The Irregulars (29 page)

Dahl and Marsh were so pleased with their humorous send-up of international diplomacy and espionage that they approached the New York publisher Curtice Hitchcock about possibly collaborating on a book together. The movie project with Wallace had long since petered out, and Dahl, always on the lookout for money-making enterprises and eager to retain the support of his generous patron, was casting about for a new joint venture. On April 22 Hitchcock wrote Dahl that he was sure the book would be “a tremendous hit,” and if it went over as big in both England and the United States as he expected it would, “we shall be able to laugh ourselves out of some of the pain and casualties of this war”:

Perhaps the nearest thing which has approached it in fantasy is your own
Gremlins,
but think of the wave of laughter across the Atlantic from both shores when the hoax is discovered and Halifax shows what a good sport he is.

 

Hitchcock went on to say that he was “rather surprised” to learn that Dahl had managed to obtain Lord Halifax’s consent for the book but was reassured by Marsh’s explanation that His Lordship had a “statesman’s mind” and “clear sense of humor.” He understood, of course, the need to protect Dahl’s position at the embassy and agreed with Marsh that for the time being the air attaché’s part in the project “should be observed as a secret.” Outlining the terms of the deal for Dahl, Hitchcock wrote that Marsh had agreed to be listed as the sole author of the spoof and would “take the full responsibility of having written it all.” As a further precaution, Hitchcock promised to see to it that any trace of Dahl’s participation was either “destroyed or hidden.”

It seems highly unlikely that Halifax was ever consulted. Instead, Marsh sent Dahl an extremely crude, over-the-top letter requesting that he seek the ambassador’s assistance on a sex manual for boys’ preparatory schools that he was writing for Hitchcock, as he regarded “his Lordship as the purest English type of sex manhood,” and “only a past master in the theory and practice of sex life can qualify as a collaborator.” Marsh, who relished any opportunity to descend into vulgarity, went on to poke fun at Halifax’s distinguished ancestry, disgusting sexual practices, and desiccated balls, culminating in the inevitable “dong” jokes. That said, he told Dahl that the ambassador was probably unique in the annals of literature and that his name as a coauthor would mean much: “My chapter on English public schools will need careful editing. I have never attended an English public school…Halifax could supply the equivalent English experience finishing with the dead end of the Oxford don—page Berlin.” Marsh placed an asterisk by Berlin’s name and tacked on a scathing addendum in which he ripped into the embassy’s London liaison, a fixture at Georgetown dinner parties, who had rebuffed him once too often:

Berlin is not a city nor does it refer to a music writer named “Irving.” It refers to Isaiah the Great, the Ouija Board operator who forecasts the political scene for Churchill—Berlin, alias THE WHITE SLUG, the volcano of a mind, the cannibalistic brain that ate up a body at the age of two, the genius of sex sublimation, the perfect virgin. So give me Halifax the Pure but I trust the imperfect. Rather a dumb bunny of dignity rather than a genius of nonperformance. Always the practical man for mine.

 

And so their epistolary circle jerk continued. Dahl sent a reply in his own name stating that he had taken the liberty of showing Halifax Marsh’s letter of the seventeenth of that month. After mulling it over in silence for what seemed like an eternity, he had called for his secretary and dictated a reply. Enclosed was another fake letter from Halifax to Marsh, expressing his great excitement at being asked to help with the sex book: “I have long played with the idea of how I could best give the world the benefit of my profound and widespread knowledge on this subject.” Not one to be outdone in print, Dahl then launched into a lengthy discussion of His Lordhip’s “extreme virility,” the secret of his amazing performance, manifold experience, and subtlety of operation. The ambassador concludes the letter by stating that he cannot wait to have at the subject, adding, “I shall not fail to consult my chambermaid.”

The war interrupted their schoolboy games, bringing their correspondence temporarily to a close. That spring Dahl did a good deal of traveling for the BSC—the exact nature of these missions is never specified—while Stephenson maneuvered to get the air marshal off his new recruit’s back by having him officially transferred. Dahl also spent a lot of time and effort brokering a deal for his friend Ernest Hemingway to visit England. Martha “Marty” Gellhorn had called him at the embassy and asked if as a personal favor he could possibly help them arrange air passage across the Atlantic, which was next to impossible to obtain for civilians not engaged in priority war business. Gellhorn had begged Dahl to see what he could do, as she felt Hemingway had spent enough time in the bars of Havana and it was time he got back in the field. She was desperate to get out of Cuba herself and made no secret of the fact their life of drunken domesticity was driving her mad. Finally, in late 1943, she had traveled to Europe alone to report on the fighting for
Collier’s
and ever since had been sending Ernest letters filled with all the news from London in an effort to entice him to join her. The saturation bombing of the coastal defenses in France had begun preparatory to the big push—to be called D-day—and her only thought was to be there in time for the invasion.

Dahl had no trouble convincing British authorities of the propaganda value of inviting Hemingway, the celebrated American author and war correspondent, to visit their embattled island. By March, he had worked out a compromise: If Hemingway would be willing to report on the RAF’s heroic feats in one of the popular American magazines, the Air Ministry could be persuaded to allocate him a seat on a seaplane. Hemingway immediately agreed to the proposal and talked
Collier’s
into giving him the assignment, effectively big-footing Gellhorn’s work for the magazine. She was understandably miffed that after penning twenty-six articles for the magazine, her byline was to be eclipsed by her husband’s. Making matters worse, Gellhorn, who had flown back to Cuba to help pry Ernest away from his hard-drinking buddies, now found herself stranded in the United States with no way to get back to England. In mid-April Britain tightened security in advance of the invasion and for the first time during the war imposed travel restrictions, including forbidding all neutral and Allied diplomats from leaving the country.

With no assurances from Dahl that a second seat could be allocated for her, Gellhorn went to Washington to see what strings she could pull, and she stayed at the White House for several days at the invitation of her old friend Eleanor Roosevelt. At the end of April, she wrote the First Lady thanking her for the swell accommodations and confided that she “had been a fool to come back from Europe” to fetch Ernest. She was almost “sick with fear” that she would miss out on the coming invasion and lose out on the one thing she cared most about seeing and writing about in her whole life. “Anyhow, due to Roald Dahl—who has been angelically helpful—Ernest will get off to England at the end of next week,” she added. “But I have been shoved back and back, on the American export plane passenger list, and we do not know if the RAF will consent to fly me over (it’s different for Ernest) and there I am.” In the end, Dahl was not able to secure her a seat, and Gellhorn ended up being left behind and feeling badly used. A friend finally found her a berth on a Norwegian freighter, and she traveled to England as the sole passenger on a ship loaded with a cargo of amphibious personnel carriers and dynamite.

While the Hemingways were still in New York awaiting word of their passage, Dahl came up from Washington to raise a glass and see them off in style. They spent a drunken evening at the Hotel Gladstone, spooning caviar from a two-kilo tin and downing magnums of champagne. They were joined by the boxing coach George Brown, who owned a gymnasium in New York where the macho author liked to work out when he was in town. Hemingway was sporting a long salt-and-pepper beard, which he claimed he could not shave on doctor’s orders. His story was that he was suffering from a form of benign skin cancer due to years of exposure to the sun, but he told so many different versions of the tale that it seemed likely he had grown attached to the luxuriant growth. Gellhorn shipped out on May 13, and four days later Hemingway took off on a Pan American flying boat.

The Air Ministry, in its infinite wisdom, decided Hemingway needed looking after during his tour of duty as an observer with the RAF and assigned various officers to oversee his program and make sure the trip went off without a hitch. It was the famous American author’s first visit to the city he insisted on calling “dear old London town,” and his arrival was expected to make news. Dahl, who was already on good terms with the writer, was assigned to be one of Hemingway’s RAF escorts. After the isolation of Washington, Dahl welcomed the opportunity to get back to London, despite the renewed bombings known as the “Little Blitz,” which the Luftwaffe was treating the city to that spring. There had already been thirteen major raids, with as many as three hundred bombers in each, and the nights were full of the sound of barking guns and wailing sirens. He worried about the strikes being awfully close to his mother’s village and about his youngest sister, Asta, who was in the WAAF (the women’s branch of the RAF) and dangerously close to the frontline radar stations on the south coast. For the most part, however, the bombings seemed like a last hurrah. The Allies were about to invade Europe and win the war. If he was lucky, he would have a grandstand view of not only the military victory but, much more than that, the long overdue triumph of a people who had refused against tremendous odds to give up.

He had been very moved by a story he had recently heard about an old Scottish dowager who had lost three sons in the war. All three had been in the RAF. She was the sort of “fossilized” creature with a centuries-old manor house that one would normally stear clear of, but this Lady MacRobert, upon being told of the death of her last boy, gave a tremendous sum of money to the RAF to pay for the construction of a new Sterling bomber. When the plane was completed, she asked them to paint on its side, “Lady MacRobert’s Reply.” It struck Dahl as “something really dauntless, really indomitable,” and he remembered thinking, “You really cannot defeat such people.”

Dahl made his way through the scarred but still familiar streets to the Dorchester Hotel, which had survived five years of bombing remarkably unscathed, and knocked on the door of Ernest’s suite. He found the great man preoccupied with an eyedropper and a bottle of hair-growing lotion, which, as it emerged, had something to do with the heavily bearded author’s concern about the thinning white halo on his crown. “Why the eyedropper, Ernest?” Dahl inquired. “To get the stuff through the hair and onto the scalp,” Hemingway explained. “But you don’t have much hair to get through,” Dahl pointed out. “I have enough,” he retorted crossly.

His RAF guards notwithstanding, there was no keeping Hemingway out of trouble. With Gellhorn still on the high seas, making the arduous two-week crossing by boat, the writer was free to spend his nights drinking with old friends. After one especially rambunctious late-night party at the home of the photographer Robert Capa, a drunken Ernest and his kid brother Leicester (who was there as part of an army documentary unit) insisted on giving a sweaty demonstration of their boxing prowess for their fellow revelers. In the wee hours of the morning, Peter Gorer, a doctor at Guy’s Hospital, and his German refugee wife offered to drive Hemingway back to his hotel. They made it less than a mile in the blacked-out streets before crashing into a steel water tank. Hemingway’s head collided with the windshield, and he had to be pried from the wreckage. He and the car’s other passengers were rushed to St. George’s Hospital at Hyde Park corner, two blocks from the hotel. Hemingway suffered a concussion and later boasted that the doctors needed fifty-seven stitches “to tidy him up.” A British dispatch reported that the famous author had been killed in a blackout accident in London, and the story was picked up by the major wire services. It was a whole day before the correction went out, during which Bumby, Hemingway’s son by a previous marriage, who was stationed in Italy, mourned his father’s loss by going on a serious bender.

When Gellhorn arrived in Liverpool, she was sandbagged at the dock by a throng of reporters demanding to know her view of her husband’s accident. She was not amused by their colorful accounts of the boozy escapades that preceded the collision, which she considered contemptible at such a tense moment in the war. When she finally paid a sick call to the London clinic where he was recovering, she burst into laughter at the sight of his big head swathed in a giant white turban of bandages. Instead of being sympathetic, she ridiculed his appearance to all their friends. Her response brought little comfort to the bruised author, with his wounded pride, and they quarreled nonstop in the days that followed. While still at sea, Gellhorn had written to her oldest friend that she feared their relationship was “over”—she was “wrong for him,” he was “bad” for her—and their hospital reunion only reaffirmed her conviction that it “would never work between [them] again.” She did not yet know, but surely suspected, that Ernest had already moved on. Shortly after his arrival, he had begun avidly courting a tiny, buxom blond American reporter named Mary Welsh, who, although married at the time, proved amenable.
*

Hemingway had originally planned to accompany some RAF pilots on their missions to the Continent, but his injuries forced him to postpone the flights. He checked out of the clinic on May 29 and, despite bad headaches from the concussion, took up drinking and carousing where he left off. Ten days after his accident, he insisted on going on a low-level bombing mission against France, riding along in a Mosquito fighter, even though his head was throbbing and the sudden changes in altitude could bring on bleeding where he had been stitched up. Embarrassed by his bandages, Hemingway told Peter Wykeham Barnes, the group captain in command of the attack wing of Mosquitoes, a cock and bull story about stumbling and banging his head on the fountain outside the RAF Club in Piccadilly. The RAF was none too happy about taking him up, but Hemingway had come to see the war and would not be talked out of it. To the poet John Pudney, an RAF public relations officer, “He was a fellow obsessed with playing the part of Ernest Hemingway and ‘hamming’ it to boot.” Compared with the many brave young soldiers, “who walked so modestly and stylishly with death,” the swaggering American appeared to Pudney “a bizarre cardboard figure.”