‘I’M A PERFECTLY ordinary fellow, except that I happen to be very tall,’ Roald Dahl told a group of children in 1975.1 As with any number of pronouncements he made about himself over the course of an unpredictable life, he was aware of its disingenuousness even as he asserted its truth. Whatever his fictional stock-in-trade, Roald insisted, a writer seldom rivalled his characters for excitement: readers must not expect ‘fiery eyes and a green moustache and ink all over [the writer’s] clothes’; ‘a writer, when you meet him, is not in the least bit like the books he writes’.
Really? At least we can agree that Roald Dahl was not a perfectly ordinary fellow. He was neither eager nor willing to be mistaken for such. Admittedly he lacked a green moustache, his dislike of male facial hair as studiedly intemperate as many of his foibles. But his belief in fantasy, grotesquerie, magic – the building blocks of so many of his fictions – ran deep, and the stark polarities of good and bad which shape his narratives reflected a black-and-white dichotomy within his own outlook that more than once proved detrimental to his happiness, wellbeing or reputation.
Like Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame, whose lives I explored in short biographies in 2016 and 2018, Roald Dahl achieved extraordinary commercial success with work that has proved enduringly popular: paperback sales of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator exceeded more than 4 million in the UK alone by the time of his death.2 Beatrix Potter correctly predicted that her fame would rival Hans Christian Andersen’s; Roald might have said something similar. Indeed, in 1988, withdrawing from a government committee examining schools’ teaching of English, Roald justified his claim to omniscience in the matter of children’s reading by referring Education Minister Kenneth Baker to his record-breaking sales figures. In more than three decades since his death, his books have continued to sell in remarkable quantities, milestones in the cultural landscapes of successive generations: celebrated, imitated and frequently adapted for stage, screen and radio. As he regarded himself, very tall Roald Dahl – writer and commercial commodity – is a giant.
He is also, as he was in his lifetime, a divisive figure. At its best, Roald’s writing both for children and adults is lyrical, hilarious, vivid, unpredictable, tender and utterly absorbing; his darkest fictions portray without regret a world of cruelty, cynicism, misanthropy and caprice. In a story written for private circulation, P. L. Travers, creator of Mary Poppins, claimed ‘Children have strong and deep emotions but no mechanism to deal with them.’3 Time and again, Roald provided his underdog heroes with the mechanisms for dealing with these emotions and the circumstances from which they might emerge. Roald’s detractors condemn bullying, vituperation, stridency, subversion and gratuitous scatology as characteristics of the man and his work. This Roald is coarse, misogynistic and an anti-Semite – for all his denials, anti-Semitism did shape aspects of Roald’s thinking. Irascible, dominant and hectoring, he could be, as his three-year-old son described him, ‘just a wasps’ nest’.4 Grounds for critic Kathryn Hughes’s unsympathetic assessment of Roald as ‘crashing through life like a big, bad child’ are clear, but this is a selective view, countered by testimony to Roald’s charm, kindness and generosity, and for the majority of his child readers what Hughes castigates as Roald’s ‘grandiosity, dishonesty, and spite’ play no part in the writing that constitutes his continuing claim to our attention.5
In the second half of his life, with the success of his writing for children, beginning in the 1960s, Roald repeatedly spoke and wrote about his work and the qualities within him that he believed uniquely equipped him to satisfy his audience. He denied any purpose behind his writing beyond an evangelical zeal for turning children into readers. ‘There are very few messages in these books of mine. They are there simply to turn the child into a reader of books. Damn it all, they are mostly pure fantasy,’ he wrote to a linguistics student in 1989.6 He told an American academic, to whom he refused assistance with the writing of his biography, to look for the material he needed in the books themselves: ‘Your book, if you are going to do it, would have to be primarily based on your own analysis of my work, which is basically what all biographies are.’7 In the present work, I have – up to a point – followed this testy injunction; I have given consideration to Roald’s verdict that ‘the things that go into [one’s] books come from one’s imagination – from a small secret part of the brain which is able to invent things and dream up funny stories’ and his disclaimer that his books aim simply to entertain and engage.8 The picture that emerges is of a man, like most of us, composed of contradictions, responsible for a body of exceptional story-telling – and often, as he described himself, ‘a jokey sort of fellow [with a liking for] simple tricks and jokes and riddles and other childish things … unconventional and inventive’, certainly not ‘perfectly ordinary’.9