Roald Dahl

A Biography

Jeremy Treglown

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781504038591
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Biographies littéraires

A New York Times Notable Book: A revealing look at the famous twentieth-century children's author who brought us The BFG and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Few writers have had the enduring cultural influence of Roald Dahl, who inspired generations of loyal readers. Acclaimed biographer Jeremy Treglown cuts no corners in humanizing this longstanding immortal of juvenile fiction. Roald Dahl explores this master of children's literature from childhood—focusing a tight lens on the relationship between Dahl and his mother, who lovingly referred to him as "Apple"—through to his death. Treglown deftly navigates Dahl's time as a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force, exploring how the experience transformed many of the beliefs that influenced the English writer's work, including The Gremlins, which was commissioned by Walt Disney. A former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Treglown discusses many of Dahl's most famous works, such as James and the Giant Peach and Fantastic Mr. Fox, while also delving into his marriage to actress Patricia Neal, combing through letters and archives to show a man who could be both comic and vitriolic, thoughtful yet manipulative and irascible. Treglown highlights many of Dahl's literary achievements as well as his breakdowns and shortcomings, presenting a very personal and telling picture of the author and the inner turmoil that crippled him. Separating the man from the myth, Treglown's frank, intimate portrait of Dahl illuminates the contradictions within the mind of this beloved author, a man who could be both a monster and a hero. It is required reading for book lovers and film buffs alike.

1

Almost Anything You Could Say About Him Would Be True

Diplomats often receive odd propositions, so on the face of things there was nothing unusually unusual about the contents of a letter sent to the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1944, with the request that it should be passed on to the ambassador, then Lord Halifax. The correspondent said he thought that Halifax might like to help him write a school textbook. Its aim would be “to improve the sex stance of American male juvenility which grows in the dense New England area called the Preparatory School district.”¹ Its model was to be the mores of the English public school. This was where the fourth Viscount Halifax (Eton and Christ Church) came in. The author claimed to regard him as a perfect example of English virility.

A reply came a week later, under the thick wax Embassy seal, with a covering note from a junior Embassy official who said he had passed the letter to Lord Halifax that morning. The ambassador had read it more than once, the official claimed, and the correspondent would doubtless find his answer very satisfactory.

The enclosure was long and enthusiastic. It could have been written by a schoolboy. It spoke of Halifax’s excitement at this opportunity to communicate to others his deep experience of the subject. Halifax was widely traveled, the letter said, and had even been accused of libertinism. Admittedly, that was in his younger days, “when I was in the habit of pleasuring others (not to mention myself) at least once every fourteen days.” Even so, he had maintained what he regarded as an unusually vigorous sex life and would be delighted to communicate the secrets of his success to the young. “As you say, I would improve their stance. I would teach them to slice and to hook, to play a low ball into wind and a backspin onto the green right beside the hole.”

April 1944 might not have seemed the best time for such a project. The Allied invasion of France was only six weeks away. Day and night, the U.S. Air Force and the RAF were bombing German cities and Italian ports. In the Pacific, there were many more islands to fight over before the atom bomb would bring Japan to surrender in August 1945. And while human beings were killing each other in the tens of thousands, there was the question of what would happen once they stopped. The Allies were by now confident of victory, and in Washington, London, and Moscow, politicians were drawing provisional maps of the postwar world. Then, too, this was election year in the United States. Roosevelt, already in his unprecedented third term of office, was standing for a fourth that autumn. But his policies, and particularly his support for Britain, were far from universally popular with voters. In the Wisconsin primary, early in April, the internationalist presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, whose support of military loans to Britain had earned him the nickname “the American Beaverbrook,” was sensationally defeated. These were among the matters which the British ambassador, Lord Halifax, formerly Foreign Secretary and before that Viceroy of India, was occupied in analyzing, together with his staff, and reporting back to London.²

Meanwhile, the correspondence about sex education went in and out of the Embassy. When Halifax told Whitehall on April 16 that Willkie’s downfall was widely seen in the United States as a victory for isolationism, he also sent news of other matters: American opinion about the imminent betrayal of Poland and the Vice President’s forthcoming trip to China.³ The following day, a long-suffering secretary turned to the matter of “male juvenility.”

Except, of course, that Halifax’s correspondence wasn’t entirely—if even at all—his own. His official dispatches, like those of any senior diplomat, were for the most part put together by his staff: the “weekly summaries,” for example, by the young Oxford political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who had been seconded from the Ministry of Information. The ambassador added some finishing touches and sent them on. As for the inquiry about English public-school sexuality, it was part of an extended joke of which Halifax was completely unaware, and in which his own part was played by a young member of the Embassy staff. Readers of My Uncle Oswald will have recognized him as Roald Dahl.

Dahl had been invalided out of active service as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot after surviving the desperate lost battle for Greece. He had come to Washington as assistant air attaché two years before, at the beginning of 1942, when he was twenty-five. Six-foot-six-inch, handsome, articulate, battle-hardened heroes were rare at that time in the United States, which had only recently entered the war. Later, they were in plentiful supply—so much so that by 1944, Dahl’s practical joking may have been prompted by a sense both that he was excluded from the main action and that he was no longer as special as he had once seemed, a feeling he disliked even more. But there was anyway something in him which made him continually look for ways of regressing to the carefree childhood he had enjoyed until he was four, when both his older sister and his father had suddenly died.⁴

His partner in the joke, as in many other exploits, frivolous and otherwise, was a man who had become his surrogate father—one of several such figures in his life but the most important of them. Charles Marsh was in his mid-fifties when Dahl met him in Washington: a self-made multimillionaire oil tycoon, newspaper owner, art collector, and power broker. Almost as tall as Dahl, he was—according to the observer’s standpoint—a man of deep charm or a philandering opportunist, an idealist or a fantasist, a fascinating talker or a self-regarding bore. Dahl had been told by the Embassy to cultivate him, partly because Marsh was powerful and partly because he was a friend of the radical—and therefore to many eyes suspect—American Vice President, Henry Wallace. They took an instant liking to each other, and Marsh became a lasting role model for the younger man.

Another protégé of Marsh’s was the future President Lyndon Johnson. In his biography of Johnson, Robert Caro describes how Marsh, who was “addicted to the grandiose gesture,”⁵ had offered to bankroll the young politician by selling him a million-dollar share in his oil business, to be paid for by an interest-free loan on which there was to be no down payment, and which could easily be repaid out of the profits. (Johnson refused, knowing that if the public learned about the arrangement, his chances of becoming President would be damaged.) On an earlier occasion, Marsh had rewarded a reporter he liked by giving him a newspaper. “The dividends [Marsh] wanted from his munificence,” Caro harshly continues, “were gratitude and deference: he wanted to be not only the patron, but the seer.”⁶ Someone who knew him well said, “He always had to be the pontificator, the center of attention. He was the most arrogant man I ever met.”

In this respect Dahl, like LBJ, was close to being his match. To Marsh, this was part of Dahl’s attraction. As the war progressed, they saw each other continually, both in Washington and at Longlea, the country house in Virginia where Marsh entertained at weekends with his beautiful mistress, Alice Glass. Sometimes alone together, sometimes with other friends such as Creekmore Fath, a young Roosevelt aide, the men would sit up late two or three nights a week, arguing, joking, plotting, and gossiping about the recently departed guests: politicians, journalists, businessmen. “Washington was a sieve,” Fath says now. “You could sit at Charles’s house and hear more of what was going on than you’d hear in practically anyplace in town. I’m afraid that we weren’t brought up properly as to how to keep secrets.”

It was a heady time for the provincial but ambitious young RAF officer, and as Dahl and Marsh came to know each other better, they fed one another’s involvement in a fiction of power, increasingly removed from real people and situations. In June 1943, for example, Marsh wrote to Dahl:

You have weight on your spirit. Your duty to your country … is one weight. The demands of superiors and colleagues which do not coincide with your judgment or your spirit is another.

But these weights will lessen if the inside of your spirit, which has nothing to do with the particular, slowly becomes serene. This illusive [sic] quality can never be possessed in immaturity. But the embryo is there at birth. You have it in the potential.…

You have had the wisdom already to refuse to tie yourself to a personal ambition such as becoming a Member of Parliament. Another side of you tells you that you are twenty-seven; that the future is uncertain; that you have certain responsibilities of family and country.⁷

Soon, Marsh continued, the spirit would show Dahl what it was that he had to do. Then, “I may be of service to you.”

Dahl was quick to imitate Marsh’s semimystical brand of personal encouragement, with its high gibberish quotient (“the embryo is there at birth”). Soon he was urging the older man to go to Roosevelt and impress his world-view on him.⁸ It requires a little courage, Dahl dramatically concluded: “I do not know whether you have it; you might like to find out.”

Not all of this was impracticable. Marsh would have had little difficulty in seeing Roosevelt, and Dahl gave him the sensible, if uncharacteristic, advice that in conjuring up a picture before the eyes of the man he called “the big white chief,” he should remember that “sometimes your colours are too bright and vivid, and the picture which you paint, although at first fantastic and alive, becomes upon second thoughts merely fantastic.” But observers of the relationship were generally unimpressed. Marsh’s two sons, John and Charles, who were about Dahl’s age, were particularly cool about it. And a later acquaintance recalls, “Roald and Charles both did a job on each other. It was very extraordinary. I used to wonder what was the purpose of it all. The bullshit that washed across the table!”⁹

Part of the purpose was sheer fun, the boyish antiauthoritarianism that led to the joke-correspondence about Lord Halifax. In one of Dahl’s more straightforwardly young-serviceman-hits-town pranks, as Marsh’s stepdaughter relates, “he painted the balls of the bison on the Q Street bridge.”¹⁰ Yet there was a serious side to the relationship. Dahl was, among other things, trying to resolve an intractable personal conflict. How could he satisfy his ambition to be like Marsh—rich, dominant, a public figure—while appeasing his equally strong desire to return to childhood?

The answer—by becoming one of the world’s most successful writers of children’s books—may seem clear to readers now, but it certainly wasn’t to Dahl at the time. True, he was drawn to children, and one of his first professional pieces of writing was a children’s story, which he produced in wartime Washington.¹¹ But it wasn’t until he was in his forties that he properly—although even then, as we shall see, reluctantly—began the career which made him famous and wealthy.

Powerful, too, because Dahl’s readers would number in the millions. His work is a common point of reference all over the world, popular not only throughout Europe and the United States but in Brazil, Thailand, Japan, even—despite what is politely called his anti-Zionism—Israel. Famously, the initial Chinese print run for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was two million copies. In Britain alone, between 1980 and 1990, over eleven million of his children’s books were sold in paperback form—considerably more than the total number of children born there in the same period. By the end of his life, every third British child, on average, bought or was given a book by him each year.¹²

Although he became known as an author in the late 1940s, it was during the last twenty-eight years of his life, from 1962 onward, that he did much of his best, as well as best-selling, work: James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, George’s Marvellous Medicine, The Twits, Revolting Rhymes, The BFG, Dirty Beasts, The Witches, Matilda, and the two vivid memoirs, Boy and Going Solo. How did his career develop? Could he have been a better writer? Why did so ambitious, so macho a man end up devoting so much of his life to children? The answers are to some extent practical and social: they concern the literary marketplace, the power of editors, the growing cultural independence of children. But they are also, of course, personal to Dahl. Quite outside his writing, yet in ways which inevitably affected it, he was an intriguing, contradictory figure. He was famously a war hero, a connoisseur, a philanthropist, a devoted family man who had to confront an appalling succession of tragedies. He was also, as will be seen, a fantasist, an anti-Semite, a bully, and a self-publicizing troublemaker. Although he had a voice of his own as a writer, he was not above taking credit for others’ ideas. Many people loved him and have reason to be grateful to him; many—some of them the same people—frankly detested him.

The only common view about Dahl, in fact, is that opinions of him are divided. His early patroness Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Practically no one in the world is entirely bad or entirely good,”¹³ but if you were to believe everyone who knew him, you would have to conclude that he was both. Although in various ways his apparent inconsistencies were of a piece, there are points at which he simply can’t be reconciled with himself. More than most people, he was divided between the things he was and those he wanted to be. His intense, self-dissatisfied perfectionism often produced the worst in him, as well as the best.

An old friend of the family told me, “Almost anything you could say about him would be true. It depended which side he decided to show you.” Perhaps his inconsistencies seemed to him just part of the act—a way of keeping the audience guessing. Towering half a foot over most people he met, with his shambling gait, keen eyes, and scratchy smoker’s voice, he was a performer. Although he said that he hated Hollywood, he behaved like an actor, a ringmaster, a spellbinder: Mr. Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But not all the performance was fun, either for him or for others in the cast. He was once described as looking like Henry Fonda after several hours on the rack.¹⁴

Some of his sufferings were external, but others sprang from the contradictions in his own mind. For example, he was a Tory anarchist. His children’s stories are subversive and hedonistic (hence, in part, their popularity in the 1960s, when they began to appear), and yet conservative, nostalgic, authoritarian (hence some of their appeal to parents). In the ways he brought up his own children, this division caused problems and pain. It was a part of his dividedness that he relished trouble. He enjoyed stirring people up, whether with a book or at a dinner party or in a letter to The Times. Yet he was also at his best when there was a genuine tragedy to rise to.

In some respects his character makes better sense if he is thought of less as a writer than as a capricious tycoon.¹⁵ He pursued money ruthlessly and single-mindedly, using other people as accessories to his various enterprises—“the Business,” as they are collectively called in his will. He came from a commercial family and was proud of the fact that both his father and his uncle made fortunes. Dahl’s own royalties now bring in millions of pounds a year. Like many successful businessmen, he had little interest in abstract thought and was impatient with intellectuals. “Genius,” on the other hand, he revered. Next came courage, practicality, and what he called sparkiness. These were his own qualities, and those which his children’s books encourage readers to admire.

Arguably, he never grew up. Much of his behavior seems like that of someone who had been forced into a premature but permanent, and rather unconvincing, show of adulthood. A handful of his stories for adults are among the most memorable written by a British author since the beginning of the Second World War. But in much of his adult fiction, he is overanxious to prove his virility to the reader. Noël Coward wrote in his diary, after reading the newly published Someone Like You: “The stories are brilliant and his imagination is fabulous. Unfortunately there is, in all of them, an underlying streak of cruelty and macabre unpleasantness, and a curiously adolescent emp...