Articles/Interviews

Book and Magazine Collector (April 1994) Article

Roald Dahl was not only the bestselling children's author of his time, he was also one of the most accomplished writers of adult short stories. His macabre contes cruel have been reprinted many times, and were successfully televised in 1979-80 as Tales of the Unexpected. They are among the most memorable written by a British author over the past half-century.

Noel Coward hit the nail on the head when he wrote in his diary, after reading Dahl's second collection, Someone Like You, forty years ago: "The stories are brilliant and his imagination is fabulous. Unfortunately there is, in all of them, an underlying streak of cruelty and macabre unpleasantness, and a curiously adolescent emphasis on sex."

The strange and complex personality who created these quirky tales of love and revenge has been expertly unravelled in a fascinating new biography by Jeremy Treglown, published on 21st March by Faber & Faber.

Roald Dahl was born to Norwegian parents in Llandaff, south Wales, on 13th September 1916. He lost both his elder sister (from appendicitis) and father (pneumonia) when he was only three. His mother, Sofie (to whom he dedicated his memoir, Going Solo), "was undoubtedly the absolute primary influence on my own life. She had a crystal-clear intellect and a deep interest in almost everything under the sun."

FORMATIVE

He was sent to St. Peter's Prep School -- "the greatest torture in the world" -- in Weston-super-Mare, where he acquired a copy of the newly-published Can Such Things Be (Cape: 'Traveller's Library', 1926). This classic collection of stories by Ambrose Bierce "profoundly fascinated and probably influenced" the young Dahl, and almost certainly sowed the seeds of his own successful career as a short-story writer. At the age of ten, he could never have guessed that the company which issued that formative book would become the main publisher of his children's books nearly half-a-century later.

His next school, Repton, was equally distasteful to him. In Boy: Tales of Childhood (Cape, 1984), and also in several TV interviews, Dahl represented the headmaster, Godfrey Fisher (who later became Archbishop of Canterbury and crowned Queen Elizabeth II), as a sadistic flogger, but Jeremy Treglown proves clearly that Fisher had, in fact left Repton a year before the beatings described in Boy.

The dreaded headmaster who succeeded Fisher and who made the lives of so many Repton pupils a misery was J. T. Christie who, according to the philosopher, Richard Wollheim, "rejoiced in beating boys" (he moved on to Westminster in 1937). If Dahl mixed up these two men, then how many of the other 'facts' in his two volumes of memoirs can be trusted? Much is clarified in Treglown's book.

After leaving Repton in 1934, Dahl joined the Shell Oil Company, and spent an exciting few years in Tanganyika. At the outbreak of war, he signed up with the Royal Air Force, receiving his training in Kenya and Iraq before being posted to the Number 80 Fighter Squadron based in the western deserts of Libya.

In Going Solo, Dahl describes many heroic exploits, from being "shot down and crippled in an air-battle" to inventing the RAF expression, 'gremlins'. Treglown shows that Dahl was not shot down as he often claimed: in fact he ran out of petrol and was forced to crash land. He also reveals that he was officially a flight lieutenant, and not a 'wing commander' as he claimed in Who's Who.

WASHINGTON

Dahl was invalided back to England in 1941, and was promoted to the post of Assistant Air Attaché at the British Embassy in Washington the following year. During his first week in this job, he was contacted by C. S. Forester who was writing an article on fighter pilots for the Saturday Evening Post and wanted to hear something of his experiences in North Africa. Dahl sent him an account of his short career in the service, and two weeks later Forester wrote back: "You were meant to give me notes, not a finished story. I'm bowled over. Your piece is marvellous. It is the work of a gifted writer... Did you know you were a writer?"

Dahl was paid $900 for the article, which appeared (anonymously) in the August 1942 issue of the Post under the title, 'Shot Down in Libya'. The story was introduced as a "factual report on Libyan air fighting" by an unnamed RAF pilot "at present in this country for medical reasons" (a reference to his back injury).

Dahl' s first book for children, The Gremlins, was originally serialised in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1942, and he contributed several more flying stories to the Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly ('The Sword', July 1943) and Ladies Home Journal ('Katina', March 1944).

EXPLOITS

Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying, was first published in the United States by the short-lived company, Reynal & Hitchcock, in 1946, and soon afterwards in Britain by Hamish Hamilton.

Mersa Matruh, Cairo, Spitfires over the Channel and the heroic exploits of RAF fighters in the first Greek campaign, all feature in these vivid stories. Everyone of them is concerned with the war in the air and its psychological effect on the men who fought it. The author recaptures the spirit of "those early days when we were fighting in Libya; one flew very hard in those days because there were not many pilots; they certainly could not send any out from England, because they were fighting the Battle of Britain".

The stories in Over to You were favourably compared with those of 'Flying Officer X' (H. E. Bates) and 'Gunbuster' (John Charles Austin). Noel Coward noted in his diary that they "pierced the layers of my consciousness and stirred up the very deep feelings I had during the war and have since, almost deliberately, been in danger of losing".

The American first edition now fetches £150-£200 (Very Good with jacket), compared with £100-£150 for the U.K. equivalent. The dustjacket of the latter features a distinctive Roger Furse design, showing two white wings.

Dahl's first four adult books -- published between 1946 and 1960 -- are eminently collectable in pristine condition. However, all are notoriously difficult to find with Very Good/Fine dustjackets. Whenever they turn up in catalogues, the descriptions of the jackets usually run from "internally repaired" and "lacks small piece at head of spine", to "worn and chipped with some loss". These faults can sometimes mean a difference in price of £30-£60, or more! The dustjacket of my own copy of Over to You is predictably worn at the edges, but has not had the '7/6' price tag removed.

Dahl's first novel (and least-known book),

Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen

In essence, this weird, futuristic fantasy -- one of the very earliest novels about nuclear war -- blends elements of Dahl's first children's book, The Gremlins (1943), with Tolkien, Lewis Carroll and Orwell. The story opens during the Battle of Britain, and concludes with the end of civilisation. The second part of the novel presents a world dominated by communism, whose apologists are described by Dahl as "too brainless even to amass coin-collections for themselves, [but] preach... that all coins should be shared by all people".

After the Third World War (and before the all-destroying Fourth), an underground kingdom is whimsically ruled over by the leader of the Gremlins, who alternately bullies his subjects and appeases them with sweet fruits called snozzberries. Their misogyny ("the female of any type is always more scheming, cunning, jealous and relentless than the male") anticipates that of many of Dahl's later stories.

Overall the novel reads like a hastily written first draft, and is in dire need of editing. It was a complete flop on both sides of the Atlantic, and neither Scribner nor Collins showed any further interest in Dahl' s stories. The book has subsequently remained out of print everywhere -- apart from Holland, where it was reissued in 1982.

DUST JACKETS

Very Good copies of the Scribner edition fetch an average of £120-£150 in dustjackets (although I have seen examples advertised at anything from £35 with a very worn jacket to $300 with one described as "rubbed"), compared to £80-£120 for the Collins equivalent.

Dahl was by now earning large sums from selling articles and short stories to American magazines. Colliers paid him $2,250 for 'Man from the South', a sinister tale (which Dahl subsequently sold to the BBC) about a very gruesome bet, and he received similar sums from the same magazine for other stories, including 'Poison', a classic tale about an imaginary snake.

His first sales to the prestigious New Yorker were 'The Sound Machine' (May 1949), a fantasy about a man who believes he can hear noises made by plants; and a story about a fraudulent wine connoisseur, 'Taste' (August 1951). An article on 'Love' for the Ladies Home Journal earned him $2,500, and was followed by a piece on the Mildenhall treasure ('He Plowed Up $1,OO0,000').

In March 1952, the sixty-year-old publisher, Alfred Knopf (a noted wine expert), read 'Taste' in a back-number of the New Yorker, thoughtit "stunning", and promptly secured the rights to Dahl's next collection of stories.

Someone Like You, which contains such classics as 'Taste', 'Lamb to the Slaughter', 'Man from the South', 'The Soldier', 'Neck', 'The Sound Machine' and 'Nunc Dimittis', was first published in the United States by Knopf in the autumn of 1953. Dahl's recent marriage (in July) to the well-known actress, Patricia Neal, brought the book considerable publicity, and certainly raised sales.

Most of the American reviewers were ecstatic about the collection. The New York Times wrote: " At disconcertingly long intervals, the compleat short-story writer comes along who knows how to blend and season four notable talents: an antic imagination, an eye for the anecdotal predicament with a twist at the end, a savage sense of humor suitable for stabbing or cutting, and an economical precise writing style. No worshipper of Chekhov, he. You'll find him marching with solid plotters like Saki and O. Henry, Maupassant and Maugham... The reader looking for sweetness, light, and subtle characterization will have to try another address. Tension is his business; give him a surprise denouement, and he'll give you a story leading up to it. His name in this instance is Roald Dahl."

HUMOUR

Dahl's black humour was often compared to that of the New Yorker cartoonist, Charles Addams (see BMC 103), and his twist-in-thetale plots with those of expatriate English writer, John Collier.

By Christmas 1953, 7,500 copies of Someone Like You had been sold (which Knopf told Dahl was a record for short stories), and the book reached its fourth printing by February 1954. In April of that year, it won the Mystery Writers of America 'Edgar' award.

The collection was less successful in Britain. Priced at 12/6, the first edition had poor sales, and copies are now very hard to find in really good condition. These now fetch up to £75 in the dustjacket, compared with £80-£120 for the Knopf edition. Two of his best-known stories were written at this time, following a temporary rift with Patricia Neal. Both are about tyrannical husbands. 'The Way Up to Heaven' (New Yorker, January 1954) features a woman with a pathological fear of unpunctuality, who leaves her spouse to die in a lift after discovering that his constant delays are deliberate. The 'hero' of 'William and Mary' suffers an even more gruesome fate: following his death, his still-conscious brain (with one eye attached) is taken home in a dish by his embittered wife! Although Dahl wrote the latter tale soon after Curt Siodmak's strikingly similar novel Donovan's Brain (published by Knopf in 1943), had been filmed with Lew Ayres and Nancy (Reagan) Davis in the leading roles, he claimed not to have seen -- or even heard about -- the movie until he'd finished his own story.