“MEI’m afraid I like strong contrasts,” Roald Dahl said shortly before his death in 1990. “I like villains to be terrible and good people to be very good.” Dahl himself denied that formulation. It is very easy to present him as a villain: even his friends described him as stalker, pushy, arrogant and impossible; he was a compulsive gambler, a distant and wayward husband, an unforgivable anti-semite. But then, with the help of quentin blake, there are also the books. Tens of millions of children, myself included, fell under the spell of his merry, wicked, silly, and inventive imaginations into stories that suggested that he did not belong in the adult world at all, but was still the leader of a child gang. . Books that started you, as he hoped and believed, in a life of reading. Books that, despite the waning reputation of its creator, Netflix paid more than £500 million for the adaptation rights last year..
Various biographers have attempted to fill the gap between these polarities. Jeremy Treglown book from 1994 Roald Dahl: A Biography set the parameters. Without the permission of Dahl’s second wife and children, but with access to many of his letters and to his first wife, actress Patricia Neal, Treglown offered a seductive analysis of the writer’s psychology. He argued that Dahl’s tragic life (the writer’s father and sister had died when he was four years old, he lost his own eldest daughter to measles at the age of seven, and cared for both Neal and their seriously injured son Theo brain) gave him a deep emotional darkness and a desperate need to find ways to transcend it. Dahl had asked his daughter Ophelia to write an authorized book, but when that proved too difficult, the family asked Donald Sturrock, in 2010, to intervene. Sturrock carefully sidestepped some of Dahl’s more awkward behaviors and found a compelling strength and belated generosity of spirit to balance them out.
The New Life of Matthew Dennison is a well-researched compact book drawn from the existing record. There are no new revelations or notable interviews, but it turns the loose complications of Dahl’s life into something quick and manageable. Dennison is alive to tell the details, but he does throw some punches. the infamous 1983 interview that Dahl gave to the new statesman, for example, in which he told Michael Coren: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that provokes animosity, perhaps it is a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews” and: “Even a stinker like Hitler does not just get into with them for no reason” is mentioned only in passing. Dennison tends to conclude that the charges against Dahl of lazy or deliberately provocative anti-Semitism are mostly evidence that “contemporary liberal shibboleths bear little relation to earlier renown.”
He is good at the strangeness of early life. Dahl’s father, Harald, had left Norway for Paris to be an artist. Somehow he ended up in South Wales, running a highly successful business selling Norwegian timber as props for coal mines. After his death, Dahl, always preternaturally tall (he was 6 feet 5 inches at the age of 15), was forced to assume the role of man of the house. He longed for a life of adventure and discovered one, first as a Shell representative in Dar es Salaam, then as a fighter pilot in the war (he landed in Libya), and later as a socialite (and spy for Winston Churchill) in the war. of Roosevelt. Washington.
Dennison finds it justifiably revealing, though he falls short of one caveat, that Dahl recast the story of his near-death experience in the war, both in print and anecdotally, to emphasize his own heroism. Having crawled from the burning wreckage, he was saved in part by a fellow pilot who landed beside him in the desert and held him up overnight to keep him warm. At the time of Dahl’s autobiography going alone (1986) that part of the story was lost from his accounts. He became the singular author of his own survival. This nascent megalomania seems to inform a sense of self throughout his life.
The competitiveness was expressed sexually before Dahl’s writing took off. In postwar America, the young fighter pilot was a magnet for wealthy married women of a certain age. One contemporary recalled that in that period: “I think he slept with everybody on the East and West Coasts who had more than $50,000 a year.” Six months after her marriage to Neal, Dahl was convinced that he should leave her: “I make coffee in the morning,” he wrote to a friend. “She stays in bed. I work until lunchtime. Then I get my own lunch out of a soup can.” He engaged in an attempted seduction of Gloria Vanderbilt, quickly abandoned. He and Neal had five children, but it was never a happy union.
The books that changed lives followed in the footsteps of the tragedy. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Dahl had previously thought of children’s books as “a wasteful distraction” from adult fiction and screenwriting) it was completed a year after the death of seven-year-old Olivia. Dahl had retired to silence and drink; his daughter Tessa recalled how the family thereafter “fell unknowingly over the edge of a jagged cliff into a canyon of gloomy darkness, a devastation so total that we would never recover.”
That desperation was compounded by Neal’s brain hemorrhage during pregnancy in 1965 that left her in a coma and requiring intensive physical and speech therapy for months and years afterward. Dahl refused to accept her change in her, insisting on a fierce daily rehab rotation, writing down the nonsensical phrases he sometimes uttered for use in her books. Reading this tale, you begin to recognize the appeal of its fictional heroes: Charlie and James and Matilda and Fantastic Mr Fox and all the rest: they are universally survivors against all odds, often orphans, always alone against the world, before finding Departures. .
In his own life, Dahl escaped on an affair with a family friend, Felicity “Liccy” Crosland, more than 20 years his junior. The affair lasted 10 years before she ended his marriage to Neal. She married Crosland at the age of 67 and entered in some ways the most productive phase of her life, certainly her most serene. However, until the very end, she never lost that will to prevail against all comers. Not long before his death, Dennison notes, Dahl recalled having nagging “world champion” dreams of him winning Wimbledon or open golf championships. He often woke up thinking, “I’ve beaten them all and they’re all surprised.”