Storyteller Read online

  Copyright © 2010 by Donald Sturrock

  Published simultaneously in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster and in the U.K. by HarperCollins.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Sturrock, Donald

  Storyteller : the authorized biography of Roald Dahl / Donald Sturrock.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-344-7

  1. Dahl, Roald. 2. Authors, English–20th century–Biography. I. Title.

  PR6054.A36Z88 2010 823′.914 C2010-901554-1

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  Photo credits are listed on this page.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  For my parents, Gordon and Margaret

  I don’t lie. I merely make the truth a little more interesting …

  I don’t break my word—I merely bend it slightly….

  ROALD DAHL, from his Ideas Books, No. 1 (ca. 1945–48)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE: Lunch with Igor Stravinsky

  CHAPTER ONE: The Outsider

  CHAPTER TWO: Shutting Out the Sun

  CHAPTER THREE: Boy

  CHAPTER FOUR: Foul Things and Horrid People

  CHAPTER FIVE: Distant Faraway Lands

  CHAPTER SIX: A Monumental Bash on the Head

  CHAPTER SEVEN: David and Goliath

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Alive but Earthbound

  CHAPTER NINE: A Sort of Fairy Story

  Photo Insert 1

  CHAPTER TEN: Secrets and Lies

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Scholar-Gypsy

  CHAPTER TWELVE: The Poacher

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Master of the Macabre

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: A Tornado of Troubles

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Breaking Point

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Indomitable

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The Gentle Warmth of Love

  Photo Insert 2

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Explosions Are Exciting

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: The Wizard and the Wonderman

  CHAPTER TWENTY: No Point in Struggling

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Photo Credits

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  Lunch with Igor Stravinsky

  ROALD DAHL THOUGHT BIOGRAPHIES were boring. He told me so while munching on a lobster claw. I was twenty-four years old and had been invited for the weekend to the author’s home in rural Buckinghamshire. Dinner was in full swing. A mixture of family and friends were devouring a platter brimming with seafood, while a strange object, made up of intertwined metal links, made its slow way around the table. The links appeared inseparable, but Dahl had told us all they could be separated quite easily by someone with sufficient manual dexterity and spatial awareness. So far none of the guests had been able to solve it. As I waited for the puzzle to come round to me, I tried to respond to Roald’s disdain for biography. I mentioned Lytton Strachey, Victoria Glendinning, Michael Holroyd. But he wasn’t having any of it. Sitting in a high armchair, at the head of his long pine dining table, he leaned back, took a swig from his large glass of Burgundy, and returned to his theme with renewed relish. Biographers were dreary fact-collectors, he argued, unimaginative people, whose books were usually as enervating as the lives of their subjects. With a glint in his eye, he told me that many of the most exceptional writers he had encountered in his life had been unexceptional as human beings. Norman Mailer, Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Mann and Dr. Seuss were, I recall, each dismissed with a wave of his large hand, as tiresome, vain, dreary or insufferable. He knew I loved music and perhaps that was why he also mentioned Stravinsky. “An authentic genius as a composer,” he declared, throwing back his head with a chuckle, “but otherwise quite ordinary.” He had once had lunch with him, he added, so therefore he spoke from experience. I tried to think of subjects whose lives were as vivid as their art: Mozart, Caravaggio, Van Gogh perhaps? His intense blue eyes looked straight at me. That wasn’t the point, he said. Why on earth would anyone choose to read an assemblage of detail, a catalogue of facts, when there was so much good fiction around as an alternative? Invention, he declared, was always more interesting than reality.

  As I sat there, observing the humorous but combative glint in his eye, I sensed that, like a boxer, he was sparring with me. He had thrown a punch and been pleased that I jabbed back. Now he had thrown me another. This one was more difficult to parry. It would be hard to take it further without the exchange becoming detailed and perhaps wearisome. I hesitated. I wondered at his own life. He had just written two volumes of memoirs, one of which he had given to me to read in draft. So I knew the rough outline of his first twenty-five years: Norwegian parents, a childhood in Wales, miserable schooldays, youthful adventures in Newfoundland and Tanganyika, flying as a fighter pilot, a serious plane crash, then a career as a wartime diplomat in Washington. I had already told him privately that I found the books compelling. Did he want me to repeat the compliment over dinner as well? It was hard to tell. At that moment the metal links were presented to me and the conversation moved on. Soon, too, his huge pointy fingers had plucked the puzzle from my inept hands and he had begun confidently to demonstrate its solution. Later on, at the end of a meal which had concluded with the offer of KitKats and Mars Bars dispensed from a small red plastic box, he took his two dogs out into the garden. A few minutes later he returned, wished everyone good night, and retired theatrically from the public space of the drawing room into the privacy of his bedroom.

  Half an hour later, I was walking up the frosty path from the main building to the guest house in the garden. The atmosphere was absolutely still. A fox shrieked in the distance. I stopped for a moment and looked up at the clear winter sky. I was struck by how many stars I could see. Great Missenden was less than an hour’s drive from London, but the lights of the city seemed far, far away. Some cows stirred in a nearby field. I looked about me. Gentle hills curved around the garden on all sides. At the top of the lane a vast beechwood glowered. The dark outline of the 500-year-old yew tree that had inspired Fantastic Mr. Fox loomed over me. In the orchard, moonlight glinted on the gaily painted gypsy caravan that he had recreated in Danny The Champion of the World. An owl fluttered low into the yew. I turned and opened the door to my room.

  Soon, I found myself examining the books in the bookcase by my bedside. There was certainly no biography here. Most of it was crime fiction: Ed McBain, Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Dick Francis. As I pulled out a volume, I noticed some ghost stories too, an insect encyclopedia, the diary of a Victorian priest, and a book of poetry by D. H. Lawrence. All of the books looked as if they had been read. I reflected again on our exchange over dinner, and wondered whether Roald had actually met Stravinsky. Perhaps he had simply made that remark to disconcert me? Before I switched off the light, I remember thinking that next day I would flush him
out. I would ask him how he had come to have lunch with the great composer. Needless to say, I got distracted and forgot to do so.

  It was then February 1986. I had known Dahl six months. The previous autumn, as a fledgling documentary director in the BBC’s Music and Arts Department, I had proposed making a film about him for Bookmark, the corporation’s flagship literary program. Nigel Williams, the producer, himself an established playwright and novelist, had decided that the Christmas edition of the show would be devoted to children’s literature. Twenty-five years ago this was still a field that many people in the UK arts affected to despise, and for once none of the program’s older, more experienced directors seemed keen to put forward any ideas. I was the most junior on the team. I wanted desperately to make a film. Any film. So I took my chance. It was an obvious suggestion—a portrait of the most famous and successful living children’s writer. The motivation however behind my plan was largely opportunistic. At that point, I had read none of Dahl’s children’s fiction other than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. On the other hand, as a thirteen-year-old, I had read most of his adult short stories, feasting on them with concentrated relish from behind a school desk during math lessons. My adolescent mind had revelled in their grotesqueries, their complex twists and turns, and their spare, elegant, strangely sexy prose.

  I remember Nigel Williams’s smile. How he looked at me when I mentioned Roald Dahl. It was knowing, almost wicked. “Okay,” he said. “If you can persuade him to do it.” I paused. Was he thinking about money? The program had a tiny budget and always paid its contributors the most modest of disturbance fees. It wasn’t cash, however, that was on Nigel’s mind. “You know his reputation?” he asked rhetorically. “Unbelievably grumpy and difficult. He’ll never agree to take part.” I nodded, although this was actually news to me, for my impression of Dahl the man at that point was in fact one of singular lightness. Four years earlier, while I was an undergraduate, he had taken part in a debate at the Oxford Union. “Romance is bunk” was the motion. Dahl had contributed to it memorably, arguing that romance was no more than a euphemism for the human sex drive. He was a great entertainer—witty, subversive, and often risqué. At one point he challenged a young woman in his audience to try and “get romantic” with a eunuch. At another he joked that a castrated male was similar to an aeroplane with no engine, because neither could get up. As I walked out of Nigel’s office, all this was still fresh in my memory. Maybe Dahl will be cantankerous, I thought, but I am sure he will be funny, too. I discovered from press cuttings that he lived in a village called Great Missenden. I searched a telephone directory for Dahl, R. and there was his phone number. Ten minutes later I was calling him to discuss the project. Our conversation was brief and to the point. “Come to lunch,” he said. “There are good train services from Marylebone.”

  A week later, I was standing outside the bright yellow front door of Gipsy House, his modest eighteenth-century whitewashed home. I rang the bell. An explosion of dogs barking heralded the arrival of a gigantic figure in a long red cardigan. He looked down at me. He was six foot five inches tall, craggy and broad of beam. His body seemed larger than the doorway and far, far too big for the proportions of the cottage. He ushered me through into a cozy sitting room where a log fire burned generously in the fireplace. He seemed a trifle surprised. I asked if I had got the date wrong. “No,” he said. “I was expecting you.” He asked me to wait a moment, then left the room. His strides were huge and ponderous, but strangely graceful—a bit like a giraffe. On one wall a triptych of distorted Francis Bacon heads glared out at me alarmingly, reminding me that for years, Dahl’s adult publishers had dubbed him “the Master of the Macabre.” On an adjacent wall, another Bacon head—this one a distorted swirl of green and white—returned my gaze. Around them a dazzlingly eclectic group of paintings and artifacts decorated the room: colorful oils, a collection of outsize antique Norwegian pipes, a primitive mask, a sober Dutch landscape and some stylized geometric paintings. I learned over lunch that these were the works of the Russian Suprematists: Popova, Malevich and Goncharova.

  His wife Liccy (pronounced “Lici” as in the middle two syllables of her name, Felicity) returned five minutes later and suggested I go through into the dining room, where he was waiting for me. Over a lunch of smoked oysters, served from a tin—I don’t recall any wine—we discussed the documentary. In the week leading up to our meeting I felt I had become an expert on his work and had read everything of his that I could get my hands on. I asked him some questions about his early life and about childhood. He told me how easy he found it to see the world from a child’s perspective and how he thought that this was perhaps the secret to writing successfully for children. His memoir of childhood, Boy, had recently been published. I wanted to use this as the backbone of the film and so we talked about Repton, the school where he had spent his teenage years, fifty years earlier. He told me what a miserable time he had had there and we talked about the ethics of beating, for which the school was famous. We pencilled some provisional shooting dates in his diary. Then I asked whether I could see his writing hut. I had read about it and wanted to film there. I anticipated he might say no and tell me that it was too private a place to show to a film crew. But he did not bat an eyelid, and, after lunch, he took me to see it. We walked down a stone path bordered with leafless lime saplings, tied onto a bamboo framework that arched gently over our heads. He explained to me that in time the saplings would grow around the structure and make a magical, shady tunnel.

  He opened the door to the hut and I went inside. An anteroom, stuffed with old picture frames and filing cabinets, led directly into his writing space. The walls were lined with aged polystyrene foam blocks for insulation. Everything was yellow with nicotine and reeked of tobacco. A carpet of dust, pencil sharpenings and cigarette ash covered the worn linoleum floor. A plastic curtain hung limply over a tiny window. There was almost no natural light. A great armchair filled the tiny room—Dahl frequently compared the experience of sitting there to being inside the womb or the cockpit of a Hurricane. He had chopped a huge chunk out of the back of the chair, he told me, so nothing would press onto the lower part of his spine and aggravate the injury he suffered when his plane crashed during the war. A battered anglepoise lamp, like a praying mantis, crouched over the chair, an ancient golf ball dangling from its chipped arm. A single-bar electric heater, its flex trailing down to a socket near the floor, hung from the ceiling. He told me that by poking it with an old golf club he could direct heat onto his hands when it was cold.

  Everything seemed ramshackle and makeshift. Much of it seemed rather dangerous. Its charm, however, was irresistible. An enormous child was showing me his treasures: the green baize writing board he’d designed himself, the filthy sleeping bag that kept his legs warm, and—most prized of all—his cabinet of curiosities. These were gathered on a wooden table beside his armchair and included the head of one of his femurs (which had been sawn off during a hip replacement operation twenty years earlier), a glass vial filled with pink alcohol, in which some stringy glutinous bits of his spine were floating, a piece of rock that had been split in half to reveal a cluster of purple crystals nestling within, a tiny model aeroplane, some fragments of Babylonian pottery and a metal ball made, so he assured me, from the wrappers of hundreds of chocolate bars. Finally, he pointed out a gleaming steel prosthesis. It had been temporarily fitted into his pelvis during an unsuccessful hip replacement operation. He was now using it as an improvised handle for a drawer on one of his broken-down filing cabinets.

  The shooting went without incident. Though it was the first time he had ever been filmed in his writing hut, and indeed the first time that the BBC had made a documentary about him, there were no rows, no difficulties, and no grumpiness. Roald charmed everyone and I occasionally wondered how he had come to acquire his reputation for being irascible. His short fuse had not been apparent to me at all. Years later, however, I discovered that I just missed seeing it on my
very first visit. Not long after he died, Liccy explained why I had been abandoned in his drawing room. For, standing in his doorstep, I had not made a good impression. Roald had gone straight to her study. “Oh Christ, Lic, they’ve sent a fucking child,” he had groaned. Liccy encouraged him to give me a chance and I think my youth and earnestness eventually became an asset. I even felt at the end of the two-day shoot as if Roald had become a friend. In the editing room, putting the documentary together, I was reminded of the suspicion that still surrounded Dahl in literary circles. Nigel Williams, concerned that Dahl appeared too sympathetic, insisted that I shoot an interview with a literary critic who was known to be hostile to his children’s fiction. This reaction may have been largely a result of a trenchantly anti-Israeli piece Dahl had written for The Literary Review two years earlier. The article had caused a great deal of controversy and fixed him as an anti-Semite in many people’s minds. But there was, I felt, something more than this in the atmosphere of wariness and distrust that seemed to surround people’s reactions to him. Something I could not quite put my finger on. A sense perhaps that he was an outsider: misunderstood, rejected, almost a pariah.

  I must have visited Gipsy House six or seven times in the next four years. Gradually, I came to know his children: Tessa, Theo, Ophelia and Lucy. Many memories of those visits linger still in the brain. Roald’s excited voice on the telephone early one morning: “I don’t know what you’re doing next Saturday, but whatever it is, you’d better drop it. The meal we’re planning will be amazing. If you don’t come, you’ll regret it.” The surprise that evening was caviar, something he knew I had never tasted. True to the spirit of the poacher at his heart, he later explained that it had been obtained, at a bargain price, in a furtive transaction that seemed like a cross between a John Le Carré spy novel and a Carry On film. The code phrase was: “Are you Sarah with the big tits?” Another evening, I remember him opening several of the hundreds of cases of 1982 Bordeaux he had recently purchased and that were piled up everywhere in his cellar. The wines were not supposed to be ready to drink until the 1990s, but he paid no attention. “Bugger that,” he declared. “If they’re going to be good in the 1990s, they’ll be good now.” They were. I recall his entrances into the drawing room before dinner, always theatrical, always conversation-stopping, and his loud, infectious laugh. Being in his company was always invigorating. You never quite knew what was going to happen next. And whatever he did seemed to provoke a story. Once, on a summer’s morning outside on the terrace, he taught me how to shuck my first oyster, using his father’s wooden pocketknife. He told me he had carried it around the world with him since his schooldays. Years later, when I told Ophelia that story, she roared with laughter. “Dad was having you on,” she explained. “It was just an old knife he had pulled out of the kitchen.”