V

The Perfect Spy?

1943–1950

‘Trying to create amity.’

ROALD ONCE DESCRIBED ‘spy’ as ‘an ugly word’ and denied any connection with anti-American wartime surveillance in Washington. ‘I was trying to create amity,’ he explained. ‘My job was to try to help Winston Churchill to get on with FDR [President Roosevelt], and tell Winston what was in the old boy’s mind.’¹ In private, he was less inclined to equivocate; he was clear that his motives were patriotic. His second wife Liccy, privy to Roald’s off-the-record recollections, has described him as ‘definitely finding out information for the British government’. Given his eye and ear for detail, his sense of fair play, charm and loyalty, and an opportunistic streak in Roald, she labelled him ‘the perfect spy’.²

On 17 June 1943, Roald sent Sofie Magdalene good news: he had been promoted to the rank of squadron leader.³ A week later, his news was more startling: the president had invited him to spend the weekend at Hyde Park, Roosevelt’s house in upstate New York; he regarded Roald, Roald suggested, as a friend of his wife’s.⁴ The ‘very high circles’ in which Roald found himself had reached an apogee: his fellow guests that weekend included Crown Princess Martha of Norway and her children Prince Harald and Princesses Astrid and Ragnhild. But this was to be more than a weekend of idle chatter or royal hobnobbing, with Roald, in his own words, playing the clown to disarm his wily host. In its aftermath he supplied British embassy officials with a ten-page report on his visit, as Roosevelt had surely known he would. At this stage Roald’s links with Britain’s intelligence community in the States were informal (and would remain so for another year): the closeness of Roald’s friendship with Wallace, added to occasional access to the president, made him too useful a source of information to set aside lightly, even for those at the Air Mission least sympathetic to him, including his immediate boss, Air Commodore ‘Bill’ Thornton, and the new head of the RAF delegation, Air Marshal William Welsh, who nevertheless manoeuvred to bring about his dismissal within the year. A Russian speaker, conciliatory towards the Soviet Union and anti-British in his views, Henry Wallace was positioned as Roosevelt’s successor. For Halifax and his staff, as for British politicians at home, this was a troubling prospect.

Despite their friendship, it was a prospect that troubled Roald, too. Roald also showed his report of his visit to Hyde Park to Charles Marsh, at whose house in Washington he most often encountered Wallace. Marsh was a committed Democrat; unsuccessfully he longed to be admitted to Roosevelt’s inner circle; political gossip delighted him, and he admired Wallace. In sharing his report, Roald may have felt he was paying back a favour. Previously Marsh had shown Roald a draft copy of a discussion document by Wallace outlining post-war US foreign policy. At the heart of Our Job in the Pacific was American ‘encouragement’ of independence among Pacific region territories of the British Empire. On that occasion, Marsh appeared not to recognize the likely effect on Roald of the document he showed him: Roald regarded it as a cold-blooded body-blow aimed at Britain’s overseas possessions, and traitorous on the part of an ally. In his own later account acting with both speed and stealth, he had arranged for the document to be secretly copied, while he explained its temporary absence, which lasted no more than fifteen minutes, by pretending he was trying to find somewhere quiet to read it. He told neither Marsh nor Wallace what he had done, but would claim subsequently that the copied document made its way to Churchill, whose response of ‘cataclysms of wrath’ was much the same as his own.⁵ Our Job in the Pacific altered Roald’s relationship with Wallace: although the men remained friends, Roald’s subsequent vigilance was not a feature of conventional friendship. Roald’s had become a double life. He was still the air attaché intent on promoting the RAF in Washington salons; at the same time he was a gatherer and conduit of information in Britain’s best interests – as he explained his informal role, ‘I’d slip [Halifax’s senior adviser] a couple of bits of information which I thought might help the war effort’, grounds for one intelligence chief’s thanks, in a letter written in June 1945, for the ‘many occasions [during the period of your attachment to the British embassy] when your cooperation – always unstintingly given – was of great use to us’.⁶ Roald was excited by this careful balancing act and the adroitness with which, habitually indiscreet, he nevertheless maintained necessary secrecy, as well as by his commitment to what he regarded as a patriotic mission.⁷ Excitement offered compensation of sorts for the loss of his pilot’s career and served as a measure of the changes within him.⁸ In a story called ‘Someone Like You’, written in 1944, he described a pilot who, like him, had been ‘in the Western Desert … in Greece … at Habbaniya’.⁹ In the pilot’s attitude to his wartime career is no exulting or even relief at his own survival, only the disillusionment that follows his acknowledgement of his power to inflict death arbitrarily, a reflection of Roald’s own retreat from more boisterous views on RAF heroism.

In truth, excitement was not in short supply for the handsome young airman whose direct manner, charm, brisk humour and growing literary reputation made him ‘the most attractive man in Washington’.¹⁰ Roald may have failed to make friends in the embassy staff: he amply compensated among the Americans he encountered – as well as Marsh and Wallace, a sequence of rich, well-connected, in some cases beautiful, older, invariably married women, including sexagenarian cosmetics entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden, congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, whose husband owned Time and Life magazines, oil heiress Millicent Rogers and gold mine heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean, at whose dinner parties ‘everything was gold. All the plates, all the knives, forks, spoons and salt cellars etc’.¹¹ Roald was fascinated by wealth: ‘The rich are always interesting,’ he stated baldly.¹² He was also candid about his enjoyment of sex, quoting George Bernard Shaw on ‘the Pleasures of Man’: ‘eating, drinking, chatting, sexual intercourse’; sex, he suggested, far outweighed affection in a typical romantic relationship.¹³ Repeatedly his social conquests became sexual conquests: ‘I think he slept with everybody on the East and West Coasts that had more than fifty thousand dollars a year,’ remembered Charles Marsh’s daughter, Antoinette.¹⁴ His letters to his mother detailed the vapidity of unvarying social encounters, trappings of his Washington acquaintances’ riches, the efforts of ageing society women to cling to vestiges of youth. His response to his sexual conquests was complex: detachment from the women themselves, in some cases bordering on dislike, balanced by a connoisseur’s relish for their sumptuous surroundings and deep pockets. He showed off gold trinkets given to him by Millicent Rogers; of Clare Boothe Luce, he told a friend, ‘I am all fucked out. That goddamn woman has absolutely screwed me from one end of the room to the other for three goddam nights.’¹⁵ As a young man seduced by the forty-something wife of a family friend, one of Roald’s fictional alter egos, Oswald Hendryks Cornelius, betrays a similar ambivalence. Oswald is torn between physical attraction that nevertheless reduces his partner to a collection of body parts – ‘a torso that tapered to a waist I could have circled with my two hands’, ‘a jewelled hand’, ‘heaving’ bosom – and, for the room in which he finds himself, a lingering appreciation that recalls Roald’s own in similar circumstances. ‘There was a Boucher pastel on one wall and a Fragonard watercolour on another,’ notes the narrator of My Uncle Oswald, much as Roald had inventoried Millicent Rogers’ collection of paintings in her house in South Virginia: ‘In the next room there were twelve Boucher and some Fragonard. All very beautiful.’¹⁶ Antoinette Marsh pinpointed arrogance as uppermost in Roald’s treatment of the women she claimed ‘just fell at his feet’; another friend observed his resistance to emotional entanglements.¹⁷ His customary aloofness played its part. So, too, a certain tough cynicism about his presence in Washington mansions. Stronger than his personal response to Evalyn Walsh McLean, whom he dismissed as ‘very peculiar’, was his awareness of her usefulness socially: ‘she runs a good [salon] ... and there are a lot of folks to see and that’s my business’; some of these ‘folk’ included Washington power brokers with little attachment to their British allies.¹⁸ Roald did not, for example, lose sight of the importance of bolstering Clare Boothe Luce’s late conversion to Anglophilia, given her influence as politician and publisher’s wife and both husband and wife’s track record of anti-imperialism and hostility to Churchill. As throughout his time in Washington, his private and working lives merged.

In October 1943, Roald wrote cryptically to Sofie Magdalene of a new job ‘about which I’m afraid I can tell you nothing’.¹⁹ This was formalized the following spring and began in June 1944. Before that, Roald returned briefly to London. He sat for his portrait by Matthew Smith, whom he had met in 1941 – displayed in a gallery in Haymarket, Smith’s paintings, with their bold, Fauvist colours, had enthralled injured, footloose Roald, who traced the artist to a rundown London hotel to tell him so; Roald also acted as a chaperone of sorts to his literary hero, Ernest Hemingway. Roald and Hemingway had crossed paths in Washington: from the Air Mission, Roald had arranged a commission for Hemingway as an RAF correspondent, which secured the author a seat on a seaplane to Britain. In a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, Hemingway’s wife Martha Gellhorn described Roald’s intervention as ‘angelically helpful’, a view she may have revised after Roald failed to secure a second seat for her.²⁰ In London, Roald’s attitude to Hemingway fluctuated – he was irritated, for example, at being kept waiting while the writer applied hair tonic for incipient baldness – but his respect for his writing remained ‘overwhelming’, and Hemingway’s style, with its much-copied sparseness, was an important influence on Roald’s early stories like ‘Katina’.

Roald’s employment by the New York-based British Security Coordination (BSC), a wartime secret service network, formalized his sideways step into intelligence. His involvement was not with covert, Bond-style espionage. Instead, he was deployed by BSC’s director William Stephenson for purposes Roald described as ‘oil[ing] the wheels’. Since ‘theoretically I was a nobody’, he explained, ‘I could ask FDR over lunch what he thought, and he could tell me, quite openly, far more than he could say in a formal way.’ In this way, Roald’s work scarcely differed from aspects of his pre-BSC Washington life: his report on his weekend with the Roosevelts; his quick-fire decision to copy Wallace’s foreign policy documents. What changed, however, was Roald’s perception of the likely impact of his actions. ‘Bleeding this information on the highest level from the Americans was not for nefarious purposes, but for the war effort,’ he stated later.²¹ Until his death, he resisted further explanation.

Yet despite his pleasure in his departure from the embassy, in the eighteen months until his return to Buckinghamshire Roald’s happiness was mixed. After-effects of his flying accident lingered: years later he was still conscious of ‘an ache, or a pain, or a slight disability’ that never receded fully.²² In this instance, agonizing back pains first forced him to heavy doses of alcohol, then two operations, including removal of a disc. Charles Marsh paid for both and facilitated luxurious convalescence of the sort to which Roald had become accustomed in Alexandria: in Marsh’s house in Virginia, paintings by Monet and Renoir vied for Roald’s attention with an indoor staff of eighteen. Confined to bed for much of the time, Roald read ‘a lot of that old stuff which I’d never read before’: novels by the Brontës and Dickens – his absorption of Dickens’s merging of fantasy and elaborate grotesquerie is evident in his own writing.²³ Happier was an intense, passionate, sexually adventurous affair with a French actress called Annabella, again Roald’s senior, married to the film star Tyrone Power. Unusually for Roald’s romantic life to date, the two recognized in one another a similarity of outlook that, more than sexual chemistry, underpinned their relationship. Annabella likened them to siblings in their attitudes: for all his sexual charisma, Roald was more practised in the role of brother than lover. Their affair ended with Power’s return from the US air force. Annabella’s later description of Roald as ‘kind of impossible’ was admiring and affectionate and the two remained close following Annabella’s return to France and Roald’s return to England: Roald would write to her candidly about his marriage difficulties.²⁴

On a deeper imaginative and emotional level, Roald was sustained by his writing. In his letters to Sofie Magdalene, this had always been the case: consistently a lifeline, a plea for endorsement, applause, affection, and a private communing and ordering of his world. Wartime Washington convinced Roald that his writing mattered. His stories – ‘Shot Down Over Libya’, ‘The Sword’, ‘Only This’, ‘Beware of the Dog’, ‘Someone Like You’ or the Hemingway-esque ‘Katina’ – found markets and readers and earned Roald not only the fees that he passed on to RAF charities but a degree of public renown: Walt Disney’s interest; a distinguished literary agent, Ann Watkins, whose clients included Hemingway and Dylan Thomas; Eleanor Roosevelt’s admiration. In Washington, Roald’s writing, like Roald, was in demand.

*

His homecoming in February 1946 turned back the clock. In one of Roald’s stories of unhappy marriages, ‘Neck’, Sir Basil Turton is forced out of comfortable country bachelorhood into the hurly burly of a London characterized by Roald as sexually predatory. There, an aggressive, rapacious, calculating young woman speedily entraps him in an unsuitable marriage; she compels him to live his life on the public stage he has happily shunned. After years in the American capital – lionized, fêted and pursued – Roald’s return to Buckinghamshire and the house he shared with his mother and sisters threatened to reverse the story of Sir Basil’s emergence from rural obscurity; after visiting him there, Martha Gellhorn described the atmosphere as ‘very boring and very heavy’.²⁵ Roald approached his thirtieth birthday unmarried and uncertain in his prospects. Supported by a middling sum from Harald’s trust and an RAF pension, he determined to embrace Sofie Magdalene’s ramshackle peacetime bucolia; he bought a greyhound for racing, acquired a pet magpie and once again set about growing fruit and vegetables. His daughter Tessa would reflect that Roald’s head had been turned by rarefied social encounters in the States, his four years’ steeping in millionaires’ lives of ease and plenty; in suffering post-war Britain, despite parcels of food, kitchen gadgets and clothing sent to the Dahls by Charles Marsh’s secretary, Claudia Haines, the contrast made him listless, then downcast. Uppermost in his thoughts was his writing. ‘I have become quite excited about [writing] and writing stories is the only … thing that I want to do,’ Roald had stated ahead of publication at the beginning of the year of Over to You.²⁶ Yet his whole literary success, including his signing by Ann Watkins, was rooted in America. Awareness of his lack of literary standing at home increased his sense of post-war bleakness. He had left Washington intent on writing an admonitory novel based on his fears of nuclear war. On completion in June 1947, Some Time Never was a disillusioned, sad, astringent book, full of Roald’s unhappiness and pulled, like him, in different directions, part despondent, part uncomfortably frivolous. Its cast again included gremlins, in this instance shorn of any power to beguile and lacking benignity. Ann Watkins sold the novel in the States; at home, to Roald’s fury, his new British agent, Peter Watt, acting on a reader’s report, declined to read it. Although the novel was published on both sides of the Atlantic, its reception was at best lukewarm. Roald came to share this view, albeit his own verdict was coloured by his disillusionment at responses to the novel on the part of those who encountered it pre-publication, including Watt and publishers Hamish Hamilton. Later Roald referred to it as ‘that ghastly book’.²⁷

In its aftermath, Ann Watkins declined to humour Roald’s requests that she find him journalistic work, including as a foreign correspondent. Roald was rudderless, denied the splash his stories’ reception had appeared to guarantee any novel he might write, still struggling to adapt to peacetime. War and the feelings it provokes, he would write, demand ‘our whole attention’; by contrast, ‘after it is over it is only a memory’.²⁸ In the meantime nothing eclipsed these memories’ vividness or filled the void convincingly. ‘Let’s have some memories of sweet days,’ implores the narrator of one of Roald’s stories written then.²⁹ The memories the narrator summons are as distant as he can manage, of ‘seaside holidays in the summer’, a retreat into early childhood; he invites his mother to share in the act of remembering. In reality this, too, was not the comfort it might have been for Roald. Sofie Magdalene appeared as melancholy and morose as her son; she described Roald as ‘not easy to live with’.³⁰ Seemingly without its customary loving ease, their reunion caused both to withdraw within themselves. As he had in the winter of 1944, awaiting an operation on his back, Roald again began drinking heavily. Sofie Magdalene too. Shortly after Roald’s return, she had moved to a house outside Great Missenden called Grange Farm, where Roald turned a cottage into a writing room, complete with blinds at the windows, which he drew even in daylight to minimize distractions, as he would in his writing hut at Gipsy House. Together but apart, this arrangement rooted in practicalities served as a metaphor for mother and son’s separation. From afar – and unsuccessfully – Ann Watkins encouraged Roald to cheerfulness.

It did not help that a clutch of new stories failed to attract any interest, turned down even by the American magazines Roald regarded as his champions. Not for the last time, he was seriously worried about money. For Roald this was doubly troubling. It had never been enough simply to write. Competitive, including with himself, he needed his writing to be successful, and calibrated his success in dollars. He suggested as much to Charles Marsh, to whom he wrote at least once a week; in the circumstances his statement to his wealthy benefactor that he preferred to pay his own way in life was a plaintive one, pointing to potential grounds for wounded pride as long as he remained dependent on his mother or Charles’s kindness. Roald was less open in letters to Ann Watkins. Characteristically, he denied any faltering of confidence in the face of repeated rejections. Whatever the fate of Some Time Never, he told her, the act of writing was itself useful practice; in January 1948, he insisted, ‘I shall continue to write and I truly believe that one day I shall produce a really first-class novel.’³¹

He was mistaken in the short term. Roald worked slowly on Fifty Thousand Frogskins. The novel took him two years, dilatoriness the result of oscillating conviction and lassitude, in turn a reflection of his low mental state: greyhound racing, which drained his finite resources, engaged him more consistently. The result was a discursive, murkily humorous account of rural chicanery heavily based on his own experiences, in particular his friendship with his mother’s odd job man, Claud Taylor, greyhound fancier, poacher, trout tickler and rogue; it contained warning signs of the anti-Semitism of which he would be accused later and, like early drafts of several of his children’s novels, flaws in its construction. Roald argued that ‘if you live in the country, your work is bound to be influenced by it’, and the earthy realism of much of his second novel represented a deliberate rejection of fantastical elements in Some Time Never.³² Three years after completing it, Roald successfully extracted four episodes for inclusion in his second collection of short stories, Someone Like You. They demonstrate the calibre of writing of which he was capable. Pungent imagery foreshadows his later style, like his description in ‘Mr Feasey’ of the greyhound racing crowd: ‘Sharp-nosed men and women with dirty faces and bad teeth and quick shifty eyes. The dregs of the big town. Oozing out like sewage from a cracked pipe and trickling along the road through the gate and making a smelly little pond of sewage at the top end of the field.’³³ But the novel as a whole was unpublishable. Ann Watkins dismissed it as dull.

Roald had posed for publicity photographs with Walt Disney, the two men holding gremlin-inspired cuddly toys; he had lunched, dined, weekended with the president and first lady and, at the Norwegian Embassy in Washington, found himself a guest of the crown prince and princess; three of his stories had been broadcast on the BBC, another published in the New Yorker. But his first novel came close to failure and his second failed spectacularly. For Roald, it was a watershed moment, from which he was powerless to extricate himself. Later, in a version of the story that became Matilda, he would claim that ‘most of the things we are frightened of are not really there at all. We just imagine they are’; he identified learning this lesson as ‘one of the most important truths anyone can ever learn about life’.³⁴ Early in 1951, failure for Roald was more than an imaginative figment. In his own words to Ann Watkins, he fled. He fled from failure, fled from Britain, fled from his mother’s house. He flew to Beirut to meet Charles Marsh. Marsh came to Roald’s rescue with an offer of a job at his charity, the Public Welfare Foundation, an invitation to treat as his own Marsh’s house in New York and, during a stopover in Cairo, a rich man’s present of ‘a beautiful alabaster [statue] made in at least 6000 BC and very valuable’.³⁵ ‘Your spirit is with me now and tomorrow and yesterday,’ Marsh had told Roald in the summer of 1945, assuring him of the strength of their friendship.³⁶ Five years after Roald’s departure, the older man – Svengali turned fairy godmother – made good his promise, and Roald returned to the United States.