fact that he viewed writing still as more craftsmanship than inspiration, sticking to his mantra that what the writer needed was “an infinite capacity for taking pains … you really have to get down to it and work and work and work and work. … Rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.”3
Much of this new productivity was due to Liccy, who gave up her own job at Carvers and Gilders and set about changing the nature of Gipsy House. Her arrival there was not without stresses. The years of deceit had left a legacy of resentment and anger. Roald’s children initially somewhat begrudged her presence in their home, while Liccy’s three girls felt somewhat “swallowed up by the Dahl pack.”4 From being one of three, Neisha recalled, she was now “one of many.” Liccy, however, was determined to set a new agenda. She and Roald had decided between themselves that they would not attempt to have any children together, so that at least would minimize disruption to the status quo. She also focused on making the house calmer, more comfortable and more stable. It would be prettier. It would be more private.
The swimming pool and greenhouse were pulled down to make way for a separate guest annex and a snooker room—all away from the main house. The old guest room on the ground floor, now a drawing room, became their master bedroom. The garden was redesigned. The open house policy that his nephews and nieces remembered affectionately from earlier days became more restricted. Roald complained bitterly about the building work. “The entire inside is being ripped out and redesigned,” he told his old schoolfriend Douglas Highton. “Dust and bricks and dusty labourers are in every room except one, in which we cook and sit and eat.”5 Tessa recalled that she could never remember her father as fractious and bad-tempered as he was when the remodelling was going on. But the end result provided him with a restful, tranquil environment that eased his final years enormously.6
Almost everyone was aware how much happier he seemed with Liccy around him. She delighted in looking after him and both glowed in each other’s presence. “I know few couples that loved one another the way they did,” Tom Maschler told me. “She took care of everything.”7 Roald himself paid tribute to his new wife—they had married quietly in 1983 at Brixton Town Hall—ghosting an article in 1985 about life in Gipsy House for his Australian housekeeper, Sandy Anderson, who had helped nurse him through another operation—this time for suspected bowel cancer. “Felicity is a lovely woman of forty-six,” he declared. “She is beautiful, cheerful, clever … and everything a wife should be. She cares for her husband totally and without her I doubt very much if he could keep going. He is obviously deeply in love with her and she with him and it is a fine thing to watch them when they are together.”8 Even his own children, who initially felt resentment toward her, had to admit that their father was transformed. Lucy thought that Liccy “stimulated” and “fulfilled him in a way no one had done before,”9 because she was strong, energetic, positive and not in the least bit needy. Ophelia noticed that her father had relaxed physically. “He seemed comfortable kissing people on the cheek, and suddenly he was embracing us more often and with less brusqueness.”10 Charlotte thought Roald, for his part, made her mother “stronger, because she had been struggling a bit before,” while observing that her need “to control” was almost as great as Roald’s.* Quentin Blake sensed that Liccy brought Roald a kind of new “equilibrium” because she was not a “competing ego.”11 Everyone noticed that his writing productivity increased dramatically.
Now, after years of distractions, in love and surrounded by this newfound stability, Roald was able to concentrate more fully on his most particular pleasure, his writing. In a radio interview in 1970, he described the almost sensual delight he got when he went up to his hut, closed the door and sat down in his chair.
You become a different person, you are no longer an ordinary fellow who walks around and looks after his children and eats meals and does silly things, you go into a completely different world. I personally draw all the curtains in the room, so that I don’t see out the window and put on a little light which shines on my board. Everything else in your life disappears and you look at your bit of paper and get completely lost in what you’re doing. You do become another person for a moment. Time disappears completely. You may start at nine in the morning and the next time you look at your watch, when you’re getting hungry, it can be lunchtime. And you’ve absolutely no idea that three or fours hours have gone by. So when you meet a musician or a writer, you shouldn’t be surprised that they look exactly like ordinary people, because in that part of their lives they are. … All the best artists that I’ve known, like Hemingway and Steinbeck and EB White and Thurber, behave very normally in their private lives. … They are ordinary people who have a secret compartment somewhere in their brain which they can switch on when they become quite alone and go to work.12
Freed from the “financial evils”13 of the Random House four-book deal, he felt ready to embark upon a longer children’s book, his first for five years. He worked on it for most of 1981, and in October wrote to Dirk Bogarde that he was “feeling a little light … because yesterday I finished the longest children’s novel I’ve done so far, the end of about 600 hours work, seven days a week.”14 The story had begun with something he scribbled in an Ideas Book many years before: “The man who captured and kept in bottles—Ideas from the brain—Thoughts—Pieces of knowledge—Jokes—I saw them thrashing around furiously in their jars.”15 He had explored this character briefly in Danny The Champion of the World. Now he would devote a whole book to the Big Friendly Giant—The BFG.
Dedicated to Olivia on the twentieth anniversary of her death, the book would become Roald’s own favorite of all his works. However, as with so many of his longer stories, it had a complex journey to completion. The first draft had a male hero called Jody, while the BFG himself spoke barely a word of “gobblefunk”—the mangled English
that would come to define his eccentric and lovable personality. “As I am telling you before, I know exactly what words I am wanting to say,” the BFG declared to the eventual heroine, Sophie, who was named after Roald’s first grandchild, “but somehow or other they is always getting squiff-squiddled around.”16 Both idiosyncratic language and new protagonist were in place when Roald sent a completed draft to Stephen Roxburgh at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Tom Maschler at Cape thought it ready for publication in the United Kingdom and Roald was already quietly excited about it. Yet he sensed it might be further improved, although he did not think he had enough energy left for any significant rewrites. “I think it is the longest children’s book I have done,” he told Roxburgh,
and I believe that in time it will become as well established as either “Charlie” or “James,” both of which have been going some twenty years with undiminished sales. I am a severe self-critic and have been a long time in the business, so I am not giving this opinion lightly. But listen, do you as an editor have any suggestions to make about this book? I don’t mean major changes. I couldn’t do that. But I would welcome criticisms of a more minor nature. A wrong word. An unnecessary sentence. A bad paragraph. A poor joke. You see, Tom Maschler is a great picture editor, probably the greatest. But he is not by nature a word man.17