Roxburgh and Dahl were made for each other in many ways. An academic specialist in Victorian children’s literature, Roxburgh had become disenchanted with university life and joined Farrar, Straus in 1978 as an assistant in their small but prestigious children’s book department. His talents were such that by 1981 he had become editor-in-chief. He was thrusting, hardworking and he bubbled over with energy; but he was nervous of dealing with Dahl. He had also been warned by both Murray Pollinger and Tom Maschler that his new author did not take kindly to editing. Nevertheless, he believed the manuscript he had been sent could be polished. So he took a deep breath and wrote Roald a “meticulous” letter, eleven pages long, with many small observations alongside some much more significant suggestions about how The BFG might be improved structurally and how the giant’s bizarre language might be further refined. He even told Roald that he thought some passages of the book had gone too far in offending a significant part of his potential market: the librarians. With some trepidation, he despatched his comments.
He need not have worried. Roald wrote back enthusiastically with his own lengthy commentary on these notes. For Roxburgh, this response was “an editor’s dream.”18 For Roald, it was even better. He had rediscovered the kind of thoughtful, sensitive critical voice that he had not really experienced since the days of Ann Watkins and Sheila St. Lawrence. And he embraced this new force in his life with an enthusiasm that bubbled over into gobblefunk.
I am absolutely swishboggled and sloshbungled by the trouble you have taken and by the skill of your editorial work on The BFG. In nearly forty years of dealing with publishers, I have never seen a job like it. Gottlieb’s maximum was two pages of comments. Maschler’s nil. Rayner Unwin’s nil. Michael Joseph nil, etc. … Ninety-eight percent of your comments were thoroughly sound and a couple of them were vital. … The whole thing must have driven you round the twist. It nearly drove me the same way going through them. But it was all marvellously worthwhile. … You are right that frobscottle [a delicious fizzy liquid, whose bubbles travel downwards] and whizz-poppers [extravagant noisy farts brought on by drinking frobscottle] should not be an isolated incident never to be mentioned again. So I’ve gone even further and had the BFG doing a whizzpopper for the Queen. Slightly vulgar, perhaps. But you and I know that the children will love it. And this is a book for children. To hell with the spinster librarians of your country. By now I am impervious to their comments. The louder they shout, the better the book does.
Only one thing in your letter disturbs me. You say in the final paragraph “ … the book could be published just as it is and be quite successful …” It’s the word “quite” that worries me. It has two meanings. One is “moderately,” the other is “thoroughly.” The former is the more common usage, and if that is what you meant, then you’ve got me fretting. I honestly think that I have yet to write a children’s book that is only moderately successful, and I hope this one isn’t it. Anyway, I do thank you enormously for the blood, sweat and tears you have spent on my behalf.19
Roxburgh’s response in turn was swift and to the point: “I stand corrected. The BFG will be thoroughly successful. … And I stand flabber-stacked by your kind words. Praise from you is praise indeed. The scenes you reworded are terrific. The new scene in which the BFG whizzpops for the Queen is simply one of the funniest things I have ever read. The entire office is laughing out loud.”20
When Roxburgh told Roald that he would be visiting London, he was immediately invited for lunch to Gipsy House. Yet he was unsure the meeting was such a good idea. Would he and his author have anything to talk about? “I came from a teeny little town on the wrong side of the tracks in Massachusetts,” he told me later. “And now, here I was in England—with the great Roald Dahl.” As he boarded the train for the forty-minute ride from London to Great Missenden, he hoped he would get away from the meeting without doing anything stupid or embarrassing. Roald collected him at the station. Over lunch, any anxieties soon dissolved and it was immediately apparent to both men that they were on the same wavelength.21 The “shy, intimidated editor,” who was still in awe of his author, discovered not only that he and his author had literary tastes in common—both were admirers of Hemingway—but that they were also keen wine buffs and knowledgeable about woodwork and carpentry. Roxburgh at one time had worked finishing cabinets.
He returned to London later that afternoon relieved that the encounter had passed without an explosion, but unaware what a striking impression he had made. The following evening, after a day of meetings, he arrived back at the house of a friend in Chelsea to discover that Roald had driven down to London and personally delivered him the manuscript of his new book: The Witches. He had also left a message informing his young editor that he had not shown it to anyone else. When Roxburgh called Tom Maschler to ask what he should do, Maschler had just one piece of advice—to drop whatever he was doing and read the manuscript now. “Dahl’s not in a hurry until he’s in a hurry,” he told him. That night, Roxburgh read the script, and the following morning he returned on the train to Great Missenden to discuss it with Roald.22
The BFG was not only the first book on which Roald collaborated with Stephen Roxburgh, it was also the first long book on which he would work with the illustrator who would become synonymous with almost his entire children’s oeuvre: Quentin Blake. Blake had first worked on a Dahl book in 1978, when—in response to Roald’s complaints that Maschler had failed to find him an illustrator for The Enormous Crocodile, his first book for really very young kids—Murray Pollinger’s wife, Gina, suggested the forty-six-year-old artist as a potential collaborator.23 Gina was a celebrated and successful children’s literary agent in her own right, and Roald respected her and frequently sought her advice. Maschler, who later took credit for having conceived the pairing, agreed, and the combination was an instant success. Blake’s colorful, witty, yet slightly dangerous illustrations were a sparkling counterpoint to Roald’s anarchic description of a greedy, cunning reptile hunting children down in the African jungle.
The team then worked together again on two of the Random House four books—The Twits and George’s Marvellous Medicine—where Quentin’s witty caricatures brilliantly animated the two hideous practical jokers, as well as George’s grumpy grandmother, with her “pale brown teeth” and “small puckered up mouth like a dog’s bottom.”24 Curiously, the illustrations for Dirty Beasts, which Blake himself would reillustrate in 1984, were originally drawn by Rosemary Fawcett. More curious still was the fact that, until they started working on The BFG, writer and illustrator did not meet together except in Tom Maschler’s office at Jonathan Cape.
Blake remembered that initially their relationship was formal. “I was rather nervous and frightened of him,” he admitted.25 And the collaboration on The BFG did not get off to a good start. Maschler had asked Quentin only to provide twelve illustrations for the book’s twenty-four chapters. Roald insisted on more. “I hope I am not right in thinking that because Quentin is not sharing in the royalties of this book he has done a rather quicky job and got away with as few illustrations as possible,”26 he complained. When, a few days later, he discovered that Quentin indeed was not to blame, Maschler was the recipient of an incendiary letter:
There is no way in which I will permit a major children’s book of mine to be published with only twelve illustrations. It cannot be difficult for you to imagine my astonishment when I discover (from Roger Straus) that you were unwilling to pay Quentin more than £300 for illustrating The BFG. Of course he gave you only twelve pictures! This is cheeseparing to the ultimate degree. It is also an insult to my book. You have got yourself into this difficulty and I’m afraid you are going to have to get yourself out of it as best you can. I will not agree to your publishing The BFG unless properly and fully illustrated in the same manner as all the others … I do not wish to have a long telephonic conversation about this and I don’t wish to be browbeaten. I am too upset for that. I want to be left in peace while this is prope
rly resolved, which it must be as soon as possible.27
Maschler quickly backed down, and Quentin was offered a better deal, which involved starting all over again from scratch. It was during this process that Roald and Quentin finally met on their own and Quentin began to realize just how precisely Roald imagined his stories, and how close in particular he was to the character of the BFG. Initially, Dahl had described his character wearing a black hat, apron and large black boots. But when Roald saw Quentin’s drawing, he knew at once that the giant needed to look softer and more lovable. During the course of his discussions with Quentin on this new look, he posted his illustrator one of his own gigantic Norwegian sandals in a “lumpy brown paper parcel”28 to help him get the character right.
But the giant was not entirely modelled on his creator. There were a number of other sources, including Dahl’s ever present builder, Wally Saunders, whose huge ears influenced the BFG’s. “I have been working hard with Quentin Blake to make The BFG look curious and comical,” Roald told Roxburgh. “I think we have about got it now and this necessitates a change in my brief description of the clothes he was wearing.”29 He was absolutely confident about his judgment, Quentin recalled, citing as an example the sequence toward the end of the story where the aggressive child-eating giants are rounded up and captured. “We must see helicopters,” Roald had told him. “Children like helicopters.” Quentin responded well to this enthusiasm and, aside from the general teasing and banter that went with the territory, there was never any animosity between them. “My belief is that if you collaborate with the book, with the words, then you collaborate with the author,” he told me. Roald “might try and wind me up,” he added, but his intention was “always affectionate.”30
Writing The BFG had taken “quite a lot of electricity out of the battery,”31 Dahl admitted, but even while he was impatiently waiting for it to charge up again, he had begun work on The Witches. His youngest daughter, Lucy, saw Liccy’s hand behind this increased productivity. She felt her father wanted to impress Liccy, that she was about the only person around whom he felt he had to behave. “But I think she pushed him too,” she reflected. “I think she knew that there was still a burning fire there … I don’t think it was a conscious decision to say, ‘Get back on the horse and write something brilliant, because you’ve still got it in you.’ I think it all worked organically. He was happy doing it, and she was happy watching it happen.”32 Tom Maschler too was “filled with admiration” to see how Roald, though ill and obviously in pain, continued to grapple with his craft. “He was incredibly ambitious for his own work and he was always trying to surpass himself,” he told me.33
In 1984, Dahl began writing another book for very young readers, The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me—a story about a little boy who starts a window-cleaning company, with the help of his friends: a giraffe, a pelican and a dancing monkey. Its thirty-two colorful pages, superbly illustrated by Quentin Blake, are the literary equivalent of a soufflé—simple, light and easily devoured. But behind this effortless façade lay seven months of hard work, and a file of discards and rewrites that exceeded 300 pages. Dahl later described writing this story as “the hardest thing in the world.”34 Once again Stephen Roxburgh was a crucial part of the mix. His obsessive attention to the detail of editing was such that he likened himself to “the vampire of legend who is caught by the morning sun because he must pick up every grain of sand sprinkled on the threshold that stands between him and his coffin.”35 Roald’s own view was less elaborate. “Three cheers for Stephen Roxburgh!” he told Roger Straus.36
The physical pain he was suffering made working both harder and easier. Now that Liccy was around and his children were moving into adulthood, he was freed up from struggling with many of his previous responsibilities. A series of accomplished cooks and housekeepers were on hand to make life at Gipsy House even more comfortable. His beloved garden too had largely been handed over to Liccy and to professionals. “Gardening is for the birds if you are sixty or over,” he told Dirk Bogarde. “I see all these old farts digging their allotments across the lane, straining their backs and bending their bones … I don’t garden any more. I supervise.”37 So, when he was not bedridden, as Stephen Roxburgh recalled he often was, his available energy could be focused on writing. For years he had longed for this situation and it had been denied to him. “I am an old man full of metal,” he declared, describing his body as a “rickety structure” that preferred “sitting comfortably in an armchair with a writing-board on the lap and the feet resting on a suitcase” to being out of doors.38 Yet other pleasures were not entirely abandoned. He still went gambling, if less frequently than before, and never recklessly (he usually risked only £200), while he indulged his passion for wine by going “banco”39 on the excellent 1982 Bordeaux vintage, buying over a thousand cases of the very greatest wines, a few of which still lie, unconsumed, in the Gipsy House cellar.
Looked after by Liccy and surrounded by his family, Dahl now seemed like an ancient lion at the head of his pride. In 1988, Tom Maschler and his managing director, Graham Carleton Greene, invited Roald for a birthday dinner in a private room at London’s Garrick Club. They told him he could invite whomever he wanted. Ever the family man, his first choices were Liccy and the available children. As special guests he added the broadcaster Frank Delaney, the actress and columnist Joanna Lumley, and Francis Bacon, whom he had not seen for some time. Lumley was surprised that she had been invited because the only time they had previously met—on a live television show—Roald had “snapped” at her and she felt that she irritated him. However, she was flattered at the invitation and particularly eager to meet Bacon, who—much to everyone’s surprise—turned up “at eight o’clock on the dot, smartly dressed and not remotely drunk.” Lumley remembered what good company Roald was that evening, how he talked about fiction writing being the highest form of any kind of creative art, and how Bacon’s “little round black eyes sparkled” when Dahl began to talk to him across the large table halfway through dinner. Delaney then “butted in” on their conversation, annoying Dahl and provoking him to announce that the meal was ended and he was going home. “We all had to suddenly swallow our chocolate mousse,” Lumley recalled, “and leave our undrunk wine and fight for our coats. … It was a ghastly end to a fabulous evening.”40
Dahl’s sense of himself as a naughty schoolboy never left him. Nor did his sense of exuberance or his belief that life needed to be filled with “treats.” He relished giving unusual and unexpected presents. Quentin Blake recalled Roald putting two oysters into his hand as he was leaving Gipsy House because a basket of seafood that he had ordered had just arrived. His stepdaughter, Neisha, enthused about his zesty eagerness, that “twinkle in the eye” that she found so attractive. Even his dreams of glory were undiminished. “In my old age, I spend my life having dreams of glory,” he told Todd McCormack. “I’m always winning the golf open championship or tennis at Wimbledon or something like that. I go through long thinks about this lying in the dark … trying to get to sleep … imagining every little detail of what happens. … I lie in bed and dream up that I’ve beaten them all, and everyone’s surprised. It’s great fun, it’s the same with books. You associate with the heroine or the hero. … You pretend it’s you.”41 And sometimes he could even laugh at himself. In 1984, responding to news that a school in Norfolk had just named one of its houses after him, he wrote to the head teacher: “I’m a bit bowled over and of course enormously honoured. … Already I can see the children lining the edge of the playing field during house matches and yelling ‘Come on, Dahl!,’ ‘Up Dahl!’ and many other personal obscenities.”42
Stephen Roxburgh was a key ingredient in this newfound enthusiasm. Roger Straus described Roald’s relationship to his editor as a “mad attachment.” Dahl “sort of fell in love with him,” he told me, recalling rumors spreading around Farrar, Straus that plans were even afoot for Roxburgh to marry one of Roald’s daughters.43 Roxburgh acknowledged that he had inde
ed “adored” Roald and felt like “a kind of disciple” when he was with him, while Roald revelled in the attention he was receiving from the kind of literary intellectual who would often not give him the time of day. It seemed the more they worked together, the deeper this professional relationship was becoming. Roxburgh found his author “enormously responsive” to “every level of detail” of his criticisms—“from broader conceptual issues, structural issues, right down to the structure of sentences.” The two men also enjoyed each other’s company. Roald “loved to be provocative … to make you respond,” Roxburgh remembered. “He liked nothing better than to get you fired up.”44
No one was happier with these new developments than Dahl’s British literary agent, Murray Pollinger, who from 1979 had taken over his global representation. He had worked for Dahl since the author joined his father, Laurence Pollinger, in 1960 and though the two men were never intimate, over twenty years an immense kinship and loyalty had developed between them. Murray too had initially “hero-worshipped” his client, finding him “dynamic, dashing, just huge.” “I loved his hugeness,” he told me, affectionately recalling a party in New York in 1961, where towering above everyone else, and quaffing double martinis as if they were water, Roald “had to stand with his legs wide apart in order to look people in the eye and hear what they were saying.”45 Murray, by contrast, was slender, spare, polished and self-consciously elegant. Ophelia recalled that he would only drink tea if it was served in a china cup, while Wendy Kress, Roald’s last secretary, remembered him as “ramrod-straight, greased hair, old-fashioned … always a gentleman.”46
Laurence was rather different. Murray described his father as “a Victorian tyrant [who] ran a very harsh home and governed the business the same way,”47 and any initial loyalty Roald might have felt toward him was soon transferred to his son, who dealt with his day-to-day UK affairs. Roald also admired the judgment of Murray’s wife, Gina, and was delighted when he and Pat were made godparents to their son, Edmund. Thus the Pollingers too were absorbed into the extended Dahl family. “We saw Murray’s nipper last Sunday,” Roald wrote to Mike Watkins in 1964. “Fine child. He and Gina are like a couple of parrots who have just seen their first egg hatch out. They sit on the edge of the nest, preening their feathers and making little clucking noises in their throats.”48
Storyteller Page 63