Roald Dahl (20 page)

So when preparations began at Knopf for his next publication, the author was in high spirits. To start with, he had been diffident about it—even slightly ashamed. Alfred Knopf had been pressing for yet more stories or, better still, for a novel. Dahl again admitted that he hadn't any ideas and that the stories in
Kiss Kiss
had come with increasing difficulty.
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There were only eleven to show for the six years since
Someone Like You
, and of those, the best two were in draft even before the earlier collection appeared. However, he had been making up tales for Olivia and Tessa, who were now five and three years old: lively and enthusiastic girls, the younger somewhat fractious; the older, charming and unmistakably intelligent. Their father apologized to Knopf in advance, saying he knew that juvenile fiction was not up his street, but here was a typescript, anyway. He later told Knopf that more than once in the course of writing it he wondered, “What the hell am I writing this nonsense for?” and that when he delivered the draft he had mentally seen Knopf hurling it across the room and asking, “What the hell am I
reading
this nonsense for?”
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The story—even more pronouncedly than his adult fiction a mixture of folktale and cartoon strip—was about an orphan who lives with a pair of repulsive and cruel aunts. James meets a man with some magic powder, which makes a peach tree in the garden grow like Jack's beanstalk. James climbs into one of its giant fruits and finds it occupied by a group of large and vociferous insects. The peach rolls away, crushing the aunts and carrying its passengers to various adventures at sea and in the sky, before becoming safely impaled on the top of the Empire State Building
. The travelers decide to stay in America, where “every one of them became rich and successful.”
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Alfred Knopf was cautious about
James and the Giant Peach
and said nothing until he had tried it on his children's-books editor, Virginie Fowler. Her immediate enthusiasm encouraged him, and in July, two months after Dahl sent the typescript, Knopf wrote to him: “I have just read with absolute delight your juvenile. If this doesn't become a little classic, I can only say that I think you will not have been dealt with justly.”
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Knopf's decision came in the course of a leisurely correspondence with his author, much of it about wine. The older man was planning a trip to Burgundy and the Gironde to see the vintage, and he and Dahl traded oenophiliac anecdotes. Dahl had bought an odd lot of claret at a London auction, where it went cheap because the labels had rotted away. As he began to open the bottles, the names on the corks revealed that the wines were first-class—Margaux, Lafite—and of vintages dating back to before the First World War. “Rather fun,” he lordily boasted.

With Knopf's staff, Dahl's tone now was an even more pronounced mixture of the jokey and the grand. He was understandably impatient at their request for yet another potted autobiography, and under “Brief summary of principal occupations” entered that he had run the harem of an Arab sheikh in the 1930s. But this good humor soon faded, and when he was asked to name authors and critics who might supply a phrase or two to be used in advertising the book, he complained that publishers “are doing this to me all the time and I hate it. The book they send me usually stinks and I have to tell them so.” The blurb writers also asked for a brief description of
James and the Giant Peach
, so that they wouldn't misrepresent it. He answered menacingly, “You won't.”

There was good reason for his self-confidence. He had already finished the first draft of another story he had been telling to the
girls, which he provisionally titled “Charlie's Chocolate Boy.”
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This was at the end of August 1960. Roald and Pat were then at Great Missenden with the girls and the new baby, Theo—now a month old. Life was not perfect perhaps, but in the light of the tragedies that were to follow, it would soon seem to have been.

8

Punishment and Pain, Unhappiness and Despair

Roald Dahl longed to be powerful enough to be able to conquer illness and other misfortunes. Whether or not the dream stemmed from the early deaths of his sister and his father, he was fascinated by medicine and often said he wished he had become a doctor. In Manhattan, through Patricia Neal, he became very friendly with a successful surgeon, Dr. Edmund Goodman.
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Dr. Goodman still lives with his wife, Marian, on the north shore of Long Island, on the estate of Averell Harriman, who was one of his first private patients. The Goodmans were friendly with another couple, the Cusicks, and as all three families had children of similar ages, they saw a lot of each other. Mrs. Goodman stresses two things about Dahl: he was wonderful with children, to whom (particularly Missy Cusick
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) “he would tell marvellous stories … and be in total communication with them.” And he would have excelled as a physician.

The storyteller and the healer
manqué
were one and the same. Dahl's children's books are full of wizards and magicians—the old man in
James and the Giant Peach
, Mr. Willy Wonka, the BFG with his dream potions—and their child equivalents, such as the girl with the Magic Finger and Matilda. Dahl had no truck with the iconoclastic attitude of writers like L. Frank Baum,
whose wizard-ruler of Oz is exposed as no more than an anxious little bald old humbug. Dahl's magicians make mistakes, and some of them (particularly Mr. Willy Wonka and George in
George's Marvellous Medicine
) are cavalier in their dealings with inconvenient people, but they are still heroes and heroines. He himself often said that he dreamed dreams of glory: literally so, according to Neal. “When he went to bed, he would make himself go to sleep by being a hero. Let's say there was a game which he played beautifully, and they needed someone. Roald would come forward and say ‘I will play'—and they would win.”
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For the moment, his triumphs were confined to games (one of the pursuits he shared with Ed Goodman was golf) and to the social contests he liked to arrange, whether or not the participants knew what was going on. One friend of Pat's remembers having dinner with him sometime around 1960 and his delightedly recounting a trick he had recently played. He had bought some very good wine, drunk it, kept the bottles, filled them with the cheapest stuff he could find, and served them to his unwitting and politely admiring guests. She found it “appalling and indicative of Roald” that he wanted “to diminish and demean people, and to crow about it.” Well, it was only a joke. Other acquaintances saw something at least as analytical as ill humored in Dahl's tricks—an interest, as one of them put it, in seeing “what effect they had on one. He was detached from it. He did things sometimes almost like a scientist.”
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In the light of future events, it would become harder than ever to separate the detached, parascientific, sometimes cruel-seeming Dahl from the kindly magician, the bully from the hero. But his first big challenge was the accident to the four-month-old Theo, to whom Dahl was unambiguously devoted. Whomever else Dahl bullied, Theo wasn't among them.

He was Dahl's only son. Put another way, he was the only person to whom Dahl could be what he himself had lacked most
of his own childhood: a boy's father. The doctors said Theo was going to die.
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His pram had been hit by a cab on the corner of Eighty-fifth Street and Madison Avenue, as the nanny pushed it across the street, bringing Tessa home from her nursery school for lunch. The taxi threw the pram into the side of a bus, crushing the child inside. Pat was out shopping nearby and heard the sirens.

An ambulance took Theo to Lenox Hill Hospital, where, by a miserable coincidence, Pat's old friend Dashiell Hammett was dying of cancer. Ed Goodman, along with the Dahls' pediatrician, saw the baby there. His skull was broken in many places, and there was a “tremendous neurological deficit.”
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Dahl's instinct in this emergency was to become increasingly typical of him: put yourself in charge, and get all the help you can from anyone you know. He didn't trust the treatment Theo was getting—particularly after a nurse mistakenly gave the baby an overdose of anticonvulsant, which the doctors had to pump out. Within three days he and Pat, driven by Harvey Orkin, took the baby away through the snow to Goodman's own hospital, Columbia Presbyterian.

One result of Theo's injuries was that he developed hydrocephalus, a buildup of cerebrospinal fluid which puts pressure on the brain. To drain it, a neurosurgeon used a relatively new technique, which involved running a thin tube from his head into a vein, where the fluid would be dispersed into the bloodstream.
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This was the best available technology at the time, in spite of a problem which no one had been able to solve. The tube contained a one-way valve, which kept clogging. Whenever this happened, the baby developed a fever, became temporarily blind, and had to be operated on again so that the tube and valve could be changed. As it became clear that Theo would live, his parents grew increasingly anxious about the dangers of these repeated invasions.

They stayed at the hospital in relays, having left Olivia and Tessa with friends. According to Pat, “It was, paradoxically, one
of the most married times in our life together.”
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But Roald was sure that there was something more to be done. The affectionate Goodmans remember: “Any new problem aroused this wonderful curiosity he had, as well as deep feeling.… He kept things moving. Roald always did that. Nothing was ever stagnant with him. He wanted to find out if there was anything to be done and to do it or to try and get someone to get at it.”

What Dahl wanted to find out in this instance was whether the problem with the valve was unique to Theo and, if not, whether anyone had come up with a better remedy. He made contact with institutions and experts concerned with hydrocephalus and discovered that thousands of children were in a similar plight. No one knew of a device which worked better.

Theo came home to East Eighty-first Street in January. Today, a big, sensitive, slow-speaking man in his thirties, he lives with his stepmother in the family home at Great Missenden, where he manages a normal existence working as a supervisor at a nearby supermarket and keeping up the neighborly snooker game instituted by his father. In the winter of 1960–61, no such happy outcome could have been predicted. Theo needed continual attention and suffered frequent, terrifying relapses. His parents' anxiety was compounded by the fact that Olivia and Tessa were still making the same daily journey to school. And if New York now seemed a dangerous place to live, medical bills of over $12,000 (in today's terms, ten times more)
⁹
showed how expensive it could be, also. It was not clear how much was covered by insurance.

To raise money not only Patricia Neal but Dahl himself did TV performances—in his case, hosting, Hitchcock-style, a drama series called
Way Out
. Hideously, the long-planned opening episode was based on his story about brain surgery, “William and Mary.” Dahl didn't object, but, although he was a heavy smoker, refused to let his introduction be turned into a commercial in which he lit one of the sponsor's brand of cigarettes.
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Meanwhile, new stories inevitably proved even less possible to write
than before, and he longed to get everyone back to England, where medical treatment was free, where they would all be close to his mother and sisters, and where he could escape into the security of his shed. His wife, although she saw the necessity, was less keen. She was now able to find work in England as well as in the States, but most of her close friends were American and she needed their emotional support. However, in mid-April, Dahl told Alfred Knopf that they were leaving for Buckinghamshire. They would be there, he said, for at least the whole of the summer, and until further notice.
¹¹

Great Missenden felt, as he knew it would, like the safest place in the world. The narrow High Street of shops and pubs wound along its shallow valley through the Chiltern Hills—once the main route between Aylesbury and London. Fields and woods sloped up all around. On one hillside, the gray flint-and-stone parish church with its squat, awkwardly shaped tower rose above the roofs of the abbey mansion. Most of the other village houses were tiny, lined up in terraces of red-and-ocher brick: a door, a window, two windows above, then the same again, all beneath a continuous uneven roof of tiles or slate. They opened straight onto the narrow pavement, as did the familiar pubs and shops—the butcher's, the baker's, the ironmonger's, with its tall old oil pumps narrowing the entrance.

Behind the main street, the buildings were more widely spaced, and the houses had gardens at the front as well as the back. They were still very small, and it was only by comparison with them that Little Whitefield looked like more than a cottage. It is white, slated, originally symmetrical, with a garden all around, and a brick wall around the garden: a house of the kind a child might draw. At one stage in its history, it had been known as Gipsy House—a contradiction which suited the much-traveling yet home-loving Dahls. The name also prevented confusion with Else's place, Whitefields, so they adopted it in 1963.
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In the village it was known that he wrote and she acted, but relatively few people in England had yet heard the name Roald Dahl, and even Patricia Neal wasn't particularly famous there. The couple were well enough liked, not least because, in extending the house and garden, they helped to provide employment. A local builder, Wally Saunders, gradually became a full-time member of the household staff. “As the family grew,” he later recalled on a television program about Patricia Neal, “so the house did. And, you know, it was ‘Pull that wall down and build up that one,' and perhaps the next year it would be just the opposite; you know, ‘Put that wall back and pull that one down, we made a mistake, we took the wrong one down.'”
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