This article was written by Bryan Appleyard and appeared in the March 31, 1990 edition of The Canberra Times. Source: Trove
Writer Roald Dahl sells in millions and is endlessly beguiling, but you might not relish his views in your nursery. Brian Appleyard talked to him.
ROALD Dahl is without question the most successful children’s writer in the world. In Australia he can fill vast theatres like some rock star; if he opens a bookshop in Holland they have to close the streets; British children worship him with the kind of stunned gratitude they will later accord to Bros or Kylie Minogue; and in China his Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has just been issued in what may be the largest first edition printing in history — two million copies.
Most parents, particularly middle-class ones, share their children’s gratitude. Just seeing their offspring enthralled by a book rather than by a computer game or video is enough to make them weak-kneed with
relief — here is a child being primed to resist the nameless temptations of the modern world and the future; here is a child who reads. It is the sensuous fact of the book itself and its associated memories of simpler, golden times that comes first. Content comes later, if at all.
Dahl is on their side. From James and the Giant Peach to his latest, Esio Trot (to be published next month), he has always regarded his own books as no more than introductions to the idea of books in general. “The most important thing I can teach them is not to be daunted by books,” he said. “It’s a terrific thing in
later life not to be daunted by heavy tomes. Whatever you are going to be you are going to have to have books.”
They may acquire from him the ability to make decent sentences, learn punctuation and vocabulary but, he believes, nothing else. The one moral thread he will acknowledge is the awareness that large numbers of people are rather unpleasant and the one theme is the assault on adults: “Putting down adults is a very strong thing with children. They love it. They have certain things they react to very strongly: laughter and putting down adults are two of the strongest. They are surrounded by these giants. You’ve really got to put your head that high from the floor and keep it there for a fortnight to see what it’s like — all these giants around you telling you what to do. Poor little buggers.
“My only moral dimension is to teach children to read. There is no other message whatsoever except the slight sense that people are quite nasty. The one thing — it is slightly immoral if anything — is to denigrate adults. It’s the path to their affections. It may be simplistic but it is the way. Parents and schoolteachers are the enemy. The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilising this thing that when it is born is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all.”
He is speaking in his large, though not grand, house at the edge of Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. Its walls are covered with a well-bought art collection and in his garden is the hut where he retreats to write. He goes there every day to compose or “just fiddle around” for about two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon.
“I’m quite sure it happens in that little hut. When I come out I just throw it off, a switch goes click. It’s good fun in there, you live in that world, it’s wonderful. It’s terrific fun and you’re with them completely.”
He is 73, tall, stooping and garrulous. He more or less chain-smokes Cartier cigarettes, though he insists that he does not inhale. Normally he drinks fairly copiously. When we met, however, he was under doctor’s orders to cut out alcohol and was contenting himself with a very weak Campari and soda — “gives you the smell of ale at least”.
Faintly raffish
His conversation is foul-mouthed in a masculine, clubbable kind of way and when not formally being interviewed he drifts into salacious, schoolboyish speculation about improbable sexual unions. The impression is of an indulged, experienced, faintly raffish man, somewhat like his hero, Ernest Hemingway. Unaware of whom you were meeting, the one thing you would not guess is that every day he steps into that hut and becomes a certain kind of child.
The world-weary cynicism that clings to him has been earned. He was brought up in Wales by comfortably off Norwegian parents. When he was three his elder sister died and then, a few weeks later, his father. His
education was a savage initiation into the grotesque demands of adults that were to dominate his children’s books. He spent time abroad with Shell and the RAF and began writing in 1942. He married the actress Patrician Neal in 1953 and they had five children, but a daughter died of measles. His wife had three massive strokes, though she subsequently recovered enough to resume her career. They were divorced in
1983. He has now remarried.
It is a life in which catastrophe, cruelty and great love — primarily from his mother — have existed in almost intolerable proximity. In the midst of it Dahl was working intently on a form of writing that would
provide all the traditional narrative escapes of fiction. He developed a strong, simple prose style and established himself as a master of the short story with a cruel twist. It was this stylistic directness that was to be his first qualification as a children’s writer. He could never manage a novel.
“All I know is that my endeavour is to enthral children and to grip them by the throat on every page. I always have been terrified of losing a reader, that’s why I can’t write a novel. A novel has to breathe and
take several pages to do all sorts of things. I would be so frightened of losing the readers if I did that. That is a fault. A great novelist doesn’t worry about that.”
The belief in a “good read” and the traditional virtues of narrative leads logically to a crusty loathing of modern novelists: “They have forgotten that their primary job is to entertain the public, not themselves,
and not to show off.” He takes great pleasure in the inability of “serious” novelists to write children’s stories and gave a speech at last year’s Edinburgh Literary Festival in which he took sour, gloating satisfaction from the fact. Any stated aspiration beyond pure storytelling seems to fill him with rage.
“The one thing I hate more than anything else in anyone who is successful is pomposity. It’s a very easy thing to acquire — especially for men. You don’t very often see pompous women. What happens to women
is something else — somebody like Iris Murdoch. What would you call her? Not pompous. But there’s definitely something irritating there. I saw her about six months ago on television saying it was very important children should read books and I thought: ‘Well, you silly old hag, why don’t you write some for them?’ ”
Dahl’s aesthetic of children’s books extends into the adult sphere: all books are entertainment; they have no grandiose social, political or moral functions. He admires Tolstoy and Graham Greene as storytellers but not at all for their didacticism. Very occasionally a Proust may come along and create intellectual fascination rather than pure plot.
On this issue he writes publicly, as he does on his other irritation with the modern world — the Jews. He says he is an anti-Zionist, but paranoia takes him further.
“It began in 1982 when the Israelis invaded Lebanon. They killed 22,000 civilians when they bombed Beirut — it was very much hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned … I’m
certainly anti-Israeli and I’ve become anti-Semitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism. I think they should see both sides. It’s the same old
thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media — jolly clever thing to do — that’s why the President of the United States has to sell all
this stuff to Israel… ” And so on.
This raises the question whether this is a man whose fictions should be allowed into our children’s minds. But the point is that, as he hides himself away in his hut to play with the slapstick-horrific side of a child’s
imagination, he also sloughs off the world. But this dissociation is not as neat as Dahl would like to believe. His own childhood traumas and adult misanthropy are all too obviously present in the books — passages
from his autobiography read precisely like one of his stories. Life and Dahl’s art do walk hand in hand, even if he has no desire or obligation to ponder the fact. The stories are not the detached fantasies he imagines. They are anti-authoritarian tracts.
Authoritarian
And the truth is that Dahl himself should disapprove of his own books, for all his attitudes are those of a hard authoritarian, disgusted by indiscipline, television and all the other seductions of the modern world.
At one point he launches into an anguished diatribe about the impossibility of bringing up teenagers these days. He talks of the uncontrollably promiscuous daughter of an acquaintance — “They can’t stop her. It’s a very decent family. I don’t know what the hell to do, it’s bloody difficult. I don’t know what to do.”
But surely the indulged anarchy, the sticky sniggering of his stories are one with all the libertarian influences that would lead to such a teenage life? Smilingly, and perhaps with unconcern, he observes the trap of his own imagination.
“I’m only taking responsibility for them up to the age of 10 … I’m certainly doing nothing to encourage it. Parental example doesn’t help, these people are wonderful parents and they behave themselves. Anti-
authoritarian? Yes, I am, very. You’ve hit on rather a nasty point there which I’m not so sure I can answer. Rebels? Yes, absolutely, and I’m afraid if that is carried on into the teens.
“I’m certainly not changing my way of amusing children by telling them their teachers and parents are bloody awful sometimes. It’s a tightrope act and you’ve got me in a bit of a corner. I can’t answer it
… I don’t think it makes the slightest difference if I gear my books to the opposite.”