Roald Dahl (37 page)

In all this, he quoted the opinions of “the shrewdest Arabs in the Middle East” and referred to factual information from “my own sources” about Israeli-American agreements. What these sources were, he didn't say, but Dahl had been a critic of Zionism since 1946
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and was a generous benefactor of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), a charity which is also a powerful pressure group.
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Many of the views expressed in Dahl's piece—for example, that the invasion served no other purpose than to distract attention from Israel's annexation of the West Bank—chimed with those of the pro-Palestinian lobby.
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Dahl's essential charge against Israeli cruelties was just, but his extremist tone didn't help the Palestinian cause. In
The Spectator
, the pro-Israeli commentator Paul Johnson rightly called the article reckless and crude.
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Some contributors began to boycott the
Literary Review
in response to Johnson's (itself not especially moderate) call “for reputable writers to refuse to be associated with a journal which publishes such filth.” Dahl, meanwhile, poured oil on the flames by claiming that Jews were cowards and that they passively submitted to the Nazi Final Solution. On the Allied side in the Second World War, he said, “we saw almost none of them in the armed services”:
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a claim which enraged representatives and kin of the 60,000 Jews who served in the British forces between 1939 and 1945, many of them winning decorations (including the Victoria Cross) for their courage.
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It was in this same interview that Dahl said Hitler hadn't picked on the Jews for no reason.

The row was widely reported in the by no means universally
pro-Zionist British press and soon spread. In Israel, a British TV drama series called
Tales of the Unexpected
was boycotted because Dahl was wrongly believed to be its author. (He had contributed some episodes to an earlier series with the same title but was not associated with the sequel.) In the United States, an article in
The New Republic
added its own touch of hysteria by interpreting Dahl's unmistakably ironic story “Genesis and Catastrophe” as “a tale that has the reader rooting for the health of a baby who turns out to be Adolf Hitler.”
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American Jewish readers began to return Dahl's books to his publishers, and some booksellers announced that they would no longer stock them.
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In reply, Roger Straus—himself Jewish—argued that his author's views were not reflected in his books. Dahl himself tried to make amends with an episode in
Going Solo
sympathetic to German Jewish refugees in wartime Palestine.
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But the damage was done, to both Jews and Palestinians as well as to Dahl's reputation in the United States. Years after the original fracas, he was still getting letters about it. In April 1990, for example, an entire school class of small children in San Francisco wrote to him. One letter said:

Dear Mr. Dahl,

We love your books, but we have a problem … we are Jews!! We love your books but you don't like us because we are jews. That offends us. Can you please change your mind about what you said about jews!…

Love,

Aliza and Tamar
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Dahl replied to their teacher, insisting that it was injustice he was against, not Jews. He was less conciliatory when he was telephoned by the
Jewish Chronicle
. “I'm an old hand at dealing with you buggers,” he said. “No comment.”
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As was sometimes the case when Dahl caused a row, he turned out to have been falling ill. In 1985, when he was almost seventy, he went into the Chiltern Hospital for surgery for cancer of the bowel. The first operation was not successful, and according to one of Dahl's nurses, he “began to sink.”
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Ophelia, who based herself at Gipsy House, came in every day to massage her father's back. Tessa flew in and out with histrionically large pots of flowers.

There was another operation, and Dahl slowly recovered. But he was left very weak, hobbling the hundred yards to his hut with the aid of two sticks and writing in a shaky hand to the many people who had sent him messages. He was particularly proud of a letter from Graham Greene congratulating him on
Boy
.
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Perhaps to make up to Tessa for having given her a scare, her father soon afterward did a piece of writing on her behalf which reads like a throwback to his practical jokes with Charles Marsh. Tessa had a new baby, was about to hire an Australian nanny-housekeeper, and had asked for help in finding the plane fare. Dahl was more cautious these days about doling out money to his children and suggested that a magazine might be persuaded to pay, if the nanny offered an interview with him in exchange. Better still, he would write the interview himself. Sitting in his shed with a blanket over his knees, he scrawled a 5,000-word eulogy of himself and his household and sent it to the publicity department of Penguin.
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Dahl, his article said, was without doubt the most popular of living writers for children, yet he spent “half his life performing dotty and unusual acts and going out of his way to make someone happy.” Exceptionally warm and attentive to the needs of others, he was rarely without some philanthropic task to occupy him. His hospitality was described at length, and praise was lavished on his family, particularly his wife—“a lovely lady.” Then the piece turned to the garden and the row of pleached limes leading to Mr. Dahl's writing hut. Here, the great man recounted
his history to the imaginary interviewer—how he had been shot down in the war and so forth—before going on to talk about the importance of writing good children's books: a much more difficult task than adult fiction, he said. He described his approach to writing: the solitary agony of thinking up a plot, which must be lively, imaginative, and utterly original; the lonely labor of endless revision. In his covering letter to Penguin, Dahl conceded that there was something a little odd about this exercise in autobiography, but “my own opinion is that it's quite a good little essay.” In more usual circumstances, he said, he would expect it to earn a fee of about £5,000.

The struggles of authorship were a frequent theme of Dahl's in these years.
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He tried making a comeback as an adult writer with two sketchy and mildly pornographic fairy tales, “Princess Mammalia” and “The Princess and the Poacher,” which were printed in a little hardback to celebrate his seventieth birthday, in 1986. (They were discreetly omitted from the
Collected Short Stories
published after his death.) “The Bookseller,” Dahl's plagiarism of James Gould Cozzens, appeared in
Playboy
in 1987.
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Playboy
also published “The Surgeon,” about some jewels hidden in an icebox which turn up in the stomach of a burglar who has helped himself to a cold drink.
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But most of his effort went into his last substantial book,
Matilda
. Once again Stephen Roxburgh was closely involved. Despite, or perhaps partly because of, all his efforts, Roxburgh was to lose the book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Roald Dahl with it.

Millions of readers know the story of
Matilda
as it was eventually published. A precocious little girl, extremely well-read and good at math, suffers both at home with her philistine parents and at her school, which is run by a sadistic and reactionary
headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. With a new alertness to the climate of the times, Dahl emphasizes how unfairly Matilda's father discriminates in favor of her talentless brother. A liberal teacher at school, the mysteriously impoverished Miss Honey, tries to educate the parents about their daughter's gifts, but it transpires that she is herself in the headmistress's thrall: an orphan, Miss Honey is the niece of the hideous Trunchbull, who has tricked her out of her inheritance. Meanwhile, Matilda develops magical powers which she uses to expose the villainess, restoring Miss Honey's little fortune and her happiness.

As Dahl would sometimes relate, the original version was not at all like this. He didn't say that the main changes were prompted by his editor, or that after the work was done, Dahl picked a fight with him, took the book away from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and left them for good.

In the first draft of
Matilda
, a copy of which is still in the Dahl files at FSG, the heroine, not unlike Hilaire Belloc's Matilda, was “born wicked.” She spends the first part of the book inflicting various tortures on her harmless and baffled parents. Only later does she turn out to be clever. The headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, is characterized much as in the final version of the book, although some details, such as her “shadow of a jet-black moustache” and her dressing in men's clothes of a military type, were eventually dropped. (Dahl was to base her new appearance on that of the principal of a horticultural school near Thame, where he and his sisters bought plants.
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)

In the second half, nothing in the draft corresponds with the final story as Roxburgh suggested it to Dahl, except that both versions are in the style of Victorian sentimental melodrama and, in both, Matilda is brought face to face with her teacher's poverty. In the original version, when Matilda's teacher—called Miss Hayes—learns of her pupil's secret powers, she makes a confession of her own. A bookie's daughter, Miss Hayes is a compulsive gambler and has run up debts of £20,000 on the horses. Keen to help, the fascinated Matilda has the idea of using her powerful
eyes to fix a race. She practices energetically by knocking over nearby cows and ponies. Meanwhile, Miss Hayes pawns an old ring of her mother's for £2,000. The two go off to Newmarket and put the money on a 50:1 outsider. It wins. Miss Hayes pockets £100,000, takes them both home in a taxi, and renounces gambling forever. By now, the beginning of the book has been forgotten. Matilda has long ago stopped being naughty, and Miss Trunchbull has disappeared from view altogether.

The structural problems with this enjoyable nonsense must have been easier to identify than their solutions, but Roxburgh saw various new possibilities, both in Matilda's cleverness and in the clash between Miss Trunchbull and Miss Hayes over educational methods. He realized, too, that the book would have more shape, and Matilda more identity, if Miss Hayes's values (nature, poetry, etc.) were contrasted with those of her pupil's parents. It was clear that in some way the young teacher's predicament should arise out of the situation already established in the early chapters. Within what was usable, there would need to be some cuts, particularly in the Trunchbull scenes and in the duplication between Matilda's naughtiness and that of her friends Hortensia and Lavender.

Roxburgh put all these points to Dahl. If they proceeded as before, Dahl would incorporate his suggestions into a new draft, on which the editor would offer further comments, having polished and cut as much as his author would tolerate.

The first stage went fine. Dahl saw the advantages of emphasizing Matilda's intelligence and enthusiasm for books. Following Roxburgh's suggestions, he developed a contrastingly boorish home background for her and reduced the episodes of her bad behavior, turning them into acts of revenge on her illiterate, sexist, and semi-criminal father. The aptly renamed Miss Honey was built up, meanwhile, into an attractive, sweet-natured, and liberally inclined teacher, a much stronger foil to Miss Trunchbull. All of this took up considerably more of the book—almost a hundred pages of typescript, to the first draft's fifty—allowing Miss
Honey's new revelations about the financial and domestic villainy of Miss Trunchbull to come closer to the climax. Here, Matilda's powers now play a positive, much briefer, and more dramatic role: the exposure of Miss Trunchbull through magical writing on the blackboard.

All this was in Dahl's next draft. Inevitably there were still roughnesses. There was too much both of Miss Trunchbull and, now, of Matilda's parents. The antique school-story idiom (“New scum,” “We've seen her at prayers,” “‘Steady on,' the boy said. ‘I mean, dash it all, Headmistress'”), however reassuring to middle-class British parents, was incongruous in the setting of a contemporary day school and wouldn't make much sense to American kids. But Roxburgh could put all this to Dahl in person at Gipsy House when they discussed what was needed in the final draft.

Except that, as it turned out, this
was
the final draft. Perhaps because he was increasingly busy at FSG, perhaps (as Dahl complained) because of complications in his private life, but perhaps also because he had been irked to hear that Dahl had been complaining about him at dinner parties with other publishers, Roxburgh's letter about the new manuscript was not fulsome. “The story holds together and moves along briskly,” he wrote early in October 1987.
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“I had hoped to read the manuscript one more time before returning it, but Frankfurt [the Book Fair] looms.” He suggested that he might come to Great Missenden on his return, in two weeks' time, to review the draft, “or whatever.”

Dahl was tired of being put to so much work. And when financial negotiations began, it became clear that there was a way out. In all the editorial discussions about
Matilda
, Roxburgh had omitted to make sure that Farrar, Straus and Giroux had a contract with Dahl for the book. They didn't, and Dahl was now quick to demand, through his agent, a full 15 percent royalty over and above whatever was paid to Quentin Blake. Roxburgh was left with little choice except to agree, but instead of capitulating graciously, he made the mistake of warning Pollinger that
he wouldn't be able to offer such good terms if Farrar Straus were the originating publishers of any future Dahl book.
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