Roald Dahl (28 page)

11

Businessman of Letters

Dahl was glad to give up film work, or to be given up by it. He was bad at collaborative enterprises, and in any case, he was beginning to see the commercial potential of concentrating on books for children.

Although he disliked the movie version of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, its release in 1971 increased his fame. But his children's books were already doing extremely well. By March 1968,
Charlie
had sold 607,240 copies in the United States. The figure for
James and the Giant Peach
was 266,435.
¹
Knopf's royalty statement showed the author as being owed almost a million dollars. Before the end of that year, all these figures had doubled.
²
And both books had at last broken through in Britain, as well as in France (where
James
was published by Gallimard in 1966, a year earlier than in England). In the course of the following decade, they were to appear in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Japan, and Israel. But it was success in Britain that mattered most to Dahl. He achieved it in a way that both pleased him very much and allowed him to use his commercial cunning.

Tessa had a school friend, Camilla Unwin, who lived in the next village, Little Missenden. Her father, Rayner Unwin, was a
publisher: J.R.R. Tolkien's publisher, in fact, although he didn't specialize in children's books. One day Camilla brought home copies of the American editions of
James
and
Charlie
, given her by Tessa. A letter from Allen & Unwin was soon on its way to the author.
³

Unwin didn't know that the books had been turned down by practically every other established publisher in Britain, and Dahl sent him a poker player's reply. Allen & Unwin, he said, was one of the few British houses which hadn't already approached him. However, the many offers he had received were too hedged about with conditions. His books were unusually successful in the States and he was ambitious for them in Britain. How could Unwin improve on his rivals' terms?

The usual publishing arrangement in Britain and the United States is one in which a publisher offers an author an advance, a sum of money before the actual book appears, and in many cases before it has been written. The author keeps this money whether or not the book turns out to be profitable, but takes a relatively small share of the total proceeds from copies sold: usually a 10–12.5 percent royalty of the book's purchase price, which must first of all repay the advance. Rayner Unwin is by his own account an old-fashioned publisher, and he suggested to Dahl an old-fashioned publishing arrangement: a partnership of the kind which his father, Sir Stanley Unwin, had very successfully formed with Tolkien and, earlier, with Bertrand Russell. Allen & Unwin would print and market the books in full liaison with the author, but without advancing him any money. If sales didn't cover the costs of production and administration, Dahl would make nothing. But any profit would be divided equally between them, and if the books were a success, his share would be bigger than under his other publishing contracts.

Because of his recent earnings, Dahl for the first time didn't feel in need of an advance. He was also impressed by the best-selling names on Unwin's backlist. So he accepted, and was soon taking a keen interest in every aspect of the deal. New illustrations
were commissioned, from Faith Jaques, for
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. In the case of
James and the Giant Peach
, Allen & Unwin, at Dahl's suggestion, used the illustrations for the French edition by Michel Simeon. The books were printed economically in East Germany and bound in hardcover but without a separate jacket. As a result, they could be sold at twelve shillings and sixpence (62.5p: in today's terms, about £4)—considerably cheaper than most British hardcover illustrated children's books at the time.

The shy-seeming, gentlemanly Unwin found Dahl extremely tough to deal with over business matters, and learned to keep his distance from him at home. “He was a very heavy persuader and a gambler,” Unwin says now. “He sort of radiated power. I'm glad he didn't go into politics.” But of course, the gamble paid off. And while Unwin felt similarly squeamish about the extent to which Dahl used his family's personal tragedies as a way of getting publicity, the interviews with him which appeared everywhere increased sales. Talking to journalists, Dahl emphasized both the low price of the books and the shocking effect they had had on humorless American “female librarians.”
⁴
Female British reviewers did not fall into the same trap. In
The Times
, Elaine Moss called
Charlie
“the funniest book I have read in years” and predicted that it would become a classic. “Dahl's dialogue in these two books smacks of Carroll,” she wrote, “his verses of Belloc. But he is a great original.” The review was helpfully quoted in the influential trade journal, the
Bookseller
, just before Christmas, 1967.
⁵

In New York, meanwhile, the staff of Knopf were still in a spin about Virginie Fowler's rejection of
The Magic Finger
, which Harper & Row published in 1966. Dahl increased their nervousness by complaining about distribution arrangements at Random House (the group of which Knopf was now part).
⁶
He passed on a report that a wholesaler in Los Angeles had been kept waiting
two months for five hundred copies of
Charlie
which had been ordered for Christmas but did not arrive until January. Alfred Knopf replied in person, laying the blame on new technology.

A flurry of in-house discussions ensued about what Dahl might be persuaded to write next and how he could be kept from the clutches of Harper & Row. Random House had responded to the expanding market among educationally anxious parents by launching a series called Beginner Books. In the spring of 1968, when Dahl visited Patricia Neal in New York during the shooting of
The Subject Was Roses
, he met Robert Gottlieb, the new head of Knopf. Gottlieb reported to Robert Bernstein, president of Random House, that they had discussed various possibilities, including a contribution to the new project.
⁷
They also talked about a sequel to
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and about a new collection of stories for adults.

Dahl was hesitant about taking on anything substantial at this stage, but the idea of another short picture book appealed to him. He started work at once and, early in June, sent in a hastily written little story—in prose, but with sketches of his own—about ruthless farmers and an embattled family of foxes.

“The Fox,” as the story was titled, caused pandemonium at Knopf. The author was earning them millions of dollars, was notoriously touchy, and had shown that he could easily be lured away by another publisher. He had in effect been commissioned to write the new book. The problem wasn't only that, as one internal memo put it, “the writing is poor, the fantasy is unbelievable, the plot is badly worked out and … contains a long middle section in which there isn't really much to illustrate.”
⁸
“The Fox” also flagrantly incited its readers to become shoplifters. From the point of view of the moral education of children, and therefore of the book's likely sales in a market still believed to be dominated by teachers and librarians, it was, everyone agreed, unpublishable.

Dahl's draft typescript begins roughly like the now well-known book, and is an allegory of how he tended to see his domestic situation at the time. A family of foxes are trapped in their den by men with shotguns, who are waiting for the animals to starve, to drive them out. Mr. Fox has an idea, and that is where, in his publishers' view, Dahl's original went most seriously wrong. With his children, Mr. Fox simply tunnels from the wood to the nearby town, under the main street, and into a supermarket. The young foxes yelp with pleasure at the sight of shelves and shelves of groceries, sweets, and toys. “Fantastic,” cries Mr. Fox. “Grab a trolley!” He warns them not to take too much, so that the losses won't be noticed and they will be able to come back again. The family returns home to a feast, which Mr. Fox assures his wife can be repeated every night. “Mrs. Fox smiled at her husband. ‘My darling,' she said, ‘you are a fantastic fox.'”

In New York, hectic discussions ensued about how to salvage the situation, while telegrams began to arrive from Great Missenden asking what was going on. Pat Neal had been away for several months making
The Subject Was Roses
. Dahl told Bob Bernstein that he was feeling the strain of running the house and dealing with his children's, as well as his own, spring viruses and other problems.
⁹
Tessa, in particular, was miserable at Roe-dean, where she was being bullied. Dahl himself underwent an operation on his nose that summer. A week later, he took Pat, Tessa, Theo, Ophelia, and the three-year-old Lucy to Norway for their annual family holiday, but developed a torrential nosebleed and had to go into hospital.
¹⁰
For a week, his nostrils were plugged with wads which, he grumbled, were the size of frankfurters.

Bernstein wrote sympathetically, temporizing about the book and pleading staff holidays as an excuse for the delays.
¹¹
Four months and half a dozen readers' reports later, the brief typescript landed on the desk of Fabio Coen, an executive editor of children's books in an elevated corner of the newly expanded Random House empire, Pantheon Books. Coen's objections were
no different from anyone else's, but he had a solution, which he summarized in 350 words. The main change is that the foxes steal from their persecutors, the farmers:
¹²

Mr. Fox digs out to get his bearings. Finds he has dug right where he wanted to be—in the chickencoop of farmer No. 1. Mr. Fox and little foxes steal eggs and chicken. Meanwhile the three farmers still waiting where we left them. Mr. Fox and children carry eggs and chicken back to Mrs. Fox, then start digging tunnel in a new direction. They dig and dig right into smokehouse of farmer No. 2. Steal hams and other goodies. Carry back to Mama fox who stores things away and begins to prepare a large meal. Mr. Fox and little foxes dig third tunnel in yet another direction. Dig and dig right out to farmer No. 3's cider cellar. Littlest fox particularly delighted, likes cider. Each one steals big bottle of cider, and return to mother fox who by this time has everything ready for a feast. All sit down to huge banquet. Switch back to three angry farmers still waiting with guns for foxes to appear.

Coen was deputed to put his idea to Dahl himself,
¹³
but Robert Bernstein first prepared the ground with more than one long, circumspect letter, making it clear that they wanted to publish everything Dahl wrote and, that if he was not convinced by the proposal, “in the end we will do it your way.” Dahl had earlier defended his version energetically. He said that he had considered the moral problem raised by the foxes' shoplifting but decided it was of no importance. In the first place, that is how foxes survive, and he thought children should be aware of the fact. Second, neither Beatrix Potter nor Tolkien had been concerned about such matters, so why should he be?
¹⁴
Bernstein could have answered that neither of these arguments might seem as conclusive to a parent or teacher in downtown Los Angeles as in rural Buckinghamshire, but Dahl was in fact sufficiently mollified to agree to consider Coen's suggestions. In the event, he was delighted by them. They were, he joked, “so good that I feel almost as though I am committing plagiarism in accepting them.” Nonetheless
, like the foxes, he would “grab them with both hands” and start immediately on a completely new draft of the book. It was the first time, he gratefully if untruthfully added, that any of his publishers had ever come up with a “constructive and acceptable idea” for his writing.
¹⁵

Coen's was the version of the book which finally appeared, and which, decades later, is still a bestseller.
Fantastic Mr. Fox
was published by both Knopf and Allen & Unwin in 1970, and soon throughout the rest of the world. Dahl dedicated it to the memory of Olivia.

Dahl was now fifty-four: hardworking and prosperous, but in poor health, balding, and distinctly lame—when he and Neal walked side by side, they lurched into each other like a pair of penguins. The children would hear him groaning in the morning as he reached for his pill bottle, before he came down in his dressing gown to breakfast, a pile of letters, and the organization of the household.
¹⁶
His wife and his son were both disabled. His oldest surviving daughter was clever and articulate but, like her brother, unhappy at school: he moved her from Roedean to Downe House, but she didn't like it much better. The fees were enormous, and there were all the others to educate. The youngest, Lucy, was still only five.

If Tessa hated school, she seemed no more contented at Gipsy House. When she came home for the holidays, Lucy remembers, “all hell would break loose”—particularly if their mother was there, too.
¹⁷
Both independently and together, they were tempestuous women. Quite often, though, Patricia Neal was away. She appeared in a TV drama called
The Homecoming
, made in Hollywood and in Wyoming, and as a speech therapist in the film
Baxter
. She was increasingly in demand for American projects concerning illness and disability: lectures about stroke rehabilitation, the voice-over for a documentary on cancer. And through Dahl's advertising friend, David Ogilvy, she was soon
offered a lucrative contract making a series of TV commercials in New York for Maxim coffee.

When Tessa was small, the whole family traveled around with Pat. Now Pat either went alone or with Valerie Eaton Griffith, and correspondingly she was less of a presence in the lives of her younger daughters. Dahl believed that Tessa's problems were largely a result of the instability of her early upbringing and was determined to provide something different for her sisters. He couldn't depend much on Pat. And having, for most of his own childhood, been without a father of his own, he had to make things up as he went along. In his younger children's eyes, he succeeded wonderfully. Lucy says that to her and Ophelia, with no memories to contend with of Theo's accident, Olivia's death, or their mother's strokes, “it [was] like there were two portions. There was the Tessa era, with all the tragedies, and then there was my era, which was calm and lovely.”