Roald Dahl

by Jeremy Treglown

  For some time, Dahl worked hard on the project, but he was torn between zeal and cynicism. He wrote to Violet Attlee, the Prime Minister’s wife, publicizing the foundation’s activities, but made jokes about her when she replied, thanking him.42 Similarly, he congratulated Marsh on his gifts, which, he said, both fed people and gave them enjoyment; but he scorned Marsh’s offer of vitamins. The poor “do not give a fuck for vitamins and do not understand them,” he told Marsh—they wouldn’t eat them even if they were told they were aphrodisiacs.43

  He may have been right about that, but he also may have been less wholeheartedly sympathetic to the poor of East London than his more impassioned letters made him seem. Much of the population there was Jewish, and in August 1947, Dahl sent Marsh a copy of an answer he pretended he had given to Sydney Rothman, treasurer of the Stepney Jewish Girls’ (B’nai B’rith) Club and Settlement, who had asked for help.44 The letter was a joke, in the style of his correspondence with Marsh about Lord Halifax and “sex-manhood.” Almost certainly, it was meant for no one’s eyes except Marsh’s. But it was typical of Dahl’s increasingly contradictory character that his most generous, constructive impulses were accompanied by something with a less pleasant taste. The reply Dahl pretended he had sent to the Settlement said that since he knew that Jews never asked for money, he assumed the treasurer’s request to have been a mistake; but in case it might be repeated, he wanted to warn Rothman that Charles Marsh was a committed pro-Arabist, prone to “sudden fits of violence during which all the Jews in the neighbourhood tremble and fear for their lives.” Marsh had once bitten off the finger of a Jewish waiter, Dahl said, and when a Jewish woman tried to seduce him, he put itching powder in her face cream and pulled out her fingernails so that she couldn’t scratch. Previously, the “East Side Club for unmarried Yiddish mothers” in New York had already asked Marsh for money, but the philanthropist’s response was to buy up their premises, throw out the women, and turn the place over to Arab sailors as a hostel. Dahl ended by listing the names of those to whom copies of his letter had supposedly been sent: joke Jewish names such as Miss Alma Finckle, the Rev. Rubin Ruderman, and so on.

  The letter was a private amusement between friends and arguably belongs to that realm of friendship which Martin Amis, with Philip Larkin in mind, has temptingly called “the willing suspension of accountability.” But whether or not consenting adults should be held answerable for their private jokes, something is revealed in them, and there is no question that while Dahl had several Jewish friends, his anti-Semitic jokes were of a piece with an underlying dislike of Jews, considered generally, and of Zionists in particular. Around the time of this letter—1946–47—Dahl lamented to Marsh that the United States should have been giving Britain more support in Palestine. He approvingly saw the difficult last years of the mandate, before the founding of the state of Israel, as a war which the British (among them, Dennis Pearl) were fighting on the Arabs’ side.45

  His humanitarian concerns were more steadily in evidence closer to home. Charles and Claudia Marsh paid several visits to Buckinghamshire, bringing lavish presents for all the family and involving themselves in various small local agricultural projects of Dahl’s devising. Marsh could never resist a business opportunity. Even as he crossed the Atlantic, he would be negotiating with the ship’s purser to buy up his surplus supplies—especially of bourbon—at the end of the voyage. Dahl began trying to interest Marsh in Norway, where he saw scope for a mutually advantageous timber project which could supply his patron’s businesses with badly needed paper, while giving employment to Dahl and Norwegian members of his family—among them, his enterprising cousin Finn, who had spent the war in the Resistance, shipping refugees across the North Sea to Britain.

  There were other schemes. In May 1946 Dahl had written to Marsh in apocalyptic terms about the starvation in Continental Europe. Separate tours of inspection were arranged over a period of several years. Piled into a limousine, Dahl, the Marshes, and assorted relations would race through the ravaged countryside, stopping occasionally so that Charles could send one of his party to find the local mayor and ask what was needed.46 It was on one of these philanthropic holidays, in 1951, that they went to Germany and visited Berchtesgaden, where, Dahl wrote, he sat in Hitler’s mountaintop redoubt and indulged in fantasies of fame and triumph.47

  Some years earlier, back in America, Marsh had dreamed a more realizable kind of dream. In the summer of 1946, he dictated a letter to Dahl from a car which was traveling, he boasted, at seventy miles per hour on the road from Monterey, California, to Laredo, Texas. He was interested in seeing what kind of trade could be done with Cyprus. He knew that the island was hungry, but it had a surplus of ancient vases. “I believe these folks … will take a pick and shovel and dig up a few more.… So if we can feed the folks over there with what we can sell over here, we might start something, particularly as there are no tariff charges on antiques coming into this country.”48

  Marsh had already benefited from Dahl’s instinct as a collector by commissioning him to find British antiques for him: a chess set used in Victorian times at Simpson’s, the old eating house in the Strand; eighteenth-century tables and chairs bought from a dealer in Thame.49 Dahl also acted for his patron in purchases of paintings, and within five or six years built up a promising part-time career as a dealer in the bullish market for European art, acting on behalf of both Marsh and other wealthy friends. He had renewed his friendship with Matthew Smith, and spent many weekends in Paris with him, cruising the galleries by day and the red-light districts by night. Dahl found it difficult to get Smith to part with any of his own work,50 but by 1950 had persuaded him to move to a studio in Amersham. While Augustus John’s daughter Poppet was decorating the place, Dahl stored fifty-four of his paintings in a spare bedroom at home. Charles Marsh paid a visit that August, and sent a note to Claudia, asking her to write a memo about an arrangement through which he planned to buy a large number of the pictures without having to go through Smith’s gallery, Tooth’s. “It is all right for Smith to know what has been taken,” Marsh wrote, “but emphasize no sale until after his death.” Whatever Smith was told, it was a confusing business: he was old and in some ways timid, and although he complained about Tooth (because of the dealer’s alleged rapacity, Smith and Dahl called him “Dog’s Tooth”), and particularly about his failure to promote him in the United States, he stuck to the letter of their agreements. At one point he became convinced that Dahl had stolen one of his canvases. Dahl said he had simply taken it to have it framed, but the quarrel badly upset them both.51

  In the autumn of 1950, Dahl, the Marshes, and their friends Ivar Bryce and Ralph Ingersoll were involved together in various other transactions, one of them over a Rouault which Dahl priced at $6,000.52 He also negotiated on Marsh’s behalf for a Vuillard.53 The following year, Dahl was enlisted to persuade Jacob Epstein (whom he had met through Matthew Smith) to sculpt Marsh. He also at some point made a trip to Switzerland, where he bought another Rouault—a cartoon of President Wilson—and a painting of a nude boy by Redon. These two cost him £190. When he took the Rouault out of its frame to transport it home, he found a self-portrait by the artist on the back.54

  There was a steady improvement in his fortunes during these years, a reward partly for sheer hard work and partly just for his friendship with Marsh, kept up in frequent letters but also on their working holidays together. Dahl not only accompanied his patron on his frequent trips to Europe but made several visits to Jamaica, where Marsh owned a resort at Ochos Rios, near Kingston, and where Ivar Bryce, Ian Fleming, Noël Coward, and other friends had houses. Charles and Roald were still like teenagers together, alternating between intense, sometimes maudlin discussions on the state of the world and schoolboy jokes which ran on for years. There was what they called the “Joy Through Length Project” and its parallel investigation into bowleggedness in women. There was a plot to seduce a royal lady-in-waiting as a means of persuading the Queen to advertise
Pond’s face cream. They fantasized that a famous Russian pianist was a spy, passing coded messages through his playing; and that Interpol was conducting an investigation into Marsh’s private life. (One piece of evidence was a story published in the Evening Standard about a feminist conference, where one of the speakers was “Miss Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Marsh, of Chelsea, S.W.—known in the pre-1914 campaign as the ‘beauty’ of the suffragette movement.”)55 On a trip to France with Dahl and Matthew Smith, Marsh handed wine waiters his personal corkscrew, which was shaped like a penis. When the cork was drawn, Marsh would insist that the waiter and everyone else sniff it.56 It was in Paris, too, that Dahl and his brother-in-law Leslie Hansen put cards in the windows of bistros on the Left Bank announcing that a wealthy American businessman needed a secretary to go with him to the United States. Applicants were directed to the Hôtel Meurice, in the rue de Rivoli, which had to close its doors against the impoverished French girls who formed a queue around the block.

  Meanwhile, Marsh was planning more substantial ways of helping his protégé financially. He set up a trust in Dahl’s name, with investments in the Marsh oil companies worth $25,000.57 In the summer of 1950, Dahl organized a business trip to Scandinavia, where they visited Oslo, Stockholm, and Helsinki. During it, the deal first mooted by Dahl four years earlier was finally agreed on, and Marsh’s Public Welfare Foundation put $10,000 into a Dahl-family forestry operation in Norway. Marsh made it clear that he didn’t want any of the money back.58 In return, Dahl was able to scratch his patron’s back, not only by acting as an agent for his art collection, but by introducing him as an investor in various business projects, including the purchase of Universal Newsreel by another OSS acquaintance, a lawyer and entrepreneur named Ernest Cuneo.

  He was also now beginning to do well on his own account, as a writer. In April 1948, he had written that he was worried that he “was going through a non-money-making period.”59 Almost immediately, things had begun to look up. There were the deals with Collier’s and the BBC, and his rueful acceptance of the Ladies’ Home Journal commission. Now, in May 1949, he sold for the first time a story to The New Yorker. This was not “Taste,” as Dahl later remembered, but “The Sound Machine,” another fantasy about obsession: a man’s belief that he can hear noises made by plants, and his anxiety over their suffering. The story had been rejected by the BBC—evidence that he was better appreciated in the United States than at home.

  More confirmation of that followed. Collier’s bought “Poison,” the story about an imaginary snake. In August 1951, it was the turn of “Taste” to be sold to The New Yorker. The next month Dahl had dinner with Lillian Hellman, who was staying at Claridge’s. She told him tearfully about the plight of her lover, the mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, imprisoned as a result of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious purge on “un-American activities.” Dahl’s main concern was that this would turn the socialist Hellman “more and more against her own country.”60

  It was a country about which, for the moment, he didn’t want to hear anything bad. He had applied for, and had just been given, a permanent American visa. His work was doing well there, whereas in Britain its only steady-seeming patron, the BBC, had lost interest. In New York he felt that he could move among literary people on equal terms.61 The muddy charms of Buckinghamshire had temporarily faded. He wanted to get back to sophistication and wealth.

  Perhaps, too, even Dahl sensed what Martha Gellhorn had seen, that life with his mother, and so close to his sisters, was not entirely good for a bachelor. But if he was escaping one family, he immediately moved back in with another. The Marshes had room for him in their New York house. At present, they were in Europe, and he asked if he might join them on the return voyage. The sooner the better, he said. “Any boat any date is all right with me.”62

  6

  Yakety Parties

  Dashiell Hammett was in jail from July to December 1951. Among the women who missed him was Patricia Neal, an ambitious young actress whose first Broadway role had been in Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest, in 1946. That was how Hammett had met her.1 He took to turning up daily at the rehearsals, usually drunk. She was twenty: tall, with unspoiled, country-girl good looks that would have been bland but for her high, wide cheekbones—so wide that New Yorker critic Brendan Gill said later, “The camera can sort of pan across a face of that kind.”2 Hammett couldn’t disguise how attractive he found her, but with Lillian Hellman he did his best to. “Pat’s an awfully pretty girl,” he told her, “if you don’t look at her hands and feet and can ignore that incredible carriage. She’s very much the earnest future star at the moment and thus not too entirely fascinating if you don’t think her career the most important thing in the world.”3

  This was written from Hollywood, where Neal had been hired by Warner Brothers after her Broadway success. Hammett took her out to dinner a lot there and heard what he didn’t already know of the story of her life. She was much talked about, not least because she had begun a long affair with Gary Cooper, with whom she co-starred in King Vidor’s film version of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (best remembered for a scene in which Neal watches longingly while Cooper drives a pneumatic drill into a rock). It was the second film she made. The first was John Loves Mary, with Ronald Reagan and Jack Carson.

  She worked with Reagan several times, including on The Hasty Heart, which was shot in England. Reagan found postwar conditions there so grim, even at the Savoy, that he had his steaks flown in from New York—a story which encapsulates something not only about Hollywood but about Anglo-American differences in general. After she had lived in England for the better part of twenty-five years, Patricia Neal still wrote of her days at Elstree in the terms of someone who had spent a period as a voluntary entertainer in a Third World refugee camp.4 Her Warner Brothers salary was set on a scale rising from $1,250 to $3,750 per week: in England at the time, that was enough to live on for twelve months.

  Patsy Neal, as she was christened, liked what money could buy. Her autobiography, As I Am (1988), is among other things a catalogue of fur coats and necklaces, and she talks frankly of how in her earliest days she got around her father for presents. He was a manager for the Southern Coal and Coke Company in Packard, Kentucky, the son of a tobacco plantation owner, and a member of the fifth generation of his family to live in the Old South. Her mother was the daughter of the town doctor, German by origin. They were unsophisticated people, but comfortably off: a telephone, plenty of toys, ready cash from Pappy, and holidays on his Virginia farm. In 1929, when she was three, the family moved to a bigger town, Knoxville, Tennessee. It was at school there that her theatrical ambitions were first encouraged. She went on to Northwestern University and was a big success as a student but, after her father’s early death, left to pursue her ambitions in New York. There she met Eugene O’Neill, the first of several famous men who would fall for her, most of them married and ranging from middle-aged to elderly. Before she was twenty-one, she had been taken to lunch by Richard Rodgers, pursued by David O. Selznick, had turned down one Broadway role in favor of another, and had made the cover of Life.

  The affair with Gary Cooper began in 1947. By 1950, his wife, “Rocky,” had found out and joined battle. (On one occasion, Neal received a telegram: I HAVE HAD JUST ABOUT ENOUGH OF YOU. YOU HAD BETTER STOP NOW OR YOU WILL BE SORRY. MRS. GARY COOPER.5) Eventually, it was Rocky who won, but not before her husband had made Pat pregnant and persuaded her to have an abortion, letting her know about the arrangements with the memorable words “Our appointment is tomorrow afternoon.”6

  It was a wretched time. Neal longed for a child. The gossip columnists called her the woman who was breaking up the Coopers’ marriage, which she only wished she could manage to do. Warner Brothers did not renew her contract, and when she moved to Fox, they lent her out to other film companies. Concentrating once again on her stage career, she appeared in 1951 in T. S. Eliot’s new play, The Cocktail Party, which Cooper called “the Yakety Party.” All
she remembers about it is that she was the character (Celia) who has “long, mystical speeches” and “ends up crucified on an anthill in Africa.”7 Then Cooper developed an ulcer. His mother told Neal that she was to blame. Guilty and scared, Neal called him to say that it was all over. He didn’t ring back.

  This was around the time of Dashiell Hammett’s imprisonment and of Dahl’s dinner in London with Lillian Hellman. Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, about two teachers suspected of being lesbian lovers, was about to be revived. Neal successfully auditioned. Shortly before rehearsals began, Hellman asked her to a dinner party. One of the guests was Roald Dahl, who had just moved to New York.

  Dahl was thirty-five, and although most of his friends were rich and successful, by their standards he himself was neither. In New York, he lived at the Marshes’ empty house on East Ninety-second Street, which they lent him rent-free in exchange for his keeping an eye on the installation of a new phone system. He wrote all day. Stung by The New Yorker’s initial rejection of the art-dealing story, “Skin,” he dashed off another satire on the cultural marketplace, this time specifically literary—about a man who uses an early form of computer to generate the kind of fiction which would satisfy what Dahl saw as the formulaic demands of commercial editors. “The Automatic Grammatisator,” a high-tech version of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” was rather crudely intended to make fun of The New Yorker, and when they rejected it, too, Dahl thought that it was because they were “very peeved.”8 By then he had rewritten “Skin” and persuaded the magazine to take it, but they didn’t like his H. E. Batesian stories of Buckinghamshire life, “The Ratcatcher” and “Rummins,” and sent back both, along with four other pieces, in the course of 1952. Among these was another fiction about painting, called “Nunc Dimittis,” and “Lamb to the Slaughter,” a comic crime thriller in miniature which was to become one of his best-known stories and whose plot must be among the first ever to depend on a domestic freezer. According to Patricia Neal, the idea was given to Dahl by Ian Fleming one night over dinner.9 A woman kills her unfaithful husband by hitting him on the head with a frozen leg of lamb, which she then cooks and serves for supper to the police, made hungry by their unsuccessful search for the murder weapon. Dahl had confirmed the details with the help of the Marshes’ cook, Mary. “He spent all one morning talking to her about techniques of freezing,” Marsh’s daughter recalls. “Everyone thought he had gone mad.”