Roald Dahl (29 page)

Her favorite memories are of the many times when she and Ophelia were alone with their father and, in the background, their Filipino cook and nanny-housekeeper. Lucy was a self-contained child, happy playing alone. Ophelia, when she was home from school, followed her father around as he pottered in the orchid house or the aviary. Sometimes he would take them and the dogs for a walk up the hill behind Gipsy House into the woods, where they looked for rabbits. He made games for them, such as a weighted metal spiral, attached to a pencil, which drew patterns on a sheet of paper. At bedtime he mixed sweet drinks which he called “witches' potions”—canned peaches or pears, blended with milk and food coloring. (His own potion would be a large Scotch.) Then he told them stories about a friendly giant who concocted dreams in a jar and blew them into children's bedrooms. More than once, after he had left the girls to sleep, he put a ladder up to their window and stirred the curtains as if he were the giant himself. In the way of paternal jokes, it became something of a routine as the years went by—one which Ophelia and Lucy dutifully humored.

From the younger girls' point of view, Tessa and their mother spoiled such idylls, partly just by being there and partly because of the pressures they brought to bear on Roald. “If there was one thing my father hated,” Lucy says, “it was to be demanded of. He liked to give, but he didn't like to be demanded of.” But of course the others see things in their own ways. To each of the children, Dahl was “my” father, and Tessa's own relationship with him was if anything more intimate and more jealous than anyone else's. He wrote to her almost every day when she was at school, and she remembers her mixture of pride and agonizing embarrassment when he came to collect her for free weekends and holidays, shambling around in his old clothes, tieless, with a flask of coffee or whiskey, among the other children's tidier and more circumspect parents.

Pat, too, has her own happy domestic memories: games of Scrabble with Roald's sisters, outings to the village pub with Roald, dinner parties with friends. And there were their holidays: in the Basque country near Annabella's farm at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, or in the Caribbean with the Bryces or with Claudia Marsh (Charles had died in 1964, after his ten-year silent paralysis). Almost every year, too, they went to the west coast of Norway, where they stayed at the same hotel, the Strand at Fevik, near Kristiansund. Each day their routine there would be the same: a hired boat, a short voyage to an island, fishing along the way, cooking the catch for lunch.

There was a cost to such idylls, and not only in the financial terms which so preoccupied Dahl. The new head of Knopf, Robert Gottlieb (later to succeed William Shawn as editor of
The New Yorker
), visited Gipsy House several times with his wife, the actress Maria Tucci. They describe an atmosphere which was lively, jolly, full of excitement, but not at all relaxed. Dahl was charming, Tucci says, “completely in charge—a puppeteer making everything work.” He took her around the garden and
showed her his orchids: it was the flowers' perfection that he liked, he told her. Dinner began with jellied consommé, and he proudly drew attention to the fact that it had been made by Pat. But even the food was for the most part his responsibility. He had grown all the vegetables, and when his guests praised the main dish, Scottish smoked haddock cooked in cream, it was he who later sent them the recipe.

Maria Tucci was intrigued and moved by Dahl. She had expected something different. Pat's friend Mildred Dunnock, with whom Maria had worked, had warned her that he was snobbish and cruel. She saw nothing of that, but what she did see, she thought, was a grueling performance. Before dinner, on their first visit, Roald had gone to tell stories to the younger children. Passing their open bedroom doorway, Maria saw him off guard, his face utterly exhausted. She later came to think of him as “a man whose need for perfection was so extreme that I was very glad I was not his child or anyone close to him.”

If the perfectionism was exhausting, so was the conflict from which it arose. Dahl wanted not only others to be better than they were but himself, too. He complained about how Pat's stroke had intensified what he saw as some of her worst characteristics—her lack of intellectual curiosity, her selfishness, her quick temper. But he knew that he had faults, too, such as the restlessness which made him pace up and down in the house which he believed he was making into a haven of calm. He still insisted that anything wrong could be put right. “Daddy got so caught up in
making things better
,” Tessa says. “He used to say, ‘You've got to get on with it.'… He used to shout, ‘I want my children to be brave.'” Dahl's moral universe was one in which there could be no question without an answer, no battle without victory, no irresoluble complexity. This was true of his writing, also.

Although he wrote little in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he still hoped to return to adult fiction, and his earlier books for
adults now reached an increasingly far-flung readership. As part of a demonstration of enthusiasm after it lost
The Magic Finger
, Random House brought out a selection of his stories in the prestigious classics series, the Modern Library. Other compilations soon appeared, and through Rayner Unwin, Dahl negotiated a deal with Penguin for paperback editions of
Someone Like You
and
Over to You
, as well as of
Charlie, James, The Magic Finger
, and
Fantastic Mr. Fox
. All these appeared between 1970 and 1974. Penguin officially claimed at the time that they paid no author a royalty higher than 12.5 percent, but Dahl got 15 percent.
¹⁸
By 1975, his books were becoming best-sellers in Britain as well as the United States.
Charlie
had sold 225,000 copies in the U.K. in paperback, 60,000 in hardcover;
James
, 115,000 and 45,000;
Fantastic Mr. Fox
, 74,000 and 15,000. Meanwhile,
Kiss Kiss
had been translated into Russian and Japanese and
The Magic Finger
into Indonesian. From now on, as soon as the English-language rights in his books were sold, foreign publishers would be negotiating to translate them.

While he waited for new ideas to come, he occupied himself with various recyclings of earlier work: the sequel to
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator)
; a collection of some of his
Playboy
stories, entitled
Switch Bitch;
a children's book based on one of his
New Yorker
stories, “The Champion of the World.”
¹⁹
He was also planning a miscellaneous collection called
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
, and a novel developing the character of the salacious Uncle Oswald, first introduced in “The Visitor.”
²⁰

Meanwhile, he had made some revisions to
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. Although the early critical response to the book had been favorable, some readers objected to the book on a variety of grounds. The most glaring was the characterization of the Oompa-Loompas. But this was of a piece with the story's outlook on other human relationships: in particular, Mr. Wonka's ready disposal of people he dislikes and his high-handed way with objectors. In 1972 a wide-ranging attack on the book was published
by Eleanor Cameron, a leading American writer of children's fiction.
²¹

Her article, in the respected journal for children's literature specialists
The Horn Book
, was damaging because of its intellectual weight, and also because it stemmed from ground Dahl had claimed as his own: hostility to the corrupting power of television. This was a theme whose public impact had been increased, since
Charlie
first appeared, by Marshall McLuhan's best-selling books
Understanding Media
(1964) and
The Medium Is the Message
(1967), which assumed that television had already taken over from printed books as irreversibly as they had taken over from illuminated manuscripts—and with no less revolutionary effect. Like Dahl, Eleanor Cameron drew a contrast between the values of TV and those of literature. But she said that those who want to defend literature must remember that it isn't valuable of itself, irrespective of its quality. Very few books last, or deserve to. You have to sort out the good from the bad. Furthermore (and here she decisively parted company with Dahl), goodness in fiction is partly a moral matter, bound up with “the goodness of the writer himself, his worth as a human being.”

Cameron claimed that, for all its satire at the expense of the television-addicted character, Mike Teavee,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
is only speciously opposed to what she saw as the medium's shallow gratifications. The pleasures the book offers, she said, are like those of a game show, or of chocolate itself: instantly enjoyable but temporary. Everything depends on the plot. The human situation, especially Charlie's poverty, is “phony.” And “as for Willy Wonka himself, he is the perfect type of TV showman with his gags and screechings. The exclamation mark is the extent of his individuality.” However amusing the book may be for adults to read, and however greedily children consume it, it is underlyingly cheap, tasteless, ugly, sadistic, and, for all these reasons, harmful.

Dahl had often complained that critics didn't take him seriously. Now that one had, he dashed off an angry, superficial reply
which avoided the main arguments and concentrated on personalia.
²²
He “had not heard of [Mrs. Cameron] until now,” he said. She, on the other hand, ought to have found out more about him before writing her “extraordinarily vicious comments.” Her observations about the moral connection between a book and its author showed, he said, that she could not have read either Barry Farrell's
Pat and Roald
or any of the numerous articles on Dahl and his family, which would have told her that they had suffered tragedies from which they had emerged “quite creditably.” One of these misfortunes had befallen his son, Theo, to whom
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
was dedicated. With more feeling than logic, Dahl said that it must be clear that he would not have written a book which would hurt Theo, or any other of his children, who “are marvellous and gay and happy,” and whose happiness he believed the book had increased.

Cameron had no difficulty in answering these points, and there the argument stopped.
²³
But Dahl's publishers got at least part of the message: that to those concerned with bringing up children in a racially mixed society, the Oompa-Loompas were no longer acceptable as originally written. The following year, to accompany its new sequel,
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
, a revised edition of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
appeared, in which the Oompa-Loompas had become dwarfish hippies with long “golden-brown” hair and “rosy-white” skin. From now on, Dahl was often to find his books read—not least by his publishers—with a critical thoroughness he wasn't used to and didn't always care for.

12

Wham!

Dahl used to boast, in the 1970s, that he paid the housekeeping bills out of his winnings at blackjack.
¹
It was an exaggeration, but a friend whom he took gambling at the Curzon House Club half a dozen times, Ian Rankin, says that he never saw him come away a loser.
²

He kept his gambling money separate, in a bedroom drawer (which, according to Tessa, some of his children were later to find a useful source of supply). When he went to the Mayfair casino, he would take £200 or so from the drawer. He never spent more than he had either brought with him or won that night.

Dahl offered to teach Rankin his blackjack method. The minutest calculations were involved: about when precisely to double, when to split, how much to alter your bets in relation to the previous ones you had been putting up. Rankin—an old-fashioned, laid-back Etonian with sandy hair and a broken nose—couldn't be bothered to memorize the technique sufficiently well to make it work, and says that even if he had, by the time the table had given him a large whiskey, he would have forgotten. But Dahl drank little while he was playing and gave the game his intensest concentration. He was always looking for the moment when he could add his own twist to the method: one
which, he liked to claim, changed the odds a little more, so that they were fractionally in his favor. The approach was psychological as well as technical. While playing, he watched for a hint that the banker was nervous, perhaps because there had been a run of play against him or because, in a changeover, he had newly joined the game. Then Dahl would pile in and win.

His public persona was not, of course, that of a gambling man. And he hadn't yet acquired his later fame as an irritable, ornery sounder-off on political issues. The world knew him as a genial, rather scruffy children's author—a tall scarecrow whose face, under the increasingly bald, high dome, looked both distinguished and in need of repair.

This appearance fitted another role, as one of the people behind what had become the Volunteer Stroke Scheme. The methods which Valerie Eaton Griffith developed by trial and error with Patricia Neal (“she teaching me,” Griffith insists) had been taken up next with the writer Alan Moorehead, who, after suffering a stroke, rented a house in Great Missenden so as to benefit from the same techniques.
³
In his case, there was much less improvement, but the possibilities of the approach were clear, and Griffith won the support of a scientist in Great Missenden, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Sir Robert Robinson, in planning a national scheme, which eventually found sponsorship from the Chest, Heart and Stroke Association. Moorehead and Dahl encouraged Valerie Eaton Griffith to write a book about her efforts,
A Stroke in the Family
, and helped her to get it published by Penguin in 1970. Gradually the volunteer organization spread, and today it coordinates 120 local schemes through ten regional managers and publishes its own books, pamphlets, and a quarterly magazine.
⁴