Articles/Interviews

The Twilight Zone Magazine (February 1983) Article

Roald Dahl: HIS STYLE IS WITTY, HIS IMAGINATION'S NASTY ... AND HE ALSO WRITES FOR CHILDREN.

'It's got to be bloody good!

Interviewer Lisa Tuttle reports:

A man from the south who wants to bet a shiny new car against one of your own fingers; the murder weapon eaten by obliging police; the beekeeper obsessed with royal jelly–the images linger. Roald Dahl's unique, macabre and horrifically funny stories are classics of the form.

Roald Dahl was born in Wales of Norwegian parents in 1916, and educated in England. His early career included a part in an expedition to explore the interior of Newfoundland and work with the Shell Oil Company in London and Dar-es-Salaam. At the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force and was shot down over the Libyan Desert. After further action over Greece and Syria, injuries made it impossible for Dahl to continue flying, and he was posted to Washington, D.C., as assistant air attache.

Shortly after Dahl arrived in Washington, the writer C. S. Forester asked to interview him about his combat experiences for the Saturday Evening Post. Trying to describe his "most exciting experIence," Dahl found himself getting bogged down in details, and suggested that he would write it all down and send it to Forester to use in writing the story. A week later, Dahl was astonished to receive a check for a thousand dollars and the news that the Post would use his story exactly as he had written it, and wanted more.

Not quite believing the ease with which he'd made so much money, Dahl began to write more flying stories. When he had exhausted his own experiences, he made them up. They all sold to top American magazines and were subsequently collected into a book called Over to You (1946).

After the war Dahl continued to write, producing the short stories that were later collected as Someone Like You (1953) and Kiss Kiss (1959). Now acclaimed as a brilliant short-story writer, Dahl went on, in the 1960s, to establish himself as a screenwriter (as in the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice) and as a master of another difficult field: children's literature. Among his best-selling children's books are James and the Giant Peach; Danny, Champion of the World; The Twits; and–recently voted the most popular children's book of all time in a poll conducted by the London Sunday Times–Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

In 1952 Roald Dahl married actress Patricia Neal. They have three daughters and one son and, at the time of this interview, were living in England, in a picturesque Buckinghamshire village. Their house might be the setting for one of Dahl's stories: it's the house of a connoisseur, a collector of fine art, antique furniture, and oddities. A glass cage in the kitchen shelters a couple of sluggishly climbing tree crabs. There's a wine cellar below, holding three thousand bottles, and outside in the garden a hothouse turns the English spring into a tropical summer for the benefit of the exotic orchids grown there.

Every morning Dahl walks across the garden (with the aid of a cane, as both his hip joints are artificial) to a small brick hut. In stark contrast to his well-kept, comfortable house, this hut is barely furnished with filing cobinets, a table, and a disreputable-looking old armchair. The windows are thickly grimed, the floor is dirty cement, and there seems to be a thin layer of grit covering everything. Dahl obviously takes pride in the fact that his tiny sanctum hasn't been cleaned in years, if ever.

There, in the large armchair–sometimes wrapped in a blanket against the chill and with a thermos of coffee close at hand–Roald Dahl sits with a pad of paper and a box of Ticonderoga pencils imported from the U.S., and writes, very slowly, with much thinking and erasing, until lunchtime.

TZ: You're very famous as a children's writer these days, but I want to talk to you about your short stories.

Dahl: Ah, good. We will. They were the result of, I suppose, twenty-five years of solid work, doing nothing else, and not many people have devoted themselves to that. Twenty-five years of solid work, absolutely nothing but these short stories.

TZ: I know the story of how you wrote the stories that were collected in Over to You ...

Dahl: Good! Thank God I don't have to say all that again.

TZ: But once you'd written them, you went on to write more short stories. Why? Why not a novel?

Dahl: I think I had a very strong feeling that it was my metier, you know. And if you find that you can do something, you don't rush off and try to do something else. I think I was probably right. I'm not a novelist, and, on the whole, the pure short-story writer is not a novelist. People like Katherine Mansfield. I don't think she ever wrote a novel. You see, the short-story writer has got to get everything so tight, so close, and so concise. It's the opposite of a novel. The novelist can spread himself or herself. They can take a page or two to describe the fucking landscape, can't they? You can't do that in a short story. It's as different as ... I don't know ... the only thing you can say about it is that they're both writing. But they're entirely different. Quite a number of fine novelists have done fine short stories... Who? Ah, Hemingway. I don't think Hemingway's short stories are as great as people say, but he's a wonderful novelist, early novelist anyway. Everyone has a go at them–Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, everyone –but they're all primarily novelists, aren't they?

TZ: And short-story writers who try to write novels?

Dahl: Usually it's a cock-up. I mean, Maupassant never wrote a novel, did he? I don't think he did. The modern great short-story writers, to me, are John Collier–we were all of a bunch in The New Yorker in the late '40s, you know–John Cheever, J. D. Salinger. He did one novel, Catcher in the Rye. Super. But just the one. He was really a supreme short-story writer, but he only had eleven good ones, then he ran out. Maupassant–have you reread Maupassant lately?

TZ: No.

Dahl: You will be disappointed. He's got the biggest reputation of all short-story writers, and I think he'd have a job selling some of them today, I really do.

TZ: Why? Because they aren't any good, or because so many other people have done the same things since?

Dahl: Standards go up all the time. I don't think standards go up in, say, painting–no one has ever painted better than Van Gogh or Cezanne, they paint differently. But funnily enough, writing dates unless it's very, very good. Tolstoy doesn't date, or Dickens, but it's got to be bloody good. I don't think Maupassant's that good. I think Salinger, in his prime, was wonderful. I think John Collier–well, a quarter of his are wonderful. The trouble with most short-story writers is that they are uneven, and they bash them out too fast. I don't know how many short-story writers you know ...

TZ: A lot.

Dahl: You know a lot, do you? Good. There's Frank O'Connor, for instance–ah, you don't know him. Well, he was one of The New Yorker writers at that time, and there's a mass of work by him, but the unevenness is unbelievable. I mean, there's half a dozen good ones in a volume that big of his collected works of maybe a hundred. That doesn't suit me at all. I will not–I try, anyway–not to do one unless it's equal in quality to the others. That's why I took six months for each story, so I did about two a year.

TZ: But a lot of the people who bash out short stories do it because they have to make a living. And that's also why a lot of short-story writers write novels.

Dahl: That's right. That's absolutely right.

TZ: But you managed.

Dahl: It's all about making a living. I was a bachelor then, and as I was lucky enough to sell my stories every time to the top-paying magazine in New York then, which was The New Yorker ... Imagine, in 1949, getting three thousand dollars for a story. It then sold in fifteen other countries, and that added up, not nearly as much, mind you, but it added up. And then they went into a book, and that sold in fifteen countries, and you've got a living. For a bachelor. It's a bit different if you've got three or four kids ... then the pressure comes on. But I was lucky enough to marry a woman who's also earning a living, so I just went on writing my stories. I was dedicated.

TZ: Who are the writers you feel have influenced you the most?

Dahl: D. H. Lawrence, for some of his sentences and phrasing, not for his construction–his use of words. And Hemingway, for his construction. The master, really, of modem writing. It seems to me that the universities, especially in America, make the trends, deciding whether somebody is in or out of favor. Hemingway was out of favor for a while. They're completely wrong. He's been a greater influence on modern writing, on English literature in this century, than anyone else who ever lived. He taught all of us the value of the short sentence, using adjectives very, very carefully–in other words, hardly at all unless you really wanted it to mean something. And you didn't keep saying "wonderful" because it became meaningless. They're great secrets, those, and nobody ever did it before him, they just didn't. You can read the writers who came before him, people like Galsworthy and Bennett and even Mark Twain, although he was a very fine writer, they all threw these adjectives around. Hemingway had far greater impact. A page of Hemingway at his best has more power than a page of Twain. Or a page of Dickens, come to that. Dickens just threw adjectives around like peanuts. Although he was rather marvelous, because of it.

TZ: Why did you take the direction that you did? The short stories in Kiss Kiss and Someone Like You tend to be on the macabre, disturbing side. What drew you to that sort of horrific story?

Dahl: I can't answer that question. Nobody can answer that. It's like, on a much higher level, let's say old Beethoven was sitting here, and you were interviewing him, and you said, "Mr. Beethoven, how did you come to think of the Fifth Symphony?" Or, "Why did you suddenly write the later quartets? What got into you?" How the hell would he know?

TZ: No, I didn't mean that, only the type of story, after Over to You, which was so much more autobiographical, so very different in tone–

Dahl: Ah, well, Over to You is easily explainable, because that was written during the war, which was a highly emotional time. You didn't live in it, and most of your readers won't have lived in it, and it's almost impossible to understand what an emotional time it was. The Americans and the British against Hitler and the Nazis were fighting for a tremendous cause, I mean saving the world, literally. And the emotions were running endlessly high. Everyone was emotional and sentimental. That was Over to You. But then the war finished, and things got back to semi-normal, and then you went into whatever direction you were going to go, and that was it.