Roald Dahl

by Jeremy Treglown

  Marsh’s twelve-page reply was full of informative side glances and showed him at his least injudicious.53 He described the protagonists’ exact shades of opinion vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, accurately predicted the run-up to the negotiations, gave a good sense of the impression those concerned had formed of Eden, and warned Dahl that any attempt by Britain to make an independent early deal with the Russians would be brushed aside by Roosevelt. He also summarized some key likely factors in postwar American economic planning. But for all this show of statesmanship, Marsh was generally happier with a mixture of gossip and speculation. He added a note about a past quarrel between two politicians over a private business contract in Ohio and described other feuds with a keen attention to detail, dialogue, and narrative shaping which the writer in Dahl must have enjoyed.

  The intelligence-gathering aspect of the friendship never spoiled the fun. In June 1944, for example, Marsh wrote to Dahl from Austin about why the Texas Democratic convention had gone against “your friend Roosevelt.” “Had you been here to advise me and report all that Isaiah [Berlin] knew in advance,” Marsh grumbled, “I would not have been caught short.” But this was little more than a parenthesis in a letter mostly given over to boisterous sexual gossip and innuendo. There was an element of both exhibitionism and voyeurism in the relationship, and not only in the obvious sense of Marsh’s boasting to the younger man about his exploits. All his letters were dictated to his secretary, Claudia Haines, whom he would marry after Alice left him. Both Claudia and, in particular, her teenage daughter were devoted to Dahl and figure in the letters Claudia herself was typing. In the summer of 1945, Charles dictated, “Claudia is too conceited to call herself your mother. She will settle on the Aunt position, though I strongly suspect that she wants to be more than the big sister. No woman will settle for anything less than being a woman.”

  Son, nephew, brother—these were roles which Dahl understood and could manage. Claudia Marsh still describes him as “part of the family.” Many who knew him at the time thought that his sexual dealings, on the other hand, were not happy. David Ogilvy believes Dahl was interested in women to the extent that he could boast about them, and “when they fell in love with him, as a lot did, I don’t think he was nice to them.” Helen Lillie, with whom Dahl drove to Canada when they began work together on the history of BSC, says much the same.54 Martha Gellhorn concluded that he hated women and that his main interest in her was as a means of access to Hemingway. (When, in 1944, she enlisted Dahl’s help in getting both her and her husband to Britain to report on the invasion of France, he found an airplane seat for Hemingway and left Gellhorn to trail behind by boat.)

  But at least one of the women whom Dahl met at this time thinks differently. The French actress Annabella spent most of the war in the United States, starring in morale-boosting plays and films such as Bomber’s Moon and Tonight We Raid Calais.55 In 1944, her husband, the actor Tyrone Power, was in the Pacific with the U.S. Air Force, and Annabella came to Washington in the pre-Broadway run of Franz Werfel’s play Jacobowsky and the Colonel. At the first-night dinner, she found herself sitting next to Dahl. He had by now perfected his social trick of trying out his stories on people. It was a way of monopolizing attention (and avoiding the necessity of small talk), but also of assessing, and sometimes dominating, his listener. The story he told the petite actress was to be published three years later as “Man from the South.” It is about a sinister foreigner who bets his Cadillac that a younger man can’t make his cigarette lighter work ten times in succession. The stake he wants from his rival is the little finger of his left hand. There is a more than usually grim twist at the end, when the suddenly cowed Cadillac owner is taken away in mid-bet by a minder, a woman, three of whose fingers are missing.

  Annabella listened attentively, and when Dahl finished, she asked calmly, “What happened next?” He was delighted by her sangfroid and asked if he could see her home. At lunchtime the next day, he showed up as if by chance in the dining room of her hotel, at the next table. Soon they were lovers. As Annabella says now, with a shrug, “During the war, it’s life against death.”

  She went back to New York, where Jacobowsky and the Colonel was to run for over four hundred performances (one of which was interrupted so that Annabella could announce that Paris had been liberated). Dahl visited her there often—sometimes on his way to or from OSS headquarters in Ottawa. On one occasion he asked whether he could leave his uniform with her for a few days while he went somewhere in civilian clothes. He told her never to ask why, because it was not his secret. She enjoyed the conspiracy and was amused by the impossibility of Roald’s disguising himself: “He was so tall and good-looking—you had to look at him!”

  After Tyrone Power came home from the war, Annabella says, “the crazy thing [with Roald] was off. It came back from time to time when we were … thrown into each other’s arms. But it was like we were twin brothers. Romantic? Not really. Physical, sometimes. But most important, we had a complete understanding, and he trusted me.” It was an understanding based, in part, on her strong practicality and courage. As a girl, she had become, in effect, the only female Boy Scout in France, when her father, Paul Charpentier, introduced the movement to his country from Britain. His daughter wore the uniform, attended rallies, and camped rough, insisting that she sleep in straw, like the boys, rather than on one of the camp beds provided for her and her father. It was good training for the last months of the war, when she joined the Red Cross and went up through Italy with the U.S. Army.

  She and Dahl were to remain close for the rest of his life—long after her marriage to Tyrone Power ended, and longer than any other relationship either of them had with a member of the opposite sex. She speaks of him as a great figure, a hero, and she clearly loved him. Would she, then, have considered marrying him? “Certainly not,” she says without hesitation. “Because—he was kind of impossible.”

  Dahl gave his own account of love, some years later, in a piece on the subject which was commissioned by the Ladies’ Home Journal. With the schematism of a school essay, he divided his topic in two, and then subdivided it by percentages. On the one hand, there is family love, between parents and children or between siblings. This kind, he said, is always clear and uncomplicated. The other sort, heterosexual romantic love, is very difficult. Here, the most common form of relationship is 70 percent based on sex and only 30 percent on mutual affection and respect. If only “our moral and ecclesiastical codes” permitted temporary liaisons for the pleasure and satisfaction of those concerned, without their contracting marriage, “then this kind of love would form an excellent basis for such activity.”56

  It can’t have helped that in Washington he was professionally encouraged to practice opportunism, duplicity, entrapment. It is not far from these to the cynicism of his postwar short stories. One of them, “My Lady Love, My Dove,” concerns a couple who decide to bug the bedroom of a pair of weekend guests.57 The idea is the wife’s, but her husband’s complicity seems to confirm her understanding of their relationship: “Listen, Arthur. I’m a nasty person. And so are you—in a secret sort of way. That’s why we get along together.”58 At any rate, he admits to his excitement in fixing up the microphone. What they overhear turns the tables on them. Their young guests have worked out a complicated technique for cheating the older couple at bridge. The spiral of conspiracy and exploitation continues, as the hosts decide to learn from their example.

  The fiction owes at least one detail to Dahl’s connection with the secret services. Bill Stephenson’s intelligence operation in America often seemed wayward and overindependent to its ostensible masters in Britain and sometimes came under close scrutiny. On one occasion, it is said, Churchill’s troubleshooter, Lord Beaverbrook, sent a man to Washington to find out exactly what Stephenson was up to, and Stephenson encouraged Dahl to lay a trap for him.59 Dahl had the investigator to lunch at his home in Georgetown, where he had set up a concealed microphone. As one drink followed another, Dahl
began to ask leading questions about Beaverbrook. The sleuth was satisfactorily disloyal, and the recording was sent to his employer, who as a result lost confidence in the eventual report. Some of Dahl’s former BSC colleagues are sniffy about the episode (“I thought it was a dirty thing to do against his own country—a terribly dirty thing to do to a man who was your own fellow, er.…”60). But it may have helped to maintain their freedom from outside interference.

  Dahl’s bugging story eventually appeared in The New Yorker. In 1953, it was included in the collection Someone Like You—the first book of his to be published by Alfred A. Knopf and the beginning of an association that would last for almost thirty years. Knopf was not the first publisher of Dahl’s adult books, although it might have been. In July 1943 its senior editor Arthur W. Wang read Dahl’s story of the outbreak of war in Dar es Salaam, “The Sword,” in The Atlantic Monthly and wrote congratulating him and asking if he had written anything longer.61 Dahl, who was staying with Alice Marsh in Falmouth, on the Massachusetts coast, sent him “Katina,” which had not yet appeared.62 Soon they met, but Wang said what all publishers used to say, that short stories don’t sell, except in magazines.63

  5

  In the Valley of the Dahls

  Decades later, Tessa Dahl was to call the Vale of Aylesbury the “Valley of the Dahls.” In 1945, long before the joke could have been made, the description was already apt. Sofie Dahl had moved from Kent to Grendon Underwood, a straggling village on a rise of land between Aylesbury and Bicester. Alfhild, now in her thirties, was in the next village with her Danish husband, Leslie Hansen. Else, since 1940 Mrs. John Logsdail, lived twenty miles down the road toward London, in Great Missenden. The twenty-five-year-old Asta, who had spent the war in the women’s branch of the RAF, was still unmarried.

  Sofie would soon move twice: first, briefly, to Grange Farm, Great Missenden, then to a village house in Amersham, nearby. Her children usually called her Mama, but her son often referred to her as “the mother,” as if there could be no other.1 For the next six years, where she went, he went. It was from the long, rather bleak scattering of cottages in Grendon Underwood that he wrote to the Marshes saying that he was living contentedly, surrounded by cattle and sheep and rustic characters with straw in their hair,2 but the way of life continued wherever they were. At Grange Farm, according to Dahl’s count, they kept a cow, eight dogs, seven ducks, one pair of ferrets and another of canaries, and eventually a parrot.3 There was a goat, too, in which he saw a strong resemblance to the pro-Roosevelt Senator Claude Pepper, which, Dahl said, gave him a thrill of uncertainty every day when he milked her.4

  He had decided not to go back to Shell but to try to earn his living as an author. It was very hard adjusting to being back in postwar England, away from the excitements and illusions of Washington, but he renewed some of his prewar hobbies, particularly greyhound racing, and settled into a rural existence.

  His enthusiasm for gambling brought him into regular contact with working-class people, for the first time since he had left active service with the RAF. Among them was a butcher named Claud Taylor, a man of his own age who worked in Old Amersham.5 Taylor helped Dahl to breed and train his own dogs, and they had a run of luck which made them unpopular among the local gypsy greyhound owners.6 Taylor also taught Roald to poach pheasant and tickle trout. Dahl made notes of the things he said, in an old cardboard-bound accounts book—jokes, poaching yarns, pieces of rural lore. He especially liked to hear about the ferocity of females in any species. (It was a lifelong preoccupation. In his seventies, he joked to a BBC interviewer, “There’s one group of spiders where the female is so fierce that the male has to weave a web around her and wrap her up and as it were handcuff her before he can mate her—which is wonderful, I think. You could apply that to some females of the human species.”7) He used what he learned from Taylor in a series of country stories which he hoped would make a novel, but eventually left as a loosely linked group called “Claud’s Dog”: tales about dog racing, rat catching, cow bulling, maggot farming, a corpse in a haystack.8 They are sour pieces: the only people in them who are vividly characterized are the unpleasant ones, and Dahl determinedly crushes any false literary idealism about the countryside. Much later, he sentimentalized those “sweet days many years ago” in which he lived “a pleasant leisurely life.” As he came to remember the time, what he wrote then was “nothing but short stories.… I worked on nothing else. I was totally preoccupied with the short story.”9 In reality, he made more than one attempt at a novel, and his mood was often one of intense gloom, anxiety about the state of the world, and preoccupation with his own lack of a clear sense of direction.

  These difficulties were in part no more (or less) than those experienced by many people in adjusting to peace and the impoverishment of postwar Britain. But Dahl was also still suffering from the effects of his accident, which in 1946 took him into the Military Hospital for Head Injuries at Wheatley, near Oxford: the latest in what was, for one reason and another, to be a lifetime of hospitalizations for his back problems and his damaged nose.10 In addition, he was facing a psychological struggle: that of being a writer and—for the time being, at least—nothing else. Among other things, this meant adapting to the fact that peacetime England was a place much more skeptical about literary talent than wartime Washington had been. Sensitive ex-RAF officers were plentiful in the Home Counties, and the fact that Dahl hobnobbed with famous Americans like Hemingway and Lillian Hellman when they were staying in London cut no ice with the Eton and Oxford types who held most of the literary power. Dahl was ignored, and often complained about the fact to his American friends, particularly to Martha Gellhorn.

  Gellhorn saw another source of complication in his return home. He was in his early thirties and, on the face of things, perfectly marriageable. But his domestic circumstances could seem deterring to women friends. She remembers his taking her home to Wistaria Cottage, in the High Street in Amersham, where she met his mother and what seemed like “a thousand sisters.” There was “a suffocating atmosphere of adoration of him … and I was treated with hatred by these women, because nobody could be good enough for our boy.” It was all “very boring and very heavy.” She thought it could not have been a good situation either to have grown up in or to have returned to.

  It was in these complicated psychological circumstances that Dahl made his first attempt at a novel: a pacifist fantasy about nuclear war.

  In the short stories he had written in Washington, the mood was already increasingly grim, closer to Wilfred Owen than to Rupert Brooke. “Someone Like You,” for example, is a conversation between two bomber pilots getting drunk in a bar. One has been through the whole war and has become obsessed with the arbitrariness of the fate he has been dealing out:

  I keep thinking during a raid, when we are running over the target, just as we are going to release our bombs, I keep thinking to myself, shall I just jink a little; shall I swerve a fraction to one side, then my bombs will fall on someone else. I keep thinking, whom shall I make them fall on; whom shall I kill tonight. It is all up to me.… It would just be a gentle pressure with the ball of my foot upon the rudder-bar; a pressure so slight that I would hardly know that I was doing it, and it would throw the bombs on to a different house and on to other people. It is all up to me.11

  “Someone Like You” supplied the title for a later book by Dahl, but was itself collected with most of his other war stories in his first book for adults, Over to You. Because of Arthur Wang’s doubts about short stories, Knopf had passed up the chance of publishing it,12 so Over to You went to the enterprising but shortlived Reynal and Hitchcock, who brought it out in 1946. In England, it was published soon afterward by Hamish Hamilton. Noël Coward noted in his diary that the stories “pierced the layers of my consciousness and stirred up the very deep feelings I had during the war and have since, almost deliberately, been in danger of losing.”13

  Few British critics were keen on the mystical elements in the b
ook—the moving mountains and Fin’s heavenly landing grounds. The no-nonsense Times Literary Supplement, for example, said that Dahl “is safe with men in the air or on the ground; he is less easy with mysteries.”14 But the TLS liked Dahl’s “combination of ease in the telling and of cumulative suspense.” In the States, The Saturday Review of Literature’s reviewer, Michael Straight, went further, seeing him as “an author of great promise.”15 Straight—a novelist and political writer of Dahl’s own age, whose Make This the Last War had appeared in 1943—defended the phantasmagoric aspects of some of the stories in Over to You, which he found true to the psychology of exhausted pilots. For this reason, he saw Dahl as having achieved a more powerful kind of realism than, say, H. E. Bates in his RAF fiction. Over to You offered something “more intense and conceived on a larger scale.”

  This was certainly true of one of Dahl’s next pieces, which nags away at the problem that agonizes the bomber pilot in “Someone Like You”: people’s interchangeability. The new story, “The Soldier,” involves a situation which was to become common in his writing: an obsessive man dominated by a stronger woman.

  In this case, the man has returned from the war full of fears of airplanes and imaginary gunfire, and suffering from what seems to be a neurological complaint which confuses his senses: he can’t always feel pain or tell hot from cold. He longs to return to the stability of childhood, to seaside holidays with his mother. He is treated by a doctor, but gets worse. Ultimately, he confuses his wife with another woman and is about to attack her with a knife. She disarms him by humoring him and then, choosing her moment, hitting him hard in the face.