Roald Dahl: Teller of the Unexpected
Matthew Dennison
Head of Zeus, £20, 264 pages
Perhaps my favourite Roald Dahl story – and one not, alas, recounted by Matthew Dennison in his new biography of the author – comes in Kingsley Amis’s Memoirs. Amis encountered Dahl at an awkward 1970s literary party thrown by Tom Stoppard, and the two authors, who were never natural bedfellows, immediately talked about writers’ favourite topic: money. After Dahl ribbed Amis about his respectable but hardly earth-shattering earnings from literary fiction, he then suggested that Amis write a children’s book. Amis protested that he had “no feeling for that kind of thing”, to which Dahl replied: “Never mind, the little bastards’d swallow it.”
Over 30 years after Dahl’s death, he occupies a curious position in the literary firmament. His children’s books are acknowledged classics and have recently been acquired by Netflix for a stupendous sum. Yet Dahl’s adult-orientated novels and short stories seem to be fading from consciousness – perhaps unsurprisingly, given his rather shocking stab at erotica in My Uncle Oswald (1979) – and his own personal reputation has been heading steadily downhill for years now, not helped by some widely reported anti-Semitic comments that he made in an interview with the New Statesman in 1983. He said of the Jews that “there is a trait in the Jewish character which provokes animosity … even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” This has now been formally apologised for on the Roald Dahl Foundation website.
This contradiction lies at Dahl’s heart. Was he an essentially rotten man who was nonetheless capable of great imaginative genius, or someone who removed himself from the world to conjure up baroque fantasias of childhood extravagance, and who therefore dealt with its crueller, more complex side with unbecoming simplicity? In the latest of his briskly written and engaging brief lives of children’s authors (previous subjects have included Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame) Dennison follows in the footsteps of more in-depth Dahl biographers such as Jeremy Treglown and Donald Sturrock. All have tried to answer the riddle that might either save or damn a reputation that has been clinging onto the edge of respectability for a considerable time.
From the outset, Dennison presents Dahl as a man who blended fact and fiction in both life and art. He cites the author saying to a group of children in 1975 that “I’m a perfectly ordinary fellow, except that I happen to be very tall,” and then remarks that Dahl “was aware of its disingenuousness even as he asserted its truth”. Very few perfectly ordinary fellows have a life that not only encompassed selling hundreds of millions of copies of their books but also included eventful service as both a fighter pilot and an intelligence officer in WWII, marriage to the Hollywood star Patricia Neal and a brief career as a James Bond screenwriter.
Dahl was keenly aware of his absence from respectability. There was no Booker prize for him, and those accolades that he did receive – the Whitbread Prize for The Witches, the Smarties Book Prize for Esio Trot – seem oddly sparse compared to his peers. Yet, as the old Liberace line had it, he wept all the way to the bank.
Dennison, who has used Treglown and Sturrock’s accounts of Dahl’s life both comprehensively and intelligently, locates much of the author’s antipathy towards others in his schooldays. Both his children’s fiction and autobiographical works such as Boy present his early years as miserable and feral, where often the only escape came through the life of the mind and where adults (and one’s fellow children) were ignorant, cruel or sadistic. Little wonder that Dahl once said to a friend, when he was much older, that “Life isn’t beautiful and sentimental and clear. It’s full of horrid things and foul people.” His writing is largely devoid of beauty and sentiment, although never of clarity; instead, Dahl took delight in exaggerating the horror and the foulness of life, often to great comic effect, and in doing so made himself the pre-eminent writer whom children adored and by whom their parents often felt either queasy or repulsed.
A recurring motif is the author’s mythomania; his autobiographical writings are riddled with inaccuracies, which Dahl showed little interest in correcting when they were pointed out to him. As he created his own narrative, he began to believe in his own infallibility: “in one form or another, single-handed endeavour, coloured by brilliance or even glory, was always his picture of himself”. This is certainly true of his most popular creations; Willy Wonka, the BFG and the Fantastic Mr Fox, to name but three, are all heroic individualists hellbent on doing their own thing, and convention – and society at large – be damned. This extended to his high opinion of his writing; Dennison observes “his confidence in his work was immense and, as all his publishers would be forced to recognise, he never rated contradictory views as highly as his own”.
The Dahl who emerges from Teller of the Unexpected is not likeable, exactly, but it is hard not to admire his unstinting self-belief. Dennison is not blind to Dahl’s faults – we are reminded that he criticised Salman Rushdie at the height of the fatwa, saying (inexplicably), “Degas has more art in his little fingernail than Rushdie has in his entire body.” His arro-
gance, bullying, self-absorption and sheer bloody-mindedness are all portrayed in unflatt-
ering detail. Yet set against this, the man and writer who emerges from Dennison’s absorb-
ing, measured book was certainly some kind of genius. Even as he may have grumbled and groused about his talent, he remained one of the premier myth-makers of literature – both for himself, and, with a generosity of spirit often absent from his life, for others.
Alexander Larman is the author of several historical titles and is literary editor of the Spectator’s world edition
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