Articles/Interviews

Book and Magazine Collector (April 1994) Article

Either way, the New Yorker rejected 'William and Mary' when it was sent to them in 1954, and again three years later. Between February 1957 and March 1959, six other stories suffered the same fate, including the repulsive 'Pig', in which an orphan brought up as a vegetarian is slaughtered in an abattoir; 'Genesis and Catastrophe', an ironical account of the birth of Hitler; and 'Royal Jelly', an excess of which causes a baby to turn into a bee!

These stories, along with a number of others written between 1953 and 1959 -- eleven in all -- make up Dahl' s third collection, Kiss Kiss, published by Knopf in early February 1960, with a massive advertising campaign linking it to St. Valentine's Day! The print-run of the first edition was much larger than that for Someone Like You -- 24,000 copies, of which two-thirds had been sold by April.

ENTERPRISING

In March 1960, the Dahls and their children, Olivia and Tessa, sailed from New York to England on the 'Queen Elizabeth'. By a fortunate coincidence, Dahl's agent, his first 'patron', C. S. Forester, and an enterprising British publisher, Charles Pick (recently appointed managing director of Michael Joseph), were also on board.

Pick had purchased a copy of Kiss Kiss to read on the voyage, and was very impressed by it. By the time the ship docked at Southampton, he had bought the U.K. rights to the book, in return for a generous royalty of (to begin with) 12.5%. So began Dahl's longest-running partnership with any British publishing company (although Pick was to remain with the firm for only two more years). As is evident from his bibliography, his earlier dealings with London publishers had been decidedly shortlived, mainly due to his dissatisfaction with the lack of promotion of his works, to which he attributed their poor sales.

Charles Pick was a great publicist, and immediately persuaded the literary editor of the Sunday Times to print 'The Way Up to Heaven' in the newspaper as 'holiday reading'. Published by Michael Joseph in October 1960, Kiss Kiss turned out to be a much greater popular and critical success in the U.K. than Someone Like You, achieving hardback sales of 20,000 copies within two years.

OMNIBUS

In the late Fifties, Dahl found it increasingly difficult to think up new stories, and he had no ideas for a new novel (which Knopf continually demanded). He was both amazed and delighted at the way that his relatively small body of work continued to earn him large amounts of money, especially from Europe (at least five million copies of his adult books have been sold in German-language editions alone).

But his literary talents were now taking a new direction, beginning in 1961 with the publication in the United States of his first major children's book, James and the Giant Peach, which was based on a story he'd originally told his two daughters, Olivia and Tessa. The first draft of another story, 'Charlie's Chocolate Boy', was completed in 1960, after the family had settled in England at Gipsy House in Great Missenden -- Dahl's home for the last thirty years of his life.

The Dahl family was hit by a series of tragedies in the early 1960s: first, four-month-old Theo was seriously injured when his pram was struck by a cab in New York in 1960; then, the delicate Olivia almost succumbed to a virulent attack of measles in 1962; and finally, in 1965, Dahl's wife, Patricia Neal, suffered two successive strokes whilst in Hollywood.

With Charles Pick no longer managing the company, Michael Joseph showed no interest in either James and the Giant Peach or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the final version of 'Charlie's Chocolate Boy'). Other London firms were similarily unimpressed, considering both books to be really "adult stories in disguise". They were eventually published in this country by G. Allen & Unwin in 1967.

In 1967-8, Dahl turned his attention to screen-writing, adapting two very different works by lan Fleming -- the 'James Bond' novel, You Only Live Twice, and his juvenile fantasy, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang -- for the cinema. He also began a screenplay of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, but never completed it.

He then bought the screen rights to a novel by Joy Cowley called Nest in a Falling Tree, which he adapted as The Night Digger. The film starred Patricia Neal as Maura, a woman recovering from a cerebral aneurysm who works part-time in a Buckinghamshire children' s hospital. The film sank without trace in America, and has never been released in Britain.

EROTIC

Beginning with 'The Last Act', Dahl then wrote some violently erotic stories, all of which were published in Playboy (they were too spicy for the New Yorker!). Most of these take a dark, rather Gothic view of sex: in 'The Visitor', for instance, Uncle Oswald, discovers that he may have slept with a leper, while 'Bitch' ends with him being assaulted by a hideous woman to whom he has administered a powerful aphrodisiac. These three stories -- along with one other, 'The Great Switcheroo', in which two men devise a plan for going to bed with each others wives without the women realising -- make up Dahl's fourth collection, Switch Bitch, published in both Britain (Michael Joseph) and America (Knopf) in 1974.

Discussing these stories in a recent article in the Times Literary Supplement, Frederic Raphael wrote: "There was a kind of camp in Dahl's later outrageousness... No one else could have written 'Bitch' -- in which the hero is finally transformed into a walking, working phallus -- without falling into tweeness or rising into pornography. The requirements of the marketplace served Dahl well; energy, rage, fancy, which might have taken monstrous wing -- or been grounded entirely -- were re-invested in toothsome ghoulishness."

One of Dahl's later tales, 'The Bookseller' (Playboy, January 1987), is about a sleazy bookdealer who blackmails the families of recently-deceased men by sending them a spurious bill for the purchase of hardcore pornographic books. His downfall comes when he chooses a blind man as a victim. (Evelyn Laye gave a memorable performance as the man's widow when the story was televised in 1988.)

The publication of My Uncle Oswald in 1979 -- exactly thirty years after his only other attempt at along work of fiction, Sometime Never -- finally proved to the world that Dahl was incapable of writing a successful novel for adults.

As Jeremy Treglown comments in his new book, Dahl was really scraping the barrel with this work, which describes Uncle Oswald's attempts to procure semen-samples from some of the world's great men in order to sell them to wealthy, childless women. Because of Dahl' s notoriously unreliable memory , the text had to be carefully edited by the publishers. Balzac was among the original roster of donors, despite the fact that the book is set in 1919! (Strangely, Dumas was omitted!) Typically, Dahl's schoolboy humour was much in evidence, most notably when he makes a joke about the size of Stravinsky's penis. "Madame S is still alive (and wonderful)," commented Robert Gottlieb, Dahl's hard-pressed editor at Knopf, "and I feel she would be distressed."

In short, My Uncle Oswald is a complete disaster -- an author like Tom Sharpe would have made a far wittier novel out of the same material. It was universally panned by the critics, and Dahl later regretted that it had ever been published.

Gottlieb put up with Dahl's frequent tantrums and increasingly rude letters until 1981. As a publisher, he had always operated on what he calls the 'F*** You' Principle, under which he was willing to accept "almost any amount of shit from any given writer" on the unspoken proviso that, when he could take no more, he would be free "to turn around and say 'F*** you'".

PARTNERSHIP

And that was precisely what he now did with Dahl in a letter which is printed in full in the new biography. (According to Gottlieb, when his letter went off, everyone at Knopf who had ever had any dealings with the author "stood on their desks and cheered"!) So ended the 38-year-old partnership between Dahl and Knopf, a company which had done so much to champion his career when he was still relatively unknown in Britain.

In 1979, Dahl's stories were successfully transferred to the screen in Anglia Television's hit series, Tales of the Unexpected. This was hosted by Dahl himself -- looking suitably creepy seated in his armchair next to a roaring fire -- and featured a number of big-name actors, including Jos&eaccute; Ferrer ('Man from the South'), Joseph Cotten, Sir John Gielgud and Joan Collins (who co-starred in the hilarious 'Neck'). The series spawned two spin-off collections: Tales of the Unexpected (Michael Joseph, 1979; actually published one month after the Penguin edition) and More Tales of the Unexpected (Michael Joseph, 1980; with four new stories).

After the supply of Dahl's own stories had been exhausted, the series limped on for another two years with adaptations of work by other, less distinguished authors. (Incidentally, this series should not be confused with an earlier, American one from 1977, also entitled Tales of the Unexpected, which was hosted by the late, great William Conrad -- nothing to do with Roald Dahl at all!)

In 1983, Jonathan Cape published Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories, the dustjacket of which features a large photograph of the author. However, his work is conspicuous by its absence from the book itself -- as he freely admitted: "Good ghost stories, like good children's books, are damnably difficult to write -- I have always longed to write just one decent ghost story, [but] I have never succeeded in bringing it off."

In 1958, he had been commissioned by film producer, Edwin Knopf (his publisher's half-brother), to select 24 supernatural stories for a TV series entitled Ghost Time. This was never made, but Dahl's shortlist was the basis for his 1983 anthology.

In 1983, Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal were divorced after thirty years of marriage, and later that same year he married Felicity Crosland. Despite the fact that they were of, respectively, Norwegian and Portugese parentage (her maiden name was 'd'Abreau'), both had coincidentally been born in the Welsh town of Llandaff. They collaborated on a coffee-table-style cookery book, Memories with Food at Gipsy House (1991), which includes a family tree from which both their former spouses are omitted!

COMEBACK

In 1986, Dahl tried to make a comeback as an adult writer with Two Fables, a slim, 64-page hardback published to celebrate his seventieth birthday. This contained two mildly pornographic fairy-tales: 'Princess Mammalia' and 'The Princess and the Poacher'. Graham Dean provided the cover illustrations, and the dustjacket was designed by Bet Ayer. Viking also issued an Edition-De-Luxe, limited to 300 copies signed by DahL and bound in quarter red leather.

Both these 'fables' were discretely omitted from Dahl's Collected Short Stories, a 762-page omnibus edition published by Michael Joseph in 1991. Ah, Sweet Memory of Life (1989; illustrated by John Lawrence) is a collection of country stories which Dahl had once hoped to merge into a complete novel (yet another unrealised project). Apart from the title-piece, this volume includes four stories (about ratcatching, maggot-farming and other rustic delights) from Someone Like You and two -- 'Parson's Pleasure' and 'The Champion of the World' -- from Kiss Kiss.

Unfortunately, Dahl did not mellow with age (he was desperately disappointed that he was never offered a knighthood), and he became well known for creating 'scenes' in public, and especially for his racist and misogynous comments.

According to Jeremy Treglown, book fairs made him particularly irritable, not least because "they make a writer aware of other writers, and how highly some of them are regarded. If illness and pain were principal causes of Dahl's cantankerousness, envy was another. Going Solo had been an inspired title for the second volume of his autobiography; he could never be a mere member of a group."

The difficulties he had experienced getting his books published in Britain in the Forties and Fifties gave him a lasting grudge against the London 'literary establishment', whom he believed were out of touch with the general public. He was genuinely convinced that he voiced the opinions of the 'silent majority' when he spoke out against such subjects as the Booker Prize and Salman Rushdie.

In a letter to the Times (28th February 1989), Dahl claimed that Rushdie had prompted his own downfall by deliberately courting notoriety in an attempt to boost sales of his books (had he never done the same himself?) and that same year he maintained, in a widely publicised speech, that the Booker Prize judges tended to choose 'beautifully-crafted' novels that were also "often beautifully boring"! ("Balls!" shouted Laurie Lee from the audience.) He always derived a great deal of satisfaction from being utterly opposed to the majority of his fellow writers.

POPULARITY

On the other hand, Dahl defended the books of Enid Blyton, pointing out that -- whatever adults felt about them -- they remained popular with millions of children. Of course, as she'd been dead for almost twenty years, she was no longer a threat to him, although she is still his only rival in terms of popularity and sales.

Dahl was also something of a philanthropist, actively supporting the Dyslexia Institute and other organisations concerned with learning difficulties. He paid for equipment for disabled children and funded research programmes into neurological disorders, and was a generous donor to a number of medical appeals, including that for the Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Half of his royalties now go to fund the Roald Dahl Foundation, which makes grants to projects in areas with which he was personally concerned, notably neurology, haematology and literacy. In 1992, the Foundation helped to build a library for an epileptics' centre in Cheshire and provided a minibus for a school for epileptic children. It will continue to offer support to other good causes until the copyright on Dahl's works expires in 2060.

Roald Dahl died on 23rd November 1990, and was buried on the hillside opposite Gipsy House. His family subsequently placed a notice in the Times describing him as a "scrumiddly-umptious husband and a wondercrump father". Ophelia Dahl is now working on the 'official' biography of her father.

Jeremy Treglown's biography is unauthorised and is all the more powerful for that. It is a compulsive read, and presents a well-rounded portrait of this unique writer who, for all his faults, was undoubtedly generous and charismatic. This book is essential reading for the millions who have enjoyed his funny, scary, sometimes scatalogical but always immaculately-crafted stories.