Roald Dahl (19 page)

His writing hut represented part of an effort not only to recreate his own early childhood but to improve on it. As a boy in the 1920s, Roald used to hide up a tree in order to write his diary;
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at Repton, there had been the photography darkroom. His garden shed was a more substantial place in which to work, where he could commemorate, and fantasize about, his past. On a side table, he gradually accumulated shards of himself.
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There was his father's silver and tortoiseshell paper knife. There was the heavy ball which he had made at Shell out of the wrappings of chocolate bars. There were souvenirs of his time in North Africa—a stone “star of the desert,” picked up in Libya, and a tablet fragment with a cuneiform inscription found in Babylon. As he grew old, other relics were added: his own femur, for example, and fragments of his spine, saved from operations. For much of his life, he was to spend several hours of every morning and afternoon surrounded by these fetishes, snugly wrapped in a sleeping bag, sitting in an old armchair, his feet on a trunk which was filled with blocks of wood and tied to a leg of the chair, to prevent it from slipping. Here he transported himself back to his earliest infancy. Even beyond. “It's a lovely place to work,” he told an interviewer. “It's small and tight and dark and the curtains are always drawn and it's a kind of womb—you go up here and you disappear and get lost.”
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The New Yorker
turned down seven stories by him between February 1957 and March 1959.
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Dahl was being pressed by Alfred Knopf to put together a new collection but told the publisher that he found ideas harder and harder to come by and was beginning to fear that they would run out altogether. But the real difficulty perhaps wasn't lack of ideas so much as a change of heart, stemming from his new experiences of parenthood. His stories were still “clever,” cynical, vengeful: but these attributes—skillfully deployed in the best of his earlier postwar stories—seem overcontrived in the fiction he was now writing. Perhaps he was beginning to suspect that human dealings required something different of him, both as a man and as a writer, but wasn't yet sure what it was. The new tales were often focused on children, and it is with a rather artificial air that they carry their burden of malice. In one, a delighted couple, Hitler by name, none of whose previous infants has survived, manage to bring up a son called Adolf. In another, a baby is fed on royal jelly and frighteningly turns into a bee. A third piece, “Pig,” is about an orphan brought up as a vegetarian, who ends up slaughtered in a butcher's abattoir.

None of these sold. Fortunately, Neal was also busy and earning enough for all the family. Apart from American film and TV performances, she began to get roles in English productions of American plays. The first was a BBC version of
The Royal Family of Broadway
, about a family of actors. Gradually the couple established a busy, unpredictable, but well-rooted existence, commuting between the English countryside and Manhattan, and rapidly extending their busy household. On the surface, it looked like an idyll. Dahl toured the countryside buying antique furniture, some of which he restored. He planted about a hundred varieties of roses and began to grow vegetables, especially onions, which were his favorite. He built an aviary and, imitating an idea of Ivar Bryce's at his Elizabethan mansion, Moyns Park, filled it with brightly colored budgerigars—white, pink, yellow, green—which flew in clouds around the garden or sat whistling in the trees.

In April 1957, their second daughter was born at Oxford, and named Chantal, until her parents noticed the rhyme and called her Tessa instead. Pat's mother paid a visit. As before, she and her son-in-law quarreled. She criticized his obsession with the rich; he complained about her Southern cooking. Peace was resumed when she went home and the Dahls took their annual holiday in Norway, fishing and scuba diving and visiting his family.

There were frequent summer outings closer to home. Sofie was in her seventies now and crippled with arthritis. She lived with a housekeeper in a wing of Else and John's house, Whitefields, in Great Missenden. Roald visited her often, with Pat and the children, and for the rest of the tribe he would organize picnics on the river Thames or a trip to the Cotswolds. Some evenings he played snooker with men from the village, or drove to the greyhound stadium at White City, twenty minutes away in west London. Or he and Pat would leave Olivia and Tessa with the nanny and drive down to London for dinner. One memorable night, dining at the fashionable restaurant Prunier's with Matthew Smith, Pat took a liking to a pair of silver sugar tongs and Roald pocketed them for her. As they left, a waiter unsuccessfully accosted the shifty-looking painter, but didn't dare to confront Dahl himself.
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They also spent occasional weekends at the Bryces', in company divided equally between the international rich and the decayed European aristocracy. Bryce's heiress wife, Josephine Hartford, had helped him to buy back the magnificent house and estate where he had spent part of his childhood. He was infatuated with writers and, according to a young woman friend, admired Dahl personally as “a kind of Viking: strong, manly, adventurous—a throwback.”
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The two men had much in common: a family fortune made in shipping and then partly lost;
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war years spent in the United States; enthusiasms for gambling and for art. (Bryce collected famous fakes, which some think revealing about him.
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) Both Roald and Pat relished the atmosphere
of raffish luxury at Moyns, where they played cards until the wee hours and were brought large breakfasts in bed by uniformed servants.

More often, though, they saw local friends, comfortably well-off people with children of the same ages as Olivia and Tessa: the Kirwans, for example, a retired brigadier and his wife who farmed on the other side of the hill behind Gipsy House; or the Stewart-Libertys, in front of whose big old farmhouse in The Lee stands a ship's figurehead, taken from one of the hulks which were broken up to supply timber for the family's mock-Tudor department store, Liberty's, in Regent Street.

The Stewart-Libertys' place was much less grand than Moyns Park, but nonetheless had a Hollywood level of opulence which made Pat feel at home. Because of her work, she was often in Southern California, sometimes taking the family with her. Early in 1958, they stayed at Yul Brynner's house in Laguna Beach, where they saw a lot of the painter Alden Brooks, another friend of Matthew Smith's.
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Back in England that summer, Pat made her West End debut in Tennessee Williams's
Suddenly Last Summer
: Kenneth Tynan said she played her “dark brown voice” like a cello, and compared the performance to Maria Casares's Phèdre.
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And Dahl at last had a breakthrough with
The New Yorker
, where Katharine White's son and assistant, Roger Angell, accepted a story about pheasant poaching entitled “The Champion of the World.”
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Dahl rebelled against Neal's being so continually busy,
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but the demands on her time continued throughout the following year and began to take an emotional toll. She made a film at Elstree before returning to New York to rehearse a play about Helen Keller, William Gibson's
The Miracle Worker
. Dahl didn't like the piece, and told the author so, at which Pat told him to “keep your fucking nose out of my business and let me make my own enemies.”
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Although they often got on well, they were also more and more inclined to quarrel, especially after they had
had a few drinks. Roald, in particular, seemed jealous of Pat's success and was prone to needling her with jibes against Americans or against theater people.
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In such moods, each brought out in the other the characteristics he or she found most irritating: Roald's tetchy, sometimes supercilious presence encouraged Pat to be compensatorily laid-back, while her chaotic-seeming ease with the children drove him to pace up and down restlessly until he could stand no more and disappeared to write. But a combination of work and children meant that they were rarely alone together for very long, and their squabbles were countered by the powerful physical attraction between them. Maturity made Pat more beautiful than ever, with her sad dark eyes and her strong-boned face. The allure of the now middle-aged Roald was less easily definable. Untidily dressed, sharp-nosed, with a high forehead, gangly body, very long hands, and flat feet, he looked, Pat said, like Virginia Woolf in drag, except that he was going bald. But women were attracted both by this battered appearance and, when he could be bothered, by the attentiveness, energy, and humor of his conversation. He gave an impression of being both strong and vulnerable. And because he was hard to please, when he liked you, you could easily find yourself liking him back.

Soon Pat was pregnant again. In March 1960, Roald, Pat, Olivia, Tessa, and the nanny sailed from New York to England. The new baby, Theo, was born that summer. Ivar Bryce was one of his godfathers and put him down for Eton.
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The crossing had been eventful. Dahl's London agent was with them on the
Queen Elizabeth I
. So was his first patron, C. S. Forester. So, too, was an ambitious British publisher, Charles Pick, recently appointed managing director of Michael Joseph.
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Dahl's new collection of stories,
Kiss Kiss
, had just appeared in New York, and Pick bought a copy to read on the voyage back. Although the author had not been writing well recently
, the collection contained his two unforgettable stories “William and Mary” and “The Way Up to Heaven,” as well as another which was to become a popular favorite: “Parson's Pleasure,” about an antique dealer who buys a Chippendale commode from some men whom he thinks of as yokels, pretending that it is worthless to him except for its legs. While he is fetching his car, the men obligingly cut off the legs and smash up the rest for firewood.

Heavily promoted by Knopf, the collection was a success in the States, and as soon as Pick was introduced to the author, he offered him a £350 advance for the British rights, with a royalty starting at 12.5 percent (the usual figure was 10 percent). Dahl accepted. When they docked at Southampton, Pick telephoned the literary editor of the
Sunday Times
and persuaded him to print “The Way Up to Heaven” as holiday reading.
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He reckons that within a couple of years he sold around 20,000 copies of
Kiss Kiss
in hardcover in Britain, about ten times what he would normally have expected for a collection of short stories. Next, seeing an opportunity in the newly expanding paperback trade, Pick bought the rights to the out-of-print
Someone Like You
and invited the editorial director of Penguin to dinner.

In later life, Dahl always claimed to have been ignored by the English literary establishment, but
Kiss Kiss
was respectfully received in Britain.
The Times Literary Supplement
compared the book with the early work of Angus Wilson and talked of “the verisimilitude of [Dahl's] caricature of human weakness, showing this to the edge of extravagance, revealing a social satirist and a moralist at work behind the entertaining fantast.”
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And Malcolm Bradbury, then a young lecturer in the Adult Education Department at Hull University, wrote enthusiastically that Dahl “gets straight A's in
my
creative writing class.”
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Bradbury, who had recently made his name with
Eating People Is Wrong
, was writing in
The New York Times Book Review
and commented tellingly on transatlantic differences for writers of short stories: not only the fact that the United States provided the only substantial market
, but also the effects of this on Dahl's fiction. Dahl's England was, he rightly said, a curious place, “rather like the England in British Travel Association ads in
The New Yorker
. Deliberately, he makes it a bit more rural, a bit more quaint, a bit more lively than it really is, a foreigner's England, perhaps.”

It was the American critics who now proved harder to please. Some linked
Kiss Kiss
with the new vogue for sick humor, and Robert Phelps made the point that Dahl's stories are in fact rather like jokes: you can tell them to people.
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But if they could be retold, not everyone thought they stood up well to being reread, and another reviewer, Paul A. Bittenwieser, said that they were becoming increasingly predictable.
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Several critics also found something childlike in the book. Phelps was reminded of cartoons: “There is only the simplest, generic characterization—the Priggish Professor, the Mousy Parson, the Grouchy Millionaire.” Bittenwieser commented on Dahl's fairy-tale use of superlatives: “An antique is not merely valuable, it is a Venus de Milo of the furniture world; a certain new food is not only delicious, it is worth five hundred an ounce.” Another critic who saw the stories as fairy tales, with an old-fashioned intention to scare their readers, was the Canadian novelist and playwright Robertson Davies. But out of the eleven tales in
Kiss Kiss
, Davies was disappointed that “Mr. Dahl only made me shudder with one.”
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None of this discouraged book buyers. In the States,
Kiss Kiss
was published early in February 1960, with massive advertising linking it to St. Valentine's Day. Knopf spent in all $8,000 on publicity for the book, and by April, the firm had sent out 16,000 of the 24,000 copies printed.
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Continental European publishers eagerly bought the rights, not only in Scandinavia, but in countries where Dahl's books had not previously been translated: France, Germany, Holland, Italy. In each case he was taken up by one of the leading literary houses—Gallimard, Rowohlt, Meulenhoff, Feltrinelli. Most of them bought
Someone Like You
, too, for good measure. And in Germany and Holland, where the collections
were quickly successful, translators soon began work on his book of war stories,
Over to You
. It would be some time before Dahl saw a big financial return on his writing, but in the German language alone, during the next thirty years his books for adults were to sell five million copies.
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