THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2010 BOOK WORLD
A giant, peachy look at Roald Dahl W
by Michael Dirda
hen 74-year-old Roald Dahl died from leukemia in 1990, I wrote a longish
essay about the enormously popular, and often controversial, author of “James and the Giant Peach” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Waspishly opinionated, frequently offen- sive, a hard bargainer with pub- lishers and a prima donna with editors, reclusive, family-focused and outrageously funny, Dahl struck me then as the Evelyn Waugh of children’s literature. One could almost imagine the savage author of “Black Mischief” and “A Handful of Dust” writing “The Twits” or “Matilda.” Having read and admired Jer-
emy Treglown’s “Roald Dahl” (1994), I didn’t think there would be much new in this authorized biography. I was wrong. Donald Sturrock’s “Storyteller” enriches the now-familiar outline of an eventful life with much new in- formation, peels away the layers of myth that Dahl promulgated about himself, and makes clear the man’s immense charm as well as his cold self-possession and emotional callousness. This is a major literary biography, im- mensely satisfying to read and worthy of its complex subject. Dahl was only 3 when his Nor- wegian-born father died, leaving a sizable fortune (from shipping and coal). As a boy he attended prestigious Repton School, whose headmaster Geoffrey Fisher, a.k.a. “The Boss,” eventually be- came archbishop of Canterbury. But instead of continuing on to university, young Dahl joined the Asiatic Petroleum Co., ultimately being posted to what was then Tanganyika, where he lived some- thing of a pukka sahib life. With the outbreak of World
War II, Dahl trained as a pilot but crashed his plane, disastrously, en route to his first post in North Africa. His nose was pushed into his face and his body mangled: He suffered from spinal problems and headaches for the rest of his life and periodically underwent palliative operations to relieve the pain. While Dahl ultimately recovered well enough to fly again — he participated in active
ODD COUPLE:The writer and his first wife, Patricia Neal.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
aerial combat over Greece — he was ultimately deployed to Wash- ington to work in promoting the British war interests here. He was, after all, a tall, attractive English ace with five confirmed kills — and, he now implied, he’d been shot down in the desert. During his time in Washing- ton, Dahl displayed astonishing social skills, becoming a confi- dant of Vice President Henry Wallace, winning the lasting friendship of newspaper magnate Charles Marsh, and bed- ding a series of pretty girls and older society matrons. Sturrock names names, including those of Clare Booth Luce, oil heiress Milli- cent Rogers and cosmet- ics queen Elizabeth Ar- den. Dahl also became a spy for British intelli- gence’s William “Intrep- id” Stephenson, the landlord of philosopher Isaiah Berlin and, be- cause of the influence of C.S. Forester, a writer. The creator of Capt. Ho- ratio Hornblower had been asked to use Dahl’s wartime crash as the basis for a propaganda article, but over din- ner with the novelist, Dahl sug- gested that he himself scribble an initial draft. It was so accom- plished that Forester’s agent sold it to the Saturday Evening Post, where it appeared in 1942 as “Shot Down Over Libya.” With this encouragement, Dahl began to write in earnest. His first major project was a se- ries of stories about gremlins, lep-
rechaun-like creatures who vex pilots with all sorts of mischief. For a long time, Walt Disney hoped to make a movie based on a script Dahl wrote about grem- lins, and this led to the writer spending time in Hollywood, where he hung out at Hoagy Car- michael’s pool and slept with a former girlfriend of Cary Grant and Howard Hughes. But the Dis- ney movie deal fell through, the war end- ed and Dahl moved back to England. After a couple of misjudged projects — the novel “Some Time Never” is an example of apocalyptic science fiction — Dahl began to publish a series of macabre and often nasty
short stories.
STORYTELLER The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl By Donald Sturrock Simon & Schuster. 655 pp. $30
These “tales of the un- expected,” as he later called them, often in- volved insidious wa- gers: In “Taste,” for in- stance, an acquisitive father “stakes his eighteen-year-old daughter’s hand in marriage in a bet against a lecherous
middle-aged wine connoisseur” who must precisely identify an obscure Bordeaux’s vintage and vineyard. Oddly enough, Stur- rock fails to mention Dahl’s most famous short story, “Lamb to the Slaughter,” in which a wife who has killed her husband ingen- iously disposes of the highly orig- inal murder weapon. The publisher Alfred Knopf
liked these macabre tales and so brought out Dahl’s first impor-
KLMNO
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tant book, “Someone Like You,” and later followed up with its companion volume, “Kiss Kiss.” Then, on a business trip back to
New York, Dahl met the actress Patricia Neal, who was broken- hearted over the end of her affair with Gary Cooper. In short order he persuaded her to marry him and live in what was sometimes known as the “Valley of the Dahls.” Their life together was rocky from the start. But the pair made a go of it for a long while, and several terrible disasters — including the death of a child — drew them close. When Neal suf- fered a debilitating stroke at just 39, Dahl oversaw a relentless pro- gram for her recovery.
While Roald Dahl was deeply
devoted to his mother, sisters and children, relishing the role of family man, he regularly cheated on Neal. The affairs were casual up until his mid-50s, when the writer fell in love with the 20- years-younger Felicity Crosland who, after much angst all around, became his second wife. The mar- riage proved a serenely happy one and allowed for the great fi- nal flourishing of the 1980s chil- dren’s books: “The BFG,” “The Witches,” “Matilda” and the high- ly embroidered memoirs “Boy” and “Going Solo.” I reviewed all these, and there’s no denying his gripping power as a storyteller. J.K. Rowling, for one, clearly learned a lot from Dahl. Such is an overview of Roald
Dahl’s life, but only that. Stur- rock’s “Storyteller” is so packed with intimate details, sharply in- telligent commentary and sur- prising revelations — in an early draft of “Charlie and the Choco- late Factory” the boy hero was black — that it should be read im- mediately by anyone interested in Dahl, the ins and outs of mod- ern publishing or the art of biog- raphy. I can’t sing its praises enough.
bookworld@washpost.com
Visit Dirda’s online book discussion at
washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM Find event information for this
Saturday’s National Book Festival on the National Mall at
washingtonpost.com/NBF.
Kennedy Center gets $10 million gift from chairman Rubenstein
by Jacqueline Trescott David M. Rubenstein, the still-
newish chairman of the Kennedy Center, announced Wednesday that he is donating $10million for the center’s programs. “Essentially, I felt as chairman, it would be a good thing to get off to a strong start by making an ini- tial gift of that amount,” said Ru- benstein, co-founder and manag- ing director of the Carlyle Group, who was named the center’s chairman in May. “I assume I will make additional gifts, and I want- ed to have a good gift as my first one.” The gift has some stipulations.
A $5 million portion will be al- lotted to the National Symphony Orchestra as a welcome celebra- tion for new music director Christoph Eschenbach. “We wanted to make it clear to Chris- toph that the community and board is really supporting him,” Rubenstein said. The NSO contribution will en- able the new music director to build his own signature pro- grams, said Michael M. Kaiser, the center’s president. “This is a welcoming gift for the program- ming he wants to do,” Kaiser said. “Having the resources to do that,” he said, is “great.” Kaiser said Rubenstein offered early on to personally support many aspects of the center’s arts and education projects. “I want to enhance the partici-
pation in the center by people from all parts of the District. I want people who are younger than me to increase their partici- pation,” said Rubenstein, 61. Before he assumed the chair- manship, Rubenstein, a member of the center’s board since 2004, had given $3.5million to the cen- ter. “Generally the effort and the gift is a way to get some attention that the Kennedy Center is here and doing some vibrant things.” Rubenstein plans to encourage other donors by arranging more intimate interactions with art- ists. For instance, he is hosting a dinner for soprano Renée Flem- ing, and the two of them will talk about her career in a Charlie Rose-style interview. He plans to do the same with Eschenbach at the next board meeting. The new donation includes
$2.5million to be spent over five years — $500,000 annually for one project — moving among the various artistic disciplines. “For
this current season, it will be the India Festival, which is the most expensive project we are doing this season,” Kaiser said. The In- dia Festival, a three-week event, is scheduled for March 2011 and will likely cost about $6 million, he said.
Each year, $200,000 of the gift will be set aside to support the center’s awards and fundraising events, which include its Spring Gala, the NSO Season Opening Ball, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor and the Ken- nedy Center Honors. Finally, $1.5 million will sup-
port arts education programs for students in grades K-12, a nation- al effort for the center. “We are trying to build the re- sources to meet the demand,” Kaiser said of the increased edu- cation initiatives. In the past few months, the center has received 40 requests for its pilot program in school-based arts education, “Any Given Child.” Programs are underway
Springfield, Ill.; and Portland, Ore. As its programs expand, the
LookWho’sComing to the
center has to raise about $71mil- lion from private sources. Its con- gressional appropriation sup- ports the upkeep of the physical plant. The center, which has 2,000 shows a year, has a $160 million budget and has had an operating surplus every year for the past 10 years. Kaiser esti- mated that the surplus for the
year that ends Oct. 3 will be $5 million to $7 million.
trescottj@washpost.com
ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM For the latest in local and national cultural news and views, visit our new blog, Arts Post, at
washingtonpost.com/style.
to date rape scars daughter ASK AMY
Mom’s cruel reaction
Dear Amy: When I was a teenager, I was
date-raped, and my mother kicked me out of her home because she didn’t believe my account of what happened to me. I spent six years picking up the pieces of my life, and it was a very rough road. I have since always doubted my actions and my soul. Fast forward to recently. My mother confided in me that she, too, had been date-raped. I was shocked that she had treated me as though I had done something horribly wrong when she had experienced the exact situation. Here’s the catch: I want to
disown this woman. I hate her. Her actions traumatized me much worse than the rape. But she is wealthy, and I am a disabled veteran with several children, one of them with special needs. If I let my mother know how I feel, I could be jeopardizing a very large inheritance that could give my children the good life that she stole from me. My best friend and my husband think I need to withdraw contact, but they understand my pragmatism. Should I dump my mom and go out with a blaze of glory? Or should I pretend to love her and wait for the inheritance to give me warm fuzzies?
Furious Daughter
I fail to see how dumping your mother permits you to go out “with a blaze of glory.” To me, this act seems the opposite of glorious. The fact is, you could make
nice with your mother in hopes of receiving an inheritance, and she could choose to leave her money to the local symphony, to restore a panda habitat or to another family member. Your family needs true reconciliation: that is the best and only honest legacy to leave to your children. Faking it for the money will backfire. Aside from the inheritance, if you and your mother are able to understand one another, everybody wins. You will make progress if you receive professional counseling to deal with the rape and its aftermath, and to understand your mother’s failings, accept her frailties and, perhaps, come to forgive her.
Dear Amy: I am 32, and I have been
divorced twice. My last divorce happened earlier this year. I have recently been seeing a
wonderful woman, who is eight years my junior. We mesh very well and have
been having a great time. Recently someone commented on a picture of the two of us on a social network site and stated that I look too old for her. My gray hair doesn’t help, but I am an Army veteran and attribute it to my time in Iraq. I never feel “old” when I am with her but worry that I am keeping her from someone better. Do you have any advice for someone who doesn’t feel “age
appropriate” for his girlfriend? Baffled Boyfriend
I can’t help you feel younger.
Instead I suggest that you act your age. The gratuitous comment of someone posting on a Facebook page should be of no consequence. Maturity, security, humor and
confidence are the hallmarks of a guy who knows who he is. You do not have to prove your worthiness to anyone except yourself and your girl. You are approaching the prime of your life. You have served your country and should wear your gray hair with pride, and if you have any question about this, I have two words for you: George Clooney.
Dear Amy: I’m responding to the dialogue about what to do when given a hideous floral arrangement. As a husband who has given
flowers many times and never once received them, send the hideous ones to me. I am sure I
would find them quite beautiful. Lee, in Chapel Hill, N.C.
I’m sending you a virtual
bouquet and hereby ordering your wife to do so florally, as well.
Write to Amy Dickinson at askamy@
tribune.com or Ask Amy, Chicago Tribune, TT500, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611.
© 2010 by the Chicago Tribune Distributed by Tribune Media Services
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