Roald Dahl

by Jeremy Treglown

Dahl complicates the narrative by letting it take both sides. The dramatic tension—will the man kill his wife?—is counterbalanced by a psychological ambiguity intensified by her behavior. She has been acting unsympathetically, at least in his eyes. Now she pretends (or admits?) that she is not his wife at all: “I told you Edna’s gone out. I’m a friend of hers. My name is Mary.”

  The situation is Pinteresque, but “The Soldier” was written almost twenty years before Pinter’s The Homecoming. Dahl began it in 1947 and sold an early version to the BBC’s new high-cultural radio channel, the Third Programme, in the summer of the following year.16 This first draft, called “People Nowadays,” contains some extra clues about Dahl’s state of mind at the time. Admittedly, the version lacks the inner terrors he later developed in it. It is both more explicit and more sentimental, with an us-against-the-crazy-universe ending denied to “The Soldier.” The wife murmurs to her husband that the situation they are in cannot be real: what is wrong with everyone today? He can’t answer her, except by saying that they all seem to have gone crazy. But if in this draft of the story the madness may be the whole world’s, rather than just the soldier’s, his explanation for it is revealing: “It was the war talk that did it. He knew it was the war talk, and the talk of new weapons and the talk of another war coming soon for certain.”

  Given both Stalin’s ruthless expansionism since 1944 and the dawning public realization of the implications of Hiroshima, many people had such fears and assumed that the enemy would be a nuclear-armed Soviet Union. One of those with whom Dahl discussed the possibility was his friend Dennis Pearl, who whenever he was on leave would come to stay at Wistaria Cottage. Pearl had spent most of the war in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, after being captured at Singapore, but decided to stay in the army after his release and was now based in the Middle East in the 3rd Infantry Division, preparing to counter an anticipated Russian advance into what is now Iran. At the time, Pearl says, “it didn’t seem to many of us that peace had really broken out.” Dahl’s frequent letters to Charles Marsh are consumed by such anxieties, and by his irritation at what he saw as Marsh’s new political complacency. Marsh took Henry Wallace’s side, deploring the anti-Communist mood in the United States. Dahl replied that it was not Communism he was frightened of but war. If Marsh went on kissing his beloved Russians, he said, they would sooner or later bite off his tongue.17 He told Marsh that expert opinion in London predicted a new war by the spring of 1950.18 It was “the saddest goddamn thought, the saddest craziest thought that it is possible to think.”19 Throughout the spring and summer of 1946—two years before the Soviet Union blockaded Berlin and took over Czechoslovakia, three years before it exploded an atom bomb, four years before the war in Korea—he thought and wrote about little else.

  The main fictional product of his anxieties, a novel called Sometime Never, was published in the United States in 1948 by Scribner’s, and in England a year later by Collins (which had also published The Gremlins). It flopped and was scarcely heard of again. Even in Dahl’s commercially successful last years, when practically everything he had ever written was reissued, recycled, or simply reshuffled into a “new” collection under a different title, he never tried to revive it. In 1979, My Uncle Oswald was promoted as Dahl’s first novel—a mistake which Auberon Waugh was among the few critics to notice. (Peace-loving Holland is the only country where Sometime Never has been reissued: the 1982 Dutch translation has remained in print ever since.) Yet it was the first novel about nuclear war to appear in the United States after Hiroshima. For that reason alone, it deserves a close look.

  There had been several prewar fantasy-fictions on the subject. According to Paul Brians, in his expert and readable survey of them,20 they go back almost as far as the discovery of radiation—Robert Cromie’s The Crack of Doom appeared in 1895, almost twenty years before H. G. Wells’s better-known The World Set Free. But during the Second World War, the topic had been banned. Some brave editors of science-fiction magazines, particularly John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding, ignored the censorship, but it was thorough, and in U.S.-occupied Japan continued well after the war had ended. There, despite what many people had good reason to know for themselves, fictional references to the effects of radiation were officially deleted, under the pretense that they were untrue.21

  Such deceptions were harder to practice in the West, particularly once censorship had been lifted. Dahl himself didn’t have far to look for reliable information on the subject. In November 1945, The Atlantic Monthly published a whimsical short story by him called “Smoked Cheese.” (It seems to have been intended for children. Thirty-five years later, in The Twits, he reused the main element of the plot, in which a man plagued with mice disorientates them by gluing his furniture to the ceiling.) The same issue of the magazine carried stories by Eudora Welty and Frederic Prokosch, and a piece by Raymond Chandler about writers in Hollywood. But even in this company Dahl was unlikely to have missed an article on the atomic bomb by Albert Einstein. “As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great powers,” Einstein wrote, “war is inevitable.” The only hope lay in a form of world government.

  These ideas found their way into Dahl’s novel. It is evident both from his letters at the time and from the book’s preliminaries how ambitious and how serious he felt about it. (He even opens with an epigraph from Isocrates—“The age in which we live should be distinguished by some glorious enterprise, that those who have been so long oppressed may, in some period of their lives, know what it is to be happy.… We stand in need of some more durable plan which will forever put an end to our hostilities and unite us by the lasting ties of mutual affection and fidelity.”) In his foreword, Dahl writes confessionally, in the spirit of the pilot in “Someone Like You,” about having been a licensed murderer, and about the likely destruction of all civilization. So it comes as a shock when he immediately slips back into a newly extended but not much less juvenile version of The Gremlins. The book begins where the earlier one did, in the Battle of Britain, but continues to the end of human civilization.

  Dahl may, as will become clear, have had Tolkien in mind in writing the story (he liked The Hobbit). There are echoes, too, of Lewis Carroll’s mixture of the irrational and the commonsensical. But these elements are combined with the realism of his tougher war stories. The book can’t decide whether it is for adults or for children, and the resulting clashes of tone are bizarre. So, for example, one paragraph about the Blitz begins: “You can remember how it was, how the scream seemed to come from high up, directly overhead, a female scream, a thin high wailing scream.” The next drops into childish talk: “And I happen to know that many of the people behaved in the funniest ways when the siren woke them, especially if they were alone.”

  This unsureness of style reflects other confusions. Dahl wrote the book at speed during the spring and summer of 1946—at the height, that is, of the war-crimes trials at Nuremberg. Yet plentiful revelations about Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust did not discourage him from satirizing “a little pawnbroker in Hounsditch called Meatbein who, when the wailing started, would rush downstairs to the large safe in which he kept his money, open it and wriggle inside on to the lowest shelf where he lay like a hibernating hedgehog until the all-clear had gone.”22 Elsewhere, the story delights in its Gremlin dictator, “The Leader,” as if Hitler and Mussolini had never existed.

  The Leader of the Gremlins is a prototype of Mr. Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Between the imagined Third World War and the all-destructive Fourth, he rules whimsically over an underground kingdom, alternately bullying his subjects and appeasing them with sweet fruits called snozzberries. And the book anticipates other aspects of Dahl’s later stories—their cheerful misogyny (“the female of any type is always more scheming cunning jealous and relentless than the male”23), their cartoon-strip satire—for example, at the expense of the Political-Gremlins (who hang upside down, and out of whose mouths comes hot air)—and their anal h
umor (the best way for Gremlins to short-circuit the sparking plugs of Spitfires is to sit on them: “It is a delightful sensation anyway”24). All this seems messy beside an otherwise grim attempt to imagine both a global nuclear war and a new form of world order.

  The book’s politics are alarmingly straightforward. Part Two imagines a world dominated by Communism, a system Dahl describes as one in which people “too brainless even to amass coin-collections for themselves preach … that all coins should be shared by all people.” This free-market theme prompts a lugubrious passage imagining the destruction of London in World War III, where what Dahl seizes on is the fate of Regent Street: Austin Reed, the Kodak shop, Hamley’s, Liberty’s, “everything was gone, all the fine shops.… They were all gone now.” Then there is talk of an alliance between China and India, the latter a country of “crafty sunburnt men” who “are copying and improving upon the weapons of other nations.” While human self-destruction draws near, developments are keenly watched by the Leader, who has devised his own internationalist, libertarian, anti-industrial dictatorship, a kind of proto-Green Fascism whose most appealing regulations (handed down to the men, whose responsibility it is to pass them on to the women and children) are that everyone may eat the fruit of any snozzberry tree, and that “no one shall covet his own wife to the point where he becomes a bore.”25 But at the book’s J. M. Barrie-ish end, the Gremlins’ dream cannot be realized. They themselves, we are reminded, are purely fictional creatures, dependent for their existence on the imaginations of humans—who have now become extinct. “We haven’t really existed very much, have we? Just a little bit, here and there and then only … how shall I put it … only in a rather imaginative sort of way.” Only insects are left to begin the process of life over again.

  There are some enjoyable moments in all this, and some memorably grim ones, and given much more thought and a skillful editor, a popular allegory might conceivably have been made out of it (especially since this was the period of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four).26 As it stands, though, apart from its place in the history of war fiction, the book’s main interest is in its revelation of Dahl’s volatile mood at the time. This is particularly true of the character of Peternip, a former RAF pilot, now a music critic, whose thoughts are fatalistic and “despairing and who “ever since World War II had walked with an irregular, short-long … limping gait which reminded one somehow of the swing of a maladjusted pendulum.”27 Dahl himself was slightly lame since his accident, and his own gloom was lifted by his enthusiasm for classical music and modern painting, as well as for writing.

  The period immediately after the war was difficult for many authors, Dahl among them. Paper shortages led to long delays in book publication—Sometime Never did not appear in England until 1949. Magazine editors seemed less receptive in peacetime than in war. As a result, Dahl sometimes became uncertain not only about the best direction for his writing but about whether he should be writing at all.

  Uncertainty was not the impression he gave to people with whom he dealt professionally over his stories. In the summer of 1946, he took time off from Sometime Never to write about the recent accidental discovery of a Roman treasure hoard at Mildenhall, in Suffolk. The piece was bought by The Saturday Evening Post, which had published “Shot Down over Libya,” and whose editor, Stuart Rose, had recently visited the Dahls at Grange Farm, near Great Missenden. Rose’s subeditors wanted to cut the article, and Dahl fired off a long letter, enraged that they thought they could write better than he did, insisting that none of his recent work had been shortened and lamenting the fate of other, tenderer authors if their efforts were so abused.28 In what was to become the signature tune of such complaints, Dahl opened with a bribe and closed with a moral outburst. He said that after Rose’s visit, he had found a set of old wineglasses and bought them for him: they had been waiting for his return. But he ended by warning that a writer at the outset of his career could be crushed by such editorial ruthlessness—particularly if the only way he could feed himself was to submit to what was asked. Dahl added that such behavior on an editor’s part was “a great crime … and I know that you, for one, would not wish to be accused of it.”

  With the BBC, he was more ingratiating, partly because the relationship was new. He was encouraged to try the medium by a friend of Alfhild’s, Archie Gordon, an aristocratic writer and broadcaster who had often stayed at Oakwood before the war. Dahl’s first approach, in the summer of 1948, was to send in a letter about a radio talk he had heard on the subject of dog racing. He was invited to turn the reply into a talk of his own, which he promptly did, modestly pleading that he would be more than grateful for any suggestions about changes and taking the opportunity to offer some of his stories.29 With the help of a recommendation from Gordon, they were looked at by the South African poet Roy Campbell, who was on the BBC’s staff. He immediately accepted “People Nowadays” (Dahl’s first draft of “The Soldier”), while passing two others to a colleague in the more popular Home Service, H. N. Bentinck:30 “A Picture for Drioli” (later called “Skin”) and “The Menace” (later, “Collector’s Item” and finally titled “Man from the South”). Bentinck said that both were too long for his purposes, but he would take the second if it was shortened, which he thought would anyway improve it—a suggestion Dahl meekly accepted.31

  Things did not go on so smoothly. Bentinck didn’t like Dahl’s next submission, “The Sound Machine,” and rejected it.32 Dahl in his turn complained that the BBC’s reader of “People Nowadays” had talked like an adult addressing a child, which—although this is in fact often Dahl’s own tone, both in that story and elsewhere—he didn’t think appropriate.33 He now tried two more stories on Roy Campbell, but unsuccessfully.34

  Dahl’s side of the correspondence became increasingly irritable, and he was soon sardonically comparing “the discriminating literary gentlemen of the Third Programme” with their richer and more full-blooded counterparts on American magazines. In 1951, he visited Germany with Charles Marsh and told Archie Gordon that he had dreamed glorious dreams in Hitler’s former retreat at Berchtesgaden: absurd fantasies, such as selling a story to the BBC.35

  If he was annoyed with the BBC, he was sometimes annoyed with himself, too—for example, about his article on “Love” for the Ladies’ Home Journal, which earned him a more than useful $2,500 (in today’s terms, about $13,000), but which he now thought “bullshit.”36 Writing well was hard to do, and the rejections made it harder.37 In May 1949, Scribner’s, which had published Sometime Never, turned down the idea of a new book of his short stories.38 Still, there were some successes. A compromise had been reached over the piece about the Mildenhall treasure. (It appeared under the straight-to-the-nub title “He Plowed Up $l,000,000.”39) “Man from the South,” the psychological thriller about a sinister bet for a young man’s little finger with which he had entertained Annabella when they first met, earned him $2,250 from another American magazine, Collier’s, before he sold it to the BBC. And Dahl was right to think that not all the refusals were deserved. The story which became “Skin” is an eerie satire on the picture-dealing world, where—in a metaphor which the story enacts with chilling literalness—people would take the hide off someone’s back to get a painting they valued. Both this and “Man from the South” owe something to The Merchant of Venice. They contrast business contracts with humaner dealings; material possessions (a Cadillac, a picture by Soutine) with flesh and blood. “Man from the South” ends, like Shakespeare’s play, with a surprise reversal and the humiliation of the Shylock figure by a woman. “Skin” is set in war-devastated Paris in 1946. A starving old man is forced to sell a picture of his wife by Soutine to a ruthless dealer. In doing so, he is literally selling his own skin: thirty years earlier, the artist had tattooed the portrait on his back. It is left to the reader to guess whether or not he survives.

  Postwar Europe, as “Skin” suggests, was a continent of ruins and, in some areas, starvation. Dahl was affected not only by the
hard personal adjustment between millionaire society in Washington and the relative privations of postwar Buckinghamshire but by the larger plight which he saw around him, and about which he read in the papers. Britain fared better than some countries, and rural people there less badly than Londoners, but the winter of 1946–47 had been brutally severe and was followed by an economic crisis worsened by the fact that the first of Britain’s repayments on its war debt to the United States was already due. Dahl’s apocalyptic mood extended to domestic politics, as well as the Cold War, and he blamed much of the dereliction on Attlee’s Labour government: “I wish them dead,” he wrote to Charles Marsh. Although he was “nearly a Socialist now,” he said he would gladly see the whole cabinet of incapable, greedy, vengeful, joyless, arrogant, physically unattractive, and morally minuscule men dead.40

  Marsh had various reasons for being concerned about the national and international situation which Dahl described to him. He was genuinely philanthropic and cared even more than most Americans that, having helped to win the war in Europe, they shouldn’t lose the peace. He wanted to help his young protégé by giving him work to do. And he saw opportunities for himself, both as a businessman and as a collector.

  In 1949, he formed a charitable trust, the Public Welfare Foundation. It still exists, spending millions of dollars a year on education, social welfare, medicine, and emergency relief for poor countries. The beginnings were more modest. As early as 1945, Marsh arranged with Dahl to set up a project in Limehouse, East London. The parish rector was asked to select two hundred needy families, each of which would be allowed up to $200 per month for a period of six months.41 The scheme was quickly extended to nearby Rotherhithe, and because what was required couldn’t always be bought easily in Britain, the foundation also arranged to send vitamin pills and apples from Marsh’s farm in Rappahannock County, Virginia.