This built-in double standard is one enjoyable joke. Another, again aimed at the adult reader (and the sophisticated child), is Dahl’s pantomime trick of making puns that the young won’t necessarily get: the buttergin, for example, which Mr. Willy Wonka manufactures alongside butterscotch. And then there is the story’s direct way of commenting on how children should and should not be brought up, in its ridicule of spoiled children and their parents and its attacks on television.
Virginie Fowler wanted to keep out the adult references. In May 1963, she sent Dahl a list of editorial comments, in which one of her main criticisms was that the story kept commenting “on an adult level” rather than staying “on the child’s side where the book should be.” But if it should be on the child’s side, Fowler quailed at its raucous humor: for example, the disposal of Veruca Salt down the factory’s rubbish chute.38 “This whole image of smelling stinking garbage makes for a crude image,” she sniffed, “which can be done perhaps in an adult commentary on the current world and written in another form. But, in a fairy tale based on the eating of sweets, one is a bit revolted and unnecessarily too!… fish heads and cabbage and stuff have no place in a chocolate factory.” African pygmies, on the other hand (“Are they really made of chocolate, Mr. Wonka?”), didn’t strike her as out of place there. She says today that she persuaded Dahl to make some changes in his treatment of the Oompa-Loompas, and that the songs he wrote for them, turning them into a kind of comic Greek chorus, were among the results. But there isn’t anything about the Oompa-Loompas in her letter, and eventually, as we shall see, they were to cause so much trouble that for later editions these episodes were rewritten and redrawn.39
If some of Fowler’s objections now seem both finicky and misdirected, no one at Knopf seems to have noticed how the story could be interpreted as a warning about the firm’s future dealings with the author. It would be naïve to say that Mr. Willy Wonka “is” Roald Dahl, but they have a lot in common—for example, in the similarity between Dahl’s third-person narrative voice and Mr. Wonka’s own hectic, exaggerated way of talking:
“There!” cried Mr. Wonka, dancing up and down and pointing his gold-topped cane at the great brown river. “It’s all chocolate! Every drop of that river is hot melted chocolate of the finest quality. The very finest quality. There’s enough chocolate in there to fill every bathtub in the entire country! And all the swimming pools as well! Isn’t it terrific?…”
The children and their parents were too flabbergasted to speak. They were staggered. They were dumbfounded. They were bewildered and dazzled. They were completely bowled over by the hugeness of the whole thing. They simply stood and stared.40
More revealing, as things were to turn out, was Mr. Wonka’s way with criticism (“No arguments, please”) and his jettisoning of those he didn’t like. But that is to jump many years ahead.
Mr. Willy Wonka knows what is good for people and forces it on them, whether they want it or not. At the end of the story, he takes over Charlie’s whole family with the same cheerful dictatorial confidence he must have used when enslaving the Oompa-Loompas:
“I’d rather die in my bed!” shouted Grandma Josephine.
“So would I!” cried Grandma Georgina.
“I refuse to go!” announced Grandpa George.
So Mr. Wonka and Grandpa Joe and Charlie, taking no notice of their screams, simply pushed the bed into the lift.41
This was very like Dahl’s own approach to family disagreements—for example, the way he moved his family back to England after Theo’s accident. By now, though, Pat was again so busy that they were never in one place long. Dahl himself, as the months accumulated after Olivia’s death, found more to occupy him wherever she happened to be working. In Honolulu, in the summer of 1964, he was approached by the then little-known director Robert Altman and began work with him on an original screenplay, Oh, Death, Where Is Thy Sting-a-ling-a-ling.42
The film was never made, partly because Dahl and his Hollywood agent, Irving Lazar, quarreled with Altman over money and the ownership of the storyline.43 There was the excuse of his family’s needs once more, and by the time of the dispute, he had to find cash to care for Pat herself. Yet already he was seeing the first signs of his later colossal earnings. Olivia’s trust fund, when she died, was sufficient to endow a small charity.44 The children’s trusts benefited again in the summer of 1964, when Dahl was paid $30,000—in today’s terms, about $240,000—by MGM for the film rights to one of his war stories, “Beware of the Dog.”45 “The Visitor”—the Uncle Oswald story he had related so graphically to David Ogilvy46—had been sold, earlier in the year, to Playboy, after being rejected by The New Yorker. In July, his reprint publisher, Dell, renewed the licenses to paperback rights to Someone Like You and Kiss Kiss, which were due to expire. In an unguarded moment, Dahl boasted about some of these successes to Harding Lemay at Knopf. He wrote that he was continually amazed by the way his small store of fiction continued, week by week, to earn money, “and quite big money, too,” especially from Continental Europe. There was also a steady market in television adaptations, and his work was always in demand for what he called “the anthology racket.”
In September 1964, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory appeared in the United States to general acclaim. The allegations of racism did not come until later. Even the sober Library Journal, which had dismissed James and the Giant Peach as crude and exaggerated, was enthusiastic.47 Within a month, the first printing of 10,000 copies had sold out. The New York Times was sufficiently impressed to ask Dahl for an article on writing for children, and he dashed off a diatribe claiming that “five out of seven children’s books published today are a cheat” and condemning the indolence of all contemporary publishers with the exception of Alfred Knopf, and all contemporary authors with the exception of himself. His own children’s books, he boasted, took “somewhere between eight and nine months to complete, with no time off for other work … a big slice out of the life of any writer, and a big drain on his batteries.” It was a drain, too, or so he prematurely lamented, on his bank balance. “For one who is used to writing for adults only, it is … an uneconomic diversion.”
9
Center Stage
Writers are more prone than most people to worrying about money—especially when they are doing well. Like other artists, many of them are continually afraid that their talent, and with it their earning power, may vanish as inexplicably as it appeared. The tastes of publishers and audiences can seem arbitrary: as much so when they are enthusiastic as when they aren’t. Few artists, however successful and confident-seeming they may be, don’t harbor a doubt that perhaps a mistake has been made and that sooner or later they will be dropped.
Roald Dahl was no stranger to these anxieties, especially given the way his adult stories seemed to have both lost favor and dried up at around the same time. His insecurity was increased by the needs of his young children, especially Theo, and, at a deeper level, by the facts of Theo’s accident and Olivia’s death. These were events without meaning, yet crying out for explanation. On the surface, both Roald and Pat responded to them with determined rationalism and practicality. They continued to employ the nanny who was pushing Theo’s pram on that terrible day. But both of them also felt obscure, potent forms of guilt. Patricia wondered whether Olivia’s death might not have been a punishment for her abortion, when she was carrying Gary Cooper’s child.1 She also bitterly remembered times when she or Roald had smacked Olivia for naughtiness. Could these tragedies—Theo’s, at least—somehow have been averted if their way of life had been different, less ambitious and hectic?
Yet Pat found herself working harder and harder. She tried to ration herself to one film a year, and had a clause written into her Hud contract guaranteeing her a month free with her children at Great Missenden in the middle of the shooting schedule.2 In April 1964, heavily pregnant, she decided not to go to Los Angeles to collect her Oscar for Hud and agreed to Roald’s suggestion that Annabella should
attend the ceremony on her behalf. But she was poor company when she wasn’t in the limelight: desultory, lethargic, bored by the household chores, and inclined, like her husband, to drink too much.
The more work she turned down, the more she was asked to do: which in turn brought yet other pressures into the couple’s life, in the form of jealousy on the part of the ever-competitive Roald. Some people who knew them thought that they were showing the strains of a deeper incompatibility.3 Whatever the truth of that, Olivia’s death had brought a new degree of grimness to Roald’s already often cynical emotional life. The mood was exacerbated by his poor health: in April 1964 he was diagnosed as suffering from a kidney stone.4 All in all, it was understandable that there was a haphazard-seeming ferocity in his New York Times article—in the claim, for example, that most modern juvenile fiction was so bad that after reading it to a child, all you could do was “apologize … and turn out the light and slink downstairs to wash away the memory with a glass of whiskey and water.” An editor asked him to tighten up the argument and to cut some of his more punitive criticisms. He refused, so the piece was moved from the front of the Sunday Book Review, for which it had been commissioned, to an inside page. Dahl grumbled to Alfred Knopf, who bluntly consoled him: “In your case the point isn’t that they should welsh at putting you on the front page but rather that they were stupid enough to expect a piece from you that they could print there.”5
Knopf knew that Dahl had a specific reason for his bile against the children’s-literature establishment. He couldn’t find a British publisher either for James and the Giant Peach or, now, for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The most enthusiastic of Dahl’s British editors, Charles Pick, had left Michael Joseph in 1962, and it was then that the firm decided, after a year of hesitation, not to take James.6 Dahl’s British agent, Laurence Pollinger, offered the book to George Weidenfeld, again unsuccessfully. Since plans were under way for the American publication of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl and Pollinger decided to wait until they could offer both books together in Britain. The first new attempt, in the autumn of 1964, was with Hamish Hamilton, but Hamilton told Pollinger that the books seemed to be adult stories in disguise—a repetition of Virginie Fowler’s earlier criticism.7
This was a blow to the author’s morale, and of course to his finances—one made worse by the fact that children’s publishers in Continental Europe still looked more to Britain for new books than to the United States. James was translated into Dutch in 1963, but so far, that was all. Dahl complained bitterly to Alfred Knopf’s wife, Blanche: “I refuse to peddle these two books around all the publishers of London.” He had told his agent to give up until he learned what she and Alfred recommended. English publishers were prim, stupid, and snobbish, he added. “I refuse to go cap in hand, and I refuse to be rejected right and left.”
There was nothing much the Knopfs could do, but of Pollinger’s list of the remaining interested British publishers, they suggested Dahl start with Chatto & Windus, and then try Cassell, Cape, and Collins, in that order—although, Knopf warned, “I would not trust one of them to risk a shilling on our unsupported enthusiasm for your work or the work of anyone else.”8 Dahl made the rounds again, and was yet again rejected. Among those who turned him down this time was Judy Taylor, children’s books editor at The Bodley Head and a future biographer of Beatrix Potter. She remembers having been put off by the tone of Dahl’s agent’s letter, which—unusual for a writer still little known in Britain—laid down various conditions, including a retail price per copy so low that she thought it would have been “totally impractical.”9 But Taylor has no regrets about the decision. “As an editor, one has to like a book oneself,” she says. “I could see that Dahl would be popular with children, but publishing for them has to involve more than that, somehow.”
If these rebuffs were painful in themselves, they further complicated Dahl’s envy of his wife’s successes. The more famous she became, the more he seemed an appendage to her career. In the summer of 1964, they were in Honolulu, where he passed his time looking for orchids while Pat shot In Harm’s Way. She had recently passed up a possible leading role in The Pumpkin Eater, directed by Jack Clayton, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter based on Penelope Mortimer’s novel. This was reported in the Daily News’s “Hollywood” column, while the Dahls were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel on their way home to England: “Pat’s getting choosy about scripts since she won the Oscar. She turned down one that would have given her more money than she’s ever been offered.”10 The Oscar trophy for Hud, the News told readers, was sitting on her living-room mantelpiece in Great Missenden. The piece ended by mentioning parenthetically that her husband’s latest children’s book was out that month.
Film and theater offers continued to come in while Neal spent the rest of the summer at Gipsy House with Tessa, now seven, four-year-old Theo, and the new baby, Ophelia. Dahl was fractious about his desire to be writing for adults, but managed to turn out some semi-pornographic, distinctly misogynistic tales, among them, “The Last Act,” which he hoped would prove commercial. In his leisure time, he pottered about in his new orchid house, which stood on its own a little way from the writing hut. He admired the flawless elegance of the flowers and the intricacies of their taxonomy, which gave him another area in which to display expertise. He grew only phalaenopsids, he would say airily.11
He and Pat also caught up with their local friends, particularly Brigadier Kirwan and his wife, Patricia, who farmed nearby, and whose son James was the same age as Tessa. The Kirwans had a tennis court, and Dahl often played singles with James’s older sister, Angela, a slightly built, conventionally pretty secretary in her early twenties.12 Angela was bored with her job and with life in Great Missenden. She found Gipsy House a “lovely, unpompous” place and often went round there. She admired the glamorous Pat, but had the impression that Roald didn’t much like women, so was taken aback when Pat teased her that perhaps she was a little in love with him. The Dahls were in need of extra domestic help and offered to take her to Los Angeles, where the whole family was to move in February 1965 for six weeks, for the shooting of John Ford’s 7 Women.
They went in February 1965, just after Chatto and Windus turned down Charlie. Ophelia was nine months old, and although Patricia told no one other than Roald, she was once again pregnant.
The flight out was unusually tiring—a storm forced them to land in Labrador, where they waited, dressed for Southern California, in a temperature that felt like fifty below. From the moment of their late arrival, Neal was occupied with costume fittings, rehearsals, and the visits of countless old Hollywood friends. Kirwan, doubling as cook, secretary, and deputy nanny, was flabbergasted by her employer’s reception in Hollywood: how busy and popular she was, and how fascinated everyone seemed by every detail of her life.
For the children, too, it was a starry existence: one which, to Tessa, helped to compensate for her feeling that she was always being compared unfavorably with her dead sister. Their Brentwood house, rented from Martin Ritt, director of Hud and, most recently, of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, had a kidney-shaped pool. Theo had learned to swim while they were in Honolulu, but he was still prone to falls, and it was necessary to take special care of his head. Dahl busied himself with making the place safe for him, padding a stone pillar and other sharp surfaces.13
He also finished a piece of fiction, which he asked Angela Kirwan to type. She still remembers it vividly. It was “a particularly horrid story about a gynecologist who had been in love with some woman who had gone off and married somebody else. She’d then come back to him, I can’t remember why, twenty or thirty years later, widowed, and she was obviously menopausal, and he was absolutely beastly to her and just getting his own back on her, and she was having problems with lovemaking, and it had a horrid—like all of Roald’s stories—but a horrid, twist to it. I remember, as a very innocent twenty-two-year-old, being absolutely shattered.”
Dahl hadn’t gi
ven her any warning about the contents of “The Last Act.” “He liked to shock,” Angela Kirwan says, “so he probably would have been very happy shocking me.” But almost anyone would have been troubled by the way Anna’s “problems with lovemaking” are anatomized by the gynecologist, Conrad, as he reaches the climax of his “bit of unfinished business” with her.14 The menopausal Anna, whose husband has recently been killed in an accident, is in the middle of a prolonged breakdown when Conrad part seduces and then rapes her:
“No!” She was struggling desperately to free herself, but he still had her pinned.
“The reason it hurts,” he went on, “is that you are not manufacturing any fluid. The mucosa is virtually dry.…”
“Stop!”
“The actual name is senile atrophic vaginitis. It comes with age, Anna. That’s why it’s called senile vaginitis. There’s not much one can do …”
When Anna starts to scream, Conrad pushes her away and walks coolly from her hotel room. The End.
The story was bought by Playboy, where, over the years, Dahl was to publish almost as much as he ever had in The New Yorker (which turned it down15), and more than in any other magazine. It’s hard to catch the tone of the Playboy pieces. They have a gothic archness which makes it seem beside the point to ask for more convincing dialogue and characterization, or a deeper moral sense. Part of the joke is to write about self-consciously “adult” matters in the voice of a schoolboy—but, of course, that was often Dahl’s own voice, too:
Then all of a sudden, Conrad put his tongue into one of her ears. The effect of this upon her was electric. It was as though a live two-hundred-volt plug had been pushed into an empty socket, and all the lights came on and the bones began to melt and the hot molten sap went running down into her limbs and she exploded into a frenzy.16
Roald Dahl Page 17
