An only boy, warts and all

ANYONE who opens this book expecting to find a friendly giant is in for a disappointment. Big, physically and creatively, he may have been, but friendly might be pushing Roald Dahl beyond the limits of his personality.

It was Dahl’s daughter, Ophelia, who asked Donald Sturrock to write this authorised biography, having been unable to do so herself due to family and work. She asked Sturrock because he had known and liked Dahl and had made an award-winning television film for the BBC about him.

Ophelia believed that only someone who had met her father could knit together the disparate elements of his complex, contradictory and extravagant character. Sturrock succeeds in this and also fulfils his own self-imposed obligation to tell the Dahl story, warts and all, and his knitting includes both work and working methods in its pattern.

Nothing less should be expected from a good biography of a writer, but with Dahl who fictionalised, and even lied about, his own life (could this title be a pun?), the writing career had an additional complexity.

Dahl reluctantly began to write for children, although, when it brought acclaim and financial independence, he embraced it as if it had been a lifetime’s dream. Because it was not the writing life he had intended for himself, because he always suspected it was of lesser literary value than adult fiction, he defended it with a ferocity that drove him from agent to agent and publisher to publisher.

He was a little like the clown who wants to play Hamlet, and the impression after reading this long and demanding book is that Hamlet is the part that would have suited him best.

Born to Norwegian parents settled in England, educated at a minor and nasty English public school, Dahl disdained university and opted to work for Shell Oil in Africa instead. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he trained with enthusiasm and daring as a RAF pilot. Following a crash-landing in which he sustained injuries that tormented him all his life, his war service sent him as a British embassy attaché to Washington. There he enjoyed the high life and made lasting and influential friendships, while enjoying a series of affairs with, usually, much older women who were also, usually, rich, famous or both.

He also began to write; his short story about the RAF’s ‘gremlins’, a scapegoat excuse for inexplicable mishaps, caught the attention of Walt Disney and brought him to Hollywood for the first of a series of film options, resulting in a secondary career as scriptwriter.

Sturrock has made fluent and extensive use of the Dahl material, of which there was a very great deal. Dahl was an untiring writer of letters and, from quite early on, his friends, as well as his publishers, realised that these were letters they should keep. This abundance of correspondence, the careful storing of draft after draft, and the wealth of anecdotal response to Sturrock’s enquiries means that some chapters are over-packed with narrative detail. There are also the memoirs, especially Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984), so-called because this was his name as a child in a household of women.

His mother was widowed young and remained a powerful force in his life and thinking but, apart from her, few women had much influence on his actions.

His first marriage, to the actress Patricia Neal, nearly came to early grief because she could not comply with his notions of the proper wife who, while attractively independent must also be domestic, creating a home in which Dahl was the central, controlling power. Neal gradually accepted the yoke, but the couple suffered terrible losses, first with a near-fatal and life-changing accident involving their infant son, Theo, then with the death of their eldest daughter, Olivia, from complications of measles (Sturrock writes of this with insight and compassion), and then with the stroke that felled Neal herself.

Always a medical interventionist, her recovery was dictated, managed and measured by Dahl; it must have seemed, at times, as if she had to get better to ensure he was not tied to a helplessly dependent partner.

There are episodes in this book that make it is easy to think the worst of Roald Dahl. That’s a tribute to Sturrock’s impartiality, as he liked the man and admired his work. Without passing judgment, except occasionally, through the comments of friends and family (‘Daddy was a mean drunk’, says one of Dahl’s children) or the reactions of people who had to deal with the author, he presents many questionable aspects of his subject’s career.

For example, Dahl had help with his creations — editors and agents assisted with plot or character development to a degree that might almost be called collaboration.

This assistance was significant in toning down Dahl’s attachment to the macabre or the sinister. This macabre quality made parents, whom Dahl usually identified in his fiction as the enemy, a little uncertain as to the wholesomeness of some books. The fate of adults in, for example, James and the Giant Peach might have delighted children, but the reading adults themselves were sometimes uneasy.

But that was Dahl; his short stories, published in prestigious magazines and in four collections by Knopf, such as Kiss Kiss (1960), are early indicators of his ability to turn the ridiculous into the grotesque, and of his earthy predilection for the outer shores of sexuality.

His second marriage, to Felicity Crosland, brought him the contentment he had always sought in his home life; the fact that his adult children were leaving home was no great problem, as he simply didn’t know what to do with them once they began to grow up.