IX

Such Dazzling Loveliness

1971–1983

‘The joys of this world belong to the fighters.’

IN THE NIGHT DIGGER, Pat’s character Maura Prince, her mother’s beleaguered carer, allows herself to fall in love with an outsider who offers her distractions. Something similar happened to Roald.

That year, in an interview for the National Enquirer, Pat described her life as ‘good. It’s really beautiful – even though the producers aren’t chasing me anymore’.¹ For the time being, she did not lament this professional hiatus. ‘I like living in the country and being a housewife, and cooking and washing, then going off to work when something good comes along,’ she told an Australian journalist.² As she also admitted, she liked money. In 1972, she agreed to make a series of short advertisements for Maxim instant coffee. The stylist in charge of her wardrobe would become Pat’s friend, her husband’s mistress and, after a decade, replace Pat as Roald’s wife.

Roald had recently completed Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory prompted by the novel’s continuing popularity. On 17 October 1971, he told Blanche Campbell, ‘I am trying at last, as a result of a good deal of pressure from kids, to do a sequel to ‘Charlie’. So far it’s coming out a bit odd, but that doesn’t worry me. What does worry me is where the hell we go when I finish the next chapter.’³ Roald may have hoped that the act of writing a sequel would mitigate his unhappiness at the recent film musical based on the earlier book. ‘The film of Charlie was pretty poor, wasn’t it?’ he wrote to Campbell. It was Roald’s last venture into writing for films. He had written the screenplay himself, but as always jibbed at his lack of control over the film-making process. ‘I really am appalled by the petty tinkering with lines all through the screenplay without consideration,’ he wrote to producer Robert Newman.

One tiny example – page 10. Turkentine’s speeches have been rewritten and the operative word ‘nitro-glycerin’ has been left out. That’s the whole point. And what on earth is the point of the new long speech by Turkentine at the bottom of p. 10???? Pure bullshit. I am really very much cut-up about the whole way these rewrites have been handled.⁴

Afterwards he reacted less angrily to suggestions that he ‘tinker’ with passages of the novel itself dealing with the Oompa-Loompas. Sectors of American opinion were increasingly vocal in categorizing Roald’s ‘African Pygmies’ as racist. Seldom averse to notoriety in his public life and, in his private life, happy to shock, frequently to the point of giving lasting offence to those on the receiving end of his verbal coruscations, usually at the supper table after too much to drink, Roald was clear that he did not mean to upset his child readers. A new edition of the novel transformed the Oompa-Loompas, investing them with ‘rosy-white’ skin and long ‘golden brown’ hair; new illustrations reflected these changes.⁵ To Roald’s distress, film-makers had used dwarves in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: ‘Those ghastly Oompa-Loompas – seven dirty old dwarfs – were horrible. I get nightmares about them,’ he told Blanche Campbell. He excluded Oompa-Loompas from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

In Roald and Pat’s lives appeared a young woman of winning charm, Felicity Crosland, known as ‘Liccy’ (pronounced ‘Lissy’). Roald was fifty-six, but looked older, still troubled by his back, limping as he walked – he would toy with a theory that large men wore out sooner than their shorter counterparts. Two decades earlier, he may have regretted his hair loss: in his ideas books are suggestions for stories about hair restoration – ‘A fellow really did discover by chance a substance that made a thick growth of hair appear suddenly on his bald head.’⁶ To the young woman, he retained a twinkle in his eye, considerable energy and a forceful presence. For her part, from her Indian father and English mother (in a detail Roald appreciated, a member of an old Catholic gentry family), she inherited striking and unusual good looks. His effect on her, like hers on him, was instantaneous and overwhelming. Roald fell in love on the spot, like Oswald’s first encounter with Yasmin Howcomely in the novel he wrote at a midpoint in their affair, My Uncle Oswald, Yasmin ‘a creature of such dazzling loveliness’ that Oswald ‘gap[es] and goggl[es] at her as though she were Cleopatra herself reincarnated’.⁷ In her mid-thirties, Liccy was separated from her husband, with whom her three daughters, aged twelve, eleven and ten, lived. She was not literary, but nor was Roald, who did not discuss his writing with his family and mostly avoided the company of other writers. Absorbed from Sofie Magdalene, Roald’s interests were those Tessa identified as central to civilized marriage in her novel Working for Love: ‘paintings, furniture, music or wine’, tastes that Liccy shared.⁸ As in Lilian Hellman’s apartment a lifetime earlier, Roald did not speak to her; before she left, he broke his silence and invited her to join him and Pat for dinner. Liccy declined. Again, as with his earlier pursuit of Pat, Roald waited then issued a second invitation. Like Pat, second time round Liccy agreed. Then work forced her to cancel. Instead, it was she who invited the Dahls to supper in her flat in Battersea. That night, Roald suggested meeting again when Pat was away. Liccy mentioned a forthcoming assignment in Paris; Roald set her a trap. He asked her to collect an umbrella from his former girlfriend Annabella, who was now living in France. To Annabella, his accomplice, he explained his feelings. In the absence of any umbrella, Annabella reported what Roald had told her to a partly unsuspecting Liccy. When Roald and Liccy next met – for dinner at Roald’s favourite gambling club, the Curzon House Club in Mayfair – Pat was away. The affair begun that night lasted ten years.

In a commercial for Anacin painkillers, shot in the year of her divorce, Pat tells viewers, ‘The joys of this world belong to the fighters.’ The first fight was not hers but Roald’s and Liccy’s – to keep their relationship a secret and sufficiently contained that it did not destroy Roald’s marriage. Their success was short-lived. Roald’s last-minute decision, in the summer of 1974, to holiday in Minorca rather than Norway was a means of seeing Liccy, whose rented house was close to the Dahls’. Liccy was accompanied by her daughters and a friend. Pat boasted of the happiness of her marriage and her sex life. At least one disbelieving glance, too tardily averted, provided the alert for which, subconsciously, she may have been looking.

It was the teenage Tessa, however, who had forced Roald to an openness of sorts. Tessa had overheard a late-night telephone conversation between Roald and Liccy during one of Pat’s absences. Against his sister Else’s advice, she confronted her father. Roald reacted with fury, threatening to expel her from the house, his anger not simply a reaction to discovery but its damage to the view of himself he cherished as a lynchpin of his family. Then he insisted she speak to Liccy, who, as strong-willed as him, offered her the option of complicity or an ending of the affair, with all that this entailed for Roald. Inevitably, Tessa chose complicity. Roald made clear to Liccy as well as Tessa that he did not wish to divorce Pat and break up the family whose survival had consumed so many of his energies; confusingly he rhapsodized to Liccy the extent of his love for her, describing their times together as ‘easily the best times of my own particular life’.⁹

At this moment of turmoil, when he understood the threat posed by his affair to the gossipy, rambunctious, messy, unconventional life of Gipsy House, Roald began work on a second novel that, like Fantastic Mr Fox, published in 1970, celebrated his own role at the heart of a united family. In Danny the Champion of the World, Danny’s love for his Roald-like father is straightforward and wholehearted, and his admiration embraces the man as well as the parent: ‘It was impossible to be bored in my father’s company. He was too sparky a man for that. Plots and plans and new ideas came flying off him like sparks from a grindstone.’¹⁰ Roald struggled to decide on the novel’s setting; there was a moment of revelation, and ‘all I had to do was look around my own garden. And there it was …’¹¹ He returned to a story he had published in the New Yorker in 1959, ‘The Champion of the World’, placing himself at the centre as Danny’s father, in a lilting evocation of idealized, romantic, rakish country life, and made good the metaphor by setting it in the garden of Gipsy House, in the brightly painted gypsy caravan where all Roald’s children had played. Did Pat or Tessa read the novel and wryly smile? ‘It was impossible to be with [my father] for long without being surprised and astounded by one thing or another,’ Danny tells the reader.¹² From the outset, his new story was a manifesto for parenting Roald-style: its first draft endorsed parents ‘who make exciting things happen around you, and who do exciting things with you, and who lead you into splendid adventures’ – indispensable, inspirational, unorthodox, committed parents like Roald. Although the novel would remain one of his favourites, he did not acknowledge its element of self-serving, which perhaps he concealed from himself, or note that the strength of his belief in its message precluded any need for his usual elements of fantasy. While he was working on it, Knopf published a quartet of short stories that would be Roald’s last collection for adults: Switch Bitch. Two had been written the previous decade, but their preoccupation with sex, the bleakness of their view of women and their focus on male aggression and self-delusion suited Roald’s current malaise.

Pat was lunching with the hapless Tessa when she confirmed her suspicions of Roald’s affair in the summer of 1975. Her furious response forced an uncomfortable scene at Gipsy House in which she, Roald and Liccy attempted to rationalize their dilemma. Roald denied any desire for a divorce; he disclaimed a sexual component to his relationship with Liccy, asking instead to be allowed Liccy’s companionship. And then, at this moment of impasse, Liccy withdrew from his life. She wrote to Pat, regretting, but not apologizing for, the unhappiness to which she had contributed. For two years, Roald and Liccy separated. In Roald’s case, Liccy continued to occupy the bulk of his thoughts; he was irritable, impatient. He took refuge in fond, whimsical games with Ophelia and Lucy, perched on a ladder outside their bedroom window, pretending to be the BFG, whom he had introduced in Danny the Champion of the World, blowing dreams into the room through a bamboo cane, or teaching ten-year-old Lucy to drive in a creaking Morris van in the orchard; every night he read aloud or told stories to his youngest daughters, a habit begun for Olivia. In quiet moments he read – he told schoolchildren in New Zealand that ‘an adult reader of books has a terrific advantage over the non-reader. Sooner or later, all of you are going to suffer some kind of loneliness or illness, and the comfort you will get from being “a book reader” … will be terrific.’¹³ Out of sight in his writing hut, where only Roald ventured and the curtains were always drawn, he struggled to immerse himself in work, comforted, as he had told a radio interviewer in 1970, that ‘everything else in your life disappears and you look at your bit of paper and get completely lost in what you’re doing’ in the last and most enduring of his private sanctuaries, which he likened to a nest and a womb.¹⁴ As his sixtieth birthday approached, he was aware of feeling older. He told Alfred Knopf that for nine months after he had finished Danny he wrote nothing; instead he spent his time gardening. ‘It gets harder and harder to generate the momentum that is necessary for making a new book or story,’ he confessed.¹⁵ If it was an admission of difficulties, it was not yet tantamount to giving up. Roald was collecting material for a collection of stories for older children. Not all the pieces in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More were new, but the title story – about a playboy-turned-philanthropist, who was ‘six feet two inches tall, but he wasn’t really as good-looking as he thought he was’ – was life-affirming, while a painful story of bullying, ‘The Swan’, included what felt like a rallying cry to himself: ‘Some people, when they have taken too much and have been driven beyond the point of endurance, simply crumble and give up. There are others, though they are not many, who will for some reason always be unconquerable.’¹⁶ A hip replacement operation in March 1977 was a reminder that Roald himself was not physically unconquerable; nor was his emotional resilience indefatigable.

During his slow, painful convalescence, he felt more than usually neglected by Pat. He telephoned Liccy. Clandestine again, their affair began for a second time. Despite its secrecy, deceits and routine caesuras, it restored some of Roald’s equanimity, a distraction from the barrenness of his broken relationship with Pat. Its high spirits coloured the book on which he worked throughout 1978, My Uncle Oswald, a novel-length schoolboy’s joke about sex initiated by a request from Playboy for a story for its twenty-fifth anniversary issue in January 1979. That Roald enjoyed reinhabiting the mindset of this lecherous cosmopolitan roué, a nostalgic self-projection, was clear from his byzantine correspondence with his editor Bob Gottlieb, in which Gottlieb corrected historical inaccuracies and requested excisions, including fictional details of Stravinsky’s penis, which he worried would distress the composer’s widow; on television Roald referred to ‘very rich men, who for some reason are all incredibly lecherous’.¹⁷ Roald peppered his text with extravagant exaggerations of the sort he enjoyed most: ‘I myself became rather partial to Bulgarian ladies of aristocratic stamp. They had, amongst other things, the most unusual tongues.’¹⁸ And perhaps, in the novel’s lush confines, he protested at the limits of his furtive relationship with Liccy: ‘Lukewarm is no good. Hot is not good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.’¹⁹

Pat recognized Roald’s withdrawal from her but could not bring herself to consider the implications of their marriage ending. Life at Gipsy House was tense, cold, at times acrid, but husband and wife had been together for three decades. Pat frequently travelled to the States for lecture tours: ‘I stand there for fifty minutes with my notes and tell them the story of my life. There are always plenty of questions at the end, so I guess it’s a good story,’ she told journalists.²⁰ Roald welcomed her absences and puzzled at her appetite for these jamborees. In 1980, she bought a house on Martha’s Vineyard, off the Massachusetts coast. Roald visited once, the following summer. He liked neither the Vineyard nor Pat’s life there. The visit served a useful purpose in helping him to order in his mind what it was he did like. As he wrote to Pat on his early return, he liked his life at Gipsy House. ‘I like to sit quietly in Gipsy House which I adore, writing my books and stories which I adore more and playing snooker a couple of times a week which I also adore, and popping up to London twice a week to play blackjack for which I have a passion.’²¹ He added that he loved Pat. He did not refer to Liccy. Even so, the extent of her exclusion from her husband’s inventory of homely pleasures left Pat no lifeline of hope. That Christmas, during frigid family celebrations, she discovered that Roald had resumed his affair with Liccy. It was the beginning of the end.

For Roald, despite Liccy’s return, the times were out of joint. He was rich, successful and, from 1979, thanks to a long-running series of television adaptations of his short stories called Tales of the Unexpected, which he introduced himself, a household name. It was not enough. As recently as 1973, he had described his children as ‘marvellous and gay and happy’: he would discover persuasive evidence to the contrary.²² Although he had not protested strongly at Tessa’s decision, aged fifteen, to leave Downe House, her boarding school near Newbury, her subsequent rackety lifestyle irritated him, redeemed in part by the birth of her daughter, Sophie, in 1977. His speech at Tessa’s wedding in February 1981 gave some indication of her unsettledness: ‘Although she is still only in her early twenties, she has already had more jobs than the average person has in a lifetime – an actress, a model, an antique dealer, a landlady, a sort of pimp for plumbers and painters, and has run a Nannies Agency.’²³ Undoubtedly, Roald acknowledged the extent to which Tessa was a victim of family traumas. At Downe House he had written to her daily, ‘day-to-day things – what the dogs were doing, funny things at home’, transforming everyday domesticities into stories, his means of reassuring Tessa of her fixity at the heart of the family.²⁴ Until he learned of Lucy’s cocaine addiction, when she was sixteen, he imagined his younger children – born after Theo’s accident and Olivia’s death, and too young to remember Pat’s strokes – had escaped the scourge of family tragedy. Roald blamed himself for Lucy’s addiction, but after her expulsion from school for arson, sent her to London to live with Tessa, who also struggled with addiction, a questionable decision attributed by Lucy to his lack of empathy for teenagers. Above all, Roald appeared blind to Theo’s unhappiness. At Tessa’s wedding, Roald restated his conviction that ‘action is always better than words’, a surprising apothegm for a writer and a prescription unlikely to nurture marital bliss.²⁵ In this same vigorous, unreflective spirit, he set up teenage Theo as a baker and, when this failed, an antiques dealer; Theo was happier working in the local supermarket. Roald’s initiatives for his son cost him £100,000 and caused gentle Theo, always eager to please him, much anxiety. ‘The secret of my mother was minding her own business and always being there if she’s wanted,’ Roald had told a radio journalist during Sofie Magdalene’s lifetime.²⁶ In his own approach was a combination of intervention, financial over-compensation and emotional absenteeism.²⁷ In Gipsy House, all plans emanated from Roald, but his unilateral approach was not always guided by insight or sensitivity. In a house of several daughters, in which his sisters, nieces and nephews were daily visitors, and live-in cook-housekeepers, employed for a year at a time, became honorary family members, Roald exerted a paternal dominance. Or, as observers noted, lion-like he was the pride male among his seraglio of lionesses: attentive, protective, lordly.

Roald had increased his disaffection by inadvertently forfeiting autonomy in his working life. In the late 1970s, he extended earlier arrangements made with Knopf intended to limit his income tax liability. The device he chose took the form of a Swiss-registered company to which Knopf agreed to pay Roald’s very considerable outstanding royalty payments: in the interests of legality, Knopf required a pretext for payment. This pretext took the form of goods supplied by the company, namely new books by Roald, each of which would be paid a proportion of the royalties already earned in the form of an advance. Knopf decided to make payments in four instalments; Roald’s agreement committed him to supplying four new books, beginning with My Uncle Oswald. The sooner he wanted the payments owed him, the faster he would be required to provide each new manuscript. It was not how Roald was accustomed to work, and he quickly discovered that it was not his preferred way of working.

With an increasingly bad grace, he produced two short children’s novels and a book of children’s verse, Dirty Beasts. In The Twits, delivered late in 1979, and George’s Marvellous Medicine, which he completed the following spring, Roald’s testiness shaped tales of gruesome mischief. ‘When writing stories, I cannot seem to rid myself of the unfortunate habit of having one person do nasty things to another person,’ he told television viewers in his introduction to an episode of Tales of the Unexpected based on ‘Neck’; in The Twits, husband and wife compete with one another in fervid nastiness. George’s Marvellous Medicine returns to the theme of The Night Digger, an innocent carer (the eight-year-old George of the title) in thrall to an exacting invalid, ‘that grizzly old grunion of a Grandma’.²⁸ George, however, turns the tables on his curmudgeonly gaoler; Roald’s narrative is devoid of pity for Grandma’s sorry fate. The novel culminates in simple if satisfying didacticism. ‘That’s what happens to you if you’re grumpy and bad-tempered,’ George’s father tells him, as father and son watch Grandma’s demise by shrinking.²⁹ It was not a lesson Roald himself took to heart. Over the two years of the contract’s lifespan, his attitude towards all and everyone involved in publishing the books he decided he had been tricked into writing soured into verbal fist-shaking and foot-stamping acrimony. At the time of Tessa’s wedding, he announced he was considering leaving Knopf. The threat was by way of a trump card, typical of Roald’s behaviour at its intimidating worst, and he did not intend to be taken at his word. Goaded, bullied and exasperated, Knopf exacted revenge as formidable as George’s: ‘You have behaved to us in a way I can honestly say is unmatched in my experience for overbearingness and utter lack of civility,’ wrote Roald’s former editor Bob Gottlieb on 5 March: ‘Let me reverse your threat: unless you start acting civilly to us, there is no possibility of our agreeing to publish you.’³⁰ Three decades earlier, Alfred Knopf had pursued and wooed the author of a story called ‘Taste’. But Knopf himself had retired from the company he sold to Random House in 1960; he could not shield Roald from the effects of his bad behaviour. A partnership between author and publishing house, sealed the year that Roald married Pat with publication of Someone Like You, unravelled in tandem with their marriage. The spirit of his departure moved Roald to fury rather than sadness: he did not quickly forget Random House’s perfidy.

Nor did he allow abrasive severance to interfere with his work, a measure in itself of the toughness at the core of Roald’s character, as well as his capacity for self-immolation in what he called his ‘dotty world of fantasy’: ‘Nothing can prevent the old fires of excitement rekindling once I am well into a story,’ he wrote, not even treacherous Random House.³¹ He spent much of 1981 writing a story of two innocents battling giant-size bullies that would become his favourite of his children’s books. The BFG had made an appearance in Danny the Champion of the World, as well as the bedtime rituals of Ophelia and Lucy. Over the course of the year, the gentle, dream-catching giant occupied his author, Roald calculated, for 600 hours. The story’s roots are of longer emergence. The BFG came closer than any of Roald’s previous children’s books to the folklore of his childhood: it describes the defeat of a race of cruel, flesh-eating giants by an orphan child, who is helped by a friendly giant and a queen. Seamlessly, the story moves between real and imaginary worlds; the BFG’s distinctively mangled speech merges the everyday and the fantastical. Magic pervades the novel, as it would all of Roald’s later full-length children’s stories, the BFG himself its mouthpiece, urging both Sophie and the novel’s readers to believe. ‘Just because we happen not to have actually seen something with our own two little winkles, we think it is not existing,’ he upbraids a sceptical Sophie.³² Like Roald, the BFG does not expect to be challenged, and more than once his advice to Sophie is simply to accept what she cannot understand: ‘Dreams is full of mystery and magic,’ the BFG said. ‘Do not try to understand them.’³³

During the period of Pat’s recovery, Roald had made notes of her neologisms. Twenty years later, he did not acknowledge her inspiration behind the most distinctive voice in his fiction. The year of the book’s publication, Pat agreed to a divorce and returned to the States. Legalities were finalized the following summer. An interviewer questioned Roald. His reply was characteristic, suggesting action as a remedy for unhappiness – and then apportioning blame: ‘It’s very sad and knocks you out after thirty years … I don’t think one ever gets over anything, death of a child, divorce. You have just got to go on and every year that goes by helps. The longer you live the more you become aware that the world is full of stinkers.’³⁴ On 15 December 1983, at the age of sixty-seven, Roald married Liccy.