Roald Dahl (14 page)

The book's politics are alarmingly straightforward. Part Two imagines a world dominated by Communism, a system Dahl describes as one in which people “too brainless even to amass coin-collections for themselves preach … that all coins should be shared by all people.” This free-market theme prompts a lugubrious passage imagining the destruction of London in World War III, where what Dahl seizes on is the fate of Regent Street: Austin Reed, the Kodak shop, Hamley's, Liberty's, “everything was gone, all the fine shops.… They were all gone now.” Then there is talk of an alliance between China and India, the latter a country of “crafty sunburnt men” who “are copying and improving upon the weapons of other nations.” While human self-destruction draws near, developments are keenly watched by the Leader, who has devised his own internationalist, libertarian, anti-industrial dictatorship, a kind of proto-Green Fascism whose most appealing regulations (handed down to the men, whose responsibility it is to pass them on to the women and children) are that everyone may eat the fruit of any snozzberry tree, and that “no one shall covet his own wife to the point where he becomes a bore.”
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But at the book's J. M. Barrie-ish end, the Gremlins' dream cannot be realized. They themselves, we are reminded, are purely fictional creatures, dependent for their existence on the imaginations of humans—who have now become extinct. “We haven't really existed very
much
, have we? Just a little bit, here and there and then only … how shall I put it … only in a rather imaginative sort of way.” Only insects are left to begin the process of life over again.

There are some enjoyable moments in all this, and some memorably grim ones, and given much more thought and a skillful editor, a popular allegory might conceivably have been made out of it (especially since this was the period of
Animal Farm
and
Nineteen Eighty-four
).
²⁶
As it stands, though, apart from its place in the history of war fiction, the book's main interest is in its
revelation of Dahl's volatile mood at the time. This is particularly true of the character of Peternip, a former RAF pilot, now a music critic, whose thoughts are fatalistic and “despairing and who “ever since World War II had walked with an irregular, short-long … limping gait which reminded one somehow of the swing of a maladjusted pendulum.”
²⁷
Dahl himself was slightly lame since his accident, and his own gloom was lifted by his enthusiasm for classical music and modern painting, as well as for writing.

The period immediately after the war was difficult for many authors, Dahl among them. Paper shortages led to long delays in book publication—
Sometime Never
did not appear in England until 1949. Magazine editors seemed less receptive in peacetime than in war. As a result, Dahl sometimes became uncertain not only about the best direction for his writing but about whether he should be writing at all.

Uncertainty was not the impression he gave to people with whom he dealt professionally over his stories. In the summer of 1946, he took time off from
Sometime Never
to write about the recent accidental discovery of a Roman treasure hoard at Mildenhall, in Suffolk. The piece was bought by
The Saturday Evening Post
, which had published “Shot Down over Libya,” and whose editor, Stuart Rose, had recently visited the Dahls at Grange Farm, near Great Missenden. Rose's subeditors wanted to cut the article, and Dahl fired off a long letter, enraged that they thought they could write better than he did, insisting that none of his recent work had been shortened and lamenting the fate of other, tenderer authors if their efforts were so abused.
²⁸
In what was to become the signature tune of such complaints, Dahl opened with a bribe and closed with a moral outburst. He said that after Rose's visit, he had found a set of old wineglasses and bought them for him: they had been waiting for his return. But he ended by warning that a writer at the outset of his career
could be crushed by such editorial ruthlessness—particularly if the only way he could feed himself was to submit to what was asked. Dahl added that such behavior on an editor's part was “a great crime … and I know that you, for one, would not wish to be accused of it.”

With the BBC, he was more ingratiating, partly because the relationship was new. He was encouraged to try the medium by a friend of Alfhild's, Archie Gordon, an aristocratic writer and broadcaster who had often stayed at Oakwood before the war. Dahl's first approach, in the summer of 1948, was to send in a letter about a radio talk he had heard on the subject of dog racing. He was invited to turn the reply into a talk of his own, which he promptly did, modestly pleading that he would be more than grateful for any suggestions about changes and taking the opportunity to offer some of his stories.
²⁹
With the help of a recommendation from Gordon, they were looked at by the South African poet Roy Campbell, who was on the BBC's staff. He immediately accepted “People Nowadays” (Dahl's first draft of “The Soldier”), while passing two others to a colleague in the more popular Home Service, H. N. Bentinck:
³⁰
“A Picture for Drioli” (later called “Skin”) and “The Menace” (later, “Collector's Item” and finally titled “Man from the South”). Bentinck said that both were too long for his purposes, but he would take the second if it was shortened, which he thought would anyway improve it—a suggestion Dahl meekly accepted.
³¹

Things did not go on so smoothly. Bentinck didn't like Dahl's next submission, “The Sound Machine,” and rejected it.
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Dahl in his turn complained that the BBC's reader of “People Nowadays” had talked like an adult addressing a child, which—although this is in fact often Dahl's own tone, both in that story and elsewhere—he didn't think appropriate.
³³
He now tried two more stories on Roy Campbell, but unsuccessfully.
³⁴

Dahl's side of the correspondence became increasingly irritable, and he was soon sardonically comparing “the discriminating literary gentlemen of the Third Programme” with their richer
and more full-blooded counterparts on American magazines. In 1951, he visited Germany with Charles Marsh and told Archie Gordon that he had dreamed glorious dreams in Hitler's former retreat at Berchtesgaden: absurd fantasies, such as selling a story to the BBC.
³⁵

If he was annoyed with the BBC, he was sometimes annoyed with himself, too—for example, about his article on “Love” for the
Ladies' Home Journal
, which earned him a more than useful $2,500 (in today's terms, about $13,000), but which he now thought “bullshit.”
³⁶
Writing well was hard to do, and the rejections made it harder.
³⁷
In May 1949, Scribner's, which had published
Sometime Never
, turned down the idea of a new book of his short stories.
³⁸
Still, there were some successes. A compromise had been reached over the piece about the Mildenhall treasure. (It appeared under the straight-to-the-nub title “He Plowed Up $l,000,000.”
³⁹
) “Man from the South,” the psychological thriller about a sinister bet for a young man's little finger with which he had entertained Annabella when they first met, earned him $2,250 from another American magazine,
Collier's
, before he sold it to the BBC. And Dahl was right to think that not all the refusals were deserved. The story which became “Skin” is an eerie satire on the picture-dealing world, where—in a metaphor which the story enacts with chilling literalness—people would take the hide off someone's back to get a painting they valued. Both this and “Man from the South” owe something to
The Merchant of Venice
. They contrast business contracts with humaner dealings; material possessions (a Cadillac, a picture by Soutine) with flesh and blood. “Man from the South” ends, like Shakespeare's play, with a surprise reversal and the humiliation of the Shylock figure by a woman. “Skin” is set in war-devastated Paris in 1946. A starving old man is forced to sell a picture of his wife by Soutine to a ruthless dealer. In doing so, he is literally selling his own skin: thirty years earlier, the artist had tattooed the portrait on his back. It is left to the reader to guess whether or not he survives.

Postwar Europe, as “Skin” suggests, was a continent of ruins
and, in some areas, starvation. Dahl was affected not only by the hard personal adjustment between millionaire society in Washington and the relative privations of postwar Buckinghamshire but by the larger plight which he saw around him, and about which he read in the papers. Britain fared better than some countries, and rural people there less badly than Londoners, but the winter of 1946–47 had been brutally severe and was followed by an economic crisis worsened by the fact that the first of Britain's repayments on its war debt to the United States was already due. Dahl's apocalyptic mood extended to domestic politics, as well as the Cold War, and he blamed much of the dereliction on Attlee's Labour government: “I wish them dead,” he wrote to Charles Marsh. Although he was “nearly a Socialist now,” he said he would gladly see the whole cabinet of incapable, greedy, vengeful, joyless, arrogant, physically unattractive, and morally minuscule men dead.
⁴⁰

Marsh had various reasons for being concerned about the national and international situation which Dahl described to him. He was genuinely philanthropic and cared even more than most Americans that, having helped to win the war in Europe, they shouldn't lose the peace. He wanted to help his young protégé by giving him work to do. And he saw opportunities for himself, both as a businessman and as a collector.

In 1949, he formed a charitable trust, the Public Welfare Foundation. It still exists, spending millions of dollars a year on education, social welfare, medicine, and emergency relief for poor countries. The beginnings were more modest. As early as 1945, Marsh arranged with Dahl to set up a project in Limehouse, East London. The parish rector was asked to select two hundred needy families, each of which would be allowed up to $200 per month for a period of six months.
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The scheme was quickly extended to nearby Rotherhithe, and because what was required couldn't always be bought easily in Britain, the foundation also arranged to send vitamin pills and apples from Marsh's farm in Rappahannock County, Virginia.

For some time, Dahl worked hard on the project, but he was torn between zeal and cynicism. He wrote to Violet Attlee, the Prime Minister's wife, publicizing the foundation's activities, but made jokes about her when she replied, thanking him.
⁴²
Similarly, he congratulated Marsh on his gifts, which, he said, both fed people and gave them enjoyment; but he scorned Marsh's offer of vitamins. The poor “do not give a fuck for vitamins and do not understand them,” he told Marsh—they wouldn't eat them even if they were told they were aphrodisiacs.
⁴³

He may have been right about that, but he also may have been less wholeheartedly sympathetic to the poor of East London than his more impassioned letters made him seem. Much of the population there was Jewish, and in August 1947, Dahl sent Marsh a copy of an answer he pretended he had given to Sydney Rothman, treasurer of the Stepney Jewish Girls' (B'nai B'rith) Club and Settlement, who had asked for help.
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The letter was a joke, in the style of his correspondence with Marsh about Lord Halifax and “sex-manhood.” Almost certainly, it was meant for no one's eyes except Marsh's. But it was typical of Dahl's increasingly contradictory character that his most generous, constructive impulses were accompanied by something with a less pleasant taste. The reply Dahl pretended he had sent to the Settlement said that since he knew that Jews never asked for money, he assumed the treasurer's request to have been a mistake; but in case it might be repeated, he wanted to warn Rothman that Charles Marsh was a committed pro-Arabist, prone to “sudden fits of violence during which all the Jews in the neighbourhood tremble and fear for their lives.” Marsh had once bitten off the finger of a Jewish waiter, Dahl said, and when a Jewish woman tried to seduce him, he put itching powder in her face cream and pulled out her fingernails so that she couldn't scratch. Previously, the “East Side Club for unmarried Yiddish mothers” in New York had already asked Marsh for money, but the philanthropist's response was to buy up their premises, throw out the women, and turn the place over to Arab sailors as a hostel. Dahl ended by
listing the names of those to whom copies of his letter had supposedly been sent: joke Jewish names such as Miss Alma Finckle, the Rev. Rubin Ruderman, and so on.

The letter was a private amusement between friends and arguably belongs to that realm of friendship which Martin Amis, with Philip Larkin in mind, has temptingly called “the willing suspension of accountability.” But whether or not consenting adults should be held answerable for their private jokes, something is revealed in them, and there is no question that while Dahl had several Jewish friends, his anti-Semitic jokes were of a piece with an underlying dislike of Jews, considered generally, and of Zionists in particular. Around the time of this letter—1946–47—Dahl lamented to Marsh that the United States should have been giving Britain more support in Palestine. He approvingly saw the difficult last years of the mandate, before the founding of the state of Israel, as a war which the British (among them, Dennis Pearl) were fighting on the Arabs' side.
⁴⁵

His humanitarian concerns were more steadily in evidence closer to home. Charles and Claudia Marsh paid several visits to Buckinghamshire, bringing lavish presents for all the family and involving themselves in various small local agricultural projects of Dahl's devising. Marsh could never resist a business opportunity. Even as he crossed the Atlantic, he would be negotiating with the ship's purser to buy up his surplus supplies—especially of bourbon—at the end of the voyage. Dahl began trying to interest Marsh in Norway, where he saw scope for a mutually advantageous timber project which could supply his patron's businesses with badly needed paper, while giving employment to Dahl and Norwegian members of his family—among them, his enterprising cousin Finn, who had spent the war in the Resistance, shipping refugees across the North Sea to Britain.