The Tragedy & Triumph of Roald Dahl
All his life the master storyteller said “The key thing was not to get depressed and feel sorry for yourself. You had to rise to the challenge. Do something."
A shorter version of my essay about the new biography of Roald Dahl appeared in Notre Dame Magazine, the alumni magazine of that university.
Roald Dahl, the author of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and masterworks like The Witches and The BFG, knew what his pint-sized audience craved. “They love being spooked. They love suspense. They love action. They love ghosts. They love the finding of treasure. They love chocolates and toys and money. They love magic,” said this towering writer.
At six-feet five-inches tall, Dahl joked “I’m a perfectly ordinarily fellow.” But there was nothing average about him. At the end of his life in 1990 he was the world’s most popular children’s author. Netflix in 2021 purchased the rights to his works for a rumored $1 billion.
The new short biography Roald Dahl: Teller of the Unexpected by Matthew Dennison reveals a man of strong contrasts. “I like villains to be terrible and good people to be very good,” Dahl said.
Like other literary titans, he knew suffering. In his book The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature, literary critic Edmund Wilson speculated that great art arose from great childhood grief. Dickens, thanks to his father’s bankruptcy, at age 12 had to paste labels on bottles day after day. Kipling grew up in a “house of desolation” when his parents left him in the care of a heartless aunt.
So it was with little Roald. His father, a butcher, died in 1920 when he was three, his heart broken by the sudden death of Roald’s seven-year-old sister Astri from appendicitis. His mother, who had “a stern lack of sentiment,” according to Dennison, sent him to a local private school. (To her credit, she also told him Norwegian folk tales about witches and dark forests.) She withdrew him at age 11 after discovering he had been brutally caned. In his autobiography Boy, Dahl wrote the tears from the thrashing “poured down your cheeks in streams and dripped on the carpet.” His mother then packed him off to boarding school. He was caned there, too.
If Boy is to be believed—and why shouldn’t it?—the first caning came as as punishment for a misdeed that revealed the lad had an especially ghoulish imagination. A crone with “a mouth as sour as a green gooseberry” ran the local candy store. When she angered him, Roald chanced on a dead mouse and stuffed it in a sweets jar so her fingers could stumble on its squishy remains.
The origins of Willy Wonka can be traced to Dahl’s love of chocolate, something not even the severest punishment could quench. At boarding school each child, thanks to an arrangement with Cadbury’s, was given a small brown box containing eight luscious bars. He found himself dreaming of inventing new chocolates. When working in London as a young adult, he saved the silver wrappers of the chocolate bars he ate every day after lunch, and he wrapped them around each other until they were as big as a tennis ball.
Dahl also had a sweet tooth for all things ghastly. His short stories, which were published in The New Yorker and Playboy, won him prestige long before he turned to children’s fiction. In Lamb to the Slaughter, which Alfred Hitchcock directed for his long-running TV anthology show, a wife brains her hubbie with a frozen leg of lamb. She then roasts it and feeds to the witless police. In Neck, a woman dies after being unable to free her head from a hole in a Henry Moore sculpture. And a widow gets a surprise in The Bookseller when a man who sells dirty books sends her the bill.
Dahl’s life had the makings of movie. A WWII RAF fighter pilot, he crashed in the Libyan desert and spent weeks blind and immobile in the hospital recovering. Back in the air, he downed three German fighters. Upon becoming assistant air attaché in Washington, he became a gentleman spy. After spending the weekend at Hyde Park with FDR, he promptly filed a 10-page report to his embassy. Deemed the most attractive man in town by an admirer, he bedded cosmetics queen Elizabeth Arden and author Clare Boothe Luce.
Upon meeting novelist C.S. Forester, the creator of Horatio Hornblower, he showed him a draft of his account of his desert crash. Forester said send it to The Saturday Evening Post, which, with four million readers, was the nation’s largest circulation magazine. It, of course, ran the story. Next, Dahl found himself in Hollywood working personally with Walt Disney. He turned Dahl’s book on gremlins into a comic strip and storybook and almost made it into a movie. Later, Dahl married movie star Patricia Neal and penned screenplays for You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which Ian Fleming also wrote.
Life, nonetheless, was hard for Dahl. His early novels tanked. A play bombed. He drank too much. When Patricia suffered a severe stroke in 1965, he put her through a punishing rehabilitation regime. “The way one trains a dog,” a friend observed. Though she hated him for it, later she admitted “He really did do a wondrous job. He was a very good man.” Yet during her recovery he had a 10-year affair with one of her assistants who he later married.
Worse things happened, as they might have in one of his stories. A careening taxi flung his son Theo, then four-months-old, against a bus crushing his skull. Shunts refused to drain his cerebral fluid. Doctors gave up hope. Indomitable, Dahl brought together a pediatric neurosurgeon and a toymaker. They created the Wade-Dahl-Till non-blocking valve. It saved Theo’s life. Dahl made sure it was marketed on a non-profit basis.
All his life Dahl said “They key thing was not to get depressed and feel sorry for yourself. You had to rise to the challenge. Do something. Anything was better than nothing.” Alas, when his daughter Olivia died of measles at age seven, the same age Astri was when she passed away, he was bereft. “Life isn’t beautiful and sentimental and clear,” he told a high school classmate. “It’s full of foul things and horrid people.”
No wonder, writes Dennison, that Dahl’s “darkest fictions portray without regret a world of cruelty, cynicism, misanthropy, and caprice....[Yet he] provided his underdog heroes with the mechanisms for dealing with these emotions and the circumstances from which they might emerge.”
Late in his life charges of anti-Semitism arose against Dahl, especially when he railed against Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them [the Jews] for no reason,” a writer for the New Statesman quoted Dahl as saying.
Dahl reserved special venom for editors. “All my adult life I have worked alone in one small room...I cannot suddenly adjust to...listening to a dozen different people voicing their views,” he wrote in 1988 two years before his death. Yet to this day editors meddle with his prose. His publisher Puffin earlier this year sparked furor from fans and luminaries like Salman Rushdie when it announced it would release bowdlerized versions of his classics. The word “fat” was cut from every book as were the words “black” “white” “crazy” and “mad.”
One wonders how volcanic Dahl’s reaction would have been were he alive. The NAACP complained in 1973 about the Oompa-Loompas who were originally African pygmies who loved to eat cocoa beans. In a new edition, Dahl, apparently without complaint, gave them “rosy-white’ skin and long “golden brown’ hair. Interestingly, in an early draft of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the hero Charlie is a “small Negro boy.”
Dahl, like the rest of us, had many flaws, but unlike most of us, he had a wizardly imagination that made millions happy. His underdog and often orphaned heroes always defeated bullies. “There are very few messages in these books of mine,” Dahl demurred. “They are there simply to turn the child into a reader of books.”
His favorite book was The BFG in which the orphan Sophie battles giants. Perhaps Dahl was himself a Big Friendly Giant who also captured and bottled dreams like the BFG. Like his kindly character, he might also have said of himself, “I am hearing all the secret whisperings of the world.”
For stories similar to this one, buy my book Courage 101: True Tales of Grit & Glory.