Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  As far as drugs were concerned, he argued that he would like to see senior boys and girls in all schools throughout the land attending, as part of their education, regular meetings of Narcotics Anonymous. “It’s no good giving them a few lectures and showing a few films,” he wrote. “Make them sit and listen to the dreadful tales of drugging and thieving that the young addicts at NA meetings have to tell. Once a week for the last year of school should be compulsory.”81

  Lucy was most critical of her father for the way he dealt with Theo. She remembered the period in the late 1970s—after Tessa had left home, and when Ophelia was at boarding school—when she was often alone with Theo and her father. She felt sorry for her brother because Roald seemed to demand so much of him. “I watched everything,” Lucy told me. “Dad was always pushing him too far and I think Theo felt that he was always disappointing him.” When his son was sixteen, Roald decided his education was over, dismissing his tutor and taking the unilateral decision that he should become a baker. After sending him to a local college to learn his craft he set him up in business with a local firm that had been facing financial difficulties. He invested much-needed capital in the enterprise, selling one of his Francis Bacons—Landscape at Malabata—to raise the £50,000 he needed. “Theo was so unhappy,” Lucy recalled. “He would have to get up at three in the morning and be at work at four. He’d come home with cuts and burns all the way up his arms. It was never going to work.”

  After the bakery collapsed, Roald tried to set up an antiques business for his son, committing a further £50,000 to the business, and filling up the empty swimming pool at Gipsy House with so much stock that it looked like an “antiques supermarket.”82 The enterprise was a “big deal” for Roald, who believed that the business would be “Theo’s whole future,”83 but it too was destined for failure because Theo, unlike his father, was simply not interested in furniture.

  Theo, who—like so many sons of dominant, successful men—craved his father’s approval, was frequently worn down by his apparent failure to live up to Roald’s high standards. “He worshipped his father, smoked a pipe, and tried so much to be like him,” Roald’s secretary, Wendy Kress, recalled, adding that Theo loathed any uncertainty, change or upheaval. Once, she remembered, Roald had just come out of hospital, and Liccy was driving him to the Isle of Wight for a few days’ recuperation. Roald had just bought a small portrait by his favorite painter, Van Gogh, and wanted to bring it with him to hang in his hotel bedroom. So he wrapped the painting in a tartan blanket and gave it to Theo to put in the car. Ophelia, who was packing the car, thought it was crazy to take the picture, so sent him back inside with it. There his father berated him for not having put the picture in the car. “He was aimless, paralyzed,” Wendy reflected; “he didn’t know what to do, wandering around with a Van Gogh under his arm.”84 Eventually, Theo would find some measure of contentment working at the local supermarket. Some years after his father died he married and settled down in Florida, where he started his own family.

  Meanwhile Roald was struggling with his last long children’s book: Matilda. Almost all the people who read an early draft thought he had gone off the rails. The heroine, Matilda Wormwood, was “born wicked,” and the story focused a great deal on gambling and cheating at the racetracks. The story climaxed at a race course, with Matilda using her tele-kinetic powers to manipulate the result of a horse race and therefore help her favorite teacher solve her financial problems. She died doing so. Gina Pollinger had serious reservations about this initial version. “I was shocked,” she recalled, adding that the storyline seemed unnecessarily “savage” and “aggressive.”85 Stephen Roxburgh saw the first draft and thought it was so “hopeless”86 he did not even immediately acknowledge receipt of the manuscript. This hesitation hurt Roald, who—for the first time—had to chase his editor for a response. He knew himself that there were problems with the draft. “I had awful trouble with it,” he admitted later. “I got it wrong … the main character, the little girl kept changing.”87 It was a situation that even Roger Straus could see “depressed him … and made him scratchy.”88 As a result his warmth toward Stephen Roxburgh began to wane.

  Sensing this cooling, Roxburgh tried hard to put things right, to reestablish his old relationship with his author. He flew over to see him three separate times to discuss revisions, but the process only exhausted Dahl and made him wonder whether he could any longer go on writing books of that length. “I started the whole book again,” he told Todd Mc-Cormack in 1988. “I rewrote every word. … It was a very interesting experience, which I’ve never had to do before, but maybe in my old age I’m getting not so good at it and it takes longer. … I’m fairly happy with [the book] now. I think it’s OK. But it certainly wasn’t before.”89 The mellow atmosphere of his working relationship with Stephen Roxburgh, however, had disappeared. Roxburgh recalled an argument over dinner about whether Merlot or Cabernet grapes were picked first, where both he and Roald defended their territory without humor. “It was like an old marriage,” he said. “We would just sort of snip at each other. And that aggravated me.”90 Roger Straus thought his colleague had become too grand, that he “had decided he knew more about Roald’s work than Roald knew himself.”91 Roxburgh disagreed, but sensed that his own obsessiveness might be “wearing [Roald] down.” He thought his author simply “wanted to be left alone.” A comic dimension crept in, too. On his most recent visits to Gipsy House, Roxburgh had arrived sporting a beard, something he knew Dahl hated. Wendy Kress thought Stephen now looked “scruffy … creepy … a bit like a hippie.” She too speculated that perhaps he had just got a little too big for his boots.92 As Murray Pollinger recalled: “this clean-shaven, keen editor who Roald put so much faith in … had not only gone down the tubes, but had actually grown a bloody beard too.”93

  The editing of Matilda proved to be protracted. Roald complained to Liccy not that Roxburgh had too much energy, but that he had too little. Furthermore, as he was also now responsible for contractual negotiations as well as artistic ones, Roxburgh found himself negotiating a contract for the book after the revisions had been completed. Characteristically, Roald refused to accept FSG’s initial offer. Roxburgh responded by hinting that perhaps the publishers deserved the proposed royalty split because of the amount of time they had put into editing the book. Appearing to put a price on the cost of editing infuriated Dahl. He readily acknowledged Roxburgh’s help, but wrote that he had “never before heard of a publisher who actually made a charge in this way for editorial work.” However, it was the fact that Roald sensed Roxburgh did not really value the book that rankled more than anything. In the end this was probably the key influence in his decision to take it to a different publisher. In a long letter he attempted to explain his decision to move to Penguin:

  … I am not even sure that you like the final version of Matilda. The most I could get out of you on the phone when I called to see if you had gotten it after three weeks was (and these two words are seared on my memory) “It works.” This contrasted very strongly with Cape’s attitude. They were enthusiastic and rolled up their sleeves and went right ahead making plans to publish in the spring. … So all in all, I would be dishonest if I did not tell you that I feel pretty uncomfortable about this whole business … My duty is to my own family in the long term, and I must not allow sentiment to prevent me from getting the best terms I can for my works. Both Liccy and Ophelia agree reluctantly and with great sadness that I am right to go elsewhere now, especially as your present duties in FSG are going to prevent you in the future doing the kind of super-editing that you did for me in the past.94

  For his part, Roxburgh tried to argue that his author should have left contractual matters to his agent, and that “the rhetoric of negotiations” was not “the language of friends.”95 He deplored the antagonistic attitude that seemed to have entered the argument, and apologized if he was in any way responsible for this. But it was no good. The relationship had come to an end.

 
Roald was also ill. His recent bowel operations, though successful, had left him exhausted. Peter Mayer at Penguin promised him new energy and a better royalty deal. Roger Straus tried to persuade him to change his mind, but Roald was adamant. A reminder that Straus had helped his author out of his million-pound tax liability made him hesitate for a moment, before Roald simply replied that it wasn’t “gentlemanly” of Straus to mention that. “But we’ll always be friends.”96 Roxburgh’s biography died with Roald’s move to Penguin, but there was no antagonism left behind. Only a vague sense of regret. For his part, Roald had once again moved on, while Roxburgh, though disappointed, remains justifiably proud of the six books they published together and still treasures his close association with Roald. “He’d involved me in his life,” he reflected. “And there was a great personal affection and admiration. He was a father figure for me—there’s no question about that.” He also well understood his author’s psychology. “He dealt with superlatives. … The best, the brightest, the most famous, the richest … if your star fell out of the constellation … you quickly became the lowest, meanest, stupidest, vilest of things. He saw things in black and white.”97

  The financial advantages of the move to Penguin aside, Dahl quickly found a kindred spirit in Liz Attenborough, the youthful publishing director at Puffin Books. She found him “extraordinarily professional,” and—once he had got over her youth—he delighted in the fact that she usually answered the phone herself, and was not always protected by a secretary. Soon they were sharing gossipy stories about their respective families and he was asking her children to comment on a new manuscript. He admired her passionate commitment to children’s literature, while delighting in the fact that she regularly made charts and lists for him about which of his many books was selling best.98

  Financial success meant a lot to Dahl. “He had a great sense of being able to enjoy money, but he was not one of those people who could enjoy it in a vacuum,” Ophelia reflected. “He liked handing money around and being generous with it. But he was consistently surprised by the sort of treats and delights that it could buy and the very serious things that money could do.” She recalled a short essay she once had to write at school entitled “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” She had spoken to her father about it and he told her bluntly that some of the best things in life were not free—like many of “the best medical interventions,” for example. “He knew they were trying to get me to say that the woods and the fields are just wonderful, delightful things that we can all enjoy for free but he didn’t delight in anything so obvious,” she told me.99

  In a similar vein, Dahl refused to insure his paintings. His reasons were threefold. “Firstly, I hang them on my walls only for their beauty and for the pleasure they give. Once you start insuring them, it means that you are becoming overly conscious of their value, and this will tend to supersede in your mind their aesthetic beauty. Secondly, I do not insure because I know damn well how simple it is for villains to penetrate the files of insurance companies. Thirdly, I don’t think it makes any sense for a thief to nick them. He’d have an awful job getting rid of any of my better paintings, and I myself would never, on principle, negotiate to buy them back. So he’s stuck with them. If the house burns down, then that’s just bad luck. I would miss my pictures terribly, but money would be no compensation for their loss.”100

  In 1975, at the speech to pupils at Repton, he had reiterated Charles Marsh’s dictum that money was only good “if you spread it around.”101 And his final years saw acts of considerable generosity both to individuals and to the many charities that he supported. He wrote a short book called The Vicar of Nibbleswicke whose rights he auctioned in aid of the Dyslexia Institute. He raised money for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, and other medical charities. In 1987, he donated his manuscript of You Only Live Twice to the writers’ charity PEN. But the bulk of his giving was done quietly and on a personal level. A story recalled by Liz Atten-borough was typical. She had been invited to dinner at Gipsy House and brought with her a letter from a woman with two young daughters so disabled they required special motorized wheelchairs, which cost £10,000 each. The woman had written in the hope that Puffin might be able to help her raise the money and Attenborough had brought a book with her for Roald to sign in the hope she might be able to sell it and put the cash toward the purchase of the wheelchairs. When Roald saw the letter, he was so struck by the women’s plight that he went upstairs and brought down a complete set of his work. He and Quentin Blake (also a dinner guest that night) signed each book. Then, a week later, Roald called Attenborough. He told her he had just phoned the mother and had a long talk with her about her daughters’ problems. The conversation had concluded with Dahl writing her a check for £10,000 to cover the cost of one wheelchair, and advising her where she might get help with purchasing the second. Attenborough was flabbergasted. “I’m sure I was the only one he told. … It was typical. He was always doing things like that.”102

  Sick or injured children were most usually the recipients of this generosity, but others were beneficiaries too. He increased Pat’s divorce settlement, gave financial support to his nephews and nieces, and regularly rewarded those who worked for him with gifts that ranged from Christmas turkeys and geese to foreign holidays.

  Some saw this relationship as a bit like that of a “master to his serfs,”103 but most saw it as simple benevolence combined with a total lack of snobbery. Small acts of kindness had always meant a great deal to him. On holiday with his family in Switzerland in the 1980s, he noticed that the operator of the funicular that took guests from the hotel down into the center of Zurich was getting enormous pleasure from smoking a humble little cigar. He seemed to be able to make one last forever, taking a contented puff or two while the car trundled up or down the mountainside, then leaving the smoldering stub on a ledge while he went out to collect tickets from the passengers about to board the car. One day, in Zurich, Roald bought the most expensive cigar he could find, and when the driver left the car, he quietly replaced the chewed stub with the grand new one. He did not stay to see the look on the man’s face when he found it. Knowing that he would be delighted was quite enough. Similarly, when Tom Maschler had a nervous breakdown and was recovering in France, Roald wrote him an extremely long, entertaining letter about what was going on back in London—just to cheer him up. Maschler was astonished. “It had poems, gossip, bits of stories, it was a whole world,” he recalled. “A little book, written just for me. It was an extraordinary act of generosity.”104

  He was assiduous, too, in answering letters from the constituents who mattered most to him: his young readers. A sick child in a remote hospital in Nebraska, a small boy in New Zealand whose mother had asked him to encourage her backward child with his reading, an English school in Abu Dhabi that was holding a charity auction and wanted an article of his clothing to sell, a small girl in New South Wales with multiple sclerosis. All received replies. Few were ignored. “He loved being with children,” Murray Pollinger recalled. “He would always have a word with each of them, get a reaction from them.”105 He shared their sense of fantasy. He knew that storytelling was a powerful force for good and that there was something deathly about nonfiction. “The nicest small children, without the slightest doubt, are those who have been fed upon fantasy,” he had written years before in the New York Times, while “the nastiest are the ones who know all the facts.”106 Alfred Knopf had been farsighted when, in the mid-sixties, he described Dahl as “one of the wizards, one of the wondermen of this age.”107 Twenty years later, the middle-aged wizard had become the grand old master of his craft. He knew how to shock, he knew how to scare, he knew how to keep his readers on the edge of their seats with excitement. He knew how to make them smile and how to make them roar with laughter. In learning his trade, he had evolved into something of a zealot: a committed supporter of countless literacy campaigns. His “passionate purpose,” as he described it, had become to teach children “to be comfort
able with a book and to read a book.”108

  He wanted to take them out of their everyday environment, filled with chores and schoolwork, where “nothing was fabulous anymore,” and to lift them into some kind of “marvellous or funny or incredible place.”109 He was now almost content with his status as a subversive. He was proud of being the voice of youth in a world that sometimes seemed to despise children as much as it seemed to despise him. Only a couple of months before he died, he jotted down some notes for a lecture. To children, he reflected, grown-ups were giants, and consequently, “whether it is the mother or the father or the teacher,” all were subconsciously “the enemy.” “This fact is not generally realised by adults,” he continued. “When I write a book which vilifies parents or teachers, e.g. Matilda, children absolutely love it. … This is because the children shout, ‘Hooray, here at last is a grown-up who understands what it is like to be one of us.’ ”110 He had outlined this philosophy more than ten years earlier in an article that reads almost as a manifesto for his craft:

  What makes a good children’s writer? The writer must have a genuine and powerful wish not only to entertain children, but to teach them the habit of reading…. [He] must be a jokey sort of fellow. … He must like simple tricks and jokes and riddles and other childish things. He must be unconventional and inventive. He must have a really first-class plot. He must know what enthrals children and what bores them. They love being spooked. They love suspense. They love action. They love ghosts. They love the finding of treasure. They love chocolates and toys and money. They love magic. They love being made to giggle. They love seeing the villain meet a grisly death. They love a hero and they love the hero to be a winner. But they hate descriptive passages and flowery prose. They hate long descriptions of any sort. Many of them are sensitive to good writing and can spot a clumsy sentence. They like stories that contain a threat. “D’you know what I feel like?” said the big crocodile to the smaller one. “I feel like having myself a nice plump juicy child for my lunch.” They love that sort of thing. What else do they love? New inventions. Unorthodox methods. Eccentricity. Secret information. The list is long. But above all, when you write a story for them, bear in mind that they do not possess the same power of concentration as an adult, and they become very easily bored or diverted. Your story, therefore, must tantalize and titillate them on every page and all the time that you are writing you must be saying to yourself, “Is this too slow? Is it too dull? Will they stop reading?” To those questions, you must answer yes more often than you answer no. [If not] you must cross it out and start again.111