Matthew Dennison - Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, an Unofficial Biography

Teller

of the

Unexpected

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Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions

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Over the Hills and Far Away: The Life of Beatrix Potter

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Eternal Boy: The Life of Kenneth Grahame

The Queen

Teller

of the

Unexpected

The Life of Roald Dahl

An Unofficial Biography

MATTHEW DENNISON

www.headofzeus.com

First published in the UK in 2022 by Head of Zeus Ltd,
part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright Matthew Dennison, 2022

All quoted written material by Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl Story Company Ltd

The moral right of Matthew Dennison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781788549417
ISBN (E): 9781788549400

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If you want a bar of chocolate, all you have to do is go outside and get a bucket of mud.

Roald Dahl, explaining the workings of Bubblers Instant Chocolate-Making Machine in notes for an unwritten story

Artists are not gods. They are entertainers, pure and simple.

Roald Dahl, letter to The Times , 7 February 1990

Give children well-bound books Let them have good illustrations and fine printing, and be full of stories and tales of wonder. That done, have no fear that the child will not learn to read. Children love to hear absurd stories; you may see them every day in fits of laughter, or shedding tears at what you tell them.

Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fenelon,
On the Education of Daughters , 1688

For Tom Cairns, in gratitude

I M A PERFECTLY ordinary fellow, except that I happen to be very tall, Roald Dahl told a group of children in 1975. As with any number of pronouncements he made about himself over the course of an unpredictable life, he was aware of its disingenuousness even as he asserted its truth. Whatever his fictional stock-in-trade, Roald insisted, a writer seldom rivalled his characters for excitement: readers must not expect fiery eyes and a green moustache and ink all over [the writers] clothes; a writer, when you meet him, is not in the least bit like the books he writes.

Really? At least we can agree that Roald Dahl was not a perfectly ordinary fellow. He was neither eager nor willing to be mistaken for such. Admittedly he lacked a green moustache, his dislike of male facial hair as studiedly intemperate as many of his foibles. But his belief in fantasy, grotesquerie, magic the building blocks of so many of his fictions ran deep, and the stark polarities of good and bad which shape his narratives reflected a black-and-white dichotomy within his own outlook that more than once proved detrimental to his happiness, wellbeing or reputation.

Like Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame, whose lives I explored in short biographies in 2016 and 2018, Roald Dahl achieved extraordinary commercial success with work that has proved enduringly popular: paperback sales of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator exceeded more than 4 million in the UK alone by the time of his death. Beatrix Potter correctly predicted that her fame would rival Hans Christian Andersens; Roald might have said something similar. Indeed, in 1988, withdrawing from a government committee examining schools teaching of English, Roald justified his claim to omniscience in the matter of childrens reading by referring Education Minister Kenneth Baker to his record-breaking sales figures. In more than three decades since his death, his books have continued to sell in remarkable quantities, milestones in the cultural landscapes of successive generations: celebrated, imitated and frequently adapted for stage, screen and radio. As he regarded himself, very tall Roald Dahl writer and commercial commodity is a giant.

He is also, as he was in his lifetime, a divisive figure. At its best, Roalds writing both for children and adults is lyrical, hilarious, vivid, unpredictable, tender and utterly absorbing; his darkest fictions portray without regret a world of cruelty, cynicism, misanthropy and caprice. In a story written for private circulation, P. L. Travers, creator of Mary Poppins, claimed Children have strong and deep emotions but no mechanism to deal with them.

In the second half of his life, with the success of his writing for children, beginning in the 1960s, Roald repeatedly spoke and wrote about his work and the qualities within him that he believed uniquely equipped him to satisfy his audience. He denied any purpose behind his writing beyond an evangelical zeal for turning children into readers. There are very few messages in these books of mine. They are there simply to turn the child into a reader of books. Damn it all, they are mostly pure fantasy, he wrote to a linguistics student in 1989.

I do not remember much of it; not before anyway; not until it happened.

I GOT IT all wrong, commented Roald Dahl of his first draft of Matilda , his last full-length novel for children. He identified his mistakes in constructing his original story: The parents were normal. No good. The school was ordinary. No good.

Neither is a criticism that can be levelled at Roald Dahls own childhood parents or schooling. His enterprising father Harald was a perfectionist: exacting, undemonstrative (as Roald would prove), acquisitive but conscientious, the eldest child of an enormously tall, feckless Norwegian provincial butcher like the husband in Roalds story Genesis and Catastrophe, an arrogant, overbearing, bullying drunkard His shipbroking fortune amounted to 150,000, equivalent at current values to nearly 7 million, a more than comfortable nest egg for his grieving family. Among the death bed promises he extracted from his wife was an assurance that his children would be educated in England. Family tragedy a father and sister lost imprinted Roalds first horizons. From the outset his was not an ordinary childhood.

Among Harald Dahls legacies to Roald were aesthetic sensibilities (carefully cultivated) and a love of nature; the many curious objects that cluttered the table in Roalds writing hut as an adult included a silver and tortoiseshell paper knife of Haralds. Romantic for all his shrewdness, he had named his son after his hero, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole. Adventure and philanthropy would play their part in Roalds life, too. Harald had been married twice. His first wife, Marie Beaurrin-Gressier, died in 1907, leaving behind Roalds half-siblings, Ellen and Louis.