Roald Dahl

by Jeremy Treglown

  Although he became known as an author in the late 1940s, it was during the last twenty-eight years of his life, from 1962 onward, that he did much of his best, as well as best-selling, work: James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, George’s Marvellous Medicine, The Twits, Revolting Rhymes, The BFG, Dirty Beasts, The Witches, Matilda, and the two vivid memoirs, Boy and Going Solo. How did his career develop? Could he have been a better writer? Why did so ambitious, so macho a man end up devoting so much of his life to children? The answers are to some extent practical and social: they concern the literary marketplace, the power of editors, the growing cultural independence of children. But they are also, of course, personal to Dahl. Quite outside his writing, yet in ways which inevitably affected it, he was an intriguing, contradictory figure. He was famously a war hero, a connoisseur, a philanthropist, a devoted family man who had to confront an appalling succession of tragedies. He was also, as will be seen, a fantasist, an anti-Semite, a bully, and a self-publicizing troublemaker. Although he had a voice of his own as a writer, he was not above taking credit for others’ ideas. Many people loved him and have reason to be grateful to him; many—some of them the same people—frankly detested him.

  The only common view about Dahl, in fact, is that opinions of him are divided. His early patroness Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Practically no one in the world is entirely bad or entirely good,”13 but if you were to believe everyone who knew him, you would have to conclude that he was both. Although in various ways his apparent inconsistencies were of a piece, there are points at which he simply can’t be reconciled with himself. More than most people, he was divided between the things he was and those he wanted to be. His intense, self-dissatisfied perfectionism often produced the worst in him, as well as the best.

  An old friend of the family told me, “Almost anything you could say about him would be true. It depended which side he decided to show you.” Perhaps his inconsistencies seemed to him just part of the act—a way of keeping the audience guessing. Towering half a foot over most people he met, with his shambling gait, keen eyes, and scratchy smoker’s voice, he was a performer. Although he said that he hated Hollywood, he behaved like an actor, a ringmaster, a spellbinder: Mr. Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But not all the performance was fun, either for him or for others in the cast. He was once described as looking like Henry Fonda after several hours on the rack.14

  Some of his sufferings were external, but others sprang from the contradictions in his own mind. For example, he was a Tory anarchist. His children’s stories are subversive and hedonistic (hence, in part, their popularity in the 1960s, when they began to appear), and yet conservative, nostalgic, authoritarian (hence some of their appeal to parents). In the ways he brought up his own children, this division caused problems and pain. It was a part of his dividedness that he relished trouble. He enjoyed stirring people up, whether with a book or at a dinner party or in a letter to The Times. Yet he was also at his best when there was a genuine tragedy to rise to.

  In some respects his character makes better sense if he is thought of less as a writer than as a capricious tycoon.15 He pursued money ruthlessly and single-mindedly, using other people as accessories to his various enterprises—“the Business,” as they are collectively called in his will. He came from a commercial family and was proud of the fact that both his father and his uncle made fortunes. Dahl’s own royalties now bring in millions of pounds a year. Like many successful businessmen, he had little interest in abstract thought and was impatient with intellectuals. “Genius,” on the other hand, he revered. Next came courage, practicality, and what he called sparkiness. These were his own qualities, and those which his children’s books encourage readers to admire.

  Arguably, he never grew up. Much of his behavior seems like that of someone who had been forced into a premature but permanent, and rather unconvincing, show of adulthood. A handful of his stories for adults are among the most memorable written by a British author since the beginning of the Second World War. But in much of his adult fiction, he is overanxious to prove his virility to the reader. Noël Coward wrote in his diary, after reading the newly published Someone Like You: “The stories are brilliant and his imagination is fabulous. Unfortunately there is, in all of them, an underlying streak of cruelty and macabre unpleasantness, and a curiously adolescent emphasis on sex.”16 So it is heartening to see how a new audience of children (the first of them his own) helped Dahl to turn what were often very similar fictional ingredients—modern folktales of oppression and revenge, cunning and sorcery—into something warmer, much funnier, more fanciful, and better written.17 One of the rare things about Roald Dahl is that his books, on the whole and with help from outside, continued to improve. Not all of them will last. But the best—especially The BFG—surely will. Like folktales, they draw on deep, widespread longings and fears. They bind characters, readers, and writer into a private fantasy. They make you laugh and cry. They do all this with well-tried technical expertise, and in a way that is often a cryptogram of the life which produced them.

  2

  The Apple

  Dahl’s parents were both Norwegian. When his mother, Sofie Hesselberg, married his father, Harald Dahl, in 1911, she was in her mid-twenties, Harald in his forties. He was a prosperous widower with two children, co-owner of a ship-brokering business in Cardiff. He had settled there in the 1880s, in the boom years of the South Wales coalfields and of the port of Cardiff, at the time among the biggest cargo shipping centers in the world.

  Harald came from a lower-middle-class mercantile family. His own father, whom Roald—himself very tall—later remembered as a seven-foot giant, kept a general store in a small town near Oslo. He had three daughters and two sons, both of whom emigrated and flourished; the younger, Roald’s uncle, with a fleet of trawlers in La Rochelle. Harald had lost his left forearm in a boyhood accident, but didn’t allow the disability to prevent him from making a similarly successful career. By 1905, at the age of forty, he had built a comfortable home for his wife, Marie, and their two-year-old daughter, Ellen, in Llandaff. The medieval town was by then rapidly becoming a suburb of Cardiff, but even today, with its ancient cathedral and a green scattered with low white cottages, it has some of its old rural seclusion. Five minutes’ walk from the cathedral close, the Dahls’ steeply gabled house still stands in Fairwater Road. It is now called Ty Gwyn, but Harald named it Villa Marie, for his wife.

  Two years after they moved in, Marie died, aged twenty-nine. Harald was left with Ellen, now four, and a one-year-old son, Louis. He managed alone for four years, until in 1911 he married Sofie (her name has three syllables), whom he had met on holiday in Norway, traveling on the Oslo Fjord.

  Sofie’s background was more bourgeois than Harald’s. Her father, Karl Hesselberg, came from a long line of clergymen and was a naturalist: for a time, he edited the Norwegian magazine Nature.1 Her formidable, possessive mother was born Ellen Wallace, of a Norwegian family which claims descent from the medieval Scottish national hero Sir William Wallace. Sofie was Karl and Ellen’s first child. Shortly before her birth in 1885, her father took a job with the Norwegian state pension fund, eventually rising to become its senior manager, although not, to his disappointment, its chief. A family picture taken around the time of Sofie’s marriage shows him, trim-bearded and sharp-eyed, with his wife and three of their daughters: Sofie, Astrid, and Ellen (again). A fourth had died in 1907. The girls are all good-looking, but Sofie is the most striking.2 She has her father’s slender nose and watchful eyes, but the full lower lip and strong chin are her mother’s.

  As it turned out, Sofie was the only daughter who married. She sailed to Cardiff and moved into Villa Marie, taking charge of her stepchildren and soon beginning her own family. A daughter, Astri, was born in 1912. Another, Alfhild, followed two years later. Two years after that, her only son was born, on September 13, 1916. They gave him just the one name, Roald, which Norwegians pronounce “Roo-ahl,” wi
thout sounding the final d. The family were still living in Fairwater Road when another daughter, Else, arrived, but the first house Roald remembered was on the hill near Radyr, a few miles farther out from Cardiff, where they moved at the end of the First World War, in 1918.

  Even by the opulent standards of the past half century, this was a time of fabulous prosperity in Cardiff. Until the slump in the early 1920s, shipping, according to one historian, “developed from a business to a craze. The Port became the centre of a great … boom which attracted millions of pounds from investors and speculators.”3 Now, when Harald returned home each day from his office beside the hectic West Dock Basin, it was to Ty Mynydd, a Victorian country mansion with its own farm. On the other side of the valley stood a castle so impressive to a small boy that, in his old age, Roald Dahl seems to have half-believed that he had lived there.4 It was the medieval Castell Coch, restored to neo-Gothic extravagance by the Victorian architect William Burges for a South Wales magnate at around the time of Harald’s arrival in Cardiff.

  Harald was a domineering man, both a romantic and a perfectionist.5 At the end of 1919, Sofie became pregnant once more and began to anticipate the regime which her husband had devised for the benefit of his future children. In Boy their son described how, after six months of her pregnancy, Harald would declare that “the glorious walks” should begin. On these glorious walks, they visited beautiful places in the countryside for about an hour each day, with the idea that Sofie would pass on her aesthetic response to the unborn child:

  His theory was that if the eye of a pregnant woman was constantly observing the beauty of nature, this beauty would somehow become transmitted to the mind of the unborn baby within her womb and that baby would grow up to be a lover of beautiful things.6

  But there were to be no more glorious walks together. In February 1920, Astri died of appendicitis, aged seven. Two months later, Harald, too, was dead of pneumonia or, as many people thought, of a broken heart.

  Sofie had no immediate financial anxieties. Harald had left over £150,000 (in today’s terms, nearly three million pounds).7 Not all of this survived the 1920s slump, but there was enough for the family to live on very comfortably, and for all the children eventually to go to boarding school. Harald also provided for each of them to buy a house when they grew up. Meanwhile, the family stayed on at Ty Mynydd until the baby, another girl, Asta, was born that autumn. But it now seemed most practical to sell up and move back into Llandaff. Sofie was thirty-five. Her husband and oldest child were both dead. She was solely responsible, in a foreign country, for two orphaned stepchildren, now in their teens, and four small offspring of her own. She was to live for a further forty-seven years, never remarrying, and for the greater part of that time within an hour’s journey of each of her children.

  Almost seventy years after the deaths of Astri and Harald, one of Roald Dahl’s daughters, Tessa, wrote about her state of mind when, in her own childhood, comparable tragedies struck the family yet again. She described the conflict between, on the one hand, feeling required to give unobtrusive support and, on the other, wanting to do something extraordinary, so as to be noticed amid all the emotional drama. Above all, she longed to restore everyone’s happiness.8 Dahl rarely talked about his own feelings, but he may have experienced something similar, together with the pride and burden of being his mother’s only son. Only child is what it must have felt like, despite—or perhaps partly because of—the size of the family. His nickname at home was “the Apple,” because he was the apple of his mother’s eye. It was an ambiguous role—privileged but demanding. Much was expected of him, and although he never lacked for either encouragement or material rewards, his mother showed him little physical warmth. The bereaved boy was both the center of attention and very lonely.

  It is as lone operators that children were to figure in Dahl’s stories. Matilda, in the book named after her, has a negligible brother, but otherwise all his main child characters are without siblings. Many of the stories are centered on orphans: “Katina,” “Pig,” James and the Giant Peach, The BFG, The Witches. Others, such as Danny, the Champion of the World, involve an intense relationship between a single child and a single parent or surrogate parent. It is, of course, a classic situation of children’s literature—partly because writers are often people who have felt isolated as children. But when, late in his life, Dahl was asked by a television interviewer about this emphasis in his work, he seemed surprised and at first denied that it existed.9

  Sofie, Dahl was to write, “was undoubtedly the absolute primary influence on my own life. She had a crystal-clear intellect and a deep interest in almost everything under the sun.… She was the matriarch, the materfamilias, and her children radiated round her like planets round a sun.”10 He explored the relationship in a story, “Only This,” which he wrote in Washington in the 1940s, about a bomber pilot and his mother. The emotional center is not the pilot’s feelings but the woman’s for him. She is seen through the bedroom window of a moonlit English cottage. Awakened by bombers flying overhead to Germany, she sits up thinking about her only son, who is flying in one of them. In her thoughts, she flies with him. He hears her speak to him and touches her shoulder before the aircraft is hit by flak and crashes. Son and mother both die, he in the cockpit, she at her bedroom window. The title refers to a passage early in the story where Dahl describes both the mother’s feelings for her child and, by implication, his for her: “the deep conscious knowing that there was nothing else to live for except this.”

  In its intensity, “Only This” may have been touched not only by Dahl’s direct feelings as a son and a pilot but by something he had read when he was still at prep school and which, he later said, “profoundly fascinated and probably influenced” him.11 Can Such Things Be, a collection by the fin-de-siècle American writer Ambrose Bierce, begins with a sinister, psychologically turbulent story, “The Death of Halpin Frayser.” A young man, neglected by his powerful father, spoiled by his mother, “of a dreamy, indolent and rather romantic turn, somewhat … addicted to literature,” decides to leave home for California. His mother does all she can to stop him, but even when she describes a dream of her own death, he is unpersuaded. Having gone, he is prevented from returning. Shanghaied in San Francisco and shipwrecked in the South Pacific, he is kept away for six years. On his way back at last, Frayser dreams that his mother has been murdered. His guilty fantasy—with which the intricately structured narrative opens—turns out to be true. Widowed, and unsuccessful in her search for her lost son, his mother remarried. The new husband killed her.

  These are the bare outlines of a fiction which, as Dahl’s own work was to be, is mythlike in its suggestiveness and extremism. Bierce is explicit about its psychological wellsprings. “Between [Halpin] and his mother was the most perfect sympathy,” he writes. She had hidden its real nature:

  She had always taken care to conceal her weakness from all eyes but those of him who shared it. Their common guilt in respect of that was an added tie between them. If in Halpin’s youth his mother had “spoiled” him he had assuredly done his part toward being spoiled. As he grew to … manhood … the attachment between him and his beautiful mother … became yearly stronger and more tender. In these two romantic natures was manifest in a signal way that neglected phenomenon, the dominance of the sexual element in all the relations of life, strengthening, softening, and beautifying even those of consanguinity.12

  The young Roald was so taken with Bierce’s book that he gave it to his best friend at prep school, Douglas Highton, whose parents lived apart and whose own home was also with his mother.13 Many years later, Dahl asked for it back, and Highton exchanged it for signed copies of Dahl’s own books.

  The two boys were boarders at St. Peter’s School, Weston-super-Mare. It was not until 1925 that Sofie sent her son there. Her first act, after Harald’s death, was to buy a double-fronted, red-brick Victorian house in Cardiff Road, Llandaff, close to where Harald’s business partner lived, and clos
e, too, to a new school for girls and small boys. Alfhild, Else, Roald, and Asta all in turn went to Elm Tree House, which was then in Ely Road, near the fields, with a well-stocked garden behind.14 In the summer, lessons were held among the much-raided fruit bushes. Miss Tucker, one of the two sisters who ran the school, taught nature study.

  Dahl often referred to his childhood fascination with birds, moles, butterflies, gnats. He vividly recalled experiments such as eating the bulb of a buttercup (“frighteningly hot”) or putting an ear of barley under his sleeve and feeling it climb to his shoulder.15 Some of this fascination came, he liked to think, from Sofie’s prenatal “glorious walks,” but it may also have been influenced by her father. Certainly it was nourished on the family’s annual Norwegian holidays. Although none of them would ever live in Norway, Harald and Sofie’s children were brought up with a strong sense of belonging there. They were christened in the Norwegian church on Cardiff docks. They learned to speak Norwegian. Every summer Sofie took them home to join her overwhelmingly female tribe, where they ate fresh fish and burnt toffee, and heard stories of trolls and witches. The family included both good cooks and good storytellers.

  It would be hard to miss the influence of Northern European folktales on Dahl’s stories. Witches, and “hags” in general, took a particular hold. Not that in the 1920s you had to be Scandinavian, or a boy brought up in a matriarchy, to be scared of witches—particularly in Druidical Wales. The small boy was especially horrified by an old woman who ran a sweet shop in Llandaff, “a small skinny old hag with a moustache on her upper lip and a mouth as sour as a green gooseberry.”16 Four chapters of Boy are given to an episode in which Roald and his friends put a dead mouse in one of her jars and are repaid with a caning. In its comic extravagance, much of Boy reads like fiction, but Dahl wasn’t the only Llandaff child to have such memories. His contemporary, Mrs. Ferris, who went to the local primary school which then stood opposite the sweetshop, vividly recalls its proprietors. “Two sisters, weren’t they? Very old, oh, very decrepit. We didn’t like going in there, you see.… We used to be a bit frightened, because they were like witches, weren’t they?”17