Roald Dahl (9 page)

Matthew Smith was the first established artist in any medium whom Dahl came to know well. The contact widened his horizons, but was also to be of practical use to him in his next posting. According to his own account, during the winter of 1941–42 a friend took him to dinner at Pratt's, one of the grander London men's clubs, off St. James's Street.
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At the common table he found himself sitting next to either the Under Secretary of State for Air, Harold Balfour, or, in another version, the Secretary of State himself, Sir Archibald Sinclair.
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Whoever it was,
he was taken with this cultivated, forceful young injured pilot, who seemed able to talk about anything—even modern art—and also played a perfectly good hand of bridge. The United States had just come into the war, but the British still needed to press their own cause there. In this, Dahl might have something to offer.

He was ordered to Glasgow, to embark on a Polish ship in a convoy bound for Canada. The crossing lasted two weeks, during which he took his turn on the watch for U-boats and made friends with another RAF pilot, Douglas Bisgood, with whom he swapped versions of the air force myth of the gremlins, a race of supernatural elves blamed for everything that went mechanically wrong on flying missions.
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Bisgood was heading for the east coast of Canada as an instructor in an officer training unit. Dahl went south to Washington, to join the British Embassy as assistant air attaché.

He found himself in some ways back at school, just as he had at Shell. In the view of one of his more important Washington colleagues, Isaiah (now Sir Isaiah) Berlin, “Everywhere the British go, they impose the pattern of the public school.” The country's representatives in wartime Washington were no exception. Berlin recalls:

At the top was Halifax, who was a kind of Provost, and had some disdain for the officials of the Embassy and the Missions. Very grand, very viceregal. The Headmaster was Sir Ronald Campbell, who was a very nice man. Then the Head of Chancery, Michael Wright, who was an Old Boy: totally devoted to the school, thought about nothing but the school, came back to it with enthusiasm as a housemaster, a rigid disciplinarian with little humour—charmless, with something fanatical about him.… Then there were the other Missions. They were looked on rather as a grammar school was looked on by public-schoolboys, at least in those days.
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The senior boys were sober, industrious, high-flying career diplomats like William Hayter, a future ambassador to Moscow, and Paul Gore-Booth, who would become High Commissioner to India. Young Dahl saw little of them, because his desk was not in the Chancery but at the Air Mission, in an annex. The missions shared a canteen with the main Embassy, and sometimes he and Isaiah Berlin lunched together there. But more of the assistant air attaché's time was spent in the company of the future advertising mogul David Ogilvy, with whom Dahl shared a house in Georgetown, and his friend Ivar Bryce, a handsome Etonian playboy who was in turn friendly with the journalist and future thriller writer Ian Fleming.

All three were members of the British intelligence services, to which Dahl himself soon became loosely attached. As allies, the British and the Americans weren't officially supposed to spy on one another, but of course they did. Dahl was encouraged to get close to as many well-placed people as he could, and to listen. The gossip columnist Drew Pearson was one target. Another was the influential reporter Ralph Ingersoll, who had covered the Battle of Britain in 1940, interviewed Stalin in 1941, and was the author of
Report on England
and
America Is Worth Fighting For
. A third was Vice President Wallace's newspaper-owning friend, Charles Marsh.

To Marsh, as to many people in the social world to which he gave Dahl an entree, the young pilot was unusually attractive. He had all the spiritedness of the RAF, heightened by his early release from the fighting. He was inquisitive and sure of himself, in a way that made him seem exceptionally intelligent. And—unlike most of his compatriates, but acceptably enough in Washington, and particularly to Marsh—he was a stupendous braggart.

From the point of view of the British war effort, all these characteristics could be made use of, particularly the last. Every diplomat is involved in creating a national fiction, and during the early months of America's direct involvement in the war, the
Allies' many reverses—in North Africa, in Singapore, and at sea—were in need of a coat of gloss. Even among American supporters of Britain (by no means an overwhelming majority), plenty of people thought that the Brits were asking for too much, and making a mess of what they were given. Since there was little in the current news that could be used to British advantage, the Embassy decided that propaganda efforts should concentrate on past glories, and especially those of the Royal Air Force.

This was the kind of work which the novelist C. S. Forester was in the United States to do. “Captain Hornblower,” as he was inevitably called, was in his forties. Sir Isaiah Berlin remembers him as a “nice, honest British patriot, who did a lot of work with his American admirers for England.”
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Forester asked Dahl to tell him his own story, so that he could write it up. Dahl thought it easier to put something on paper himself. The result was vivid and plainly written, if not without a literary pretension at plainness that showed he had been reading Hemingway. Forester was impressed and placed the piece in an influential American magazine,
The Saturday Evening Post
, where it appeared anonymously in August 1942 under the title “Shot Down over Libya.”

The story was introduced as a “factual report on Libyan air fighting” by an unnamed RAF pilot “at present in this country for medical reasons”—a reference to Dahl's troubles with his injured back, which were being treated by a surgeon friend of Charles Marsh's in Texas. The narrator describes himself strafing enemy trucks while being pursued by Italian fighters: “Hell's bells, what was that? Felt like she was hit somewhere. Blast this stick; it won't come back. They must have got my tail plane and jammed my elevators.” His Hurricane crashes in flames. Much later, Dahl remembered that he hadn't been shot down. Well, he said, the story had been edited and misleadingly captioned.
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But this contradicted another claim, that no one had touched a word. When, soon after the war ended, the piece was collected in a book, he tried to cover his tracks by rewriting it more factually
—no Italian fighters, no battle. He then pretended that this version was the original one.
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The incidents themselves, of course, weren't entirely fictional. After Dahl had recovered from the worst of his accident injuries, he really had flown Hurricanes and shot at trucks, and was often pursued by enemy aircraft. In dramatizing all this, he began his career as an imaginative writer. He also considerably enhanced his status in Washington—that, and his already considerable sex appeal. Charles Marsh's daughter Antoinette says, “Girls just fell at Roald's feet. He was very arrogant with them, but he got away with it. That uniform didn't hurt one bit—and he was an ace. I think he slept with everybody on the East and West Coasts that had more than fifty thousand dollars a year.” To his awed buddy Creekmore Fath, he was simply “one of the biggest cocksmen in Washington.”

Women vastly outnumbered men in the wartime capital, but those who knew Dahl there—among them, the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who had recently married Ernest Hemingway—agree with Antoinette Marsh that he was attractive by the standards of any time and place.
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Particularly, once again, to older women. The French actress Annabella (Suzanne Charpentier), with whom he was to become very close, was seven years his senior. And Clare Boothe Luce was thirteen years older than Dahl when she was placed beside him at an Embassy dinner.

Mrs. Luce was powerful, enterprising, and crucial to British interests. She had been involved with the pro-British group Union Now since 1940. A journalist who had been in Belgium just before Dunkirk, and the Pacific just before Pearl Harbor, she was now a member of Congress. And of course she was married to Henry Luce, the owner of
Time
and
Life
. According to Creek-more Fath, she took instantly to the young Dahl, spent the whole evening talking to him, and gave him a lift home. Officials were discreetly encouraging, but after some days, more than encouragement was needed. In Fath's words, Dahl told him:

I am all fucked out. That goddam woman has absolutely screwed me from one end of the room to the other for three goddam nights. I went back to the Ambassador this morning, and I said, “You know, it's a great assignment, but I just can't go on.” And the Ambassador said, “Roald, did you ever see the Charles Laughton movie of Henry VIII?” And I said “Yes.” “Well,” he said, “do you remember the scene with Henry going into the bedroom with Anne of Cleves, and he turns and says ‘The things I've done for England'? Well, that's what you've got to do.”
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At this distance, what comes across most vividly from the story is the atmosphere of a school dormitory ringing with boasts of sexual adventures during the past holidays. Sir Isaiah Berlin calls the anecdote “a wild flight of fancy: not untypical!” and says, “It is inconceivable that Halifax would have talked like that to anybody,” let alone to someone as unimportant as Dahl. But there was no shortage of supporting evidence for Dahl's tales of sexual conquest. He showed Fath a Tiffany gold key which he had been given to the house of the Standard Oil heiress, Millicent Rogers, along with a gold cigarette case and lighter and what Fath describes as “all this
stuff
. And Roald
loved
it, absolutely loved it, and he showed you all this junk, you know.”

Dahl was increasingly drawn to conspicuous wealth. He particularly, of course, liked conspicuous paintings and in this respect, as in others, wartime Washington must have seemed to him like El Dorado. Millicent Rogers's house was a small museum of French Impressionism. So, too, was the Charles Marsh country mansion where Dahl and Creekmore Fath spent many of their weekends.

Longlea stood in 800 acres of Virginia. Its chatelaine was Alice Glass, a much-photographed beauty in her late twenties, fond of music, good causes, and powerful men. It was she who had chosen the design of the house (Old English Manorial), found stonemasons capable of building it, and furnished it to look as though (Monets and Renoirs apart) it belonged in Renaissance Europe.
The eighteen black servants and the champagne breakfasts, on the other hand, were more in the style of the house's owner. Alice Glass was Charles Marsh's mistress, but she was in love with one of his protégés, the callow young Lyndon Johnson, whom she often entertained at Longlea.

Washington and its environs had become more than ever the social, as well as political, hub of the United States. For the rich, as the journalist David Brinkley recalls in
Washington Goes to War
, there seemed to be nowhere else to go.
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Foreign travel was impossible. And the capital's attractions were augmented by an inpouring of rich European refugees and visiting statesmen. (“More kings are expected,” Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle wrote wearily in his journal. “They take so much time.”
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) President Roosevelt added edge to the amusements by attacking “parasites,” and the “twenty-room mansions on Massachusetts Avenue,” which he thought they should have turned over to people more valuable to the war effort. One of his targets was Cissy Patterson, owner of the conservative
Times-Herald
. Another was the preposterously rich society hostess Evalyn Walsh McLean, a gold-mine heiress who in her last years used to encourage soldiers to pass around her biggest diamond and to photograph their girlfriends wearing it. It was in her house, according to Brinkley, that Dahl had a brush with one of the
Times-Herald
's hard-line isolationist writers, Frank Waldrop. “Do you realize,” Dahl asked him when there was a pause in the conversation, “that if you were to go to England today there are men in your U.S. Eighth Air Force who would tear you limb from limb for the things you write?” Waldrop considered. “Well,” he said eventually, “I guess I won't go to England.”
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Dahl gradually came to know almost everyone. Creekmore Fath got him invited to the White House, where he first met Martha Gellhorn (who thought him “very, very attractive and slightly mad, which I attributed to hitting the ground”) and, through her, Ernest Hemingway. Ralph Ingersoll introduced him to the dramatist Lillian Hellman.
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Dahl joined a poker school
where one of the regular players was Senator Harry Truman, to whom he lost the whole $1,000 he earned for his first story, or so he liked to say.
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When famous British authors came to town, it was Dahl who was deputed to look after them. Some of these—Noël Coward, among them, who thought Dahl very bright
¹⁸
—were working for the wartime intelligence agencies.

To anyone, let alone a twenty-five-year-old who a year before was being shot at in the sky above Palestine, it would all have seemed like a fantasy. Dahl's daughter Tessa thinks that it permanently turned his head. But he already had an exuberant imagination, one which he was unusually keen to share with other people.
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David Ogilvy remembers some of the yarns he told, half-pretending they were true. One was about a friend of his whose car had broken down in the Sinai Desert. According to the story, a rich man had taken him to his home and introduced him to his beautiful wife and daughter. In the night, a woman joined him in bed, but he couldn't see her face because it was dark. The next day, as his host drove him back to the garage, he casually mentioned another daughter in the house, who would never emerge in daylight. “Why?” the guest asked. “Oh, because she has leprosy.” Dahl later wrote up the story as “The Visitor.” “It was fantastic!” the narrator says. “It was straight out of Hans Christian Andersen or Grimm.”
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