Roald Dahl (33 page)

Meanwhile, a new illustrator still had to be found. He and Maschler were, he joked archly, “trying out a young lady—if that is the right way to put it.”
⁹

Despite Dahl's restlessness, it was clear to most readers that Quentin Blake's amiable drawings were an excellent complement to his writing. They helped to unify what was in the late 1970s and early '80s a varied output, and they softened the way the books spoke to a child's worst prejudices and fears. In
The Twits
, for example, Dahl uses children's fastidiousness as an opportunity to dwell on his own obsessive physical revulsions, particularly at facial hair. The bearded Mr. Twit and the ugly, one-eyed Mrs. Twit live in squalor, cruelty, and mutual hatred, united only by their pursuit of birds to eat. Mr. Twit keeps a cage full of pet monkeys, who join forces with an exotic bird to save the ordinary birds from slaughter. In the ensuing war—in part a reworking of
The Magic Finger
, combined with Dahl's 1945 fantasy, “Smoked Cheese”
¹⁰
—the creatures invade the house of the “foul and smelly” and now gun-toting Twits, turn it (literally) upside down, and destroy their oppressors.

In Blake's drawings the extremism of all this is softened by the fact that he depicts ugliness much as a child would: huge nostrils and gaping teeth sketched flat onto the face, hair a mass of bristly scribbles, fingers a bunch of bananas. And where the words are at their most microscopically disgusted—for instance, in the description of the morsels of old food lodged in Mr. Twit's mustache—Blake supplies a detached, comic-book diagram, with arrows marked “cornflake” and “tinned sardine.”

He was similarly adroit in his handling of
George's Marvellous Medicine
. Here, the earlier book's connubial malice is replaced
by frank ageism, most memorably in the depiction of the grandmother, her small mouth puckered up “like a dog's bottom.” It is on her that the restless eight-year-old George experiments with his homemade size-altering potion. Like
The Twits
, this knockabout horror story owes something to a circus act or a Punch and Judy show: George “really
hated
that horrid old witchy woman. And all of a sudden he had a tremendous urge to
do something
about her. Something
whopping
.… A sort of explosion.” But again Blake lightens things by visually reminding the reader both how small George is and, as he wanders around the house looking for ingredients for his medicine, how lonely and innocent. His actions come across as prompted more by curiosity than cruelty.

So, too, with the books of rhymes on which Blake eventually worked.
Dirty Beasts
was originally given to a new illustrator, Rosemary Fawcett; the collection of reworked fairy stories,
Revolting Rhymes
, to Blake. Blake started later, but for various reasons his book appeared sooner, in 1982. In keeping with their folktale originals, the poems are as comically ruthless as anything Dahl wrote, and Blake was conscious of the artist's power with such material: when the Prince, in the new version of “Cinderella,” beheads one of the Ugly Sisters (“Try this instead!” the Prince yelled back. / He swung his trusty sword and
smack
—/ Her head went crashing to the ground. / It bounced a bit and rolled around”), how much should the illustrator depict? His solution is as vivid and funny as the words, but there are no terrifying gouts of blood or splinters of bone: the head jumps up from its neck like a slice of potato, and the reader's attention is as much caught by an enormous shoe, bigger than the Prince's thigh, dropping from the victim's pudgy hand. The pictures also match, but don't exaggerate, the louche, down-at-heel modernity of Dahl's rhymes—anachronistic in a way which hadn't worked in
My Uncle Oswald
but does here. There is the muddy, jerry-built marketplace Blake drew for “Jack and the Beanstalk,” like someplace out of Ceauşescu's Romania; or Goldilocks, sprawling
with her telephone and her hair dryer; or the eager schoolmasterly types who are Snow White's dwarfs—little men with mustaches and tweed jackets, clutching at the statuesque legs of her jeans.

Blake later did a set of illustrations for the companion volume,
Dirty Beasts
, to replace the ones which had been commissioned for the first edition.
¹¹
The new version appeared in 1984, by which time he was working with Dahl directly, rather than through Tom Maschler. The results of their collaboration—a rare experience for Dahl—are to be seen in
The BFG
. But this is to jump ahead. Both
The BFG
and
Dirty Beasts
were to appear in the States under the imprint of a new publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. First, Dahl had to disengage himself from Knopf, a process which coincided with the final breakup of his marriage.

Quite apart from the stresses of his private life, his illnesses, and his acrimonious business dealings, Dahl was contending at this time with the often burdensome intimacies prompted by being a world-renowned author. He never took his telephone number out of
Who's Who
, and at four o'clock one winter's morning, when he was about to leave for a holiday in Morocco, a man with a Brooklyn accent rang and said, “At last I have found you.”
¹²
Dahl was furious, but his caller apologized and explained that his eight-year-old son had died the day before. The boy had loved Dahl's books—would the author write a few words for the funeral? He agreed, and dictated something that night over the phone from Marrakesh. It was a typical response to personal tragedy. No less typically, he made sure that his friends knew about it.

In the same year, 1980, one winter's morning in her office on the twenty-first floor at 201 East Fiftieth Street, Manhattan, Karen Latuchie, assistant to the president and editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., opened a letter from Great Missenden. Roald Dahl wished to announce that he was running out of pencils
. He said that he never failed to use Dixon Ticonderoga and stipulated the precise type: 1388—2–5/10 (Medium). Would Robert Gottlieb please oblige him by instructing someone “competent and ravishing” to buy him a packet of six dozen and send them airmail?
¹³

The two men had barely resolved the latest of their quarrels concerning the Icarus contract, and Gottlieb decided that this was meant as some kind of a joke.
¹⁴
He didn't bother to reply. Three months later Dahl wrote again.
¹⁵
Had his request for pencils reached Gottlieb? This time, after a delay of two weeks, Latuchie responded on Gottlieb's behalf. None of the local stores seemed to stock Dixon Ticonderoga, but she enclosed samples of the nearest alternative she had been able to find.

Dahl was dissatisfied. The pencils she had sent were, he said, inordinately expensive, yet useless. They had no built-in erasers, weren't soft enough, and were not the right color. He asked her to continue her efforts on his behalf by telephoning the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company in Jersey City, New Jersey, and getting hold of their sales staff. “This surely,” he added, “will solve our problem.”
¹⁶

To judge from the addresses and telephone numbers of stationery firms scribbled all over this letter, some hapless office assistant spent the best part of a day on the search—presumably with success, since there was no further correspondence about it. But pencils were far from the end of Dahl's demands. Apart from his continuing grievance about what he described as the grotesquely unjust four-book deal which, he said, had been forced on him by Knopf,
¹⁷
he was now dissatisfied with the royalty payable to him from a longstanding U.S. paperback agreement negotiated on his behalf by Knopf.
¹⁸
These financial complaints brought with them a host of other irritations. In January 1981, he was enraged by the American cover design for
The Twits
, because his name was smaller than the title and “a good deal more unobstrusive [
sic
].”
¹⁹
In February he wrote to Gottlieb, comparing him unfavorably with Tom Maschler in his attention
to such matters and claiming, too, that Gottlieb didn't use his position in the company to “protect” Dahl.
²⁰
There was yet another grumble. Random House, Dahl now wildly alleged, had tricked him in arranging a life-insurance policy which he claimed would force him to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars up front. The firm's legal department was also making difficulties, he said, and he had decided that if such sources of dissatisfaction continued, he would offer his next book to another house.

Gottlieb had had enough. As a publisher, he has always operated under what he calls the “‘Fuck You' Principle”—whereby he will take “almost any amount of shit from any given writer,” with the unspoken proviso that when he can take no more, he is free “to turn around and say ‘Fuck you.'”
²¹
He now activated the principle in a letter to Dahl:

Dear Roald,

This is not in response to the specifics of your last several letters to me and my colleagues, but a general response to everything we've heard from you in the past year or two.

In brief, and as unemotionally as I can state it: since the time when you decided that Bob Bernstein, I and the rest of us had dealt badly with you over your contract, you have behaved to us in a way I can honestly say is unmatched in my experience for overbearingness and utter lack of civility. Lately you've begun addressing others here—who are less well placed to answer you back—with the same degree of abusiveness. For a while I put your behavior down to the physical pain you were in and so managed to excuse it. Now I've come to believe that you're just enjoying a prolonged tantrum and are bullying us.

Your threat to leave Knopf after this current contract is fulfilled leaves us far from intimidated. Harrison, Bernstein and I will be sorry to see you depart, for business reasons, but these are not strong enough to make us put up with your manner to us any longer. I've worked hard for you editorially but had already decided to stop doing so; indeed, you've managed to make the entire experience of publishing you unappealing for all of us—counter-productive behavior, I would have thought.

To be perfectly clear, let me reverse your threat: unless you
start acting civilly to us, there is no possibility of our agreeing to continue to publish you. Nor will I—or any of us—answer any future letter that we consider to be as rude as those we've been receiving.

Regretfully,

BG

According to Gottlieb, when his letter went off, everyone at Knopf who had lately been dealing with Dahl “stood on their desks and cheered.”

Perhaps publishing, as much as marriage, represents the triumph of hope over experience. When Tom Maschler steered the typescripts of
Dirty Beasts
and
The BFG
downtown to Farrar, Straus and Giroux at Union Square, Dahl's next American publishers were delighted: none more so than a young editor, Stephen Roxburgh. In his previous career, both in a children's library and as an academic specialist in children's literature, Roxburgh had seen the extraordinary hold his new author exerted over child readers—readers who, in the prosperous and indulgent post-Spock middle-class families of the 1980s, had a good deal more say than previous generations of children over which books were bought for them.

As always, Dahl was keen to start the relationship on a footing of complicity. He wrote to Roxburgh, inviting his comments on
The BFG
while making it clear that he didn't want to have to do any major new work on the book. In the course of the letter, he took the opportunity to disparage both Gottlieb (“too much arrogance there and that is not easy to stomach”) and his former publishers in general. He promised that on a future occasion he would reveal to Roxburgh what he described as the “astonishing financial evils perpetrated by the Random House gang.”
²²

A serious, precise, tweed-jacket-and-gray-flannel-trousers Anglophile, Roxburgh was flattered. He admired and liked Dahl personally
, and quickly became a proxy son with whom the older man could trade opinions about books and wine. In a way, it was the relationship with Alfred Knopf, with the seniority—and the power—reversed.

Their first dealings were straightforwardly professional. Farrar, Straus and Giroux decided to delay publication of
Dirty Beasts
, partly to avoid a clash when Knopf brought out
Revolting Rhymes
, but principally because they wanted to begin their association with Dahl on a more substantial book. It was already clear—not least to its author
²³
—that
The BFG
had the makings of a commercial success comparable at the very least with that of
James
or
Charlie
.

Imaginatively, the draft was already superior to both of the earlier books. As in most of Dahl's children's stories, the essential plot is like a folktale: a giant and a small girl together bring about the defeat of a cannibalistic tribe of monsters.
²⁴
Both the relationship and the bullying which threatens it were situations of a kind that had always brought out Dahl's strongest feelings, but there are several other elements. The Big Friendly Giant is a resonant fictional character, with his funny and in a way beautiful confusions of speech (learned from Pat), and his skill as a dream maker. And out of the familiar child's-story premises of reversal and changes of scale, Dahl had invented some memorable comic episodes: the downward-acting lemonade which makes the BFG fart (he calls it whizzpopping) rather than burp; his breakfast in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace, off a Ping-Pong table resting on four grandfather clocks. There was plenty here for Quentin Blake to work on.

The draft had already been seen by an editor at Cape, Valerie Buckingham, who made a number of comments which, if “politically correct,” were more importantly motivated by narrative plausibility.
²⁵
For example, she suggested to Dahl that the BFG's original list of the international victims of the Bonecruncher would impress Sophie more if they weren't all men. “Agree,” Dahl cheerily replied. “It takes a woman to spot this!” Similarly,
he agreed to her idea that when the BFG says that boys despise girls' dreams, it would be natural for Sophie to show some reaction.
²⁶
His concessions, though, were based on character and plot: he was persuaded by what made sense in relation to Sophie, not by any appeal to the tastes of his audience. When his editor's caution extended to a religio-dietary anxiety about the BFG's demands for sausages and bacon at breakfast in Buckingham Palace, Dahl was unmoved.