Roald Dahl (32 page)

The following year, Dahl gave a headline to another journalist, Susan Slavetin of the
Boston Globe
, by describing himself as “an adolescent at heart.”
³³
Pat had bought a house in Martha's Vineyard, and he was reluctantly and briefly staying there with her. At the end of his part of the interview, Dahl said, “People get tired of being with each other for years—day in, day out. They
need some time away from each other.” Then he wandered away. Slavetin quoted Neal as having shrugged the comment off:

“Men are such conceited asses. But I love being here on the Vineyard. Tomorrow we'll have a gorgeous party. Cagney will be here. Hellman, too.”

She smiles broadly. Somehow, the smile does not synch with what seems to be a great well of sadness in her eyes.

Dahl then returned and delivered another scarcely coded message: “Our daughter Ophelia is set on becoming an actress. I find it difficult to think about. She's letting herself in for a lifetime of unhappiness, what with constant rejection and bad marriages.”

Ophelia didn't become an actress. Later, perhaps under her father's influence, her ambitions turned toward medicine. But neither she nor Lucy was to escape unhappiness as their parents' marriage disintegrated. Lucy, in particular, entered a phase little less wild than the older of her sisters'—shoplifting, setting fire to the kitchen of her school, and, at sixteen, becoming addicted to cocaine.
³⁴

Lucy says that when Dahl discovered the extent of her drug habit, “immediately he blamed himself. He quietly said, ‘Lukey, I don't know where I went wrong,' and went for a long drive alone—about four hours—which was a worse punishment than screaming and shouting.” After that, he was limitlessly busy in seeking out the best help for her: so much so that her counselor at one clinic had to fight hard to keep her when Dahl heard good word of another. “All I had to do,” Lucy remembers, “is to say, ‘Help me, I need to go to a therapist,' and I would have been there in an hour.” But to her father, everything he had worked so hard to make good seemed to be falling apart. It was almost as if the crises which elicited his by-now famous practicality, resourcefulness
, and ingenuity were somehow caused by earlier actions of his own.

Even his elaborate tax-avoidance schemes turned out to involve commitments by which he felt entrapped. In the summer of 1979, Icarus, S.A., of rue Friesl, 1700 Freiburg, Switzerland, had entered into a contract with Knopf.
³⁵
The Swiss company agreed to supply the publisher with four works by Roald Dahl:
My Uncle Oswald
, two books for children, and one for either adults or juveniles, whichever “Icarus” chose. Knopf, in return, would pay Icarus $750,000 when the contract was signed and a further $115,341.34 plus simple interest at 5 percent per annum from the date of the agreement, on delivery of each of the other stipulated works.

At first sight, the interest payments look mysterious. Why should anyone pay interest on a debt not yet incurred? But as the contract's small print makes clear, the lump sums were not in fact advances at all. They were money already owed to Dahl from his previous books. The promised new works were from the start to earn him royalties over and above these payments. Dahl's plan—which he flattered himself was “semi-legitimate”
³⁶
—was to avoid income tax not only on future earnings but on the more than one and a quarter million dollars which his earlier books had already earned, and which Knopf (whose role in these arrangements was not improper) had been banking for him while he decided what to do with it.

Whatever the apparent advantages of the agreement to Dahl, it began to chafe on him almost as soon as it was signed. Random House had exacted a price for cooperating: they had made him commit himself to letting them publish not only
My Uncle Oswald
but three further books after that. And until these were delivered, part of the money the publishers already owed him was tied up. It was, he pretended—to Bernstein, to Gottlieb, even to himself—an imposition, a monstrously unfair trick. The
angry irrationalism of his complaints is hard to convey without quoting the letters in full: those on the receiving end began to think he was unhinged. Surely, Dahl railed at Gottlieb in 1979, never before in literary history had an author's income from existing books been frozen until he finished new work. Did Gottlieb and Bernstein imagine that such a policy would increase his affection for them, or encourage him to stay with them when he had fulfilled his contract?
³⁷

Still, the effect was to make him get back to his writing. Within a year, he had delivered drafts of three books for children. They were short, but were to be among his most popular:
The Twits, George's Marvellous Medicine
, and a collection of comic poems, some of which were to form the nucleus of
Revolting Rhymes
.
³⁸
Dahl was delighted to hand over the typescripts. He asked Gottlieb for written confirmation that what he called the crooked four-book agreement between Knopf and his Swiss company had now been completed. “I have felt that fucking contract clutching at my throat like a bloodsucking vampire ever since it was written.”
³⁹

13

Pencils

In 1983, thirty years after their marriage, eighteen years since Patricia Neal's strokes, she and Dahl were finally divorced. He was sixty-six years old, she fifty-six. For Pat, disabled and rejected in favor of a younger woman, the past years had been a period of almost unalleviated wretchedness, but there was worse to come. The divorce settlement was, she says, worth next to nothing: the lawyers took account of her house in Martha's Vineyard and her earnings from films and lecture tours, as well as of Dahl's claim that most of their children were to varying degrees dependent on him. Although Tessa was now married to a successful businessman, James Kelly, Theo was living at home and working in a new incarnation of his father's antique business, proudly renamed Dahl & Son, and Ophelia and Lucy were still in their late teens.

Most of Pat's old friends who afterward kept up with her ex-husband (including those most critical of him) speak well of his second wife and of the effects of the marriage on him. One or two go so far as to claim that it even benefited Pat, by finally pushing her out of her despondency and into a fully independent life. Pat's own feelings on the matter have inevitably been more complicated, and not without bitterness, but today she is often
generous about Felicity and about the care she has taken of her stepchildren—particularly Theo.

To outsiders looking in—as millions have been invited to do by magazine features, television programs, and books—a jarring element is the thoroughness with which the new marriage is presented as having supplanted everything that went before it. Felicity and Roald Dahl's book,
Memories with Food at Gipsy House
, begins with a family tree. The couple's parents are at the top: Harald and Sofie Dahl on Roald's side; Alfonso and Elizabeth d'Abreu on Felicity's.
¹
Children proliferate below: Felicity's three and Roald's four. Patricia Neal and Charles Crosland aren't there. It is as if they had nothing to do with their children—not even with their having been born.

To the Dahl children themselves, the change couldn't have failed to be painful. The older ones, in particular, felt loyal to Pat and worried about her disappearing to the States in her present misery. But even more strongly, all of them sensed a threat to their relationship with their father. Ever since Pat's illness, they had felt that, in some way, they had him to themselves. Lucy says of Felicity, using an American cartoon baby voice for what seems, all the same, only partly a joke, “This woman was taking away my
De-addy
!”
²
Until now, Felicity's role in the family, although considerable, had been limited. As Tessa remembers things, Felicity had from time to time made what seemed like promises: that she, Felicity, would never take their father away from their mother; then, that she would never move into Gipsy House; then, that if she were to move in, she wouldn't change it at all. Inevitably, such hopes were bound to be dashed. According to their friends, Felicity's strength of will was one of her main attractions for Dahl. She also possessed formidable domestic skills. Among other things, she was interested (to a degree that Pat hadn't been) in interior decoration, eventually making it her profession: in the mid-1970s, she had helped set up a successful antique-restoration business named Carvers and Guilders. In
Memories with Food at Gipsy House
some emphasis is laid on
the fact that Liccy's tastes reflect an inherited view of how life should be lived in a country house: her mother's family, Catholic recusants named Throckmorton, had lived in a grand house which now belongs to the National Trust, Coughton Court, in Warwickshire.
³
Again, this was an aspect of her appeal to Roald. So, soon after Roald and Felicity married at the end of 1983, Wally Saunders's sledgehammer was at work once again. Meals henceforward were to be served in an elegant dining room, rather than the familiar, scruffy, crowded kitchen. In Lucy's words: “Suddenly we had to have all these
manners
at the table. And posh wallpaper was being put up. I mean—
oh
.”

These don't seem the most heinous of interventions. The girls, after all, were by now for the most part no longer living at home: during the week, Lucy was in London, sharing the Wandsworth house with Ophelia while she studied cookery. And their father may have come to think that “manners” were not such a bad thing, after all. He himself was delighted to have his surroundings transformed, so long as no one touched his writing hut or tried to stop him from passing around the chocolate bars after dinner. He was famous and rich. He liked living in a beautiful house and eating well in it. With these tangible indications of success, happily married for perhaps the first time, he pressed ahead with what was already proving to be a newly productive phase of his writing. It was in the 1980s that he published some of his best books: among them,
The BFG, The Witches, Matilda
, and the two autobiographies,
Boy
and
Going Solo
.

If Felicity created the way of life which her husband needed for the work he did in his last years, another important relationship was also involved. Dahl had been introduced to the illustrator Quentin Blake by Tom Maschler in the late 1970s. On and off, their partnership was to last until the writer died.

In the United States and Britain alone, Dahl had already gone through more artists than he had written children's books. Most
were suggested by his publishers and had no direct contact with the author. Blake was in his mid-forties and well established in Britain, both through prize-winning children's books and as a teacher at the Royal College of Art, where, in 1978, around the time of his first meeting with Dahl, he became head of the Department of Illustration. Blake was the writer-illustrator of many children's books of his own, and Maschler had paired him with Russell Hoban in the early 1970s; one of their collaborations,
How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen
, had won a Whitbread Prize.

Educated at Cambridge, where he read English at Downing College under F. R. Leavis, Blake is a gentle, reflective man, in many ways Dahl's antithesis. There seems to be no malice in him, and the generosity of his sense of humor made him hesitate over some of the first Dahl stories on which he worked. However, he says that
The Enormous Crocodile
became pleasant enough to draw “once it had been toned down by its editors,” although Blake didn't find it particularly striking.
⁴
And although he found the next book,
The Twits
, “very black,” its extreme changes of style gradually grew on him.

On Dahl's side, one obstacle was financial. He wanted the best illustrator but, as with the earlier notion of approaching Maurice Sendak, was reluctant to sacrifice more of his royalties than he had to. Bob Gottlieb wanted Blake's drawings for the American editions, but Knopf's contract with Icarus promised Dahl 15 percent, and Dahl argued that the illustrator should be paid over and above that. From the publisher's point of view, this was outrageous, particularly for books in which illustrations and text are of almost equal importance. Eventually, a deal was agreed on by which Dahl conceded to Blake roughly a third of the authorship royalties. At the same time, he demanded that sizable new advances be paid to Icarus, in addition to the sums already agreed on with Random House and to those which Cape was paying separately.
⁵

It would be hard not to like
The Enormous Crocodile
, which
has a simple, cumulative plot, exciting in its threat to the children whom the crocodile is determined to eat and funny in his simple, repeatedly thwarted stratagems for doing so. Quentin Blake's illustrations turn him into an amiably incompetent character. He says that what he had in mind was the crocodile in a Punch and Judy show, but the result is less a reptile than a mischievous, mad-eyed, long green puppy. Dahl was happy with this collaboration and with the two that followed, but kept his options open for the long-planned book (eventually, three books) of comic poems on which he was simultaneously working and for which he now wanted someone different. He was looking, he said, for illustrations less impressionistic and more fully representational than Blake's—preferably by a new, young artist, who might also, of course, be persuaded to accept less payment.
⁶

For Dahl, now in his sixties and often in poor health, keeping so many new projects in the air simultaneously was complicated. This may have contributed to his mounting irritability with his American publishers and a corresponding rise in the influence of Tom Maschler in London. Where editorial differences arose, it was natural that Dahl should enjoy Maschler's quick enthusiasm more than the probing attentions of Gottlieb. More than ever, he tended to believe his own publicity, and when Random House wanted to Americanize some usages in
The Twits
(flannel to washcloth, long knickers to long underwear, holiday to vacation), he came on very grand and subjunctival: “I think an English book by an English author, although it be for young children, should have an English flavour to it. Do they Americanise the Christmas Carol … or the novels of Jane Austen?”
⁷
He took exception, too, when an article about Gottlieb in the
Book Review
section of
The New York Times
failed to mention that he edited the children's books of one writer alone—Dahl.
⁸
Still, Dahl agreed to his American publisher's request that he cut from
The Twits
a gruesomely detailed passage about nose blowing. He also rewrote the ending of
George's Marvellous Medicine
along the lines they suggested, and paid attention to notes on the
comic poems from Gottlieb, who was not deterred from commenting on them by Dahl's telling him that Maschler had seen each one as it came along and that Cape was “enormously high” on the book.