Roald Dahl (38 page)

Pollinger showed Roxburgh's letter to Dahl, who flared up at this hint not only of reduced earnings but, as he chose to take it, of a desire to charge him for editorial help.
⁶²
Not even the redoubtable Max Perkins, he said, had dared to expect such a thing. There were disagreements, too, over paperback royalties. But most of all Dahl resented the fact that, in conversation, his American editor had implied that the book was not yet ready to publish: this despite the fact that his British publishers, Cape, said that they were delighted with it and were already announcing it for the spring of 1988.

From a purely literary point of view, Roxburgh was right. But Dahl was again falling ill and may have felt that he would never be able to satisfy his perfectionist editor. He discussed the matter with Felicity and Ophelia, and sent Roxburgh a self-extenuating letter. His family were very sad about the decision, he said, but agreed that he “must not allow sentiment to prevent me from getting the best terms I can for my works.”
⁶³
They believed that it was best at this juncture for Dahl to make a move. Despite all that Roxburgh had done with the book, Dahl also pretended that the younger man was too busy these days for “the kind of super-editing that you did for me in the past.”

Dahl now made some changes to the last chapter of
Matilda
. Cape's editors corrected a few spelling mistakes (arithmatic, repellant, and so on
⁶⁴
) and added some punctuation. Otherwise the printed book followed the second draft exactly, incorporating all of Roxburgh's suggestions. In the United States, its publisher was Viking, the hardcover wing of Peter Mayer's Penguin. Their confidence in the story as it stood was amply justified. No book of Dahl's ever sold so fast. In Britain alone, half a million paperback copies went across the counter within six months. Stephen Roxburgh's role, of course, was never acknowledged.

15

You're Absolutely Wrong and I Am Right

The public side of Dahl's life now often wearied him as much as his dealings with his publishers. Book fairs made him particularly irritable. At Frankfurt in 1986, when his foreign publishers lined up to pay their respects on his seventieth birthday, he was as difficult as a spoiled child.
¹
At Gothenburg the following summer, he harangued an audience of “500 idiotic Swedes” for what seemed to him an hour and a half, and remembered Alfred Knopf's remark that the Swedes were Germans in human shape: too generous a verdict, in Dahl's view.
²
As if what he saw as the audience's dull complacency weren't enough, he then had to sit at “the so-called Banquet” between Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble (“not many laughs”) and opposite John Updike.

Not the least disadvantage of book fairs is that they make a writer aware of other writers and how highly some of them are regarded. If illness and pain were principal causes of Dahl's cantankerousness, envy was another.
Going Solo
had been an inspired title for the second volume of his autobiography; he could never be a mere member of a group. According to one friend, “A committee, to Roald, would be twelve men and women who had to be dominated. His view was the only view. If black is white today, then that is it, and until I've persuaded you dolts
that that is the case, we are going to have to have a confrontation.”
³
This was the Dahl encountered by the journalist Lynn Barber, who disagreed with something he said in the course of an interview. “You're wrong!” he shouted. “You're absolutely wrong and I am right. Do you understand now? I am right and you are
wrong
.”
⁴

A BBC radio interviewer, Brian Sibley, was almost routed in a similar exchange, but saved the occasion by quoting verbatim the last words of
George's Marvellous Medicine
, about making contact with a magic world. Was that what Dahl wanted to do in his books? Sibley appeasingly asked. Dahl paused, calmed down, then said, “Do you drink?” According to Sibley, it was ten in the morning, but two large Scotches were poured and the conversation continued until and through lunch. The mollified author signed Sibley's first edition of
The Gremlins
for him, dating the autograph 1943, “so as to cause your executors hell when they come to sort your affairs out”
⁵
(an unsigned copy at that time was already worth several hundred pounds).

Such quirks made loyal allies, as well as enemies. Many people—Lynn Barber among them—liked the elderly Dahl for what they saw as admirable plain-speaking. Others simply found him enjoyable as a rather absurd performer. He could be depended on to enliven public events in Great Missenden. Once, taking part in a local charity show based on
Going for a Song
—the TV program in which panelists, supposedly talking impromptu, identify and value antiques and bric-a-brac put in front of them—he threatened to walk out when he learned that the professional auctioneers appearing with him had been allowed to examine the objects in advance. Though he was persuaded to stay, he vented his feelings by dismissing everything shown to him as “total crap” which he “wouldn't have in the house.”
⁶
To some of the audience, it was Dahl himself who should be kept out of the house. He was “insufferable,” according to one. “He could be a very nasty piece of work if he wanted to, yet he expected to be greatly admired and deferred to, like a very successful
movie director. He had to show off.” This was certainly the impression he gave at a charity performance given by the actors Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray at their home in Amersham, in aid of a naturalist trust. Dahl introduced the evening but, having done so, sat disgruntledly in a prominent seat, swigging from a hip flask, banging his stick on the floor, and growling that the whole thing was bloody boring. Eventually he stalked out, taking Felicity with him.
⁷

The knighthood he craved was still proving elusive. He was offered an OBE but turned it down.
⁸
Nothing less than a knighthood would do: he wanted his wife to be Lady Dahl and was busy doing the things people said you had to do to secure this objective. Much consisted of philanthropy, of the kind he enjoyed and was good at, particularly dealing with troubles similar to those which his own family had experienced. He gave the £3,000 proceeds of the Whitbread Prize to an Oxford hospice for terminally ill children.
⁹
He bought equipment for disabled children and for research programs into neurological disorders, supported hospital fund-raising schemes (on behalf of the Great Ormond Street Hospital, for example). He gave time and money to organizations concerned with learning difficulties, particularly the Dyslexia Institute, and backed anyone he heard of who was doing anything to encourage children to read. Dahl involved himself personally in all these projects, ringing up the organizers to find out exactly what they were doing and making personal visits to sick and injured children.

In 1988, the then Education Minister, Kenneth Baker, invited Dahl to join the most recent of the Conservative Party's ever-changing working committees on English teaching. This was his best chance of making a mark with the medal givers, but he was so alienated by the slow, collective procedures of the specialist committee that, after the first meeting, he never returned and was finally persuaded to resign. He told the chairman, Professor Brian Cox—perhaps with more wisdom than he realized—that circumstances had changed since he was at school in the 1920s.
¹⁰
Later, he publicly disagreed with the panel about Enid Blyton, whose books the majority wanted to exclude from a list of approved texts, but which he backed because children liked them.
¹¹

Dahl was beginning to think that his chances of becoming Sir Roald had been blown by the
God Cried
scandal.
¹²
But even in the English-teaching debate, he wasn't unequivocally on the same side as the Conservative powers-that-were. True, Dahl told the
Daily Mail
that he was a firm believer in the necessity of teaching “proper parsing and proper grammar.”
¹³
Yet
Matilda
, which was published in the same year as Dahl's resignation from the Baker-Cox committee, is among other things an onslaught on Gradgrindian teaching methods. Soon afterward, the cultural commentator Bryan Appleyard suggested that, in his authoritarian guise, Dahl “should disapprove of his own books” because they were subversive. The author admitted to Appleyard that he had no answer to this. “It's a tightrope act and you've got me in a bit of a corner.”
¹⁴

It is such ambiguities, of course, which make the books both distinctive and underlyingly true to life. There was nothing uncertain, on the other hand, about his opinions when Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding, early in 1989, by the fundamentalist Islamic
fatwa
condemning him to death for the supposed blasphemy of
The Satanic Verses
. Many writers probably experienced a twinge of the envy Gore Vidal admitted to, that anyone could have written a book about which people cared so much. Dahl's lack of sympathy for Rushdie's plight may have been prompted also by personal dislike. Rushdie remembers their meeting one night, long before he wrote
The Satanic Verses
, at the home of a mutual acquaintance. Rushdie was lodging there at the time, but Dahl seemed bent on making him feel
de trop
, telling the Indian-born novelist how much he admired the anti-immigrant politician Enoch Powell.

Now that Rushdie had written something that had given offense and was being bullied, Dahl might have been expected to support him. But in the London literary circles by which Dahl
still felt himself excluded, everyone seemed to be on the younger author's side. Dahl wrote to
The Times
saying he had not heard any non-Muslim voice raised in criticism of Rushdie, and accused him of being a “dangerous opportunist” who had brought his fate upon himself by a calculated pursuit of notoriety, prompted by greed for sales.
¹⁵
Freedom of speech was “a very proper principle,” Dahl accepted, but all artists should censor themselves. As some readers pointed out, it was an odd line to be taken by the inventor of the Oompa-Loompas and the reviewer of
God Cried
.

Somewhat to his surprise, Dahl found himself opposed on the issue by much of the Conservative political establishment. Despite the mutual dislike between it and the vociferously anti-Thatcherite Rushdie, the government defended not only Rushdie's freedom of speech but his life, and with noticeably less hesitation than the Labour hierarchy. Dahl found some satisfaction, however, in being opposed by the overwhelming majority of his fellow writers, whom he derided for treating the novelist as “some sort of a hero.” A few members of the Society of Authors demanded that he be expelled from the society for his comments, but were reminded by wiser heads that this would have had bad connotations in an argument about freedom of speech.
¹⁶
Dahl reveled in it all. Martin Amis, invited to Gipsy House one night for a game of snooker, argued about the case with his host and mentioned that he was about to have dinner with the hapless Rushdie, who was by now moving from house to house with an armed bodyguard of secret service men. “Tell him he's a shit,” Dahl said amicably.
¹⁷

Among the things which grated about Rushdie was the fact that, as long ago as 1981, his
Midnight's Children
had won the Booker Prize. The prize (begun in 1969) is restricted to novels, so Dahl's only chance of winning—two years before Rushdie's success—had been with
My Uncle Oswald
, which was panned by critics otherwise rarely found in agreement, from Peter Kemp to Auberon Waugh. Dahl later regretted having published the
novel.
¹⁸
But he took a swipe at the Booker Prize when, in 1989, he was chairman of a rival but less prestigious contest, the
Sunday Express
Book of the Year Prize. In a widely publicized speech he said—not entirely unjustly—that the Booker judges tend to choose what they call a beautifully crafted book, “which is often beautifully boring.” A great writer, Dahl went on, was one who pleased the marketplace: the only purpose of the novel was to entertain. “Balls,” shouted another popular writer present, Laurie Lee. More soberly,
Publishers Weekly
pointed out that if the Booker Prize judges were so misguided, it was strange that they had shortlisted the very book which Dahl's panel had chosen to win, Rose Tremain's
Restoration
.
¹⁹

There were many such flare-ups in his last years. His familiar dinner-party tetchiness, the private outbursts of a volatile, impatient man with a few drinks in him, had moved into a larger arena. Even his public attempts to defend people who needed defending (like the Palestinians) were liable to backfire. This quixotic trait was particularly evident to Dahl's friend Peter Mayer, who was one of the publishers of Rushdie's
The Satanic Verses
and, as a result, along with his colleagues at Viking Penguin, subjected to repeated death threats and bomb scares after the
fatwa
. Having, in the view of many at Viking Penguin, contributed to their problems—especially the controversy over paperback publication of the book—Dahl busied himself making numerous suggestions to Mayer about how the issue might be resolved.

An earlier episode produced similarly confused results. One spring day in 1988, Roald and Felicity were driving through Hyde Park when they saw several policemen fighting with a black man.
²⁰
Shocked by the violence of the scene, and perhaps also aware that this was a chance to counteract the charges of racism which were now often made against him, Dahl told his friends that he had seen an unmotivated assault by six policemen on a
victim whose face they had left “covered in blood.” The story was widely reported, but a taxi driver who had seen the fight and heard Dahl's description of it on the radio came forward with a different version. The “six policemen” were in fact, he rightly said, three policemen and one policewoman, who were having difficulty arresting an extremely aggressive man much larger than any of them. The man did not seem to have been much hurt. This version was supported by another bystander. While Felicity and two other witnesses agreed with her husband that the police had acted roughly, only Dahl alleged that the man's face was bleeding. These discrepancies, combined with the fact that the victim had been wanted for non-payment of a fine, made it easy for the Police Complaints Authority to dismiss a case which, if it had been put more moderately, might, on the balance of the rest of the evidence, have been upheld.