As it happened, there was no need to use it on Theo, who unexpectedly but steadily began to get better. His recovery seemed to bless the whole family’s life. At their new schools, the girls quickly made friends who were delighted to be asked home by them. The house with the gypsy caravan in the garden and the colored birds flying all around had fast earned a reputation as a children’s paradise. Olivia and Tessa’s tall, restless father was a little intimidating, but was redeemed by the knowledge that he kept the glove compartment of his old Humber stuffed with packets of sweets, which he sometimes dished out as rewards for the best story anyone told on a journey. And Pat was beautiful and tolerant. Women who are now mothers themselves, friends at the time of Olivia and Tessa, describe sticking their crayon drawings over the not-yet-famous paintings on the walls and, around Christmas, helping themselves to slices from the big caramel-colored Norwegian cheese which stood in the kitchen all day.18 Pat’s best-remembered phrase, in her husky Southern voice, was “Whatever you want, darling.”
By the autumn of 1962, Olivia was seven and a half, an imaginative, slightly fey girl who made up rhyming poems in the car and charmed visitors by telling them that she had an invisible imp on each shoulder, one good, one bad.19 Tessa was an imperious, articulate five-and-a-half—plump-faced and already with something of the look of her mother. Theo was just over two. Early in October, their parents went to a dinner party given in London by Alfred Knopf, who was en route to the annual Frankfurt Book Fair. The other guests were the popular novelist Storm Jameson and her husband and the publisher Frederick Warburg. Dahl had just delivered a revised draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He had submitted the first version not long before Theo’s accident, almost two years ago, but had inevitably been slow in revising it. Now he was in boisterous spirits and told Knopf that the family were all well.20
A few days afterward, the parents of children at Godstowe School received a note warning them of an outbreak of measles. In those days, few children in Britain were inoculated against the disease: catching it was regarded as a normal rite of passage, like losing your first teeth. Gamma globulin was hard to obtain, except for pregnant women. Pat tried the husband of Roald’s older half sister Ellen, Sir Ashley Miles, who was a celebrated physician, the author of a standard textbook on immunology. For once, string pulling failed. Indeed, Miles’s eminence was itself a barrier to any help he might otherwise have given. He had been Director of the Department of Biological Standards and was well on his way to a senior position in the Royal Society. It wouldn’t have been right for him to bend the rules—and besides, he said, it would be good for the girls to get their measles over with.21 The vulnerable Theo was another matter, and the serum was made available for him.
Soon Olivia became ill. She had always succumbed heavily to minor ailments, but when she slept for twenty-four hours at a stretch, Pat called the doctor. Roald tried to amuse the child by making little animals with colored pipe cleaners, but she “couldn’t do them at all.”22 That evening, drowsiness became coma. The doctor returned, went white, and called an ambulance. Olivia died in the hospital the same night.
As Dahl’s early story “Katina” shows, he had felt a protective tenderness for little girls long before he was a father, let alone a bereaved one. To anyone, the tragedy would have been shattering, and in his case it followed two years of intense anxiety and effort over Theo. It also echoed his sister Astri’s death, at exactly the same age. Two months later, on one of the few occasions when he was ever guilty of understatement, he told Alfred Knopf, “Pat and I are finding it rather hard going still.”23 Neal herself puts it more strongly. She says that her husband all but went out of his mind.24
For a writer, one option not readily available at such a time is to take refuge in work. Sitting on his own in the shed, with a blank pad of lined yellow paper in front of him and a pile of neatly sharpened pencils, Dahl had no escape from whatever pushed itself into his mind. He gave himself to private mourning on a Victorian scale. Olivia was buried in the nearby hamlet of Little Missenden, in a large plot—the idea was that it would eventually accommodate her parents, too. Dahl went again and again to the grave, and with the help of a horticulturist friend, Valerie Finnis, built an alpine garden on it, taking an obsessive pride in the number of different species it contained—about 120, he said, including some found for him by a collector in Munich which were exceptionally scarce and had never been grown before in England. He had also imported a tiny cineraria from Afghanistan.25 He thought about afterlife and, because he believed in always going to the top man for advice, made an appointment for himself and Pat to discuss the matter with his old headmaster, Geoffrey Fisher, the retired Archbishop of Canterbury. Dahl didn’t think that Olivia could be happy where there were no dogs, and Fisher angered him by saying that the Christian heaven was confined to humans. Whether or not this doctrinal severity stirred Dahl’s later, mistaken attack on Fisher in Boy, Pat thought that their daughter’s death was the end, for Roald, of any residual possibility of Christian belief.26
He had always found it almost impossible to talk to anyone about his feelings, and seemed now to cut himself off from friends, relatives, even from his children, in a way that made Tessa, at least, feel that she could never mean as much to him as Olivia had meant. To a theater director friend, Gerald Savory, who spent a lot of time with the couple immediately after Olivia’s death, it was as if a shutter had come down.27 Some months later, Dahl asked Annabella to come and stay, and took her to the grave. But he didn’t weep and said nothing of what he was going through.28 He was drinking more than usual and increased his dose of the barbiturates which, whether for back pain or just to calm himself, he regularly took.
When Tessa was fractious, so she says, her father sometimes handed out pills to her, too. Because of her later drug addiction, it is a serious claim. Her mother denies it, saying that she and Roald would never have given the children “grown-up pills,” but her youngest daughter, Lucy, confirms Tessa’s story, while pointing out that there was and is nothing unusual about it. Lucy adds that her parents would also quite often give the children wine or whiskey if they were feeling unwell, “and it did make you feel better.”29 If this is right, some of Tessa’s and Lucy’s later difficulties may have had part of their origins in the tragedies which hit the family at this time (in Lucy’s case, before she was even born), and in their father’s escape routes from them.
Dahl’s efforts to write were still unsuccessful. Six months after Olivia’s death, he told his publishers, “I feel right now as though I’ll never in my life do any more! I simply cannot seem to get started again.”30 But for Neal, work was both a ready form of escape and a necessary source of income. Acting brought new surroundings, new friends, and a mind other than her own to occupy. For a time, she accepted almost anything that was offered: a part in a single episode of a TV series and then an unimportant-seeming role in a film with the provisional title “Hud Bannon.” The TV contract enabled her to take the whole family to Beverly Hills for a few weeks. The film unexpectedly turned out to be a hit. Hud, with Paul Newman, was eventually to win Patricia Neal an Oscar. Meanwhile, other movies followed—Alexander Singer’s Psyche ’59, with Curt Jurgens and Samantha Eggar; Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way, with John Wayne. She also quickly got pregnant. In May 1964, aged thirty-eight, she gave birth to another daughter, Ophelia. Theo, who had his own versions of names, called her “Don-Mini,” which—shortened to “Min”—was adopted by everyone because it avoided painful slips with “Olivia.” Within six months, Neal was expecting yet another baby. A new film turned up, and the whole family went on location in Honolulu: Roald, Tessa, Theo, the baby Ophelia, and two nanny housekeepers.
At the suggestion of Pat and Roald, Kenneth Till had agreed to remove Theo’s old valve altogether. After a period of nervous experimentation, he was managing well without it, and—although permanently impaired by his injuries—was beginning to enjoy the stories his father told him and his older sister,
Tessa. Slowly Dahl struggled back to taking an interest in his work and in how his published books were doing.
James and the Giant Peach, which he had completed shortly before Theo was born and had dedicated to Olivia and Tessa, had not yet found a British publisher. In the States it had been widely reviewed and was a steady, if modest, success. The critics—who tended to assume that their adult readers would be familiar with Dahl’s short stories—were particularly enthusiastic about the jaunty poems, part Edward Lear, part Hilaire Belloc, which intersperse the narrative. Some made the point that what adults find repulsive, children may enjoy—the description of the hideous aunts, for example. This wasn’t what the more specialist reviewers in librarians’ journals and educational papers thought. “The violent exaggeration of language and almost grotesque characterizations impair the storytelling and destroy the illusion of reality and plausibility which any good fantasy must achieve,” wrote Ethel L. Heins, a children’s librarian from Boston, Massachusetts, in Library Journal. “Not recommended.”31 For Dahl, it was an early taste of what was to become an increasingly common type of reaction to his work. But another Bostonian, the reviewer in the Herald, compared the book with Alice and said it “should become a classic.”32
By October 1962, a year after it first appeared and a month before Olivia’s death, James had sold 6,500 copies in hardcover and earned its author $2,000 in royalties. Meanwhile, an offer came from another publisher, inviting Dahl to take part in a project so enterprising that it was denounced by everyone who wasn’t involved. Macmillan, New York, had begun to approach well-known adult authors of the caliber of Arthur Miller, Sylvia Plath, and John Updike, inviting them to write an extremely short book for young children. They would be supplied with a vocabulary list thought suitable to the age range and would be paid $2,000:33 not a fortune (today it would be worth about ten times that), but the work didn’t look arduous and Dahl was keen both to get back to writing and to make some money of his own. Many authors had already signed up, and he was sent one of the best of the results, Robert Graves’s The Big Green Book, for which the productive but as yet relatively little-known Maurice Sendak had done the illustrations.
Graves’s story could not have failed to appeal to Dahl. It is about a lonely boy who learns how to be a magician. Turning himself into an old man, he persuades his unpleasant uncle and aunt to gamble all they have against him at cards. When they lose, he makes them his slaves. Dahl had already thought up a new tale of his own and had been telling it to Tessa and Theo. It was an attack on people who shoot birds for sport. (Dahl had some of his Buckinghamshire neighbors in mind.) A girl with a magic finger decides to thwart a trigger-happy family called the Greggs. First she spoils their aim, then she turns them into birds and has them held up at gunpoint by vengeful ducks.
Alfred Knopf was jealous of Dahl’s involvement in the rival publisher’s scheme and did all he could to warn his author off. He said that Macmillan was about to go bankrupt and sent him an article from The Horn Book (a journal for specialists in children’s literature) sternly critical of the series’ word lists.34 Dahl conceded that, taken to its limit, the approach would result in a populace whose vocabulary consisted of less than a thousand words, none of them longer than two syllables.35 Perhaps to appease Knopf, he said that with the exception of Graves’s Big Green Book, most of the titles so far published were “tripe” and that the essential idea for the series was grotesque. But he had to consider his family, he said, and from that perspective, “I was not entitled to turn it down.”
Later, having delivered the book and received his check, he dismissed the project as unimportant. He would much prefer to be writing for adults, he told Knopf. “I am trying, but no luck so far.” In any case, he rightly anticipated that an attack on the gun lobby was not what Macmillan had had in mind. They paid Dahl his fee, but the typescript of The Magic Finger sat in limbo. His willingness to deal with a new publisher, however, had sent a warning to Knopf, and Dahl’s editors there were quick to take the hint when he began to ask what was happening about his new draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which he had delivered six months before.
Dedicated to Theo, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory concerns a poor family—Charlie Bucket, his parents and all his grandparents—who live in a small wooden shack, eating little except cabbage and potatoes. Nearby stands a mysterious chocolate factory, owned by Mr. Willy Wonka. Mr. Wonka is enormously rich, and something of a magician. According to Charlie’s grandparents, his myriad inventions include a way of making both chewing gum which never loses its taste and chocolate ice cream which stays cold without being refrigerated. One day, they tell Charlie, Mr. Wonka found that some of his workers had been selling trade secrets to his rivals. So he sacked everyone, and for months the factory was silent. When the story begins, it is back in production. Yet the gates remain locked, and no one is ever seen to enter or leave.
So curiosity, as well as greed, is aroused when Mr. Wonka announces a children’s lottery in which the five winners will not only be given a lifetime’s supply of sweets but will be taken on a personally conducted tour of the factory. After several raisings and dashings of his hopes, the starving Charlie finds one of the winning tickets.
The other successful children are the greedy Augustus Gloop, the spoiled Veruca Salt, the gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde, and Mike Teavee, “a boy who does nothing but watch television.” In the course of their visit, Mr. Wonka is made angry by each of them, and disposes of them ruthlessly before the eyes of their doting parents. Charlie Bucket, on the other hand, who is simply described as “the hero,” wins favor, if more through inoffensiveness than for any positive merit. It transpires that Willy Wonka’s real purpose was to find an heir. He appoints Charlie and whisks off his family—several of whom are unenthusiastic about the idea—to join him forever in his candied underworld.
Knopf’s editor for children’s books, Virginie Fowler, had written enthusiastically to Dahl as soon as she received his revised manuscript. But she had run into difficulties with potential illustrators. The first one she approached, whom she prefers not to name, was unhappy with the Oompa-Loompas: in the version first published, a tribe of 3,000 amiable black pygmies who have been imported by Mr. Willy Wonka from “the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before.” Mr. Wonka keeps them in the factory, where they have replaced the sacked white workers. Wonka’s little slaves are delighted with their new circumstances, and particularly with their diet of chocolate. Before, they lived on green caterpillars, beetles, eucalyptus leaves, “and the bark of the bong-bong tree.”
Virginie Fowler saw the story as essentially Victorian in character—a “very English” fantasy—so she didn’t find these passages objectionable, although she had other reservations.36 But this was 1962, and there were what she describes as “civil rights problems” in the United States, which she thinks may have deterred her potential illustrator. So she thought she would try someone who had approached her, someone well established in advertising and keen to move into book illustration: Joseph Schindelman.
When Fowler sent Schindelman’s preliminary sketches to Dahl, he was devastated by Olivia’s death and did not reply. Some months later, having forced himself back to work, and also having read The Big Green Book, he suggested they try Maurice Sendak instead. Fowler investigated but found that Sendak would not be free to take on the job until the autumn of 1964, eighteen months away, and that he would want a share of royalties rather than a straight fee. Dahl was prepared to wait, but not to lose part of his income. The following year, 1963, Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are first appeared and made his name. His work has much in common with Dahl’s—particularly its roots in North European traditions and its keen empathy with the crueler sides of a child’s imagination. Their never-realized partnership is one of the more tantalizing might-have-beens of children’s literature.
It would be more than fifteen years before Dahl found, in Quentin Blake, an
illustrator who, although very different from Sendak, truly complemented his writing. Always inclined to impatience, he was made even more so by his grief, and complained to Alfred Knopf both about the financial demands of illustrators and about what he described as Fowler’s unconscionable delays. Among the firm’s nervously prompt and soothing responses was one from Robert Bernstein, then in charge of all juvenile publication for the new Random House-Knopf-Pantheon group. Bernstein said he had just read Charlie, “and so have my sons, who are 6, 10 and 11, and it is a wonderful, wonderful children’s book.”37 This was the superlative vein Dahl himself used as a writer and to which he had been growing accustomed from his American publishers. By profession and instinct, the less expansive Virginie Fowler belonged among the specialists in children’s literature: teachers and librarians whose responsible but sometimes overcautious judgments Dahl came over the years increasingly to despise. She was in her fifties, long established in juvenile publishing, and believed that good books for children followed certain conventions. For example, they shouldn’t be in bad taste, and they shouldn’t have half an eye on adults. Although Fowler liked Charlie, the book seemed to her to break both rules, and she now tried to explain why.
Dahl had tried the stories on his own children. He both understood and shared their taste for bad taste and couldn’t have cared less about the consequences. He also knew that reading aloud is more fun for adults if the story includes something for them, too. In the case of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, part of what they are offered is the ruthless, if temporary, elimination of children themselves. Dahl, like Hilaire Belloc in the Cautionary Tales, was frank about the fact that most children are obnoxious, both to adults and to each other, some of the time. He entertains by comically allowing the worst to happen to representatives of the very people for whom he is supposed to be writing.
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