Roald Dahl (13 page)

These difficulties were in part no more (or less) than those experienced by many people in adjusting to peace and the impoverishment of postwar Britain. But Dahl was also still suffering from the effects of his accident, which in 1946 took him into the Military Hospital for Head Injuries at Wheatley, near Oxford: the latest in what was, for one reason and another, to be a lifetime of hospitalizations for his back problems and his damaged nose.
¹⁰
In addition, he was facing a psychological struggle: that of being a writer and—for the time being, at least—nothing else. Among other things, this meant adapting to the fact that peacetime England was a place much more skeptical about literary talent than wartime Washington had been. Sensitive ex-RAF officers were plentiful in the Home Counties, and the fact that Dahl hobnobbed with famous Americans like Hemingway and Lillian Hellman when they were staying in London cut no ice with the Eton and Oxford types who held most of the literary power. Dahl was ignored, and often complained about the fact to his American friends, particularly to Martha Gellhorn.

Gellhorn saw another source of complication in his return home. He was in his early thirties and, on the face of things, perfectly marriageable. But his domestic circumstances could seem deterring to women friends. She remembers his taking her home to Wistaria Cottage, in the High Street in Amersham, where she met his mother and what seemed like “a
thousand
sisters.” There was “a
suffocating
atmosphere of adoration of him … and I was treated with
hatred
by these women, because nobody could be good enough for our boy.” It was all “
very
boring and
very
heavy.” She thought it could not have been a good situation either to have grown up in or to have returned to.

It was in these complicated psychological circumstances that Dahl made his first attempt at a novel: a pacifist fantasy about nuclear war.

In the short stories he had written in Washington, the mood was already increasingly grim, closer to Wilfred Owen than to Rupert Brooke. “Someone Like You,” for example, is a conversation between two bomber pilots getting drunk in a bar. One has been through the whole war and has become obsessed with the arbitrariness of the fate he has been dealing out:

I keep thinking during a raid, when we are running over the target, just as we are going to release our bombs, I keep thinking to myself, shall I just jink a little; shall I swerve a fraction to one side, then my bombs will fall on someone else. I keep thinking, whom shall I make them fall on; whom shall I kill tonight. It is all up to me.… It would just be a gentle pressure with the ball of my foot upon the rudder-bar; a pressure so slight that I would hardly know that I was doing it, and it would throw the bombs on to a different house and on to other people. It is all up to me.
¹¹

“Someone Like You” supplied the title for a later book by Dahl, but was itself collected with most of his other war stories in his first book for adults,
Over to You
. Because of Arthur Wang's doubts about short stories, Knopf had passed up the chance of publishing it,
¹²
so
Over to You
went to the enterprising but shortlived Reynal and Hitchcock, who brought it out in 1946. In England, it was published soon afterward by Hamish Hamilton. Noël Coward noted in his diary that the stories “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.”
¹³

Few British critics were keen on the mystical elements in the
book—the moving mountains and Fin's heavenly landing grounds. The no-nonsense
Times Literary Supplement
, for example, said that Dahl “is safe with men in the air or on the ground; he is less easy with mysteries.”
¹⁴
But the
TLS
liked Dahl's “combination of ease in the telling and of cumulative suspense.” In the States,
The Saturday Review of Literature
's reviewer, Michael Straight, went further, seeing him as “an author of great promise.”
¹⁵
Straight—a novelist and political writer of Dahl's own age, whose
Make This the Last War
had appeared in 1943—defended the phantasmagoric aspects of some of the stories in
Over to You
, which he found true to the psychology of exhausted pilots. For this reason, he saw Dahl as having achieved a more powerful kind of realism than, say, H. E. Bates in his RAF fiction.
Over to You
offered something “more intense and conceived on a larger scale.”

This was certainly true of one of Dahl's next pieces, which nags away at the problem that agonizes the bomber pilot in “Someone Like You”: people's interchangeability. The new story, “The Soldier,” involves a situation which was to become common in his writing: an obsessive man dominated by a stronger woman.

In this case, the man has returned from the war full of fears of airplanes and imaginary gunfire, and suffering from what seems to be a neurological complaint which confuses his senses: he can't always feel pain or tell hot from cold. He longs to return to the stability of childhood, to seaside holidays with his mother. He is treated by a doctor, but gets worse. Ultimately, he confuses his wife with another woman and is about to attack her with a knife. She disarms him by humoring him and then, choosing her moment, hitting him hard in the face.

Dahl complicates the narrative by letting it take both sides. The dramatic tension—will the man kill his wife?—is counterbalanced by a psychological ambiguity intensified by her behavior. She has been acting unsympathetically, at least in his eyes. Now she pretends (or admits?) that she is not his wife at all: “I
told you Edna's gone out. I'm a friend of hers. My name is Mary.”

The situation is Pinteresque, but “The Soldier” was written almost twenty years before Pinter's
The Homecoming
. Dahl began it in 1947 and sold an early version to the BBC's new high-cultural radio channel, the Third Programme, in the summer of the following year.
¹⁶
This first draft, called “People Nowadays,” contains some extra clues about Dahl's state of mind at the time. Admittedly, the version lacks the inner terrors he later developed in it. It is both more explicit and more sentimental, with an us-against-the-crazy-universe ending denied to “The Soldier.” The wife murmurs to her husband that the situation they are in cannot be real: what is
wrong
with everyone today? He can't answer her, except by saying that they all seem to have gone crazy. But if in this draft of the story the madness may be the whole world's, rather than just the soldier's, his explanation for it is revealing: “It was the war talk that did it. He knew it was the war talk, and the talk of new weapons and the talk of another war coming soon for certain.”

Given both Stalin's ruthless expansionism since 1944 and the dawning public realization of the implications of Hiroshima, many people had such fears and assumed that the enemy would be a nuclear-armed Soviet Union. One of those with whom Dahl discussed the possibility was his friend Dennis Pearl, who whenever he was on leave would come to stay at Wistaria Cottage. Pearl had spent most of the war in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, after being captured at Singapore, but decided to stay in the army after his release and was now based in the Middle East in the 3rd Infantry Division, preparing to counter an anticipated Russian advance into what is now Iran. At the time, Pearl says, “it didn't seem to many of us that peace had really broken out.” Dahl's frequent letters to Charles Marsh are consumed by such anxieties, and by his irritation at what he saw as Marsh's new political complacency. Marsh took Henry Wallace's side, deploring the anti-Communist mood in the United States. Dahl replied
that it was not Communism he was frightened of but war. If Marsh went on kissing his beloved Russians, he said, they would sooner or later bite off his tongue.
¹⁷
He told Marsh that expert opinion in London predicted a new war by the spring of 1950.
¹⁸
It was “the saddest goddamn thought, the saddest craziest thought that it is possible to think.”
¹⁹
Throughout the spring and summer of 1946—two years before the Soviet Union blockaded Berlin and took over Czechoslovakia, three years before it exploded an atom bomb, four years before the war in Korea—he thought and wrote about little else.

The main fictional product of his anxieties, a novel called
Sometime Never
, was published in the United States in 1948 by Scribner's, and in England a year later by Collins (which had also published
The Gremlins
). It flopped and was scarcely heard of again. Even in Dahl's commercially successful last years, when practically everything he had ever written was reissued, recycled, or simply reshuffled into a “new” collection under a different title, he never tried to revive it. In 1979,
My Uncle Oswald
was promoted as Dahl's first novel—a mistake which Auberon Waugh was among the few critics to notice. (Peace-loving Holland is the only country where
Sometime Never
has been reissued: the 1982 Dutch translation has remained in print ever since.) Yet it was the first novel about nuclear war to appear in the United States after Hiroshima. For that reason alone, it deserves a close look.

There had been several prewar fantasy-fictions on the subject. According to Paul Brians, in his expert and readable survey of them,
²⁰
they go back almost as far as the discovery of radiation—Robert Cromie's
The Crack of Doom
appeared in 1895, almost twenty years before H. G. Wells's better-known
The World Set Free
. But during the Second World War, the topic had been banned. Some brave editors of science-fiction magazines, particularly John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of
Astounding
, ignored the censorship, but it was thorough, and in U.S.-occupied Japan continued well after the war had ended. There, despite what many
people had good reason to know for themselves, fictional references to the effects of radiation were officially deleted, under the pretense that they were untrue.
²¹

Such deceptions were harder to practice in the West, particularly once censorship had been lifted. Dahl himself didn't have far to look for reliable information on the subject. In November 1945,
The Atlantic Monthly
published a whimsical short story by him called “Smoked Cheese.” (It seems to have been intended for children. Thirty-five years later, in
The Twits
, he reused the main element of the plot, in which a man plagued with mice disorientates them by gluing his furniture to the ceiling.) The same issue of the magazine carried stories by Eudora Welty and Frederic Prokosch, and a piece by Raymond Chandler about writers in Hollywood. But even in this company Dahl was unlikely to have missed an article on the atomic bomb by Albert Einstein. “As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great powers,” Einstein wrote, “war is inevitable.” The only hope lay in a form of world government.

These ideas found their way into Dahl's novel. It is evident both from his letters at the time and from the book's preliminaries how ambitious and how serious he felt about it. (He even opens with an epigraph from Isocrates—“The age in which we live should be distinguished by some glorious enterprise, that those who have been so long oppressed may, in some period of their lives, know what it is to be happy.… We stand in need of some more durable plan which will forever put an end to our hostilities and unite us by the lasting ties of mutual affection and fidelity.”) In his foreword, Dahl writes confessionally, in the spirit of the pilot in “Someone Like You,” about having been a licensed murderer, and about the likely destruction of all civilization. So it comes as a shock when he immediately slips back into a newly extended but not much less juvenile version of
The Gremlins
. The book begins where the earlier one did, in the Battle of Britain, but continues to the end of human civilization.

Dahl may, as will become clear, have had Tolkien in mind in
writing the story (he liked
The Hobbit
). There are echoes, too, of Lewis Carroll's mixture of the irrational and the commonsensical. But these elements are combined with the realism of his tougher war stories. The book can't decide whether it is for adults or for children, and the resulting clashes of tone are bizarre. So, for example, one paragraph about the Blitz begins: “You can remember how it was, how the scream seemed to come from high up, directly overhead, a female scream, a thin high wailing scream.” The next drops into childish talk: “And I happen to know that many of the people behaved in the funniest ways when the siren woke them, especially if they were alone.”

This unsureness of style reflects other confusions. Dahl wrote the book at speed during the spring and summer of 1946—at the height, that is, of the war-crimes trials at Nuremberg. Yet plentiful revelations about Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust did not discourage him from satirizing “a little pawnbroker in Hounsditch called Meatbein who, when the wailing started, would rush downstairs to the large safe in which he kept his money, open it and wriggle inside on to the lowest shelf where he lay like a hibernating hedgehog until the all-clear had gone.”
²²
Elsewhere, the story delights in its Gremlin dictator, “The Leader,” as if Hitler and Mussolini had never existed.

The Leader of the Gremlins is a prototype of Mr. Willy Wonka in
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. Between the imagined Third World War and the all-destructive Fourth, he rules whimsically over an underground kingdom, alternately bullying his subjects and appeasing them with sweet fruits called snozzberries. And the book anticipates other aspects of Dahl's later stories—their cheerful misogyny (“the female of any type is always more scheming cunning jealous and relentless than the male”
²³
), their cartoon-strip satire—for example, at the expense of the Political-Gremlins (who hang upside down, and out of whose mouths comes hot air)—and their anal humor (the best way for Gremlins to short-circuit the sparking plugs of Spitfires is to sit on them: “It is a delightful sensation anyway”
²⁴
). All this
seems messy beside an otherwise grim attempt to imagine both a global nuclear war and a new form of world order.