Roald Dahl
Authors: Jeremy Treglown
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Roald Dahl
A Biography
Jeremy Treglown
To Fleur, Grace, and Sam
Contents
1 Almost Anything You Could Say About Him Would Be True
8 Punishment and Pain, Unhappiness and Despair
14 Three Cheers for Stephen Roxburgh
15 You're Absolutely Wrong and I Am Right
Preface and Acknowledgments
In the mid-1980s, Roald Dahl published two autobiographical books for children:
Boy
, about his childhood, and
Going Solo
, which takes the story up to his departure for Washington at the end of 1941. He was helped with them by his most recent American editor, Stephen Roxburgh, whom he subsequently authorized to write a full biography. Later, Dahl fell out with Roxburgh over his editing of
Matilda
,
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and the project was abandoned.
After Dahl's death in November 1990, responsibility for choosing a new biographer fell to the third of his four surviving children, Ophelia.
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She decided that she would in due course write the book herself, and her stepmother, Felicity Dahl (the author's widow by his second marriage), asked close relatives not to cooperate in any similar project. They are a tightly knit family, centered around Dahl's old home, Gipsy House, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, where Mrs. Dahl still lives and from which she runs both her husband's literary estate and a charitable foundation named after him. Readers may ask the question I often put to myself when I began researching the book: should I have given up and gone away?
Morally, I reckoned that quite apart from his interest as a hugely successful writer, Dahl was so active in encouraging his
own, often controversial, public myth that it would not be wrong for an outsider to look into it. I have tried to be tactful in various ways, while assuming that the family and friends of so quarrelsome a man are used to the fact that not all that is said about him is admiring. And I have respected the stipulations of those I have interviewed. Most of the people who spoke to me did so unconditionally, but some asked me to leave certain of their remarks unattributed, and a fewânot the most critical of Dahlâwanted to remain anonymous.
In practical terms, the fact that the book was “unauthorized” wasn't as much an obstacle to research as I feared it might be when I started. Most of Dahl's acquaintances whom I approached agreed to talk to me, from people who were at school with him to those who edited his last books. One interview led to another, and as time went by, some members of the family decided to meet me, after all. I had, of course, read the autobiography of Dahl's wife of thirty years, Patricia Neal,
As I Am
(1988), and the moving fictionalized memoir,
Working for Love
, published in the same year by their oldest surviving daughter, Tessa Dahl. Early in 1992, Patricia Neal allowed me to interview her at her Manhattan apartment, and about a year later we spent time together in London and Great Missenden. Soon afterward, I talked at some length to both Tessa Dahl and her younger sister, Lucy. I also interviewed, among the many other people listed below, the actress Annabella (Suzanne Charpentier), whom Dahl met in 1944 and to whom he remained close for the rest of his life, and Dennis Pearl, a friend for even longer, and eventually a relative by marriage.
There was another route to Roald Dahl, or set of routes: his letters. He was a voluble correspondent, and because he lived and worked in both the United States and Britain, his friendships, as well as his dealings with his publishers, were often carried on by mail. In the 1940s and '50s, he was one of the protégés of an American newspaper owner and philanthropist, Charles Marsh, whose secretary, now his widow, Claudia, kept both sides
of their substantial correspondence and gave me access to it. And for thirty years from the day when the publisher Alfred Knopf first read Dahl's
New Yorker
story “Taste” and signed him up for a book, Knopf's staff kept their letters, memos, readers' reports, legal agreements, and other files, which are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I read Dahl's exchanges with some other publishers, too (particularly Farrar Straus Giroux), and those with Walt Disney and the BBC. I was fortunate in being able to discuss some of this correspondence with people who were involved, especially Claudia Marsh and Dahl's most important editors: Virginie Fowler Elbert, Robert Gottlieb, and Stephen Roxburgh.
On pages 305â7, I make many other acknowledgments both to individuals and to institutions: people who had met Dahl and who wrote to me or spoke to me on the phone, editors at magazines in which his work appeared, libraries which hold materials about him, his foreign publishers, and so onâan alarming number of debts for so small a book. I also acknowledge there the owners of copyrights in materials from which I have quoted. My warmest thanks, however, go to those who knew Dahl or an aspect of his life well, and who agreed to be interviewedâin some cases more than once. Apart from those already mentioned, they are: Liz Attenborough, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Robert and Helen Bernstein, Quentin Blake, Harold Jack Bloom, John Bradburn, Amanda Conquy, Camilla Corbin, Betsy Drake, Creekmore Fath, Colin Fox, Martha Gellhorn, Brough Girling, Edmund and Marian Goodman, Maria Tucci Gottlieb, Valerie Eaton Griffith, Antoinette Haskell, Douglas Highton, Angela Kirwan Hogg, Robin Hogg, Ken Hughes, Alice Keene, Tony Lacey, Tom Maschler, Peter Mayer, David Ogilvy, Antony Pegg, Charles Pick, Ian Rankin, Alastair Reid, Gerald Savory, Sir David Sells, Roger Straus, Mel Stuart, Kenneth Till, Rayner Unwin, and Kaye Webb.
Several of these people also spent time reading and commenting on draftsâof the whole book in the cases of Patricia
Neal and Dennis Pearl, and of individual sections in those of Sir Isaiah Berlin, Quentin Blake, Robert Gottlieb, Valerie Eaton Griffith, and Alice Keene. I am grateful for their suggestions and factual corrections. Any mistakes which remain are, of course, my own.
One of the book's subjects is the creative role of publishers' editors. So I am even more aware than I would have been anyway of my debt to Susanne McDadd and Julian Loose at Faber & Faber, who suggested that I write it and, along with Stephen Roxburgh and John Glusman at Farrar Straus Giroux and my agent, Deborah Rogers, made useful criticisms of successive drafts. My friend and former
TLS
colleague, Alan Hollinghurst, also read and commented helpfully on the typescript.
Among the best editors I know is my wife, Holly, but that is the least I have to thank her for.
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Almost Anything You Could Say About Him Would Be True
Diplomats often receive odd propositions, so on the face of things there was nothing unusually unusual about the contents of a letter sent to the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1944, with the request that it should be passed on to the ambassador, then Lord Halifax. The correspondent said he thought that Halifax might like to help him write a school textbook. Its aim would be “to improve the sex stance of American male juvenility which grows in the dense New England area called the Preparatory School district.”
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Its model was to be the mores of the English public school. This was where the fourth Viscount Halifax (Eton and Christ Church) came in. The author claimed to regard him as a perfect example of English virility.
A reply came a week later, under the thick wax Embassy seal, with a covering note from a junior Embassy official who said he had passed the letter to Lord Halifax that morning. The ambassador had read it more than once, the official claimed, and the correspondent would doubtless find his answer very satisfactory.
The enclosure was long and enthusiastic. It could have been written by a schoolboy. It spoke of Halifax's excitement at this opportunity to communicate to others his deep experience of the subject. Halifax was widely traveled, the letter said, and had
even been accused of libertinism. Admittedly, that was in his younger days, “when I was in the habit of pleasuring others (not to mention myself) at least once every fourteen days.” Even so, he had maintained what he regarded as an unusually vigorous sex life and would be delighted to communicate the secrets of his success to the young. “As you say, I would improve their stance. I would teach them to slice and to hook, to play a low ball into wind and a backspin onto the green right beside the hole.”
April 1944 might not have seemed the best time for such a project. The Allied invasion of France was only six weeks away. Day and night, the U.S. Air Force and the RAF were bombing German cities and Italian ports. In the Pacific, there were many more islands to fight over before the atom bomb would bring Japan to surrender in August 1945. And while human beings were killing each other in the tens of thousands, there was the question of what would happen once they stopped. The Allies were by now confident of victory, and in Washington, London, and Moscow, politicians were drawing provisional maps of the postwar world. Then, too, this was election year in the United States. Roosevelt, already in his unprecedented third term of office, was standing for a fourth that autumn. But his policies, and particularly his support for Britain, were far from universally popular with voters. In the Wisconsin primary, early in April, the internationalist presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, whose support of military loans to Britain had earned him the nickname “the American Beaverbrook,” was sensationally defeated. These were among the matters which the British ambassador, Lord Halifax, formerly Foreign Secretary and before that Viceroy of India, was occupied in analyzing, together with his staff, and reporting back to London.
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