Roald Dahl (12 page)

Important matters could be at stake, after all, and although neither Dahl nor Marsh was a key player, they were close to people who were very close to people with power. Marsh's newspaper empire, in particular, gave him a degree of personal influence on public opinion, especially in Texas, as well as firsthand knowledge of the personalities, ambitions, and activities of individual politicians. He could be useful to the British, and the pragmatism of their approach to him through Dahl was well calculated to flatter his already well-developed sense of his own political value. In March 1943, for example, shortly after a visit to the United States by the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, Dahl sent Marsh eleven precise questions.
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Some asked for detailed information relevant to minute aspects of Roosevelt's chances of re-election in 1944. Others were more far-reaching. The Allies were beginning their long-term preparations for the Yalta summit, which would decide the shape of postwar Europe. Preliminary meetings were being planned, and the British wanted to know which of the Americans involved had most influence in this area, what their relations with each other were, and who was likely to be leading the side at what everyone called “the semi-final.”

Marsh's twelve-page reply was full of informative side glances and showed him at his least injudicious.
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He described the protagonists' exact shades of opinion vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, accurately predicted the run-up to the negotiations, gave a good sense of the impression those concerned had formed of Eden, and warned Dahl that any attempt by Britain to make an independent early deal with the Russians would be brushed aside by Roosevelt. He also summarized some key likely factors in postwar
American economic planning. But for all this show of statesmanship, Marsh was generally happier with a mixture of gossip and speculation. He added a note about a past quarrel between two politicians over a private business contract in Ohio and described other feuds with a keen attention to detail, dialogue, and narrative shaping which the writer in Dahl must have enjoyed.

The intelligence-gathering aspect of the friendship never spoiled the fun. In June 1944, for example, Marsh wrote to Dahl from Austin about why the Texas Democratic convention had gone against “your friend Roosevelt.” “Had you been here to advise me and report all that Isaiah [Berlin] knew in advance,” Marsh grumbled, “I would not have been caught short.” But this was little more than a parenthesis in a letter mostly given over to boisterous sexual gossip and innuendo. There was an element of both exhibitionism and voyeurism in the relationship, and not only in the obvious sense of Marsh's boasting to the younger man about his exploits. All his letters were dictated to his secretary, Claudia Haines, whom he would marry after Alice left him. Both Claudia and, in particular, her teenage daughter were devoted to Dahl and figure in the letters Claudia herself was typing. In the summer of 1945, Charles dictated, “Claudia is too conceited to call herself your mother. She will settle on the Aunt position, though I strongly suspect that she wants to be more than the big sister. No woman will settle for anything less than being a woman.”

Son, nephew, brother—these were roles which Dahl understood and could manage. Claudia Marsh still describes him as “part of the family.” Many who knew him at the time thought that his sexual dealings, on the other hand, were not happy. David Ogilvy believes Dahl was interested in women to the extent that he could boast about them, and “when they fell in love with him, as a lot did, I don't think he was nice to them.” Helen Lillie, with whom Dahl drove to Canada when they began work together on the history of BSC, says much the same.
⁵⁴
Martha
Gellhorn concluded that he hated women and that his main interest in her was as a means of access to Hemingway. (When, in 1944, she enlisted Dahl's help in getting both her and her husband to Britain to report on the invasion of France, he found an airplane seat for Hemingway and left Gellhorn to trail behind by boat.)

But at least one of the women whom Dahl met at this time thinks differently. The French actress Annabella spent most of the war in the United States, starring in morale-boosting plays and films such as
Bomber's Moon
and
Tonight We Raid Calais
.
⁵⁵
In 1944, her husband, the actor Tyrone Power, was in the Pacific with the U.S. Air Force, and Annabella came to Washington in the pre-Broadway run of Franz Werfel's play
Jacobowsky and the Colonel
. At the first-night dinner, she found herself sitting next to Dahl. He had by now perfected his social trick of trying out his stories on people. It was a way of monopolizing attention (and avoiding the necessity of small talk), but also of assessing, and sometimes dominating, his listener. The story he told the petite actress was to be published three years later as “Man from the South.” It is about a sinister foreigner who bets his Cadillac that a younger man can't make his cigarette lighter work ten times in succession. The stake he wants from his rival is the little finger of his left hand. There is a more than usually grim twist at the end, when the suddenly cowed Cadillac owner is taken away in mid-bet by a minder, a woman, three of whose fingers are missing.

Annabella listened attentively, and when Dahl finished, she asked calmly, “What happened next?” He was delighted by her sangfroid and asked if he could see her home. At lunchtime the next day, he showed up as if by chance in the dining room of her hotel, at the next table. Soon they were lovers. As Annabella says now, with a shrug, “During the war, it's life against death.”

She went back to New York, where
Jacobowsky and the Colonel
was to run for over four hundred performances (one of which was interrupted so that Annabella could announce that Paris had
been liberated). Dahl visited her there often—sometimes on his way to or from OSS headquarters in Ottawa. On one occasion he asked whether he could leave his uniform with her for a few days while he went somewhere in civilian clothes. He told her never to ask why, because it was not his secret. She enjoyed the conspiracy and was amused by the impossibility of Roald's disguising himself: “He was so tall and good-looking—you had to look at him!”

After Tyrone Power came home from the war, Annabella says, “the crazy thing [with Roald] was off. It came back from time to time when we were … thrown into each other's arms. But it was like we were twin brothers. Romantic? Not really. Physical, sometimes. But most important, we had a complete understanding, and he trusted me.” It was an understanding based, in part, on her strong practicality and courage. As a girl, she had become, in effect, the only female Boy Scout in France, when her father, Paul Charpentier, introduced the movement to his country from Britain. His daughter wore the uniform, attended rallies, and camped rough, insisting that she sleep in straw, like the boys, rather than on one of the camp beds provided for her and her father. It was good training for the last months of the war, when she joined the Red Cross and went up through Italy with the U.S. Army.

She and Dahl were to remain close for the rest of his life—long after her marriage to Tyrone Power ended, and longer than any other relationship either of them had with a member of the opposite sex. She speaks of him as a great figure, a hero, and she clearly loved him. Would she, then, have considered marrying him? “Certainly not,” she says without hesitation. “Because—he was kind of impossible.”

Dahl gave his own account of love, some years later, in a piece on the subject which was commissioned by the
Ladies' Home Journal
. With the schematism of a school essay, he divided his topic in two, and then subdivided it by percentages. On the one hand, there is family love, between parents and children or between
siblings. This kind, he said, is always clear and uncomplicated. The other sort, heterosexual romantic love, is very difficult. Here, the most common form of relationship is 70 percent based on sex and only 30 percent on mutual affection and respect. If only “our moral and ecclesiastical codes” permitted temporary liaisons for the pleasure and satisfaction of those concerned, without their contracting marriage, “then this kind of love would form an excellent basis for such activity.”
⁵⁶

It can't have helped that in Washington he was professionally encouraged to practice opportunism, duplicity, entrapment. It is not far from these to the cynicism of his postwar short stories. One of them, “My Lady Love, My Dove,” concerns a couple who decide to bug the bedroom of a pair of weekend guests.
⁵⁷
The idea is the wife's, but her husband's complicity seems to confirm her understanding of their relationship: “Listen, Arthur. I'm a
nasty
person. And so are you—in a secret sort of way. That's why we get along together.”
⁵⁸
At any rate, he admits to his excitement in fixing up the microphone. What they overhear turns the tables on them. Their young guests have worked out a complicated technique for cheating the older couple at bridge. The spiral of conspiracy and exploitation continues, as the hosts decide to learn from their example.

The fiction owes at least one detail to Dahl's connection with the secret services. Bill Stephenson's intelligence operation in America often seemed wayward and overindependent to its ostensible masters in Britain and sometimes came under close scrutiny. On one occasion, it is said, Churchill's troubleshooter, Lord Beaverbrook, sent a man to Washington to find out exactly what Stephenson was up to, and Stephenson encouraged Dahl to lay a trap for him.
⁵⁹
Dahl had the investigator to lunch at his home in Georgetown, where he had set up a concealed microphone. As one drink followed another, Dahl began to ask leading questions about Beaverbrook. The sleuth was satisfactorily disloyal, and the recording was sent to his employer, who as a result lost confidence in the eventual report. Some of Dahl's former BSC
colleagues are sniffy about the episode (“I thought it was a dirty thing to do against his own country—a terribly dirty thing to do to a man who was your own fellow, er.…”
⁶⁰
). But it may have helped to maintain their freedom from outside interference.

Dahl's bugging story eventually appeared in
The New Yorker
. In 1953, it was included in the collection
Someone Like You
—the first book of his to be published by Alfred A. Knopf and the beginning of an association that would last for almost thirty years. Knopf was not the first publisher of Dahl's adult books, although it might have been. In July 1943 its senior editor Arthur W. Wang read Dahl's story of the outbreak of war in Dar es Salaam, “The Sword,” in
The Atlantic Monthly
and wrote congratulating him and asking if he had written anything longer.
⁶¹
Dahl, who was staying with Alice Marsh in Falmouth, on the Massachusetts coast, sent him “Katina,” which had not yet appeared.
⁶²
Soon they met, but Wang said what all publishers used to say, that short stories don't sell, except in magazines.
⁶³

5

In the Valley of the Dahls

Decades later, Tessa Dahl was to call the Vale of Aylesbury the “Valley of the Dahls.” In 1945, long before the joke could have been made, the description was already apt. Sofie Dahl had moved from Kent to Grendon Underwood, a straggling village on a rise of land between Aylesbury and Bicester. Alfhild, now in her thirties, was in the next village with her Danish husband, Leslie Hansen. Else, since 1940 Mrs. John Logsdail, lived twenty miles down the road toward London, in Great Missenden. The twenty-five-year-old Asta, who had spent the war in the women's branch of the RAF, was still unmarried.

Sofie would soon move twice: first, briefly, to Grange Farm, Great Missenden, then to a village house in Amersham, nearby. Her children usually called her Mama, but her son often referred to her as “the mother,” as if there could be no other.
¹
For the next six years, where she went, he went. It was from the long, rather bleak scattering of cottages in Grendon Underwood that he wrote to the Marshes saying that he was living contentedly, surrounded by cattle and sheep and rustic characters with straw in their hair,
²
but the way of life continued wherever they were. At Grange Farm, according to Dahl's count, they kept a cow, eight dogs, seven ducks, one pair of ferrets and another of canaries
, and eventually a parrot.
³
There was a goat, too, in which he saw a strong resemblance to the pro-Roosevelt Senator Claude Pepper, which, Dahl said, gave him a thrill of uncertainty every day when he milked her.
⁴

He had decided not to go back to Shell but to try to earn his living as an author. It was very hard adjusting to being back in postwar England, away from the excitements and illusions of Washington, but he renewed some of his prewar hobbies, particularly greyhound racing, and settled into a rural existence.

His enthusiasm for gambling brought him into regular contact with working-class people, for the first time since he had left active service with the RAF. Among them was a butcher named Claud Taylor, a man of his own age who worked in Old Amersham.
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Taylor helped Dahl to breed and train his own dogs, and they had a run of luck which made them unpopular among the local gypsy greyhound owners.
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Taylor also taught Roald to poach pheasant and tickle trout. Dahl made notes of the things he said, in an old cardboard-bound accounts book—jokes, poaching yarns, pieces of rural lore. He especially liked to hear about the ferocity of females in any species. (It was a lifelong preoccupation. In his seventies, he joked to a BBC interviewer, “There's one group of spiders where the female is so fierce that the male has to weave a web around her and wrap her up and as it were handcuff her before he can mate her—which is wonderful, I think. You could apply that to some females of the human species.”
⁷
) He used what he learned from Taylor in a series of country stories which he hoped would make a novel, but eventually left as a loosely linked group called “Claud's Dog”: tales about dog racing, rat catching, cow bulling, maggot farming, a corpse in a haystack.
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They are sour pieces: the only people in them who are vividly characterized are the unpleasant ones, and Dahl determinedly crushes any false literary idealism about the countryside. Much later, he sentimentalized those “sweet days many years ago” in which he lived “a pleasant leisurely life.” As he came to remember the time, what he wrote then was “nothing
but short stories.… I worked on nothing else. I was totally preoccupied with the short story.”
⁹
In reality, he made more than one attempt at a novel, and his mood was often one of intense gloom, anxiety about the state of the world, and preoccupation with his own lack of a clear sense of direction.