Roald Dahl (18 page)

7

A Very Maternal Daddy

Someone Like You
was published in the United States in the autumn of 1953. (In Britain, Secker & Warburg brought it out the following year.) Dahl's recent marriage added to the plentiful publicity material the Knopf team already had to work on. He asked them to tone down the jacket blurb which they had drafted (he was beginning to be nervous of the phrase “wounded in action”), but he provided an impressive list of people to whom complimentary copies should be sent. An internal memo observed that he was well connected.

The sales reps liked the book, and so did most of the influential reviewers. The
New York Times
critic James Kelly rhapsodized:

At disconcertingly long intervals, the
compleat
short-story writer comes along who knows how to blend and season four notable talents: an antic imagination, an eye for the anecdotal predicament with a twist at the end, a savage sense of humor suitable for stabbing or cutting, and an economical, precise writing style. No worshiper of Chekhov, he. You'll find him marching with solid plotters like Saki and O. Henry, Maupassant and Maugham.… The reader looking for sweetness, light, and subtle characterization will have to try another address. Tension is his business; give him a surprise denouement, and
he'll give you a story leading up to it. His name in this instance is Roald Dahl.
¹

Other critics compared his black humor with that of the gothic
New Yorker
cartoonist Charles Addams and his plot situations with those of the now-neglected expatriate English writer John Collier, whose pungent seriocomic tales of bizarre marriages and trick revenges had taken him to Hollywood in the mid-1930s. There was a dissenting voice in the
Buffalo News
, whose reviewer argued that such resemblances were being exaggerated and that “Dahl's art … is not very likely to develop further for the sufficient reason that it is already in full flower.”
²
The tales, he said, “are sardonic specimens of pure story, devoid of all social significance.” For the most part, though, the reviewers, of whom there were a lot, settled for variations on a theme of “never a dull moment.” They all assumed that readers would know who Dahl was—he was Patricia Neal's husband.

By Christmas, 7,500 copies had been sold, which Alfred Knopf told Dahl was probably some kind of a record for short stories. The book was in its third printing, and Dahl was still doing promotional appearances and interviews. He was a natural subject for journalists—self-confident-seeming, opinionated, cantankerous, unpredictable. He lectured them about his ambition to remake the short story as an art form and compared himself with Picasso breaking away from Corot and Monet.
³
When an interviewer from the
Post
of Houston, Texas, asked if he was writing a novel, he silenced her with a fierce glare: “‘No hovels.' Mr. Dahl looked grim. ‘It's a mistake to try to do both.'”
⁴
She was either too unnerved or too ill prepared to remind him of
Sometime Never
, and when he went on to speak enthusiastically about D. H. Lawrence—one of many authors who have successfully written both short stories and novels (and, in his case, poetry, too)—she didn't pick up on the point but simply asked who his favorite British author was. Loyally, or perhaps just to bamboozle her further, he named a great friend of Matthew Smith's, the
avant-garde novelist Henry Green, then having a success in New York. What did she think of him? he demanded.

One-upmanship and turning the tables were favorite techniques. Another was a glib kind of dogmatism. “A short story has to be two things,” he told the audience at a book-signing session in Dallas. “It has to be short, and it has to be a story.” Too many fictions in the better magazines were disguised essays or mood pieces. “I think the short story ought to entertain.”

By February 1954,
Someone Like You
was in its fourth U.S. printing and was being offered by the Book-of-the-Month Club, which paid a $4,000 advance for it. In April, it won a Mystery Writers of America award (an “Edgar,” to chime with Oscar, but also to avoid its being known as a Poe). There were plans for a play to be based on three of the stories. There was even talk of an opera. But Dahl was most pleased by the fact that a Norwegian publisher had expressed interest in the book. Gyldendal, who brought it out in 1955, are still Dahl's publishers in Norway—the longest continuous association of his literary career.

Norway was quickly followed by other Scandinavian countries: Sweden, Denmark, Finland. Meanwhile, Secker & Warburg published the collection in England, although without much success.
The Times Literary Supplement
complained about its “morbidity and a certain irresponsible cruelty.” Dahl had a gift for suspense, the journal acknowledged, “but the after-impression is one of heartlessness and distortion.”
⁵

Nowhere were these ambiguous qualities put to more effective use by Dahl than in two stories he wrote around the time of his temporary split with Patricia Neal—too late for publication in the book. Like all his best writing for adults, they suggest a bleak, if comical, kind of self-awareness. Both are about tyrannical husbands, and both give memorable victories to the downtrodden wives.

“The Way Up to Heaven,” published in
The New Yorker
in January 1954, is about a woman with a pathological fear of lateness. Her husband tortures her by procrastination. At last she
finds proof that his delays are intentional. In the course of one of them, he accidentally gets stuck in a lift, as had recently happened to Charles Marsh in his house on East Ninety-second Street. Unlike the tolerant Claudia, Dahl's heroine leaves her husband there to die.

The second story, “William and Mary,” has lasted no less well. It can be seen as a counterblast against political correctness
avant la lettre
—but in its fascination with the minutiae of brain surgery it also turned out to have a grim element of prophecy in relation to Dahl's own family. The tale was, he told the Marshes, “a stinker,” both in itself and to write. As early as October 1953, he was on his third complete draft, working every day until midnight and “slightly dotty with it all.” He didn't finish it until the following summer.
⁶

The plot concerns a philosopher who is encouraged by a neurosurgeon to let him preserve his brain. (There is an element of sadism in the doctor's description of the process to William, and this echoes William's own cruelty to his wife.) By the time the story opens, the philosopher has died and the experiment has been successfully carried out. All that is left of William is his living brain, floating in a bowl of fluid, still attached to one active eyeball, which gazes tetchily at the ceiling. Mary is at home, reading a long letter he has left for her, setting out the situation and telling her how she should comport herself in her widowhood: no drinking cocktails, eating pastries, watching television, using the telephone, or, particularly, smoking cigarettes. But Mary has notions of her own. She goes to the laboratory to visit the ex-William, lights a cigarette, and pleasurably blows a thick cloud of smoke into his enraged eye. “Isn't he sweet?” she says to the surgeon in the story's closing words. “Isn't he heaven? I just can't wait to get him home.”
⁷

“William and Mary” (which Dahl first called “Abide with Me”) was later successfully adapted for television and is now one of his best-known stories. He had no success with it at the time.
The New Yorker
rejected it in 1954, and again in 1957. It may
have been thought too close to Curt Siodmak's novel
Donovan's Brain
, first published in book form by Knopf in 1943, which is about a scientist who successfully keeps a brain alive, using methods very like those described in Dahl's story. The resemblance ends there, but
Donovan's Brain
was well known, having been often reprinted (including in Britain) and twice filmed. The second movie version, with Lew Ayres and Nancy (Reagan) Davis, was released shortly before Dahl began writing his story. If he knew Siodmak's book or the film, he had forgotten that he did. In 1954, Pat Neal wrote to the Marshes, “Roald finished his difficult story. Then horrors! He discovered that this strange story had already been written. It was done in 1943 & called Donovans Brain.”

Whatever the reason for its rejection, “William and Mary” was part of a new run of failures with
The New Yorker
, where Dahl's editor, Gustave Lobrano, had fallen ill and was replaced by the woman who had been his predecessor, the formidable Katharine S. White. Dahl seems not to have known about the changeover. He wrote to Alfred Knopf complaining that he was no longer seeing eye to eye with
The New Yorker
. “The last polite letter to the chief fiction editor, whom I've known well, didn't even get an answer. So regretfully I'm having to move away and just put the stories in a drawer.”

He had never in fact had as smooth a run with the magazine as he later remembered. And as his complaint to Alfred Knopf implies, he was meeting resistance elsewhere, too. New values had been creeping into Anglo-American fiction, as into other aspects of the culture, and Dahl found the kind of stories he was now writing increasingly hard to place, even in the men's magazines—especially
Playboy
—which from now on would be their chief outlets. To earn money, he took on work of a kind which, however estimable by comparison with the average contents of
Playboy
, he, like many writers, affected to despise: movie writing—at this time helping with the preliminary screenplay for the John Huston/Ray Bradbury film,
Moby Dick
. It was the beginning
of what would for a time become his major source of income.

It didn't help that a play he had written,
The Honeys
, was a flop. Dahl had tried to combine several of his stories in a plot which involved irascible twin brothers and their long-suffering but eventually murderous wives. Disposing of the men required, as
Time
magazine described, “a stalled elevator, tainted oyster juice, a skull-bopping with a frozen leg of lamb, and a medicinal drink containing tiger's whiskers.” The play,
Time
said, was “happier in its details than its fundamental design.” It suffered by comparison with its obvious rival, the venerable
Arsenic and Old Lace
, because its murderers weren't so lovable and its plot complications weren't so insane. In Dahl's play, “when people aren't actually attempting murder, they are making good, bad and indifferent jokes about it.”

The tryout tour—New Haven, Boston, and Philadelphia—was a disaster, with one director being fired and another bringing in new writers to doctor the script. Neal, however, sitting on an unfamiliar side of the footlights, wrote loyally to the Marshes that she would rather be married to a poor but happy short-story writer than to a rich playwright who was in misery.
⁹
She was well into her pregnancy and, after some false alarms, feeling good. The baby, a girl, was born in New York on April 20, 1955. Dahl flew to the hospital from Boston, where
The Honeys
was running. They called the child Olivia, after Pat's first stage role at Northwestern. For her second name, Roald suggested Twenty, because of the coincidence of the date and the number of dollars per day he was getting in expenses on tour.

From the start he was a doting father. There had been only his mother to teach him parenthood, and according to Patricia Neal, he was “a very maternal daddy.”
¹⁰
Soon he was telling the baby's nannies what to do, when he wasn't giving them the sack.
¹¹
One nurse, whose credentials had impressed him because
she had worked for the Churchill family, proved too ugly and had a persistent cough which irritated him.
¹²
Another was confused by having to take orders from the baby's father. Pat wrote to Claudia Marsh: “This is the first American house she has been in where the woman didn't dominate. Next she will have to see yours.”
¹³
Dahl occasionally escaped the crowded Upper West Side apartment for an outing to the ball game or to play cards, but he took a keen interest in every detail of household management, particularly when Pat returned to work. He was intensely protective of Olivia and told friends he wouldn't allow the baby to be left on her own in the apartment with “some tyrannical nurse.”
¹⁴

She was well cared for, in fact, since his mother-in-law was enthusiastically involved in New York, as was his sister Else when they were in England. Fortunately so, because whenever Dahl returned to Great Missenden, he was reluctant to leave again, and from Olivia's first months on, a fair amount of her life was spent crossing the Atlantic. Even in Manhattan the family was on the move, between West Seventy-seventh Street and a more spacious apartment across the park at Eighty-first Street and Madison Avenue, which had been vacated by Neal's friend Mildred Dunnock. Their life was hectic, especially for Neal, who was both acting and still trying to follow Charles Marsh's advice about wifehood. During the run of Edith Sommer's
A Roomful of Roses
, “I rose early to bathe and feed my now six-month-old, walked her in the park and did the shopping. I made breakfast and lunch for my husband, conferred with the nurse, cleaned the apartment, prepared supper, did the dishes and made it to the theater for an 8:30 curtain.” Within months, she was performing again on Broadway, in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, directed by Elia Kazan. At the end of the run, Kazan asked her to come to Florida to discuss her return to Hollywood as the lead in
A Face in the Crowd
. “Hollywood” was on this occasion a figure of speech. They rehearsed the film in New York and shot it in Arkansas in the heat of August.

By then Neal was pregnant once more. She left Olivia behind at Little Whitefield, where Dahl had begun to make improvements, building a guest cottage, installing and restoring a gypsy caravan of Alfhild's, and adapting a garden shed as a place in which to write. “It's marvellous, isolated, quiet,” he wrote to the Marshes. The only occasional disturbance was from some heifers, bought for his butcher-friend Claud with a grant from the Public Welfare Foundation, which grazed in the orchard outside. Dahl said he occasionally heard their tongues scraping against the windows; if he left them open, the cows ate the curtains.