Roald Dahl (22 page)

Dahl's efforts to write were still unsuccessful. Six months after Olivia's death, he told his publishers, “I feel right now as though I'll never in my life do any more! I simply cannot seem to get started again.”
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But for Neal, work was both a ready form of escape and a necessary source of income. Acting brought new surroundings, new friends, and a mind other than her own to occupy. For a time, she accepted almost anything that was offered: a part in a single episode of a TV series and then an unimportant-seeming role in a film with the provisional title “Hud Bannon.” The TV contract enabled her to take the whole family to Beverly Hills for a few weeks. The film unexpectedly turned out to be a hit.
Hud
, with Paul Newman, was eventually to win Patricia Neal an Oscar. Meanwhile, other movies followed—Alexander Singer's
Psyche
'59, with Curt Jurgens and Samantha Eggar; Otto Preminger's
In Harm's Way
, with John Wayne. She also quickly got pregnant. In May 1964, aged thirty-eight, she gave birth to another daughter, Ophelia. Theo, who had his own versions of names, called her “Don-Mini,” which—shortened to “Min”—was adopted by everyone because it avoided painful slips with “Olivia.” Within six months, Neal was expecting yet another baby. A new film turned up, and the whole family went on location in Honolulu: Roald, Tessa, Theo, the baby Ophelia, and two nanny housekeepers.

At the suggestion of Pat and Roald, Kenneth Till had agreed to remove Theo's old valve altogether. After a period of nervous experimentation, he was managing well without it, and—although permanently impaired by his injuries—was beginning to enjoy the stories his father told him and his older sister, Tessa. Slowly Dahl struggled back to taking an interest in his work and in how his published books were doing.

James and the Giant Peach
, which he had completed shortly before Theo was born and had dedicated to Olivia and Tessa, had not yet found a British publisher. In the States it had been widely reviewed and was a steady, if modest, success. The critics—who tended to assume that their adult readers would be familiar with Dahl's short stories—were particularly enthusiastic about the jaunty poems, part Edward Lear, part Hilaire Belloc, which intersperse the narrative. Some made the point that what adults find repulsive, children may enjoy—the description of the hideous aunts, for example. This wasn't what the more specialist reviewers in librarians' journals and educational papers thought. “The violent exaggeration of language and almost grotesque characterizations impair the storytelling and destroy the illusion of reality and plausibility which any good fantasy must achieve,” wrote Ethel L. Heins, a children's librarian from Boston, Massachusetts, in
Library Journal
. “Not recommended.”
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For Dahl, it was an early taste of what was to become an increasingly common type of reaction to his work. But another Bostonian, the reviewer in the
Herald
, compared the book with
Alice
and said it “should become a classic.”
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By October 1962, a year after it first appeared and a month before Olivia's death,
James
had sold 6,500 copies in hardcover and earned its author $2,000 in royalties. Meanwhile, an offer came from another publisher, inviting Dahl to take part in a project so enterprising that it was denounced by everyone who wasn't involved. Macmillan, New York, had begun to approach well-known adult authors of the caliber of Arthur Miller, Sylvia Plath, and John Updike, inviting them to write an extremely short book for young children. They would be supplied with a vocabulary list thought suitable to the age range and would be paid $2,000:
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not a fortune (today it would be worth about ten times that), but the work didn't look arduous and Dahl was keen both to get back to writing and to make some money of his own. Many authors had already signed up, and he was sent one of the
best of the results, Robert Graves's
The Big Green Book
, for which the productive but as yet relatively little-known Maurice Sendak had done the illustrations.

Graves's story could not have failed to appeal to Dahl. It is about a lonely boy who learns how to be a magician. Turning himself into an old man, he persuades his unpleasant uncle and aunt to gamble all they have against him at cards. When they lose, he makes them his slaves. Dahl had already thought up a new tale of his own and had been telling it to Tessa and Theo. It was an attack on people who shoot birds for sport. (Dahl had some of his Buckinghamshire neighbors in mind.) A girl with a magic finger decides to thwart a trigger-happy family called the Greggs. First she spoils their aim, then she turns them into birds and has them held up at gunpoint by vengeful ducks.

Alfred Knopf was jealous of Dahl's involvement in the rival publisher's scheme and did all he could to warn his author off. He said that Macmillan was about to go bankrupt and sent him an article from
The Horn Book
(a journal for specialists in children's literature) sternly critical of the series' word lists.
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Dahl conceded that, taken to its limit, the approach would result in a populace whose vocabulary consisted of less than a thousand words, none of them longer than two syllables.
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Perhaps to appease Knopf, he said that with the exception of Graves's
Big Green Book
, most of the titles so far published were “tripe” and that the essential idea for the series was grotesque. But he had to consider his family, he said, and from that perspective, “I was not entitled to turn it down.”

Later, having delivered the book and received his check, he dismissed the project as unimportant. He would much prefer to be writing for adults, he told Knopf. “I am trying, but no luck so far.” In any case, he rightly anticipated that an attack on the gun lobby was not what Macmillan had had in mind. They paid Dahl his fee, but the typescript of
The Magic Finger
sat in limbo. His willingness to deal with a new publisher, however, had sent a warning to Knopf, and Dahl's editors there were quick to take
the hint when he began to ask what was happening about his new draft of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, which he had delivered six months before.

Dedicated to Theo,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
concerns a poor family—Charlie Bucket, his parents and all his grandparents—who live in a small wooden shack, eating little except cabbage and potatoes. Nearby stands a mysterious chocolate factory, owned by Mr. Willy Wonka. Mr. Wonka is enormously rich, and something of a magician. According to Charlie's grandparents, his myriad inventions include a way of making both chewing gum which never loses its taste and chocolate ice cream which stays cold without being refrigerated. One day, they tell Charlie, Mr. Wonka found that some of his workers had been selling trade secrets to his rivals. So he sacked everyone, and for months the factory was silent. When the story begins, it is back in production. Yet the gates remain locked, and no one is ever seen to enter or leave.

So curiosity, as well as greed, is aroused when Mr. Wonka announces a children's lottery in which the five winners will not only be given a lifetime's supply of sweets but will be taken on a personally conducted tour of the factory. After several raisings and dashings of his hopes, the starving Charlie finds one of the winning tickets.

The other successful children are the greedy Augustus Gloop, the spoiled Veruca Salt, the gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde, and Mike Teavee, “a boy who does nothing but watch television.” In the course of their visit, Mr. Wonka is made angry by each of them, and disposes of them ruthlessly before the eyes of their doting parents. Charlie Bucket, on the other hand, who is simply described as “the hero,” wins favor, if more through inoffensiveness than for any positive merit. It transpires that Willy Wonka's real purpose was to find an heir. He appoints Charlie and whisks off his family—several of whom are unenthusiastic about the idea—to join him forever in his candied underworld.

Knopf's editor for children's books, Virginie Fowler, had written
enthusiastically to Dahl as soon as she received his revised manuscript. But she had run into difficulties with potential illustrators. The first one she approached, whom she prefers not to name, was unhappy with the Oompa-Loompas: in the version first published, a tribe of 3,000 amiable black pygmies who have been imported by Mr. Willy Wonka from “the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before.” Mr. Wonka keeps them in the factory, where they have replaced the sacked white workers. Wonka's little slaves are delighted with their new circumstances, and particularly with their diet of chocolate. Before, they lived on green caterpillars, beetles, eucalyptus leaves, “and the bark of the bong-bong tree.”

Virginie Fowler saw the story as essentially Victorian in character—a “very English” fantasy—so she didn't find these passages objectionable, although she had other reservations.
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But this was 1962, and there were what she describes as “civil rights problems” in the United States, which she thinks may have deterred her potential illustrator. So she thought she would try someone who had approached her, someone well established in advertising and keen to move into book illustration: Joseph Schindelman.

When Fowler sent Schindelman's preliminary sketches to Dahl, he was devastated by Olivia's death and did not reply. Some months later, having forced himself back to work, and also having read
The Big Green Book
, he suggested they try Maurice Sendak instead. Fowler investigated but found that Sendak would not be free to take on the job until the autumn of 1964, eighteen months away, and that he would want a share of royalties rather than a straight fee. Dahl was prepared to wait, but not to lose part of his income. The following year, 1963, Sendak's
Where the Wild Things Are
first appeared and made his name. His work has much in common with Dahl's—particularly its roots in North European traditions and its keen empathy with the crueler sides of a child's imagination. Their never-realized
partnership is one of the more tantalizing might-have-beens of children's literature.

It would be more than fifteen years before Dahl found, in Quentin Blake, an illustrator who, although very different from Sendak, truly complemented his writing. Always inclined to impatience, he was made even more so by his grief, and complained to Alfred Knopf both about the financial demands of illustrators and about what he described as Fowler's unconscionable delays. Among the firm's nervously prompt and soothing responses was one from Robert Bernstein, then in charge of all juvenile publication for the new Random House-Knopf-Pantheon group. Bernstein said he had just read
Charlie
, “and so have my sons, who are 6, 10 and 11, and it is a wonderful, wonderful children's book.”
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This was the superlative vein Dahl himself used as a writer and to which he had been growing accustomed from his American publishers. By profession and instinct, the less expansive Virginie Fowler belonged among the specialists in children's literature: teachers and librarians whose responsible but sometimes overcautious judgments Dahl came over the years increasingly to despise. She was in her fifties, long established in juvenile publishing, and believed that good books for children followed certain conventions. For example, they shouldn't be in bad taste, and they shouldn't have half an eye on adults. Although Fowler liked
Charlie
, the book seemed to her to break both rules, and she now tried to explain why.

Dahl had tried the stories on his own children. He both understood and shared their taste for bad taste and couldn't have cared less about the consequences. He also knew that reading aloud is more fun for adults if the story includes something for them, too. In the case of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, part of what they are offered is the ruthless, if temporary, elimination of children themselves. Dahl, like Hilaire Belloc in the
Cautionary Tales
, was frank about the fact that most children are obnoxious, both to adults and to each other, some of the time. He
entertains by comically allowing the worst to happen to representatives of the very people for whom he is supposed to be writing.

This built-in double standard is one enjoyable joke. Another, again aimed at the adult reader (and the sophisticated child), is Dahl's pantomime trick of making puns that the young won't necessarily get: the buttergin, for example, which Mr. Willy Wonka manufactures alongside butterscotch. And then there is the story's direct way of commenting on how children should and should not be brought up, in its ridicule of spoiled children and their parents and its attacks on television.

Virginie Fowler wanted to keep out the adult references. In May 1963, she sent Dahl a list of editorial comments, in which one of her main criticisms was that the story kept commenting “on an adult level” rather than staying “on the child's side where the book should be.” But if it should be on the child's side, Fowler quailed at its raucous humor: for example, the disposal of Veruca Salt down the factory's rubbish chute.
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“This whole image of smelling stinking garbage makes for a crude image,” she sniffed, “which can be done perhaps in an adult commentary on the current world and written in another form. But, in a fairy tale based on the eating of sweets, one is a bit revolted and unnecessarily too!… fish heads and cabbage and stuff have no place in a chocolate factory.” African pygmies, on the other hand (“Are they
really
made of chocolate, Mr. Wonka?”), didn't strike her as out of place there. She says today that she persuaded Dahl to make some changes in his treatment of the Oompa-Loompas, and that the songs he wrote for them, turning them into a kind of comic Greek chorus, were among the results. But there isn't anything about the Oompa-Loompas in her letter, and eventually, as we shall see, they were to cause so much trouble that for later editions these episodes were rewritten and redrawn.
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