He had never written a story before, and so naturally there were mistakes. He did not know any of the tricks with words which writers use, which they have to use just as painters have to use tricks with paint, but when he had finished writing…he left behind him a rare and powerful tale.
In “Only This,” a woman lies sleepless with anxiety after having heard a squadron of RAF bombers fly overhead en route to an air battle with the Germans; one of the pilots is her son, whose death by fire, vividly imagined, dissolves the barrier between reality and dreams and between a mother and her son, in this story of Lawrentian subtlety and intimacy that must have been, to Dahl’s readers in the early 1940s, deeply moving, like its companion piece “Death of an Old Old Man,” a mesmerizing account of the final, excruciatingly protracted minutes of a fighter pilot whose plane has been struck by a German Focke Wulf, forcing him to parachute out, and down, to his death in a muddy pond: “I won’t struggle, he thought. There is no point in struggling, for when there is a black cloud in the sky, it is bound to rain.” In “Someone Like You,” a spare, minimalist story in a heavily ironic Hemingway vein, two former RAF bomber pilots are getting companionably drunk together not long after the end of the war, reminiscing about “jinking” on their bombing missions:
“It would just be a gentle pressure with the ball of my foot upon the rudder-bar; a pressure so slight that I would hardly know that I was doing it, and it would throw the bombs on to a different house and onto different people. It is all up to me, the whole thing is up to me and each time that I go out I have to decide which ones shall be killed…”
“I jinked once,” I said, “ground-strafing I thought I’d kill the ones on the other side of the road instead.”
“Everybody jinks,” he said. “Shall we have another drink?”
In “The Soldier,” a story of 1948, a former soldier’s growing paranoia/psychosis is signaled by a pathological growing numbness in his body: by degrees he is losing his capacity to feel sensation, even pain. Suffering from a kind of delayed shell shock—with which his wife is inexplicably unsympathetic—he becomes susceptible to hallucinations and sudden outbursts of rage:
He moved his hand over to the left—and the moment the fingers touched the knob, something small but violent exploded inside his head and with it a surge of fury and outrage and fear. He opened the door, shut it quickly behind him and shouted: “Edna, are you there?”
Like numerous other calculating females in Dahl’s stories, canny Edna saves her life by dissociating herself from her troubled husband, who seems headed for incarceration in a mental asylum at the story’s end, like the similarly over-sensitive male protagonist of “The Sound Machine,” an amateur scientist named Klausner who has invented an ingenious machine that will be his undoing:
there is a whole world of sound about us all the time that we cannot hear: It is possible that up there in those high-pitched inaudible regions there is a new exciting music being made, so powerful that it would drive us mad if only our ears were tuned to hear the sound of it…This machine…is designed to pick up sound vibrations that are too high-pitched for reception by the human ear, and to convert them to a scale of audible tones, I tune it in, almost like a radio.
Since Klausner is “a frail, nervous, twitchy little man, a moth of a man, dreamy and distracted,” we are not surprised when the sound machine picks up the “frightful, throatless shrieks” of roses being cut in the garden next door, and the terrible shriek of a tree into which an ax has been driven: “enormous and frightful and…it had made him feel sick with horror.” Klausner too is led away: the inevitable fate for an individual who hasn’t inured himself to the horrors of even ordinary life, like “normal” people.
One of Dahl’s most gripping stories is the very brief “The Wish,” in which a highly sensitive, imaginative, and lonely child fantasizes lurid dangers in the design of a carpet in his home—“The red parts are red-hot coals…the black parts are poisonous snakes”—which he has no choice but to walk on, with nightmare results as an initially playful notion blossoms into what appears to be a full-blown psychosis, or worse. (Are the poisonous snakes really alive?) Subtly rendered, poignantly convincing, “The Wish” is reminiscent of Conrad Aiken’s classic tale of encroaching childhood madness, “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.” A kindred tale of growing adult paranoia originating in childhood trauma is “Galloping Foxley,” in which a London commuter in his early sixties begins to imagine that a fellow passenger on his train is an old public school prefect—“A ‘boazer’ we called it”—now in his sixties; as a boy, this Foxley had been a brutal sadist allowed by Repton school tradition to beat any of the “fags” in his residence:
Anyone who has been properly beaten will tell you that the real pain does not come until about eight or ten seconds after the stroke [with a cane]. The stroke itself is merely a loud crack and a sort of blunt thud against your back side, numbing you completely (I’m told a bullet wound does the same). But later on…it feels as if someone is laying a red hot poker right across your naked buttocks and it is absolutely impossible for you to prevent yourself from reaching back and clutching it with your hands.
Rare among Dahl’s stories, “Galloping Foxley” ends upon an unexpectedly muted, unmelodramatic note.2
In the aptly titled “Poison,” one of Dahl’s most brilliantly realized stories, an Englishman living in Bengal, India, is held thrall in his bed by what he believes to be a krait (a highly poisonous snake common to the region) coiled and sleeping on his stomach, beneath a sheet. The terrified man, unable to move for fear of waking the snake, is aided by a fellow Englishman, the narrator of the story, and by a local Indian doctor who behaves heroically only to be viciously insulted when the ordeal is over by the racist Englishman he’d helped: “You dirty little Hindu sewer rat!” This story, for most of its length an excruciating tale of suspense, exudes the air of a fable even as it must have made for painful reading at the time of its first publication, in the popular American magazine Collier’s.
After these admirable early stories, in which Roald Dahl would seem to have invested much of his own, intimate experience, Dahl moves decisively away from prose fiction of an intensely inward, sympathetic kind: intimacy is rejected for distance, sympathy for an Olympian detachment, as if the writer were determined not to succumb to the dangers of over-sensitivity like his victim-characters, but to identify with their punitive and sadistic tormenters, like the prefect bully Foxley who goes unpunished for his cruelty. In Someone Like You, and in successive collections of stories, Dahl casts a very cold eye upon the objects of his satire who are divided about equally, to paraphrase that most savage of English satirists, Jonathan Swift, between “fools and knaves.” Jeremy Treglown speaks of Dahl’s admiration for Ian Fleming (“One of his heroes”) and of Dahl’s increasing focus upon situation, to the exclusion of character:
Critics have often commented on how pared-down Dahl’s narrative style at its best can be, and it’s interesting how much else he does without. Setting, climate, architecture, food, dress, voice—all are sketched briefly, and with the most familiar, even clichéd strokes, as if to clear the way for what really matters.
As Roald Dahl’s books for children are often fueled by fantasies of tricks, pranks, revenge in various guises, so what “really matters” in Dahl’s mature work is punishment: “Vengeance Is Mine, Inc.,” a slapdash anecdotal tale ostensibly set in New York City, might well be the title for Dahl’s collected stories. Like his younger contemporaries Muriel Spark and Patricia Highsmith, Dahl has a zest for blackly comic/sadistic situations in which characters, often hapless, are punished out of all proportion to their wrongdoings. In one of the more subtly crafted stories, the ironically titled “The Way Up to Heaven,” first published in The New Yorker in 1954, an exasperatingly slow, doddering, self-absorbed old coot, seemingly so wealthy as to live in a “large six-storey house in New York City, on East Sixty-second Street, [with] four servants” and his own private elevator, is allowed
, by his long-suffering wife, to remain trapped in the elevator as she leaves for six weeks in Europe to visit with her daughter:
The chauffeur, had he been watching [Mrs. Foster] closely, might have noticed that her face had turned absolutely white and that the whole expression had subtly altered. There was no longer that soft and rather silly look. A peculiar hardness had settled itself upon the features. The little mouth, usually so flabby, was now tight and thin, the eyes were bright, and the voice, when she spoke, carried a new air of authority.
“Hurry, driver, hurry!”
“Isn’t your husband traveling with you?” the man asked, astonished.
“Certainly not…Don’t sit there talking, man. Get going! I’ve got a plane to catch for Paris!”
In a mordantly funny coda that must have stirred visceral dread in male, upper-middle-class New Yorker readers of that pre-feminist era, the elderly liberated woman, returning from a highly enjoyable visit with her daughter, is pleased to discover when she re-enters the six-storey town house, a “faint and curious odor in the air that she had never smelled before.”
In the frequently anthologized blackly humorous anecdotal tales “Lamb to the Slaughter” and “William and Mary,” kindred long-suffering wives of annoying husbands exact lethal if improbable revenge: in “Lamb to the Slaughter,” a revenge-tale of comic-book simplicity, a woman named Mary is told by her “senior policeman” husband that he intends to leave her; with a single swing of a frozen leg of lamb, she kills him; when his policeman-colleagues come to investigate, Mary roasts the lamb and serves it to the idiots who, eating, speculate on where the murder weapon might be:
“Personally, I think it’s right here on the premises.”
“Probably right under our noses…”
And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle.
In the belabored revenge fantasy “William and Mary,” another exasperated wife named Mary exacts a yet more ingenious revenge upon her husband, or upon his brain, which has been removed from his body following his “death” and kept alive by artificial means in a basin, at enormous expense. In a plot purloined from the popular science-fiction novel Donovan’s Brain (1943) by Curt Siodmak, the egotistical William Pearl, reduced to what resembles a “great gray pulpy walnut,” will be free to luxuriate in a purely intellectual world, “able to reflect upon the ways of the world with a detachment and a serenity that no man had ever attained before” linked to the outside world by a single, ghastly eye, the brain will even be able to peruse the London newspapers. But we know that William, or his brain, will not be treated with the wifely devotion William might have wished for, since Mary is perceived in broadly villainous strokes by a scientist-friend of her husband:
What a queer little woman this was, he thought, with her large eyes and her sullen, resentful air. Her features, which must have been quite pleasant once, had now gone completely. The mouth was slack, the cheeks loose and flabby, and the whole face gave the impression of having slowly but surely sagged to pieces through years and years of joyless married life.
Mary’s revenge too is one of comic-book simplicity: she will take her husband’s brain away with her, and blow smoke rings into the permanently opened eye: “I just can’t wait to get him home.”
This is the art, if “art” is the appropriate term, of caricature that prefers to jab, stab, slash its subjects instead of attempting to present them with any degree of complexity or sympathy. Grotesque descriptions of flat, cartoon characters are Dahl’s stock-in-trade, intended perhaps to be amusing but often merely peculiar, as in this thumbnail sketch of a mildly deranged gentleman named Mr. Botibol:
He resembled, to an extraordinary degree, an asparagus. His long narrow stalk did not appear to have any shoulders at all; it merely tapered upwards, growing gradually narrower and narrower until it came to a kind of point at the top of the small bald head. He was tightly encased in a shiny blue double-breasted suit, and this…accentuated the illusion of a vegetable to a preposterous degree.
Elsewhere, in the jokey “Dip in the Pool,” Mr. Botibol, or his namesake, is described as resembling a “bollard” with “skinny legs…covered in black hairs”: his fate is to drown in the ocean as a senile old woman gazes on unperturbed. Dahl’s females are particularly grotesque specimens, like Mrs. Ponsonby of “Nunc Dimittis” who is “so incredibly short and squat and stiff, [she looked as if] she had no legs at all above the knees,” has a “salmon mouth” and fingers “like a bunch of small white snakes wriggling in her lap.” The narrator of this sour little anecdote is an elderly bachelor—a “vicious, vengeful old man”—who takes revenge upon a woman friend for having gossiped about him by displaying a portrait of her part-naked, unattractive body to their mutual friends; that the poor woman wears a hefty brassiere (“an arrangement of black straps as skillfully and scientifically rigged as the supporting cables of a suspension bridge”) and is “bow-legged, like a jockey” is presented as particularly shocking. (The portrait painter of “Nunc Dimittis” would seem to have been modeled upon Gustav Klimt, known to have painted his female subjects nude before clothing them in their elaborate fin-de-siècle finery.) Most notably, there is the formidable president of the Daughters of the American Revolution, yet another, presumably unrelated Mrs. Ponsonby:
The door was opened by the most enormous female I had ever seen in my life. I have seen giant women in circuses. I have seen lady wrestlers and weight-lifters…But never had I seen a female so tall and broad and thick as this one. Nor so thoroughly repugnant…I was able to take most of it in—the metallic silver-blue hair with every strand glued into place, the brown pig-eyes, the long sharp nose sniffing for trouble, the curled lips, the prognathous jaw, the powder, the mascara, the scarlet lipstick and, most shattering of all, the massive shored-up bosom that projected like a balcony in front of her…And there she stood, the pneumatic giant, swathed from neck to ankles in the stars and stripes of the American flag.
It must be that such misogynist female portraits are self-portraits of the misogynist’s malformed soul, they draw forth such quivering, barely containable loathing.3
As Jonathan Swift is the most obsessively scatological of English satirists, so Roald Dahl is the most obsessively sexual, in stories as casually lewd as “The Great Switcheroo” (two men, wholly ordinary husbands and fathers, plot to “switch” wives in the night, without the silly wives’ knowing) or as doggedly protracted as “Bitch” (the womanizer Oswald Cornelius finances the development of a perfume with irresistible aphrodisiac powers, brand-name “Bitch”) in which the very man who is revolted by massive Mrs. Ponsonby ends up having sex with her in what, one assumes, Dahl means to be a comic scene:
I was standing naked in a rosy room and there was a funny feeling in my groin. I looked down and saw that my beloved sexual organ was three feet long and thick to match. It was still growing. It was lengthening and swelling at a tremendous rate…Bigger and bigger grew my astonishing organ, and it went on growing, by God, until it had enveloped my entire body and absorbed it within itself. I was now a gigantic perpendicular penis, seven feet tall and handsome as they come.
In the breezy “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat” the unnamed narrator, presumably speaking for the author, with the impassioned lunacy of Philip Wylie ranting about women—“Momism”—in the long-forgotten screed against women Generation of Vipers (1942), informs us:
America is the land of opportunity for women. Already they own about eighty-five percent of the wealth of the nation. Soon they will have it all. Divorce has become a lucrative process…Young men marry like mice, almost before they reach the age of puberty, and a large proportion of them have at least two ex-wives on the payroll by the time they are thirty-six years old. To support these ladies in the manner to which they are accustomed, the men must work like slaves, which is of course precisely what they are.
Yet, from time to time, a clever man can exact a merciless punishment upon a woman, even when, as in “The Last Act,” the wom
an has been a devoted wife to her late husband, after years of mourning at last daring to revive an old boyfriend’s interest in her, with cataclysmic results:
Then at last, Conrad put his tongue into one of her ears. The effect upon [Anna] was electric. It was as though a live two-hundred-volt plug had been pushed into an empty socket, and all the lights came on and the bones began to melt and the hot molten sap went running down into her limbs and she exploded into a frenzy…She flung her arms around Conrad’s neck and started kissing him back with far more gusto than he had ever kissed her and although he looked at first as though he thought she was going to swallow him alive, he soon recovered his balance.
In this crude misogynist fable which Jeremy Treglown in his introduction concedes that Dahl “would have done better to have scrapped,” the vengeful Conrad so humiliates Anna sexually, the poor woman is driven to commit suicide.
In the yet cruder misogynist fantasy “Georgy Porgy,” a priggish, sexually repressed minister is both repelled by and attracted to women:
Provided they remained at a safe distance, I could watch them for hours on end with the same peculiar fascination you yourself might experience in watching a creature you couldn’t bear to touch—an octopus, for example, or a long poisonous snake.