Roald Dahl (36 page)

The suggestion was attractive now, coming as it did only a couple of years after the embarrassingly timed transmission of a TV film,
The Patricia Neal Story
, based on Barry Farrell's
Pat and Roald
. Directed by Anthony Page and Anthony Harvey, the drama-documentary about Patricia Neal's stroke and recovery was completed at around the time that the couple were splitting up. Dahl himself, played by Dirk Bogarde, is favorably treated in the film (and has a great deal more hair than in real life), but although his behavior is seen as crucial to Neal's rehabilitation, there is no attempt to gloss over his cruelty—early on, in the hospital, he is shown slapping her face hard—or the moody aggressiveness of his temperament in general. To Dahl, another unwelcome surprise may have been that the main character in the script, unlike in the book, was not himself but Neal. According to Anthony Page, Dahl telephoned Dirk Bogarde at the Connaught Hotel during the shooting and said he wanted to rewrite the whole thing. If there was any resistance, Bogarde and Glenda Jackson would have to leave the project. “He was just trying it on. But he wasn't at all pleased with the result.”
¹²

Other, more compliant accounts of Dahl's life appeared in the 1980s. As it turned out, Chris Powling's
Roald Dahl
, first published in 1983, proved as satisfactory as Barry Farrell's book. Here, once again, was the Dahl who had been “shot down and crippled in an air-battle,”
¹³
who invented the RAF myth of the gremlins,
¹⁴
and was the first to expose America's dastardly plan
“to take over Europe's commercial airlines after the war”—a discovery which Dahl made all the more dramatic now by redating it so that it came before Pearl Harbor.
¹⁵
There were new elements to the myth. In 1965 Dahl had ditched the then-little-known Robert Altman from an unrealized film project which had been Altman's own idea.
¹⁶
In Powling's book, the episode is presented as a battle fought on Altman's behalf but lost to the mighty producers, who “couldn't recognize talent when they saw it staring them in the face.”
¹⁷

Meanwhile, the autobiography encouraged by Stephen Roxburgh enabled Dahl to put his legend in a longer perspective and to record, too, some colorful stories of his early life with which he had entertained his own children. In compiling them, he used Roxburgh as a research assistant, sending to New York boxes full of childhood letters to Sofie Dahl, school essays, and photographs. Roxburgh put them in order, sifted them, and cannibalized them for information, which he then returned to Dahl for the narrative. Or narratives—for it soon became clear that there was enough material for more than one book, and that episodes which Dahl had drafted about Shell, East Africa, and the war in Greece could be saved for a subsequent volume, leaving the first focused on his schooldays.
¹⁸

The draft still consisted of little more than a number of scrappy and unlinked anecdotes. Roxburgh suggested various ways in which Dahl could develop, expand, and pull them together, for example by repositioning a section about holidays in Norway, adding to the material about Repton, and particularly by giving shape to the relationship with his mother, whose full importance Roxburgh had gleaned from the childhood letters. “You are not the only … major character,” Roxburgh boldly told Dahl. “From before your birth until 1936, your mother dominated your life.” For this reason, he thought that
Boy
(for which the first title suggested by Dahl was “I Want to Grow Up”
¹⁹
) should end with the family's seeing the young man off at the docks, bound for Africa. The climax of the second volume, eventually
, could be his return from the war, “straight into the arms of the waiting mother.”

In effect, Roxburgh was explaining Dahl to himself, turning a collection of noisy but unassimilated memories into a more coherent and reflective story. It may not be a coincidence that during the couple of years in which they worked together, reconstructing his childhood, Dahl's tendency to slip back into the idiom of a rather stagy English schoolboy became increasingly marked. His letters were strewn with “By golly” and “Absolutely spiffing.” “Three cheers for Stephen Roxburgh,” he wrote to Roger Straus about
Boy
.
²⁰

If Roxburgh helped Dahl to interpret himself, he also confirmed his sense of Greatness. He sees Dahl as “a truly great writer” and told him at the time that the childhood papers he had sent to FSG were “an extraordinary archive of a life, a period in history, and a society.” Dahl repaid the compliment by inviting Roxburgh to be his official biographer. It was understood that progress would be slow. The book was not intended for publication during its subject's life, and Roxburgh had domestic commitments, as well as a full-time job. But by May 1985 he had cleared his desk of other work and was beginning to plan his research.

Although Roxburgh didn't notice, things were already beginning to show signs of going wrong. Dahl had become very keen on his paperback publisher, Peter Mayer, chief executive of Penguin and a charming, gifted, and energetic man. His author always liked to deal directly with the top. Roxburgh was still only a relatively junior figure at FSG—although, partly as a result of Dahl's encouragement, he was gaining confidence and prestige to a degree that the older man did not always welcome. When, in the summer of 1984, Dahl delivered
The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me
, Roxburgh didn't send one of his diplomatic letters, full of cautiously presented suggestions, but simply annotated
the typescript.
²¹
Dahl wrote thanking him but—somewhat ominously to anyone who knew the history of his dealings with publishers—enclosed a copy of an enthusiastic letter about the book from Tom Maschler: “Vintage Dahl. And with new aspects as well. What more could one ask?”
²²
Socially, too, it seemed to Dahl that Roxburgh was becoming bumptious. Roxburgh thinks, with hindsight, that he may have angered the old man by finishing an anecdote for him in front of other people and by arguing with him on a question of wine.
²³
Dahl began to complain about such solecisms to Maschler, telling him, “I can't stand that pedantic, prissy Roxburgh anymore.”
²⁴

There was no opportunity yet for a major row. Roxburgh was doing more of what Dahl called his super-editing on “
Boy
2,” the draft of
Going Solo
, while the author was very busy elsewhere.
Sophiechen und der Riese
(
The BFG
) won the major German prize for children's books, the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis, in 1984. Dahl was in continual demand all over the world for lectures, book signings, and other appearances, at which he drew unprecedented crowds. Although he had forsworn any direct involvement in movies, he spent some time discussing the possibility of turning a Grimm story into a filmscript, and sold the film rights to
The BFG, Danny
, and
The Witches
.
²⁵
After Icarus was detected by the tax inspectors, Dahl had dissolved the family trusts. All his business was now conducted under the name Dahl & Dahl, from an office behind Gipsy House. Here, clerical staff dealt with his sacks of correspondence while, dressed in a loose cardigan and an old pair of trousers, he sat at the dining table, smoking, making decisions, telephoning his bookies, and dictating replies to fan letters: “Dear lovely, gorgeous Sheila and all the clever children in your class …”
²⁶

On weekends, he was rarely not surrounded by at least some of his large family—wife, children, stepchildren, grandchildren, sisters and their broods. He enjoyed knowing that their cars, many of which he had paid for, were drawn up like a circle of wagons at the back of the house, next to his BMW, Liccy's Ford,
and Theo's Vauxhall.
²⁷
On Friday nights, a random assortment of friends would come for the ritual snooker game: Wally, who now acted as the Dahls' chauffeur; the local plumber; a surgeon from the Chiltern Hospital; and whoever else happened to be around. Visitors noticed how happy Felicity had made her husband. “All the years that I first knew Roald I never saw him peaceful,” one neighbor says. “If there's such a thing as inner peace, that came with Liccy.”

Both he and Felicity were hospitable and knowledgeable about food and wine. Roald had always bought wine cleverly, sometimes at country-house auctions. Often now, he went straight to the source—he “went banco” on the excellent clarets of 1982, investing in “a thousand” cases.
²⁸
Felicity employed and trained a succession of gifted cooks.
Memories with Food at Gipsy House
is a panegyric to the subtleties of this variety of onion or that ham, and the right places to buy butter or pick mushrooms. To a modern version of feudal clan values, also. The recipes were provided by relatives, friends, and retainers, including Felicity's grandfather's ex-batman. Posed pictures of napery and fresh vegetables vie for space with family snapshots: picnics, cricket on the lawn. In the all-inclusive but unmistakably hierarchical scheme of things, near the end of the book there is a page about dogs—just before the section on suppliers, whose addresses hover somewhere between the photo credits of a glossy magazine feature and an older, more cap-in-hand form of advertising. You half expect Candle Makers Suppliers (“Food-Grade Wax for Jam Jars”), of 28 Blythe Road, London W14, to have a badge over the door: By Appointment to the Late Roald Dahl, Esq., Purveyors of Culinary Sealants.

Some of Felicity's stepchildren missed the days when everyone used to sit around the untidy kitchen table, Pat often still in her dressing gown, Roald with a Bloody Mary, listening to
The World at One
.
²⁹
But a standoff had been reached, partly as a result of firmness on Roald's part. One day, when Lucy was being particularly intractable, her father called her into his bedroom and told
her that she had to give Felicity a chance, “and if you can't be nice to her, you're not welcome here anymore.” She says they are the worst words she can remember his ever having spoken to her. After that, she kept her distance, and her father never mentioned the matter again.

For all of Dahl's new happiness, life was still often difficult. One or the other of his daughters always seemed to be in trouble. His health continued to be worryingly unreliable. And he hadn't lost his appetite for quarrels.

In the summer of 1983, he was asked if he would review a polemical picture book about the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon, with text by a
Newsweek
journalist, Tony Clifton. The request came from the
Literary Review
—not from the magazine's editor, but from its new owner, Naim Attallah, a wealthy Palestinian businessman, one of whose other enterprises-cum-hobbies is Quartet, a publishing house he himself founded.

Attallah had two strong reasons for wanting the book,
God Cried
, to be favorably reviewed. Like many people, he was disgusted by the savage bombardment of West Beirut. And he was the book's publisher. Such was his eagerness to get it good press that he did some of the promotional work in person. He would invite a literary editor to lunch and spend the meal haranguing him about the importance of
God Cried
and the crucial responsibility involved in his choice of reviewer.
³⁰
Attallah had met Dahl and had heard his stories about his own time in Palestine.
³¹
He may also have known something of his views about the state of Israel. But Dahl was more than anti-Zionist. As we have seen, despite his friendship with several individual Jews—among them, his current publishers, Tom Maschler, Roger Straus, and Peter Mayer—he was, like many Englishmen of his age and background, fairly consistently and by no means secretly anti-Semitic. His old Washington acquaintance Sir Isaiah Berlin excuses this on the ground that Dahl's opinions were essentially fanciful.
³²
“I
thought he might say anything,” Berlin says. “Could have been pro-Arab or pro-Jew. There was no consistent line. He was a man who followed whims, which meant he would blow up in one direction, so to speak. No doubt his imagination went into his works.” It is true that his whims usually went no further than jokes. “The best part of those two guys was thrown away when they were circumcised,”
³³
he wrote to Charles Marsh once about a couple of Jews. But they could have a violent tinge (as in the fantasy about Charles Marsh and the Jewish waiter
³⁴
), and Dahl had a weakness for fictional stereotypes like the rapacious and cowardly Meatbein in
Sometime Never
,
³⁵
or the “filthy old Syrian Jewess,” Madame Rosette, in the story named after her.
³⁶
According to Robert Gottlieb, the tendency grew worse after Dahl's falling out with him and Robert Bernstein: “That's where the later anti-Semitic spewings began.”
³⁷
He began to identify all Jews with Israelis, telling Jewish people in London, “You want to watch what your chaps are doing out there, they're getting your country a bad name.”
³⁸
As Dahl explained to a journalist in 1983, “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity.… I mean there's always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason.”
³⁹

The review Dahl wrote of
God Cried
claimed that in June 1982, when the Israeli attack on Lebanon was launched, “we all started hating the Jews.” And he assured prospective readers of the book that, whatever their present opinions, it would make them “violently anti-Jewish.” The then editor of the
Literary Review
, Gillian Greenwood, changed “Jews” to “Israel,” “Jewish” to “Israeli,”
⁴⁰
allowing Dahl to claim later, “I am not anti-Semitic. I am anti-Israel.”
⁴¹
But throughout the article, even as it was finally published, he associated actions of the Israeli government (roundly condemned by many other commentators) with the behavior and beliefs of Jews everywhere. On this occasion, his habit of lumping people together was made all the more inflammatory by his claim to be representing the views of everyone else, the
“we all” who hate the Jews and know that most of the troubles in the Middle East have been caused by Israel and its American Jewish supporters. “General opinion,” Dahl warned, is that the Arab countries will “annihilate the State of Israel … within the next fifty years,” unless Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon—in Dahl's overheated opinion, “almost exact copies in miniature of Mr. Hitler and Mr. Goering”—learned to behave better.