A chance encounter at a dinner party led this veteran of the
Royal Air Force and former oil salesman on the path to one of the most
successful writing careers in history. You know the name of Roald Dahl. You may
also know his stories, including his beloved tales for children, Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. But the story of his life
may surprise you.
Can you identify the stories
synopsized below and also name the authors who wrote them?
A
woman murders her philandering husband by striking him over the head with a
frozen leg of lamb, then cooks the evidence and serves it to the police who are
investigating the crime.
A
mysterious stranger bets a gambler that the latter can’t ignite his cigarette
lighter ten consecutive times without a malfunction. If the gambler wins, he
claims the stranger’s Cadillac. If he loses, the stranger takes his finger
which he’ll hack off with a knife.
A
boy takes a tour of a chocolate factory owned by the eccentric Willy Wonka
where chewing gum always retains its flavor and the ice cream is cold even
without refrigeration.
Agent
007, on assignment in Japan, prevents the international crime syndicate SPECTRE
from igniting World War III by invading their volcano hideaway accompanied by
an army of sword-wielding ninja warriors.
Fans
of the macabre would likely recognize the first two as “Lamb to the Slaughter”
and “Man From the South,” short stories memorably adapted on Alfred
Hitchcock Presents, the latter in an episode featuring Peter Lorre and a
pre-stardom Steve McQueen. The third can only be the classic children’s book, Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory, which inspired two popular films. And James Bond
fans know the last as the British secret agent’s fifth big-screen adventure, You
Only Live Twice.
Even
those who know the name of Roald Dahl and are familiar with his work may be
surprised to discover that he was responsible for all of the above.
More
than two decades after his death, Roald Dahl is best-known as a children’s
author whose books, such as James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory, can be found in almost any elementary school
classroom. But Roald Dahl was much more than that. He was also a war hero, a
spy, a philanthropist, a husband and father, and a man who liked to shock
people. He once passed around a part of his femur, surgically removed during an
operation, at a dinner party, and talked about circumcision at another, hugely
enjoying the startled reaction of the other guests.
“Razzing
people up,” the 6' 5" writer called it, and it was also a way to cut short
the small talk that bored him. “Dahl always seemed to stir up some kind of
controversy,” Kris Rasmussen, author of WonkaMania observed. “He would
write or say outrageous, often hateful things, and then insist he was
misunderstood and never meant any harm by his comments. For every nasty story I
could find about him, there was also an anecdote about Dahl’s incredible
kindness or generosity.” To his biographer, Jeremy Treglown, Dahl’s “behavior
seems like that of someone who had been faced with a premature but permanent,
and rather unconvincing, show of adulthood.” It may be the secret to his
success as a children’s author. As he once said, “I laugh at exactly the same
jokes that children laugh at and that’s one reason I’m able to do it.”
Roald
Dahl was born September 13, 1916 in the Welsh town of Llandaff to Norwegian
parents. The family was prosperous thanks to a ship-brokering business that his
father co-owned, but tragedy struck Dahl at an early age. When he was four, his
seven-year-old sister died of appendicitis. Only two months later, his
grief-stricken father succumbed to pneumonia. His mother was pregnant at the
time and would soon be left with the task of raising four children and two
step-children on her own.
His
school days brought back painful memories of the cruel schoolmasters who
disciplined students with a cane. “It wasn’t simply an instrument for beating
you. It was a weapon for wounding.” In his memoir, Boy, Dahl writes of
Mrs. Pratchett, the stern matron who oversaw the school: “We hated her and we
had good reason for doing so.” Of the sadistic treatment he received, he said,
“I couldn’t get over it. I never have got over it.”
The
experience did not make him eager to continue his education at a university.
“My mother asked me if I wanted to go to Oxford or Cambridge,” he told Justin
Wintle, “but I said ‘No, I want to travel.’”
He
was hired by the Shell Oil Company which sent him to Tanzania in East Africa,
“selling oil to sisal planters and diamond miners, gold miners, and learning
Swahili. I was there until September 1939 when war broke out.” Dahl decided to
do his part for the war effort by joining the Royal Air Force where he became a
fighter pilot. After suffering a fractured skull, a smashed hip and spinal
injuries when making a forced landing in Libya, he recuperated in a hospital
where “I was told I couldn’t fly anymore.”
Sent
back to England, he was hoping to become a flying instructor, but fate intervened.
Invited to dinner at an exclusive London club, he found himself sitting next to
Harold Balfour, the second most important man in the RAF. “Apparently he had liked me, and said he was
sending me to Washington to be Assistant Air Attache.”
It
wasn’t revealed until years after his death, but one of Dahl’s assignments in
Washington was to spy on behalf of his homeland through the British Security
Coordination network. It remains a mystery as to how valuable Dahl was as an
intelligence operative, but Jennet Conant, author of The Irregulars,
believes Dahl picked up a taste for lavish living at this time thanks to
hobnobbing with important well-to-do people, many of them older women with whom
he had affairs and who showered him with gifts. Conant writes that “all Dahl
had to do was keep up a cheerful front and eavesdrop his way through the
yawning Sunday breakfasts, hunt breakfasts, luncheons, teas, tea dances,
innumerable drinks parties, banquets and not infrequent balls.”
More
importantly, his time in the U.S. was instrumental in his later career as a
writer. As he recalled, “I suppose if I hadn’t gone I might never have written
anything.”
It
was pure chance that led Dahl to the career for which he is now celebrated. A
man from the British Embassy who happened to be the English novelist, C. S.
Forester, was interviewing fellow countrymen about their war experiences for a
series of articles in The Saturday Evening Post. “I started to tell him, but the story began
to get a bit bogged down,” Dahl recalled, “so I said, ‘Look, would it help if I
scribbled this out in the evening and posted it on?’”
A
week later, a check for $1000 arrived with a letter from Forester explaining
that the Post liked the story just the way Dahl wrote it and would
publish it under his name. Surprised, Dahl wrote another story, then another,
all of them finding acceptance by major American periodicals. Once the war
ended, Dahl began to concentrate on writing fiction, selling numerous stories,
most of them to The New Yorker.
With
the encouragement of friends, he moved to New York to be closer to his editors.
As his byline became more familiar, he received a call from Alfred A. Knopf,
the publisher, who expressed interest in collecting Dahl’s stories into book
form. Someone Like You appeared under the prestigious Knopf imprint in
1953. By then, Dahl had met actress Patricia Neal at a dinner party. She was
ten years younger, and had fled a Hollywood career following a love affair with
the married Gary Cooper, her co-star in a film version of Any Rand’s hefty
novel, The Fountainhead. She later admitted that she wasn’t in love with
him, but observed that Dahl “knew exactly what he wanted and he quietly went
about getting it. I did not yet realize, however, that he wanted me.” They were
married in 1953, and soon resettled in England where they would start a family
that would grow to include five children.
However,
the 30-year marriage would be marked by tragedy. In 1950, their son, Theo,
would suffer a brain injury at the age of four months when his carriage was
struck by a taxi. Then, in 1962, they would lose their daughter, Olivia, to a
fatal case of measles. She was seven-years-old, the same age at which Dahl’s
sister died. Shortly after winning an Oscar as best actress for 1963's Hud,
Neal suffered a debilitating stroke. Dahl’s tough-love approach to nursing her
back to health was unusual at the time but has since been adopted by the
medical profession. She also benefitted from a device that Dahl invented with
neurosurgeon Kenneth Till and toy designer Stanley Wade that drained fluid from
the brain. Known as the Wade-Dahl-Till valve, it was created after the shunt
used during Theo’s operations kept clogging. Dall was “very knowledgeable,“
Till said, and “had the coolness - I think this perhaps is the word - to know
the pros and cons, the whys and wherefores.” Exported throughout the world, the
valve would be used to treat as many as 3,000 children.
The
real-life drama of Neal’s illness and recovery became the basis for Barry
Farrell’s book, Pat and Roald, which in turn became a 1983 television
film with Glenda Jackson as Neal and Dirk Bogarde as Dahl. Ironically, by the
time the film was in production, the marriage was ending due to Dahl’s
infidelity.
Through
it all, he continued writing. To Noel Coward, Dahl’s short stories were
“brilliant and his imagination is fabulous. Unfortunately there is in all of
them, an underlying streak of cruelty and macabre unpleasantness, and a
curiously adolescent emphasis on sex.”
Although
he dashed off many of his war time reminiscences, and later admitted that he
“was making them up in the end,” he meticulously crafted his short stories,
taking as long as six months on a single tale, “working every morning, six or
seven days a week, from ten until lunchtime, and again in the afternoon from
four until six.” It was an unusually long time to spend on a story, but he
insisted it was “the only way I can get them halfway decent.” It was a
lucrative profession, but a stressful one. “A writer of fiction lives in fear.
Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to
come up with them or not.”
In
1961, he did what Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling had done so successfully,
and turned to television with an anthology series focusing on the weird and
eerie. Way Out ran for a half-hour on CBS from March through July,
preceding Twilight Zone on Friday evenings. “The host is Roald Dahl,”
reported The Plain Dealer. “He is pretty spooky, too.”
It
was around this time that he began the most successful phase of his career, as
the author of children’s books.
“What
the hell am I writing this nonsense for?” he wondered as he was working on James
and the Giant Peach.
“I
believe Dahl used his children’s stories as a means to attempt to reconcile his
own pain,” Kris Rasmussen said. “In his stories he could do what he could not
do in real life – create a happy-ever-after ending.” Dahl himself never
suggested his personal pain inspired his work, only saying that the apple trees
around his home gave him the idea for his first children’s book. “(T)here are a
lot of apple trees around here,” he said in an interview published in Revolting
Rhymes, “and you can watch them through the summer getting bigger and
bigger from a tiny little apple to bigger and bigger ones, and it seemed to me
an obvious thought - what would happen if it didn’t stop growing?” He decided
on a peach for his story because “it’s pretty and it’s big and it’s squishy and
you can go into it and it’s got a big seed in the middle that you can play
with.”
By
the time he was creating his children’s stories, Dahl was retreating to a hut
in the back of the house where he would write while seated in an armchair. He
never had a desk. “Roald had invented his own writing board covered in green
felt,” Neal wrote in her autobiography, “which he put on his lap as a writing
surface.” Before turning Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox into a 2009 movie,
director Wes Anderson asked the author’s widow for a tour of the location.
“There
is a gigantic beech tree at the end of a fox run, which I immediately
recognized from The Fantastic Mr. Fox” Anderson wrote in The New York
Times. Allowed to browse through Dahl’s archive of original manuscripts,
Anderson “felt as if I were in his presence.”
The
most popular of Dahl’s stories may be 1964’s Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory, inspired by the author’s fondness for chocolate, a subject on
which he was an expert. In the 1930s, he noted, “all the great classic
chocolates were invented: the Crunchie, the Whole Nut bar, the Mars bar, the
Black Magic assortment, Tiffin, Caramello, Aero, Malteser, the Quality Street
assortment, Kit Kat, Rolo, and Smarties. In music, the equivalent would be the
golden age when compositions by Bach and Mozart and Beethoven were given to us.”
Reviewing
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in The New York Times, Aileen
Pippett described Dahl’s strengths as a children’s author: “Fertile in
invention, rich in humor, acutely observant, he depicts fantastic characters
who are recognizable as exaggerations of real types, and situations only
slightly more absurd than those that happen daily, and he lets his imagination
rip in fairy-land.”
Although
his children’s books were often as macabre as his short stories, Dahl tried to
avoid frightening his young readers by refraining from vivid descriptions and
sprinkling the horror with humor. “Children who got crunched up in Willy
Wonka’s chocolate machine were carried away and that was the end of it. When
the parents screamed, ‘Where has he gone?’ and Wonka said, ‘Well, he’s gone to
be made into fudge,’ that’s where you laugh, because you don’t see it
happening, you don’t hear the child screaming or anything like that ever, ever,
ever.”
He
also believed subtlety was a hindrance to writing effective fiction for children. “I find that the only way to make my
characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or
bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very
nasty, very bad, very cruel.”
Reflecting
on his contributions to the genre a year before his death, Dahl said his books
“are not going to teach (children) anything at all, except to grip them by the
throat and make them love to read. To me, that’s very important.”
Children,
encouraged by their teachers, sent Dahl thousands of letters, and Dahl wrote
them back, often including the following poem:
“Dear children from across the sea,
How nice of you to write to me.
I love to hear the things you say
when you are miles and miles away.
All children, and I think I’m right,
Are nicer when they’re out of sight.”
Children’s
writer Anthony Horowitz told the BBC that Dahl’s books were unique because
“Dahl was perhaps the first author to take the children’s side and collude
against the smelly, ugly, stupid creatures that inhabit the adult world.” Dahl
himself said, “It’s the path to their affections. Parents and school teachers
are the enemy. The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process
of civilizing this thing that when it is born is an animal with no manners, no
moral sense at all.” His books did not delight everyone, however. Some found
them anti-social, anti-feminist, and violent. But as he observed, “I never get
any protests from children. All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of
delight. I know what children like.”
The
audience that made the James Bond movies as much of a phenomenon in the 1960s
as the Beatles also liked to giggle and squirm, and the films gave them plenty
of opportunities to do so with mind-boggling gadgets, violence leavened with
humor, and hair-raising escapes from danger. Although Dahl once said that “if
you’ve got enough money to live comfortably, there’s no reason in the world to
do a screenplay,” he accepted an offer from Albert R. Broccoli, co-producer of
the Bond films, to write the screenplay for the fifth entry in the series, You
Only Live Twice.
“It
was Ian Fleming’s worst book,” Dahl said, “with no plot in it which would even
make a movie.” The producers agreed with Dahl’s judgment, and instructed him to
craft a completely new story while retaining the Japanese locale and the
formula they had perfected in the four previous entries.
“Bond
has three women through the film: If I remember rightly, the first gets killed,
the second gets killed and the third gets a fond embrace during the closing
sequence. And that’s the formula.”
Dahl
enjoyed the experience, saying “You Only Live Twice was fun to do. It
was the only screenplay I’ve ever done which was fun.”
By
the time the Bond film was released to great success in 1967, Dahl was writing
another script for Broccoli, this time based on Ian Fleming’s children’s story
about a flying car, Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang. “I did the first draft
after which they paid me off, to make way for the director, Ken Hughes, to do what
he liked with it,” Dahl complained. “It was a disaster.”
Next,
he was hired to adapt his own Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, an
experience he came to regret. “I did the screenplay, but it doesn’t matter.
They changed it.” Another writer was brought in for revisions, one of his
contributions being a shift in focus from one character to another, hence the
change in title to Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
There
was a great demand for a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
and in 1972, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator appeared. “I was a bit
lucky in my timing with the second Charlie,” Dahl said. “One of the
characters was an idiot President of the United States. Soon after the book
came out, old Nixon started going off the rails.”
Dahl’s
stories were increasingly popular with filmmakers, though the results did not
always please him. He approved of a film based on Danny, the Champion of the
World, but thought The Witches was merely a “stupid horror film”
that was much too adult for children. The BFG (Big Friendly Giant),
published in 1982, became an animated film seven years later, and was
eventually followed by film versions of The Fabulous Mr. Fox, James
and the Giant Peach, and Tim Burton’s take on Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory with Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka. Matilda was also adapted as a film, and in
2010 inspired a musical commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
At
the time of his death on November 23, 1990, Dahl had sold over 100 million
books worldwide, and they continue to sell and be read by children and adults
alike.
The appeal his stories have for young
readers was best summarized by his daughter, Lucy. “He understood children and
identified with them.” His widow, Felicity, whom he married in 1983, said of
his young audience, “They were his equals.”
Today,
children and fans of all ages frequently stop by Dahl’s home in Buckinghamshire
where his widow still lives. They excitedly ask if it’s true that Roald Dahl
lives there, and she tells them, “Well, he did.” “Oh, has he moved?” they ask,
and she tells them, “‘No, he died’ and it shatters them.”
But
true to the title of that James Bond film he wrote, Dahl did live twice, maybe
even more than that, and lives still in the hearts and imaginations of readers
everywhere.
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