Roald Dahl

by Jeremy Treglown

  These rejections apart, even the success of “Taste” was diminished in Dahl’s eyes by the fact that the story had been turned down previously by the BBC.10 In it, a wine buff bets his daughter’s hand in marriage that a dinner guest can’t precisely identify what he is drinking. Dahl had researched the story thoroughly, reading up on clarets in André Simon’s A Wine Primer and calling at the author’s home in Carlisle Place to ask him to check the details.11 Despite all this, one of the BBC’s readers, the novelist P. H. Newby, reported that while he found it “fun,” it was “completely bogus. The dilemma is unreal.”12 Not only the dilemma, one may think, but the characters themselves, although the story includes a convincing dissection of the host, Mike, an arriviste who

  knew that he was not really much more than a bookmaker—an unctuous, infinitely respectable, secretly unscrupulous bookmaker—and he knew that his friends knew it, too. So he was seeking now to become a man of culture, to cultivate a literary and aesthetic taste, to collect paintings, music, books, and all the rest of it. His little sermon about Rhine wine and Moselle was a part of this thing, this culture that he sought.13

  Whether Dahl was attacking the social world around him in this story, or in some way himself, there is no question about the predominant mood. It is envy. He was too competitive not to want to succeed in New York, but he hated many of the people he met there. Not for the first or last time, he longed to beat the system, but he knew that in order to do so, he had to be accepted by it: an acceptance he didn’t always easily win, and for which—as in Groucho Marx’s joke about club membership—he despised himself when he did.

  Nothing he wrote at this time shows any affection for its characters, whom he angrily exploits as agents in plots of trickery and table-turning, competitiveness, greed, and revenge. As in a cartoon strip or a play by Ben Jonson, the mixture of exaggeration and detachment is part of the point. Readers can see their own worst motives acted out, while being spared the kind of psychological penetration that might otherwise call up conflicting sympathies and difficult judgments. Whatever else they have in common, the adult stories which Dahl wrote during these years are almost all about manipulation: the characters’ of each other and the author’s of his reader. Mike Schofield, in “Taste,” sets up a drama and a test—this is his idea of what makes a party go. It sometimes seemed to be Dahl’s, too, as many of those who have been in the same room as him recall. “Razzing people up,” he called it, according to one admirer, who added that Dahl “had the mind of a slightly naughty eleven-year-old genius.”14 He was bored by small talk and had to endure quite a lot of it in the social world to which his behavior paradoxically guaranteed him entrée.

  This was before the white-wine-or-Perrier era. Sherry was the weakest drink on offer in New York society, and most people preferred hard liquor—especially bourbon old-fashioneds: a little sugar, a few drops of grenadine, a lot of bourbon, orange, and a cherry. Everyone, Dahl among them, smoked all the time, including at the dinner table. As in wartime Washington, a rude guest was another desirable stimulant. It was a world to which detraction was as much part of the lifeblood as admiration, and people’s gossip, at its best, had a derisive exuberance of which you can still sometimes hear echoes. “The most conceited man who ever lived in our time in New York City,” Brendan Gill unhesitatingly pronounces of one of Dahl’s friends, after all these years. “Vain to the point where it was a kind of natural wonder. You could sit there and listen to him praise himself as you might go to see the Niagara Falls fall. He was full of grace, there was no impediment between him and this narcissism.”15

  Scorn was an increasingly powerful part of Dahl’s own social armory. Another weapon was to shock. The habit stuck all through his life. When he was quite an old man, a woman friend sat him next to her at an official dinner where her husband was the host. Dahl started to talk loudly about circumcision. Enjoying her embarrassment, he explained to a stranger sitting nearby, “Angela was just saying she wonders whether you’re circumcised.”16 A different gambit was simply to ignore people. At her party before rehearsals of The Children’s Hour began, Lillian Hellman placed Dahl beside Patricia Neal. She was beautiful and famous. She was also young—ten years his junior—and Dahl hadn’t previously been attracted to many younger women. Perhaps this is why he said nothing to her and spent the whole evening talking across the table to Leonard Bernstein. But soon afterward he asked her out, to a restaurant where he “knew the owner, who was John Huston’s father-in-law,” and where he talked to her impressively about “paintings and antique furniture and the joys of the English countryside.”17 He seemed to be interested in everything and acquainted with everyone.

  In the famous-friends stakes, of course, they were well matched. If Dahl boasted (exaggeratedly, according to Martha Gellhorn) of knowing Hemingway very well, Neal had recently been taken to stay with Hemingway in Cuba by his friend Gary Cooper. Dahl was extremely close to the film star Annabella; Neal was about to co-star with Annabella’s ex-husband, Tyrone Power, in Diplomatic Courier. She had also, for that matter, appeared with Jack Carson and John Wayne. But then Dahl’s friend Ivar Bryce had recently married Josephine Hartford, who owned the A&P chain of grocery stores, and his other chums included David Ogilvy, now an advertising mogul, and Bunny and Gena Phillips, “who had connections with the Russian royal family and the Queen of England.”18

  A little later, Dahl was to make a new best friend in New York who had no grand connections. An arriviste in the most literal sense, Colin Fox had turned up by accident in the Bahamas on a yacht which he had sailed single-handed from England (a rare feat in those days), having, according to his own account, made and lost a fortune in smuggling at the end of the war.19 A former merchant seaman, he sometimes claimed to have been brought up in a children’s home in Worthing, having been abandoned there by an upper-class Irish mother.20 Now a successful model, he repaid the affection of his succession of intimate friends with adulation or disdain, or both. Dahl and he competed at running down their mutual acquaintances: this one a simpering jerk, that one a show-business Jew, the women all gushing sycophants. Fox still mimics their voices: “Bobo and Woofy and Valerian, hello!” But he longed, he says, “to be like the people in books—to know algebra,” and he frankly idolized the young Dahl, who in turn was fascinated by Fox’s background and personality, and saw in him “tremendous things.” With Fox, Dahl could give full rein to his complexly divided personality. For example, he boasted to him about his work for the Public Welfare Foundation, but was derisive of such efforts by others, ridiculing the philanthropic Rhode Island senator Claiborne Pell—whom Fox had met and liked—as “a prick who gave out food parcels to the reindeer keepers in Finland.”

  Understandably enough, not everyone thought either Dahl or his address book an unmixed social asset, and some of Patricia Neal’s friends say that after she met him, she became less nice to know. In the opinion of one, “She adopted Roald’s values, and one of them was a prodigious amount of name-dropping, and a prodigious amount of gossiping about the people they were name-dropping about. And also, a tremendous attention to money. Who was rich and famous was important.” Others disagree, saying that, on the contrary, Pat “treats everyone in the same way.” But it seems possible that she was flattered by the attentions of a man to whom status was so important. Certainly she was touched by his attentiveness. During the run of The Children’s Hour, he began to collect her every night after the performance. And when she first visited his apartment, his photographs, particularly those of Else’s three children, showed her an unexpectedly home-loving side of his personality, to which, wanting children since her abortion, she responded. Still, there was something tyrannical in the way that Dahl treated her, and while it made her grateful for his few words of praise, it continued to bother her friends. When, without quite knowing why, she suddenly began telling people that she was going to marry Roald Dahl, a few tried to warn her off. She says that Leonard Bernstein told her she was making the biggest mi
stake of her life.21 Dashiell Hammett wrote a shade more tolerantly to his daughter: “I think [Dahl]’s a very silly dull fellow but Lillian—through whom Pat met him—and—I guess naturally—Pat both tell me I’m wrong and have only seen him at his worst. The ring isn’t bad looking, though, and I told her I was glad she was getting that out of it because she didn’t look as if she was getting much else.”22

  The ring had, in fact, been lent by the Marshes, who from the start took a keen interest in the affair. On the one hand, they thought it was time Roald settled down, and were encouraged in this by his mother, who was beginning to fear that he would never marry.23 On the other hand, he couldn’t yet support himself, let alone a wife, in the style to which he had become accustomed. According to Patricia Neal, when Dahl took her to meet Charles Marsh, the old man was quick to ask her how much she had in the bank.24

  Dahl had told her—truthfully, it seems—that in a stock-exchange gamble he had lost his share of the money which his father had left each of his children to buy a house.25 But he was not penniless. Marsh was continuing to help in various ways and, early in 1953, wrote that he was trying to get him on the payroll of General Newspapers.26 Meanwhile, some stories were bought by television, among them “Taste,” and “Dip in the Pool,” which also appeared in The New Yorker. Dahl said he was “living like a miser, spending nothing and getting a peculiar sensation from watching the bank balance grow.”27 He now had around $5,000, he said—which was then worth twelve or thirteen times as much as today.

  Dahl’s bank balance would improve still further as a result of the interest now taken in him by a new father-figure-to-be.

  In March 1952, the sixty-year-old publisher Alfred Knopf, who was a wine connoisseur, read “Taste” in a recent back number of The New Yorker. He thought it “stunning” and dictated a memo to his editor Harold Strauss complaining, “I don’t know how we all missed this one.”28 He told him to look Dahl up and see “who he is & what he has.” Strauss replied a little stiffly that they hadn’t missed Dahl. He filled his employer in on the author’s previous stories and reminded him that Dahl had offered them a collection some time back. But he had told them that there was no prospect of a novel, “so we let him go.”29 Knopf overrode the objection, and by June there was a deal. He told Dahl’s agent, Ann Watkins, that he was “tickled pink” to have him on the list.30

  The collection which Dahl delivered to Knopf early in 1953 began, naturally enough, with “Taste” and included all the other stories which The New Yorker had taken. There was the eavesdropping tale, “My Lady Love, My Dove”;31 “Skin”;32 and “Dip in the Pool,” a fable in which a compulsive gambler, traveling on an oceangoing liner, tries to rig his bet on the distance the boat will travel that day. Having chosen a low number, he throws himself overboard so as to hold up the voyage, trusting a woman whom he has met to raise the alarm. The idea was thought up by Charles Marsh, who had fantasies of scooping the pool on the Cunard liner Albert Ballin. Dahl added his own sour twist. The gambler in the story doesn’t realize that the woman whose help he has enlisted is mad. She leaves him to drown.33

  Then there was a dog-racing story, “Mr. Feasey,” which came at the end of the book, after the three related country-life pieces which The New Yorker had rejected34—although of these, Harold Strauss would have liked “The Ratcatcher” left out and encouraged Dahl to tone it down. Strauss also disliked, and persuaded Dahl to omit, the anti-German story, “The Sword,”35 which he said he couldn’t understand, although there is nothing at all mysterious about it.36 And he got him to reduce “The Wish”—about a child’s obsessive imaginary horrors—to a fifth of its original length.

  On the strength of Knopf’s backing, some other pieces which Dahl had unsuccessfully offered to The New Yorker were now accepted by various magazines, to appear just before the book’s publication in the autumn of 1953: Harper’s took “Lamb to the Slaughter”; Town and Country, the story about a commuter’s obsession with schoolboy bullying. Collier’s, which had already printed two stories intended for the book (“Man from the South” and “Poison”), now published “Nunc Dimittis.”

  “Nunc Dimittis” is about an artist, John Royden, who likes to paint married women in the nude, and then, in a kind of slow-motion reverse striptease, adds their clothes, sitting by sitting, until the portrait is suitable to be taken home. The narrator, Lionel, is a middle-aged bachelor. Lionel has many women friends but never becomes entangled with them. He is discontented, frustrated, regretful about something, in a way that amounts to eccentricity. He is also a connoisseur. He says that owning a good collection of paintings (in a long list of artists, he mentions Matthew Smith) can create a frightening atmosphere of suspense around a man such as himself—“frightening to think that he has the power and the right, if he feels inclined, to slash, tear, plunge his fist” through the canvases he possesses.

  For some time Lionel has been taking out a young woman called Janet de Pelagia. His friends are beginning to wonder whether he will marry at last. But one of them, an older woman, tells him that Janet has complained that he bores her, endlessly taking her to the same restaurant for dinner and going on about paintings and antique china. Lionel decides to avenge himself. He commissions John Royden to paint Janet’s portrait. When he gets it home, he patiently takes off the top layer with turpentine. At a large dinner party to which he has invited her, he unveils the picture in front of everyone: “Janet in her underclothes, the black brassière, the pink elastic belt, the suspenders, the jockey’s legs.”37

  The story may have been prompted by Goya’s famous pair of paintings The Naked Maja and The Clothed Maja, which were favorites of Matthew Smith’s. Dahl was also fascinated by the jealous upheavals in which Smith’s own portraits of women sometimes involved him (one husband, a man in public life, angrily made his wife sell the paintings of her by Smith, with whom she had had an affair).38 The unctuous Royden doesn’t resemble Smith, and Lionel is in obvious ways unlike Dahl: he is older, much richer, and the story makes great play of his sexual inexperience. Despite all that, it isn’t clear how far Dahl stands from Lionel’s physical revulsions—at John Royden’s bearded mouth, “wet and naked, a trifle indecent,” or at Janet’s bandy legs, or at the older woman’s “loose and puckered” face with its folds of fat and its mouth pinched “like a salmon’s”39—passages which were left out in the version published by Collier’s magazine.

  Perhaps if Patricia Neal had read “Nunc Dimittis” she would have given more thought to her friends’ warnings, but she was never a great reader. The wedding was held at Trinity Church, New York, on a stifling July day in 1953. Dahl tore out the lining of his suit to make it cooler. Neal wore pink chiffon. Her friend the actress Mildred Dunnock was matron of honor, Charles Marsh best man. Because of temporary British restrictions on the amount of money people were allowed to spend on foreign travel, Dahl’s family would have had difficulty in coming, so in fairness to both sides, the occasion was kept for friends only. But the Marshes assured Roald’s mother that she would like Pat, whom he was planning to take home to England at the end of the honeymoon.

  Dahl arranged their trip to Europe with enthusiasm. (Patricia Neal says dryly, “He had an enormous appreciation for anything he generated.”40) They drove a Jaguar convertible up through Italy from Naples, and on via Switzerland and the French Riviera. Dahl wanted to visit various famous acquaintances such as Rex Harrison along the way, and as early as May had suggested to Matthew Smith that he might like to join them.41 As things turned out, they didn’t see him until they reached England in August.

  At Great Missenden, the couple were to stay with Else and John and their children, whose pictures had made such an impression on Pat. The arthritic Sofie Dahl, walking with the aid of two sticks, came down the drive to meet them and simply said, “Hello.” Straight out of Broadway, Pat was surprised by the fact that “there was no kiss. No embrace,” either from Sofie or from any of the rest of the family. She soon learned that some Northern Eur
opeans of the time had their own forms of welcome. After supper, Alfhild’s husband, Leslie Hansen, entertained everyone with an impromptu display of fart lighting.

  In the following days there was a party where she met other relatives, friends, and neighbors: Roald’s half sister, Ellen, and half brother, Louis; Matthew Smith; the local GP, Dr. Brigstock, and his wife; the cookery writer Elizabeth David; and many others. Dahl’s youngest sister, Asta, had just given birth to her third child, Peter: Roald and Pat drove across to their house in High Wycombe to see them. Meanwhile, the two Mrs. Dahls began to take one another’s measure.

  Sofie had been wondering how well Pat would get on with her unusually close-knit family.42 It was a reasonable anxiety for both of them. Patricia Neal never pretended to be a domestic kind of woman. She was used to getting up late and spending the morning in her dressing gown, talking on the phone to friends. The contrast between her Hollywood habits and the sterner regime of a Norwegian housewife in rural Buckinghamshire quickly made for tensions, which Roald felt if anything more keenly than his mother. Sofie said that her concern was more whether her son would make his wife happy than the other way around. She wrote to the Marshes that she hoped Roald would be kind to Pat. “He is not easy to live with,” she told them. Nor, she recalled, had his father been.43