VI

My Lady Love, My Dove

1951–1957

‘Almost enveloped by her …’

FLASHES OF LIGHTNESS leaven the grim humour of a story about a husband and wife who decide to become card sharps that Roald wrote in New York in 1951. In ‘My Lady Love, My Dove’, the marriage of Arthur and Pamela is typically lopsided, the wife domineering, the husband deeply in thrall to her, but their relationship lacks menace, and even the prospect of being ‘almost enveloped by her’ does not unnerve Arthur unduly: he imagines it ‘as though she were a great tub of cream and I had fallen in’. Playfully Roald even toyed with satire at his own expense. ‘I myself do not like tall men,’ diminutive Arthur tells the reader: ‘they are apt to be supercilious and omniscient.’¹ Distant from the scene of his failure, temporarily disabused of claims to omniscience, Roald set his story in a comforting world of inherited wealth, a house with servants and gardeners, titled relations, no pressure of paid employment.

The New Yorker bought ‘My Lady Love, My Dove’ late that spring. Shortly before, the magazine had bought a story by Roald called ‘Taste’ about an impossible bet among wine buffs. Within a year, it would initiate an arrangement that secured it first refusal of Roald’s subsequent short stories, paying Roald an honorarium of $100 for the privilege. If Roald was unhappy in his dependence on Charles Marsh, he could not help but be encouraged by this revival in his writing. To his mother, who, despite recent fractiousness, was missing him, Roald explained that pressure of work prevented him from leaving New York: ‘I’ve got to stay on for a bit because there is a prospect of a fairly large contract for all my stories on radio and television.’² He had also received new scriptwriting offers and was working on radio adaptations of short stories by Somerset Maugham. His letters to Sofie Magdalene balanced customary boastfulness with concern for her wellbeing. In his self-appointed role of paterfamilias, he did his best to allay her concerns, solicitous about her ongoing dealings with Harald’s trustees, a proposed move to an annexe of Else’s house in Great Missenden, even her telephone bill. He forwarded advice from Charles about Sofie Magdalene’s investments – ‘If you will only do a little of what he suggests, your income should be increased a good bit’ – and he reassured her about his own finances, stating that, though ‘living in New York is terrifically expensive’, he had saved £2,000 in less than a year since his return; he assured her that only a need to make money kept him there.³ Once her house move was imminent, Roald instructed his mother which of his possessions to sell, requesting ‘my desk I would like to keep, also the books’, a clear statement of his priorities.⁴ He sent her a present of Roman glass, which he was confident could be sold successfully, and he updated her on the progress of his own occasional art dealing, writing in May, ‘It looks as though that Madonna picture I cleaned up and repainted so much may fetch quite a bit over here, maybe even about $2,000.’⁵ Roald had bought and sold paintings since the war, beginning with Epstein watercolours. Like greyhound racing and gambling, the art market’s cunning and legerdemain appealed to him; he had also inherited his father’s passion for art. In the 1940s, paintings by well-known artists were more affordable than they would become, and many of the first pictures Roald sold, including a Renoir, a Degas and a Sisley, paintings by Matisse, Cézanne, Bonnard and Soutine, were bought for his own pleasure with the proceeds of a short story, ‘then because it took me so long to write another story, I would invariably have to sell the picture I had bought six months before’.⁶ Of the artists in the collection of connoisseur Lionel Lampson in Roald’s story ‘Nunc Dimittis’, written in 1953, he himself had owned paintings by several, among them Redon, Vuillard and his friend Matthew Smith.⁷

Roald was less forthcoming about his personal life. In the second half of 1951 he offered his mother so few details about a relationship with a Hungarian divorcée called Suzanne Horvath – despite apparently anticipating marrying Suzanne – that Sofie Magdalene, who ‘never criticised her grown-up children, however much they deserved it’, resorted to writing to Claudia Haines for information, rather than upbraiding Roald for his silence.⁸ Roald prevaricated. He told his mother that he and Suzanne were ‘not hurrying over getting married’; then he suggested their marriage would not be for a considerable time; then he reported that Suzanne had ended their relationship.⁹ He offered neither explanation nor any indication of his feelings. He ought to have known – indeed, must have known – that this attitude would hurt Sofie Magdalene. At the end of the year, he embarked on a new relationship, but continued to drip-feed his mother only chicken fodder details.

Throughout Roald’s fiction, marriage is flawed, unequal, even hazardous. In a story called ‘Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat’, he referred to ‘this terrifying pattern of divorce and death’ that is a husband’s lot; other stories crackle with husbands’ cruelty to their wives and wives’ resentment.¹⁰ Successful marriages, like that of Anna Greenwood and Ed Cooper in ‘The Last Act’ or the boy-narrator’s parents in The Witches, are cut short by road accidents, as his own parents’ marriage had ended in Harald’s early death; the cast-iron union of Mr and Mrs Fox is consistently threatened by Boggis, Bunce and Bean’s machinations; in George’s Marvellous Medicine and The Magic Finger, the amiable partnerships of George’s parents and Mr and Mrs Gregg are of no interest to narrator or reader. Although Roald had been brought up with a strong sense of family, his exposure to successful marriage was negligible. Sofie Magdalene’s protracted widowhood, Charles Marsh’s serial marriages and Roald’s own freewheeling sexual conquests – his power over women, ‘ridiculously easy, like manipulating puppets’, as he described sexual charisma in a late story for adults – appeared to deny him convincing evidence of marriage as either happy or supportive.¹¹ By the time the relationship on which he embarked late in 1952 moved towards marriage, Roald’s expectations were as blunted as those of the weary spouses of his fiction.

Doubts linked Roald Dahl and film star Patricia Neal – the doubt each felt about their compatibility, their unspoken doubts about the trajectory of their shared future. Roald was thirty-six when they met in September at a dinner party organized by playwright Lillian Hellman, in whose play, The Children’s Hour, Pat had recently been cast; on and off he had lived alone for twenty years. Ten years his junior, Pat was in love with fellow actor Gary Cooper. ‘I’d have married him if he’d let me but he didn’t want tying down and it was he who called it quits,’ she admitted; their affair, which began in 1949, had lasted three years.¹² Neither Roald nor Pat was looking for the other; both, Roald suggested, were ‘eager to get married’.¹³ Pat’s eagerness to have children was quickened by an abortion forced on her by Cooper; the photographs of Else’s children Roald showed her convinced her of their likelihood of beautiful offspring. In her own words Pat was ‘a spoiled Hollywood actress’.¹⁴ Roald was sophisticated, generous, vigorously certain in his opinions, in Pat’s assessment lean and handsome and ‘interested in everything’, in his own, unsentimental way¹⁵; he knew, too, that Charles Marsh enthusiastically seconded his mother’s hopes for his marriage. When they met, Roald had ignored Pat. She was predictably irritated: when he telephoned the following morning, she turned down his invitation to dinner. Two days later he called again. That she acquiesced was almost certainly against her better judgement. To his mother, Roald would describe them both as cautious. Pat admired Roald, and Roald was attracted to Pat; he was not in love with her. Both apparently recognized the pragmatism that neither voiced. To his surprise Pat turned down Roald’s first proposal, then changed her mind. Charles Marsh provided an engagement ring, in Roald’s account a yellow sapphire of twenty carats, in Pat’s a coloured diamond. Friends cautioned Pat against what they were convinced was a mistake; one wrote that her engagement ring was all that she would gain from the relationship. In her autobiography, Pat described an argument before their wedding: she accused Roald of arrogance, rudeness, nastiness.¹⁶ It would not be the last time.

Neither of their families was present at their marriage ceremony in New York on a blistering July day in 1953: ‘The furthest anyone came was from Brooklyn,’ Roald remembered.¹⁷ That night Roald told Pat he loved her. Pat responded with unhappy tears. They spent their honeymoon driving through Italy and France in an open-top Jaguar that repeatedly broke down. Their responses to what they saw spelled out their differences. Roald dissembled the extent of first disillusionment – he would tell a friend later that he did not display emotions: ‘They may churn madly inside, but I always keep them there’¹⁸ – yet disillusioned he undoubtedly was. Pat’s claim that he was ‘all set to leave [her]’ after six months is supported by the letter Roald wrote to Charles Marsh in January 1954, in which he outlined at length the marriage’s inherent weaknesses.¹⁹ These included their fondness for ‘different people, and also different things’ and, more critically, Roald’s belief that Pat was failing in her duties towards him as a wife: ‘I make the coffee in the morning. She stays in bed. I work till lunchtime. Then I get my own lunch out of a can of soup.’²⁰ It was more than a response of its time. Roald both revelled in and struggled with Pat’s fame. Previously, older women – rich, successful and prominent, like Clare Boothe Luce and Millicent Rogers – had spoiled their handsome trophy airman, their wealth a prop to his own conviction of his success. To Sofie Magdalene, Pat described her efforts to give Roald space for his writing in their New York apartment. Beyond this, as she admitted later, she ‘never got him breakfast, never did any of the things that a European wife does to keep her man’.²¹ She spent her mornings in bed on the telephone; her cooking skills were non-existent. A disaffected Roald set about an attempted seduction of Gloria Vanderbilt, which he shortly abandoned.

More straightforwardly successful was the book Roald published that autumn, his first for five years. A second collection of his short stories, including the quartet of stories salvaged from Fifty Thousand Frogskins, Someone Like You dazzled its veteran publisher, Alfred Knopf, impressed reviewers and quickly achieved sales of the sort Roald had dreamed of. Gratifyingly in the face of recent rejections, the book had been instigated by Knopf himself, who approached Ann Watkins after reading the opening story, ‘Taste’, in the New Yorker. Author and publisher were delighted with one another. A gourmet and wine collector, egotistical, swaggering, enthusiastic and larger than life, Knopf fitted the template of American success that had become Roald’s lodestar. ‘Americans are not impressed by understatement. It is not in their character,’ he asserted later.²² Nor, he might have added, was it in his own in matters concerning his writing.

It was not the mollifying effect of success that persuaded Roald to give his brief marriage a second chance. This was Charles Marsh’s doing, in one of his last acts of friendship for Roald. In January 1954, Roald and Pat joined Charles and his former secretary, now his third wife, Claudia, in Jamaica. The Dahls had travelled separately, Pat first, Roald days later, initially unsure whether to follow the wife from whom he felt such distance. To each separately Charles gave loving, no-nonsense advice; to Roald, as so often before, he offered reassurance and invigoration – like Willy Wonka demolishing the Buckets’ fears in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator: ‘You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing.’²³ Pat agreed to defer to Roald; Roald lessened his expectations of Pat’s domestic role. To Roald, although her own earnings greatly exceeded his, Pat handed control of the couple’s finances, which she claimed achieved an instantaneous lessening of tension. Pat’s subsequent description of her marriage as ‘the first American house … where the woman didn’t dominate’ indicates that she kept her resolution; ‘dominance’ would be a criticism repeatedly levelled at Roald by his detractors.²⁴ The holiday ended in disarray nevertheless: Charles was bitten by a mosquito and contracted cerebral malaria, which set in train a succession of minor strokes. Although none of them suspected it at the time, it hastened a slow decline in his health from which he never recovered. While Claudia supervised Charles’s nursing, Roald and Pat returned to New York. There, they visited a gynaecologist, who treated the blocked fallopian tubes that he identified as responsible for Pat’s failure to conceive.

In old age, Roald would claim that he had ‘never lived in a town or city in my life and I would hate to do so’.²⁵ Although inaccurate, the statement was an honest reflection of his attachment to the country: he regarded himself, like Danny’s father in Danny the Champion of the World, as ‘a true countryman’: ‘the fields, the streams, the woods and all the creatures who lived in these places were a part of his life’.²⁶ He had told Sofie Magdalene that his return to the States was financially motivated; his quest for success played its part. He had run away from Fifty Thousand Frogskins and the shattering of his vision of himself as a successful writer; he remained in thrall to the thrifty, crafty, beautiful rural world from which the novel emerged. Now he wanted to return. His marriage’s near failure contributed to his disaffection with New York; Charles Marsh’s illness, which left him unable to speak, lessened Roald’s ties to the States. Although it would take several years and a near fatal accident for Roald to persuade Pat to move to Britain full time, she accepted his suggestion that they begin by spending part of every year in the same corner of Buckinghamshire as Sofie Magdalene and his sisters. Later, his daughter Tessa traced other motives on her father’s part. In a loosely autobiographical novel, she claimed he ‘thought he could prise [his wife] away from America, teach her about antiques, art and wine and then perhaps he could overlook the actressy part of her’.²⁷ Pat may have come to share this view. The memory of her preserved by a neighbour’s child – ‘Patricia Neal was so glamorous, she wore high heels and a fur coat … she smelt wonderful’ – does not suggest overwhelmingly rural instincts.²⁸

Roald described the acquisition of Gipsy House, his home for the rest of his life, with straightforward matter-of-factness that suggests the inevitability of a fairytale. ‘My family wrote and told me that a small Georgian house with five acres was coming up for auction in Great Missenden. I wrote back asking them to try to get it for us. They bought it at auction in the village pub for £4,250. We paid half ourselves and borrowed the rest from my mother.’²⁹ The house chosen for Roald by Sofie Magdalene and Else was a small, white-painted square building, with four rooms downstairs, three bedrooms and a bathroom under its dark slate roof, tall white chimneystacks and outbuildings of brick and dun-coloured rubble. Long years of renting to tenant farmers accounted for its neglect: in the kitchen a flagged floor was laid unevenly on to earth, fireplaces offered the only heating, and the abandoned garden, Roald wrote, resembled ‘a shambles’. But its orchard was full of apple and pear trees, a boon for Roald, for whom it was ‘a most marvellous thing to be able to go out and help yourself to your own apples whenever you feel like it’, and the house stood within walking distance of Great Missenden’s narrow high street, close to his married sister Else, with whom Sofie Magdalene now lived.³⁰ Its large garden and position on the village perimeter, on a gentle incline that traced the path of an ancient drove road, appeared to safeguard its privacy. Roald and Pat arrived in the middle of May 1954, when ‘the hawthorn was exploding white and pink and red along the hedges and the primroses were growing underneath in little clumps, and it was beautiful’; they supervised building work that included raising doorways for Roald’s comfort and removing internal walls downstairs.³¹ They moved in at the end of July. They renamed the house Little Whitefields. Rustic home-making made them both happy: at some point during their stay, Pat fell pregnant. Although Roald was disappointed during his visit by the lack of personal attention he received from Secker & Warburg, the British publishers of Someone Like You, reviews of the book, which appeared in April, were as encouraging as those in America. Roald was hailed as ‘a genuinely Anglo-American writer’. In a statement he read with ambivalence, a reviewer reminded readers that ‘Mr Dahl is the husband of actress Patricia Neal.’³²

And so he would remain for some years. Throughout the 1950s, Pat continued to win both critical acclaim and widespread popularity, while Roald’s career lurched between triumph and disaster. Following Someone Like You, in January 1954 the New Yorker published a new story by Roald, ‘The Way Up to Heaven’; five years would pass before the magazine accepted another. Twice during this interval, it rejected a story that has since become one of his best known. Roald worked on ‘William and Mary’, originally called ‘Abide with Me’, for nine months, a macabre vignette about a pettifogging husband whose brain and a single eyeball are kept alive after his death in ‘a biggish white enamel bowl about the size of a wash-basin’ in order to spy on his widow.³³ The trouble Roald took over the story’s construction, especially its medical minutiae, suggests his primary focus was not his narration of the revenge on her excessively controlling husband of a wife depleted by ‘years and years of joyless married life’; the story is not a fictionalizing of tensions within his own marriage.³⁴

‘William and Mary’s failure to find a market, within months of the success of Someone Like You, may have encouraged Roald to cling to the earlier book. In the summer of 1954, he began writing a play that incorporated vignettes from three of its short stories – in his notes, he described its plot as ‘“Lamb to the Slaughter” with small changes’.³⁵ Shaped by Roald’s teasing conviction that ‘many women in this world would gladly murder their husbands if they thought they could get away with it’, the play, which he called The Honeys, traced the course of three marriages, all of which ended with the husband’s murder by his wife (‘rather a sweet little thing’). In Britain, The Stage announced the project on 7 October, mistakenly describing it as a collaboration between Roald and the playwright Frederick Knott, author of Dial M for Murder, which that year had been released as a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock; the paper’s headline – ‘New Knott Thriller’ – points to Roald’s standing in his home country.³⁶ Instead, working on his own at the unfamiliar task of playwriting, Roald devoted two years to The Honeys. It occupied him throughout Pat’s pregnancy with their first child, Olivia; to Pat’s chagrin he was absent from Olivia’s birth in New York on 20 April 1955, on tour with The Honeys in Boston. Both its Broadway run and a provincial tour flopped, but Roald agreed nevertheless to a British production the following year, which necessitated rewriting and a new title, Your Loving Wife, intended to pinpoint the piece’s black humour. Despite this, and a cast headed by the popular Hermione Baddeley, the play garnered mixed reviews in Birmingham, Oxford and Bournemouth, and its London run was cancelled. A chastened Roald returned to New York. In October 1956, for the second time, Roald abandoned the scene of failure.

*

Absent parents fill Roald’s fiction: a mother or father dead, or, like the Wormwoods in Matilda and Billy’s mother in The Minpins, uninterested in their children, or otherwise preoccupied, like the Krankys in George’s Marvellous Medicine and Charlie Bucket’s overworked mother and father, or simply distant, like the mother in a story called ‘The Wish’, ‘far away … looking for her son’, unaware of his fears and torments.³⁷ Overwhelmingly his heroes and heroines are parentless. ‘No one is going to be worrying too much about me,’ the orphan Sophie tells the BFG: the statement applies in equal measure to any number of Roald’s fictional offspring, beginning with Lexington, the ‘beautiful baby boy’ born ‘once upon a time, in the City of New York’ in a cautionary tale from 1960 called ‘Pig’.³⁸ It would not be a criticism that, as children, Olivia, Tessa, Theo, Ophelia or Lucy Dahl could level against their father.

In October 1938, Sofie Magdalene had received a letter from a friend travelling, like Roald, on the SS Mantola to Africa. Describing Roald as ‘very popular with everyone’, she added, ‘Luckily for him he is fond of children & is good with them, for they swarm all over him.’³⁹ Two decades later, Sofie Magdalene was able to judge for herself something of this observation’s accuracy. Roald was thirty-eight when Pat conceived their first child and immediately excited by the prospect of fatherhood. By contrast, Pat would find she struggled as a mother, at one point handing over year-old Olivia to her sister-in-law Else for a period of several weeks. In her autobiography, she remembered Roald as ‘a very maternal daddy’; her career offered lengthy periods of respite from Olivia, then Tessa, who was born two years later.⁴⁰ Despite a relish for the scatological that peppers his writing, Roald did not enjoy what he labelled newborns’ ‘whirling blur of wet nappies and vomit and milk and belching and farting’; he employed and oversaw a sequence of nurses.⁴¹ But his letters written at this time reveal his familiarity with these aspects of childcare: more often than not, it was Roald, not Pat, who ministered to the family that, with Theo’s birth in July 1960, had grown to three.

This succession of new babies interrupted Roald’s writing. In New York, he rented a writing room in an apartment close to the Dahls’ own; in the garden of Little Whitefields, as he had at Grange Farm, he converted an outbuilding to provide a quiet, cut-off place for working. There he could escape from being ‘an ordinary fellow who walks around and looks after his children and eats meals and does silly things’; inspired by Dylan Thomas’s converted wooden garage on a Carmarthenshire cliff, the white-painted, brick-built shed served as his writing hut until his death.⁴² Working there in the summer of 1957, still smarting from The Honeys’ baleful fate, Roald confronted a further, more challenging dilemma: in April, Alfred Knopf had expressed considerable disappointment in a new collection of short stories that included Roald’s last two pieces published in the New Yorker, ‘Edward the Conqueror’ and ‘The Way up to Heaven’. ‘I couldn’t possibly be less than frank with you,’ Knopf had written. He made clear his grounds for reservation; he offered to publish the collection as it stood, but presented Roald with an alternative: ‘I would like to see you hold it over a bit and strengthen it with at least two more stories right out of the top drawer.’⁴³ Accustomed to respond bullishly to criticism of his writing, Roald accepted this suggestion, a measure of his respect for Knopf. Progress, however, proved appallingly slow. ‘The pencil doesn’t very often touch the paper,’ he commented once on his technique. ‘It’s looking and musing and correcting and then, then you do a little writing.’⁴⁴ That it would take him two more years to produce the required top-drawer stories dampened his appetite for short story writing for the next decade and beyond.

Published on both sides of the Atlantic in 1960, Kiss Kiss, as the collected stories were titled, replicated the pattern of Roald’s previous collections: despite good reviews and positive publicity, American enthusiasm outstripped that of British readers. In June, The Sunday Times reprinted in full ‘The Way up to Heaven’: advertised in regional papers, the story was described as ‘a minor masterpiece’, ‘in the tradition of O. Henry and Maupassant’ and ‘a contribution to holiday reading not to be missed’.⁴⁵ Among the eleven stories was evidence of the encroachment on Roald’s imagination of children and parenthood: parental fears about babies’ feeding in ‘Royal Jelly’, bigger fears about parental responsibility in the dark-hued ‘Genesis and Catastrophe’, which reimagined the birth of Hitler as a longed-for blessing for a sorrowing and downtrodden mother. Other stories point to ongoing preoccupations. ‘The Champion of the World’ is a pheasant-poaching tale that returns to the world of Fifty Thousand Frogskins; Roald would revisit it twenty years later in Danny the Champion of the World, but his first version was still an adults-only affair. A story called ‘The Landlady’ began as an attempt to write a ghost story of the sort Roald had loved since St Peter’s, ‘but when it was finished and I examined it carefully, I knew … I hadn’t brought it off. I simply hadn’t got the secret. So I … altered the ending and made it into a non-ghost story.’⁴⁶ Ghost stories were on his mind. Years before, Alfred Hitchcock had bought television rights to a handful of Roald’s stories. In 1958, Roald embarked on a similar initiative with Alfred Knopf’s film director half-brother, Edwin: ‘a television series … of nothing but ghost stories’.⁴⁷ As with the writing of his own stories, he researched exhaustively. ‘A tremendous amount of scuttling around’ included visits to the British Library and to an elderly ghost story aficionado, the former royal biographer Lady Cynthia Asquith. Over a year Roald collected twenty-four and wrote a screenplay for the pilot episode: a story by E. F. Benson in which a Catholic priest’s refusal to compromise the sanctity of the confessional shapes an unhappy outcome. Studio bosses were unanimous in their rejection of a piece almost certain to provoke America’s powerful Catholic lobby; Roald described their ‘apoplectic’ response as a shock that stayed with him.⁴⁸

How often, it seemed then, he had found himself at a crossroads: disappointed by the reception of Some Time Never; despondent following his failure with Fifty Thousand Frogskins; wrong-footed by repeated difficulties in finding a market for his stories; denied the screenwriting success he had anticipated from adapting ghost stories. In their wake, these setbacks brought other worries, too. On 27 June 1957, casting about to help him, Sheila St Lawrence, who had become Roald’s point of contact at the Watkins Agency following Ann Watkins’s retirement, suggested ‘we could always ask for an advance from Knopf on the new collection’.⁴⁹ But in the summer of 1957, the new collection was still two years from completion to Alfred Knopf’s satisfaction, and there would be no advance to help Roald’s finances. Happily, Pat remained in demand in New York and Hollywood, but Roald struggled with the disparity in their professional fortunes. His instincts were exuberant, generous, acquisitive: at fortnightly auctions hosted by Restell’s in the City of London, he filled the back of an old Morris station wagon with cases of ‘good burgundy and claret … for less than one pound a case’;⁵⁰ he showered on his family what Else remembered as ‘sacks full of presents’⁵¹; he delighted in ‘haunt[ing] small auctions all over the country and com[ing] home with my old van loaded with canvases’ and, as he had since the purchase of Little Whitefields, he hurried to ‘exciting furniture auctions … in vast decaying country houses all around’.⁵² Like the ‘houseproud wife’ in his rewriting of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, he ‘collected lovely things / Like gilded cherubs wearing wings, / And furniture by Chippendale / Bought at some … auction sale’.⁵³ On its own, it was not enough. He had reached an impasse. He would provide the solution himself.