The Umbrella Man and Other Stories

by Roald Dahl

  “Good heavens, man! What on earth did you do that for?”

  “All I know, sir, is I have the urge.”

  “What sort of urge?”

  “The creative urge, Mr. Bohlen.” Every time he looked up he saw Mr. Bohlen’s lips. They were growing thinner and thinner, more and more purple.

  “And may I ask you what you do with these stories, Knipe?”

  “Well sir, that’s the trouble. No one will buy them. Each time I finish one, I send it out on the rounds. It goes to one magazine after another. That’s all that happens, Mr. Bohlen, and they simply send them back. It’s very depressing.”

  Mr. Bohlen relaxed. “I can see quite well how you feel, my boy.” His voice was dripping with sympathy. “We all go through it one time or another in our lives. But now—now that you’ve had proof—positive proof—from the experts themselves, from the editors, that your stories are—what shall I say—rather unsuccessful, it’s time to leave off. Forget it, my boy. Just forget all about it.”

  “No, Mr. Bohlen! No! That’s not true! I know my stories are good. My heavens, when you compare them with the stuff some of those magazines print—oh my word, Mr. Bohlen!—the sloppy, boring stuff that you see in the magazines week after week—why, it drives me mad!”

  “Now wait a minute, my boy . . . ”

  “Do you ever read the magazines, Mr. Bohlen?”

  “You’ll pardon me, Knipe, but what’s all this got to do with your machine?”

  “Everything, Mr. Bohlen, absolutely everything! What I want to tell you is, I’ve made a study of magazines, and it seems that each one tends to have its own particular type of story. The writers—the successful ones—know this, and they write accordingly.”

  “Just a minute, my boy. Calm yourself down, will you. I don’t think all this is getting us anywhere.”

  “Please, Mr. Bohlen, hear me through. It’s all terribly important.” He paused to catch his breath. He was properly worked up now, throwing his hands around as he talked. The long, toothy face, with the big ears on either side, simply shone with enthusiasm, and there was an excess of saliva in his mouth which caused him to speak his words wet. “So you see, on my machine, by having an adjustable coordinator between the ‘plot-memory’ section and the ‘word-memory’ section I am able to produce any type of story I desire simply by pressing the required button.”

  “Yes, I know, Knipe, I know. This is all very interesting, but what’s the point of it?”

  “Just this, Mr. Bohlen. The market is limited. We’ve got to be able to produce the right stuff, at the right time, whenever we want it. It’s a matter of business, that’s all. I’m looking at it from your point of view now—as a commercial proposition.”

  “My dear boy, it can’t possibly be a commercial proposition—ever. You know as well as I do what it costs to build one of these machines.”

  “Yes sir, I do. But with due respect, I don’t believe you know what the magazines pay writers for stories.”

  “What do they pay?”

  “Anything up to twenty-five hundred dollars. It probably averages around a thousand.”

  Mr. Bohlen jumped.

  “Yes sir, it’s true.”

  “Absolutely impossible, Knipe! Ridiculous!”

  “No sir, it’s true.”

  “You mean to sit there and tell me that these magazines pay out money like that to a man for . . . just for scribbling off a story! Good heavens, Knipe! Whatever next! Writers must all be millionaires!”

  “That’s exactly it, Mr. Bohlen! That’s where the machine comes in. Listen a minute, sir, while I tell you some more. I’ve got it all worked out. The big magazines are carrying approximately three fiction stories in each issue. Now, take the fifteen most important magazines—the ones paying the most money. A few of them are monthlies, but most of them come out every week. All right. That makes, let us say, around forty big stories being bought each week. That’s forty thousand dollars. So with our machine—when we get it working properly—we can collar nearly the whole of this market!”

  “My dear boy, you’re mad!”

  “No sir, honestly, it’s true what I say. Don’t you see that with volume alone we’ll completely overwhelm them! This machine can produce a five-thousand-word story, all typed and ready for dispatch, in thirty seconds. How can the writers compete with that? I ask you, Mr. Bohlen, how?”

  At that point, Adolph Knipe noticed a slight change in the man’s expression, an extra brightness in the eyes, the nostrils distending, the whole face becoming still, almost rigid. Quickly, he continued. “Nowadays, Mr. Bohlen, the handmade article hasn’t a hope. It can’t possibly compete with mass production, especially in this country—you know that. Carpets . . . chairs . . . shoes . . . bricks . . . crockery . . . anything you like to mention—they’re all made by machinery now. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories—well—they’re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so long as you deliver the goods. We’ll sell them wholesale, Mr. Bohlen! We’ll undercut every writer in the country! We’ll corner the market!”

  Mr. Bohlen edged up straighter in his chair. He was leaning forward now, both elbows on the desk, the face alert, the small brown eyes resting on the speaker.

  “I still think it’s impracticable, Knipe.”

  “Forty thousand a week!” cried Adolph Knipe. “And if we halve the price, making it twenty thousand a week, that’s still a million a year!” And softly he added, “You didn’t get any million a year for building the old electronic calculator, did you, Mr. Bohlen?”

  “But seriously now, Knipe. D’you really think they’d buy them?”

  “Listen, Mr. Bohlen. Who on earth is going to want custom-made stories when they can get the other kind at half the price? It stands to reason, doesn’t it?”

  “And how will you sell them? Who will you say has written them?”

  “We’ll set up our own literary agency, and we’ll distribute them through that. And we’ll invent all the names we want for the writers.”

  “I don’t like it, Knipe. To me, that smacks of trickery, does it not?”

  “And another thing, Mr. Bohlen. There’s all manner of valuable by-products once you’ve got started. Take advertising, for example. Beer manufacturers and people like that are willing to pay good money these days if famous writers will lend their names to their products. Why, my heavens, Mr. Bohlen! This isn’t any children’s plaything we’re talking about. It’s big business.”

  “Don’t get too ambitious, my boy.”

  “And another thing. There isn’t any reason why we shouldn’t put your name, Mr. Bohlen, on some of the better stories, if you wished it.”

  “My goodness, Knipe. What should I want that for?”

  “I don’t know, sir, except that some writers get to be very much respected—like Mr. Erle Gardner or Kathleen Morris, for example. We’ve got to have names, and I was certainly thinking of using my own on one or two stories, just to help out.”

  “A writer, eh?” Mr. Bohlen said, musing. “Well, it would surely surprise them over at the club when they saw my name in the magazines—the good magazines.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Bohlen!”

  For a moment, a dreamy, faraway look came into Mr. Bohlen’s eyes, and he smiled. Then he stirred himself and began leafing through the plans that lay before him.

  “One thing I don’t quite understand, Knipe. Where do the plots come from? The machine can’t possibly invent plots.”

  “We feed those in, sir. That’s no problem at all. Everyone has plots. There’s three or four hundred of them written down in that folder there on your left. Feed them straight into the ‘plot-memory’ section of the machine.”

  “Go on.”

  “There are many other little refinements too, Mr. Bohlen. You’ll see them all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses,
of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”

  “Where?”

  “In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically.

  Through most of that day the two men discussed the possibilities of the new engine. In the end, Mr. Bohlen said he would have to think about it some more. The next morning, he was quietly enthusiastic. Within a week, he was completely sold on the idea.

  “What we’ll have to do, Knipe, is to say that we’re merely building another mathematical calculator, but of a new type. That’ll keep the secret.”

  “Exactly, Mr. Bohlen.”

  And in six months the machine was completed. It was housed in a separate brick building at the back of the premises, and now that it was ready for action, no one was allowed near it excepting Mr. Bohlen and Adolph Knipe.

  It was an exciting moment when the two men—the one, short, plump, breviped—the other tall, thin and toothy—stood in the corridor before the control panel and got ready to run off the first story. All around them were walls dividing up into many small corridors, and the walls were covered with wiring and plugs and switches and huge glass valves. They were both nervous, Mr. Bohlen hopping from one foot to the other, quite unable to keep still.

  “Which button?” Adolph Knipe asked, eyeing a row of small white discs that resembled the keys of a typewriter. “You choose, Mr. Bohlen. Lots of magazines to pick from—Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Journal—any one you like.”

  “Goodness me, boy! How do I know?” He was jumping up and down like a man with hives.

  “Mr. Bohlen,” Adolph Knipe said gravely, “do you realize that at this moment, with your little finger alone, you have it in your power to become the most versatile writer on this continent?”

  “Listen Knipe, just get on with it, will you please—and cut out the preliminaries.”

  “Okay, Mr. Bohlen. Then we’ll make it . . . let me see—this one. How’s that?” He extended one finger and pressed down a button with the name TODAY’S WOMAN printed across it in diminutive black type. There was a sharp click, and when he took his finger away, the button remained down, below the level of the others.

  “So much for the selection,” he said. “Now—here we go!” He reached up and pulled a switch on the panel. Immediately, the room was filled with a loud humming noise, and a crackling of electric sparks, and the jingle of many tiny, quickly moving levers; and almost in the same instant, sheets of quarto paper began sliding out from a slot to the right of the control panel and dropping into a basket below. They came out quick, one sheet a second, and in less than half a minute it was all over. The sheets stopped coming.

  “That’s it!” Adolph Knipe cried. “There’s your story!”

  They grabbed the sheets and began to read. The first one they picked up started as follows: “Aifkjmbsaoegweztpplnvoqudskigt&,-fuhpekanvbertyuio lkjhgfdsazxcvbnm, peru itrehdjkg mvnb, wmsuy . . . ” They looked at the others. The style was roughly similar in all of them. Mr. Bohlen began to shout. The younger man tried to calm him down.

  “It’s all right, sir. Really it is. It only needs a little adjustment. We’ve got a connection wrong somewhere, that’s all. You must remember, Mr. Bohlen, there’s over a million feet of wiring in this room. You can’t expect everything to be right first time.”

  “It’ll never work,” Mr. Bohlen said.

  “Be patient, sir. Be patient.”

  Adolph Knipe set out to discover the fault, and in four days’ time he announced that all was ready for the next try.

  “It’ll never work,” Mr. Bohlen said. “I know it’ll never work.”

  Knipe smiled and pressed the selector button marked READER’S DIGEST. Then he pulled the switch, and again the strange, exciting, humming sound filled the room. One page of typescript flew out of the slot into the basket.

  “Where’s the rest?” Mr. Bohlen cried. “It’s stopped! It’s gone wrong!”

  “No sir, it hasn’t. It’s exactly right. It’s for the Digest, don’t you see?”

  This time it began. “Few people yet know thatarevolutionary-newcurehasbeendiscoveredwhichmaywellbringpermanentreliefto-sufferersofthemostdreadeddiseaseofourtime . . . ” And so on.

  “It’s gibberish!” Mr. Bohlen shouted.

  “No sir, it’s fine. Can’t you see? It’s simply that she’s not breaking up the words. That’s an easy adjustment. But the story’s there. Look, Mr. Bohlen, look! It’s all there except that the words are joined together.”

  And indeed it was.

  On the next try a few days later, everything was perfect, even the punctuation. The first story they ran off, for a famous women’s magazine, was a solid, plotty story of a boy who wanted to better himself with his rich employer. This boy arranged, so that story went, for a friend to hold up the rich man’s daughter on a dark night when she was driving home. Then the boy himself, happening by, knocked the gun out of his friend’s hand and rescued the girl. The girl was grateful. But the father was suspicious. He questioned the boy sharply. The boy broke down and confessed. Then the father, instead of kicking him out of the house, said that he admired the boy’s resourcefulness. The girl admired his honesty—and his looks. The father promised him to be head of the Accounts Department. The girl married him.

  “It’s tremendous, Mr. Bohlen! It’s exactly right!”

  “Seems a bit sloppy to me, my boy!”

  “No sir, it’s a seller, a real seller!”

  In his excitement, Adolph Knipe promptly ran off six more stories in as many minutes. All of them—except one, which for some reason came out a trifle lewd—seemed entirely satisfactory.

  Mr. Bohlen was now mollified. He agreed to set up a literary agency in an office downtown, and to put Knipe in charge. In a couple of weeks, this was accomplished. Then Knipe mailed out the first dozen stories. He put his own name to four of them, Mr. Bohlen’s to one, and for the others he simply invented names.

  Five of these stories were promptly accepted. The one with Mr. Bohlen’s name on it was turned down with a letter from the fiction editor saying, “This is a skilful job, but in our opinion it doesn’t quite come off. We would like to see more of this writer’s work . . . ” Adolph Knipe took a cab out to the factory and ran off another story for the same magazine. He again put Mr. Bohlen’s name to it, and mailed it immediately. That one they bought.

  The money started pouring in. Knipe slowly and carefully stepped up the output, and in six months’ time he was delivering thirty stories a week, and selling about half.

  He began to make a name for himself in literary circles as a prolific and successful writer. So did Mr. Bohlen; but not quite such a good name, although he didn’t know it. At the same time, Knipe was building up a dozen or more fictitious persons as promising young authors. Everything was going fine.

  At this point it was decided to adapt the machine for writing novels as well as stories. Mr. Bohlen, thirsting now for greater honours in the literary world, insisted that Knipe go to work at once on this prodigious task.

  “I want to do a novel,” he kept saying. “I want to do a novel.”

  “And so you will, sir. And so you will. But please be patient. This is a very complicated adjustment I have to make.”

  “Everyone tells me I ought to do a novel,” Mr. Bohlen cried. “All sorts of publishers are chasing after me day and night begging me to stop fooling around with stories and do something really important instead. A novel’s the only thing that counts—that’s what they say.”

  “We’re going to do novels,” Knipe told him. “Just as many as we want. But please be patient.”

  “Now listen to me, Knipe. What I’m going to do is a serious novel, something that’ll make ’em sit up and take notice. I’ve been getting rather tired of the sort of stories you’ve been putting my name to lately. A
s a matter of fact, I’m none too sure you haven’t been trying to make a monkey out of me.”

  “A monkey, Mr. Bohlen?”

  “Keeping all the best ones for yourself, that’s what you’ve been doing.”

  “Oh no, Mr. Bohlen! No!”

  “So this time I’m going to make damn sure I write a high class intelligent book. You understand that.”

  “Look, Mr. Bohlen. With the sort of switchboard I’m rigging up, you’ll be able to write any sort of book you want.”

  And this was true, for within another couple of months, the genius of Adolph Knipe had not only adapted the machine for novel writing, but had constructed a marvellous new control system which enabled the author to pre-select literally any type of plot and any style of writing he desired. There were so many dials and levers on the thing, it looked like the instrument panel of some enormous aeroplane.

  First, by depressing one of a series of master buttons, the writer made his primary decision; historical, satirical, philosophical, political, romantic, erotic, humorous or straight. Then, from the second row (the basic buttons), he chose his theme: army life, pioneer days, civil war, world war, racial problem, wild west, country life, childhood memories, seafaring, the sea bottom and many, many more. The third row of buttons gave a choice of literary style: classical, whimsical, racy, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, feminine, etc. The fourth row was for characters, the fifth for wordage—and so on and so on—ten long rows of pre-selector buttons.

  But that wasn’t all. Control had also to be exercised during the actual writing process (which took about fifteen minutes per novel), and to do this the author had to sit, as it were, in the driver’s seat, and pull (or push) a battery of labelled stops, as on an organ. By so doing, he was able continually to modulate or merge fifty different and variable qualities such as tension, surprise, humour, pathos, and mystery. Numerous dials and gauges on the dashboard itself told him throughout exactly how far along he was with his work.

  Finally, there was the question of “passion.” From a careful study of the books at the top of the best-seller lists for the past year, Adolph Knipe had decided that this was the most important ingredient of all—a magical catalyst that somehow or other could transform the dullest novel into a howling success—at any rate financially. But Knipe also knew that passion was powerful, heady stuff, and must be prudently dispensed—the right proportions at the right moments; and to ensure this, he had devised an independent control consisting of two sensitive sliding adjustors operated by foot pedals, similar to the throttle and brake in a car. One pedal governed the per centage of passion to be injected, the other regulated its intensity. There was no doubt, of course—and this was the only drawback—that the writing of a novel by the Knipe methods was going to be rather like flying a plane and driving a car and playing an organ all at the same time, but this did not trouble the inventor. When all was ready, he proudly escorted Mr. Bohlen into the machine house and began to explain the operating procedure for the new wonder.