Roald Dahl (42 page)

37
.
The Gremlins
, 1943, p. 1.

38
. They appeared in the
Ladies' Home Journal
, in March and September 1945.

39
. Interview with Creekmore Fath.

40
. Hyde, p. 190.

41
. Powling, p. 44.

42
. See n. 20.

43
. Correspondence with Helen Lillie, according to whom Stephenson gave a military rank and a uniform to anyone working with agents.

44
. Letter from Ministry of Defence RAF Personnel Management Centre: “After a thorough search of the above officer's records, I can find no indication that he served either in the substantive or acting rank of Wing Commander.”

45
. Correspondence with Helen Lillie.

46
. Powling, p. 43; CBC-TV,
A Man Called Intrepid;
Terry Lane interview.

47
. Cave Brown, p. 483.

48
. The pamphlet's title was
Our Job in the Pacific
. One of the authors was the controversial Sinologist Owen Lattimore. See Cave Brown, pp. 482–482.

49
. See
Washington Despatches 1941–1941
, March 4, 1942 and passim. Indian independence was another of Clare Boothe Luce's hobby horses. Noël Coward wrote in his diary on February 20, 1943, that he had just seen her and “she became rather shrill over the Indian question”
(The Noël Coward Diaries)
.

50
. Ibid., February 21, 1943.

51
. See Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie,
Beaverbrook
, 1992, p. 447.

52
. CM, March 31, 1943.

53
. Ibid., April 5, 1943.

54
. Letter from Helen Lillie. She adds, “I think it was in character that he should predominantly write for children, where his superiority was assured.”

55
. Interview with Annabella.

56
.
Ladies' Home Journal
, May 1949.

57
. “My Lady Love, My Dove,”
SLY
, pp. 57–57.

58
. Ibid., p. 61.

59
. Interview with David Ogilvy.

60
. Ibid.

61
. AK, July 30, 1943.

62
. Ibid., August 10, 1943.

63
. Ibid., August 23, 1943.

C
HAPTER
5

Main sources

AK; BBC; CM

Interviews with Tessa Dahl, Martha Gellhorn, Antoinette Haskell, Claudia Marsh, Dennis Pearl, Claudia Warner

ASML
(Preface);
OTY; Sometime Never

Paul Brians,
Nuclear Holocausts:
Atomic War in Fiction 1895–1895, 1987

N
OTES

1
. To her grandchildren and others in the family, she became “Mormor”—the Norwegian word for grandmother (literally, “mother's mother”).

2
. CM, February 28, 1946.

3
. Ibid., March 9, 1948.

4
. Ibid., September 5, 1946.

5
. Preface to
ASML
.

6
. Interview with Stephen Roxburgh.

7
. RD interview with Brian Sibley, “Meridian,” BBC World Service, November 1988.

8
. “The Ratcatcher,” “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life,” “Mr. Hoddy,” and “Rummins” respectively. Some of these, along with the dog-race story “Mr. Feasey,” appeared in the “Claud's Dog” section of
Someone Like You
(first published in the U.S. in 1953). They were all collected, with “Parson's Pleasure” and “The Champion of the World,” as
Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life
(1989).

9
. Preface to
ASML
, p. vii.

10
. CM, December 19 and 22, 1946.

11
.
OTY
, pp. 152–152.

12
. See Chapter 4, n. 39.

13
.
The Noël Coward Diaries
, January 29, 1946, p. 50.

14
.
TLS
, January 18, 1947.

15
.
The Saturday Review of Literature
, March 9, 1946.

16
. BBC, August 23, 1948.

17
. CM, July 22 and October 12, 1947.

18
. Ibid., July 19, 1946.

19
. Ibid., September 28, 1946.

20
. Paul Brians,
Nuclear Holocausts:
Atomic War in Fiction 1895–1895, 1987.

21
. See Marlene J. Mayo, “Literary Representation in Occupied Japan: Incidents of Civil Censorship,” in
Legacies and Ambiguities:
Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan, edited by Ernestine Schlant and J. Thomas Rimer, 1991, p. 150.

22
.
Sometime Never
, p. 53.

23
. Ibid., p. 100.

24
. Ibid., p. 112.

25
. Ibid., p. 236.

26
. As published,
Sometime Never
reads as if no one at Scribner's more than
glanced at it before sending it to the printer. On one page, the idea that the pilots look as if they have been poured into their chairs is repeated three times (p. 33). On another, Dahl doodles: “All day the flying men were up there in the sky, always moving; moving, moving, moving, so that movement became a function of their lives.… Movement swirled around them.… Movement followed them,” etc. (p. 40).

27
.
Sometime Never
, p. 143.

28
. CM (copy of letter to Stuart Rose), November 1946.

29
. BBC, July 7, 1948.

30
. Ibid., August 23 and September 9, 1948.

31
. Ibid., September 14, 1948.

32
. Ibid., November 28, 1948.

33
. Ibid., January 10, 1949.

34
. Ibid., March 8 and 17, August 1, and September 13, 1949.

35
. Ibid., September 5, 1951.

36
. CM, May 5, 1949.

37
. On October 29, 1949, he wrote to Marsh that he had suffered two months of imaginative constipation.

38
. CM, May 5, 1949.

39
.
The Saturday Evening Post
, September 20, 1947. The story was collected in
WSHS
, pp. 52–52.

40
. CM, July 22, 1947.

41
. CM, October 11, 1945.

42
. Ibid., July 22, 1946.

43
. Ibid., July 26, 1946.

44
. Ibid., August 1, 1947. The reply to Sydney Rothman is dated July 30. The Settlement remains active, and several survivors of the 1940s are involved. Since none of them has any recollection of Dahl's letter, it seems safe to assume that he neither sent it nor intended to. I am grateful to the Settlement's former director Nick Collins for his help.

45
. CM, September 14, 1946.

46
. Interview with Claudia Warner.

47
. BBC, September 5, 1951.

48
. CM, May 28 and June 11, 1946.

49
. Ibid., April 2 and July 19, 1946.

50
. Ibid., May 22, 1950.

51
. MS, [n.d.] and interview with Alice Keene.

52
. CM, October 23, 1950.

53
. Ibid., October 14, 1950.

54
. Ibid., September 10, [1953]. (Year supplied by Patricia Neal.)

55
. Ibid., May 11, 1947; April 6 and October 29, 1948; June 4, 1949.

56
. Interview with Alice Keene.

57
. CM, August 17, 1950.

58
. Ibid., September 3, 1950. The scheme had been first discussed four years earlier.

59
. Ibid., April 6, 1948.

60
. Ibid., September 10, 1951.

61
.
Interview with Martha Gellhorn.

62
. CM, September 10, 1951.

C
HAPTER
6

Main sources

AK; BBC; CM

Interviews with Betsy Drake, Colin Fox, Brendan Gill, Edmund and Marian Goodman, Antoinette Haskell, Alice Keene, Patricia Neal, David Ogilvy

As I Am

Diane Johnson,
Dashiell Hammett:
A Life (1983)

N
OTES

1
. Diane Johnson,
Dashiell Hammett:
A Life, 1983, p. 211.

2
. Interview with Brendan Gill.

3
. Quoted by Diane Johnson, p. 229.

4
.
As I Am
, pp. 110–110.

5
. Ibid., p. 131.

6
. Ibid., p. 133.

7
. Ibid., p. 139.

8
. CM, February 10, 1952.

9
. Interview with Patricia Neal.

10
. See Chapter 5, n. 17.

11
.
Memories with Food
, p. 225.

12
. BBC, September 13, 1951.

13
.
SLY
, p. 10.

14
. Interview with Brough Girling.

15
. Interview with Brendan Gill.

16
. Interview with Angela Hogg.

17
.
As I Am
, p. 155.

18
. Ibid., p. 160.

19
. Interview with Colin Fox.

20
. Patricia Neal, who is still friendly with Fox, says, “Colin was not an orphan. He was a cockney reared at home with two parents and a sister.”

21
.
As I Am
, p. 166.

22
. Johnson, p. 275.

23
. CM, April 25, 1952.

24
.
As I Am
, p. 158.

25
. Ibid., interviews with Patricia Neal and Dennis Pearl.

26
. CM, February 17, 1953.

27
. Ibid., February 1952.

28
. AK archives.

29
. AK, March 24, 1952.

30
. Ibid., June 17, 1952.

31
.
See Chapter 4, n. 37.

32
.
The New Yorker
, May 17, 1952.

33
. Ibid., January 19, 1952.

34
. “The Ratcatcher,” “Rummins,” and “Mr. Hoddy.”

35
. See Chapter 4, n. 23.

36
. AK, March 10, 1952.

37
.
SLY
, p. 186.

38
. Interview with Alice Keene.

39
.
SLY
, pp. 179, 169, 171.

40
.
As I Am
, p. 170.

41
. MS, May 14, 1953.

42
. CM, June 20, 1953.

43
. Ibid., October 1, 1953.

44
. Ibid., June 20, 1953.

45
. Johnson, p. 275.

46
. Interview with Maria Tucci Gottlieb, who was told this by Mildred Dunnock.

47
. CM, [n.d.], 1954.

48
. See, for example, the gas station run by Danny's father in
Danny, the Champion of the World
.

49
. This was revealed on the 1978 TV program
This Is Your Life
, devoted to Neal.

50
. CM, [January] 1954.

51
. Interview with Claudia Marsh;
As I Am
, p. 156.

52
. Interview with Claudia Marsh.

53
. CM, January 19, 1954.

54
.
As I Am
, p. 182.

55
. Information from Claudia Warner.

56
.
As I Am
, p. 184.

C
HAPTER
7

Main sources

AK; CM; MS

Interviews with Annabella, Betsy Drake, Alice Keene, Patricia Neal, Charles

Pick, Marina Warner

As I Am; The Dahl Diary, 1992

Ivar Bryce,
You Only Live Once:
Memories of Ian Fleming, 1975

N
OTES

1
.
The New York Times
, November 8, 1953.

2
. Charles A. Brady in the
Buffalo News
, AK cuttings file.

3
. AK, January [n.d.], 1954.

4
.
Post
, Houston, Texas, January 10, 1954.

5
.
TLS
, June 11, 1954.

6
. CM, [summer] 1954.

7
. KK, p. 46.

8. AK, January 3, 1955.

9
. CM, February 1955.

10
.
As I Am
, p. 190.

11
. Ibid., p. 191.

12
. Ibid.

13
. CM, May 20, 1955.

14
. Ibid., August 31, 1955.

15
. “Some Notes on Keeping a Diary,” in
The Dahl Diary, 1992
.

16
. These details come from
The Dahl Diary, 1992
.

17
. BBC
Bookmark
.

18
. “Parson's Pleasure,” “Royal Jelly,” “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat,” “William and Mary” (again), “Genesis and Catastrophe,” “Mrs. Mulligan,” and “Pig.”

19
. Interview with Alice Keene.

20
. Interview with Marina Warner.

21
. Ivar Bryce,
You Only Live Once:
Memories of Ian Fleming, 1975.

22
. Interview with Marina Warner.

23
. Dahl postcard to Matthew Smith, March 1958.

24
. Quoted in
As I Am
, p. 206.

25
. September 9, 1958.

26
. CM, [n.d.], received July 11 [1954].

27
.
As I Am
, p. 210.

28
. Interview with David Ogilvy.

29
.
As I Am
, p. 213.

30
. Interview with Charles Pick.

31
. It appeared in the
Sunday Times
on June 5, 1960.

32
. October 28, 1960.

33
.
The New York Times
, February 7, 1960.

34
. Robert Phelps, unattributed review in Knopf file on
KK
.

35
.
The Harvard Crimson
, March 19, 1960.

36
.
Peterborough Examiner
(Ontario), June 18, 1960.