Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl

by Donald Surrock

I got this book at Recycled Reads for $1, thinking I’d learn some interesting things to tell Daniel. In the end, there’s not much that I can share with him (or that he would find interesting), but I’m glad to know more about Roald Dahl nonetheless. This book took me months to read, so I’m also glad to be finished with it.

Highlight reminders

• RD had his teeth removed voluntarily! (ch. 9)
• After his 4-month-old son’s pram was hit by a cab in NYC, he co-invented a medical valve to replace one that he found inferior. (ch. 14) They didn’t end up using it on Theo, but it was used in over 3,000 other surgeries.
• The movie is called Willy Wonka (not Charlie) and the Chocolate Factory to appease the NAACP (ch. 18)

Chapter 1

The story about RD’s great-great-grandfather, the pastor who survived the church fire:

A story from “the Norwegian hamlet of Grue,” where a pastor was preaching a sermon on Pentecost, 1822. “As the young pastor warmed to the themes of his Pentecostal sermon, the aged sexton, tucked away in an unseen corner under the gallery, had felt his eyelids becoming heavy.” He fell asleep, and a fire used for lighting the church candles spread to the church building. The congregation smelled something but didn’t leave. Eventually, the sexton awoke and ran out, “shouting at the worshippers to save themselves.”

They “pressed against the church’s sturdy wooden doors in a desperate attempt to escape the flames. But the doors opened inwards and the pressure of the terrified crowd simply forced them more tightly shut.” The church and over 100 people died, “a most melancholy end.”

The only survivors “followed the example of their preacher. For Pastor Iver Hesselberg did not join the rush toward the closed church doors. Instead, he jumped swiftly down from his pulpit and, with great practical purpose, began piling up Bibles under one of the high windows by the altar. Then, after scrambling up them to the relative security of the window ledge, he hurled himself through the leaded glass and out of the burning edifice to safety.” European papers “praised the cool logic of the enterprising priest, who had thought his way out of a crisis and did not succumb to the group stampede. In later life, he was a member of the Norwegian parliament, “where he helped to ensure that all public buildings in Norway would in future be built with doors that opened outwards.”

Art and money

p. 25-26: Dahl saw the relatonship between art and money in a way that distanced him from his literary peers.

“All his life he bought and sold paintings, furniture and jewelry–sometimes to supplement his literary earnings. He even opened an antique shop. That connection between business and art, which came as naturally to him as breathing, would puzzle and irritate many of Dahl’s literary contemporaries, who resented his skill at making money and disliked the pride he took in his own financial successes.”

The book describes a party at Tom Stoppard’s in the 1970s, where Dahl was surrounded with literary types who “did not respect children’s writing as proper literature and this attitude made him feel vulnerable.”

He started telling Kingsley Amis that if he had financial problems, he should try writing a children’s book, and he began explaining how. “He probably felt that the only way to keep his head up with Amis was to talk money. The clash of attitudes was bitter and fundamental. Noting Dahl’s departure by helicopter (!), Amis concluded: ‘I watched the television news that night, but there was no report of a famous children’s author being killed in a helicopter crash.’”

Chapter 2 - death of his sister and father

Harald Dahl and his first wife Marie had two children, Ellen and Louis. Marie was from Paris. She died at age 29 while pregnant with their third child.

Some time later, he married Sofie Magdalene, from Norway. She had four children in five years: Astri (1912), Alfhild (1914), Roald (1916), and Else (1917).

Roald was named after a Norwegian Explorer, Roald Amundsen, who had reached the South Pole in 1911.

Sofie’s two sisters stayed to live in Norway with her parents. “Increasingly eccentric, they became a growing source of curiousity and amusement for their younger relations, who remembered them sitting on the veranda of their home, methodically picking maggots out of raspberries with a pin.”. Quite an image!

From pp. 37-38: Astri, her father’s favorite, died suddenly of a burst appendix at age 7. Harald was deeply grieved; when he came down with pneumonia a month later, he didn’t fight it, and he soon died as well at the age of 56, to be buried next to her. Roald would later go through a startlingly similar thing – his own eldest daughter would die at the age of seven. From Harald’s journal during the weeks after Astri’s death:

How little we understand about putting a price on the world's many good things? How seldom does the door to our hearts stand wide open? We put the blame on the fact that we have too much to do, that we must have peace and quiet to think and work, and so we shut out the sun. Only when it is too late do we see what we have missed.

Chapter 3

RD was unsentimental about losing his father. He had been too young when it happened to remember his dad, so it didn’t feel like he had lost anything. His mother is described as dauntless, practical, fearless, with a “crystal clear intellect” and wide-ranging interests. Devoted to her family, no outside social life, she was a “real storyteller.”

Chapter 4 - Ripton (school)

Describes school at Ripton, an archetypical British public school of the period, complete with houses, prefects, and underclassmen (“fags”) serving upperclassmen like slaves, even pre-warming their toilet seats by sitting on them (p. 70). His closest friend, Michael Arnold, was expelled for homosexual activity with younger students, but RD was not involved. The savage beating Arnold received before being kicked out left an impression and further solidified RD’s contempt for authority and independent nature.

Just as a photograph is fixed in the darkroom, Dahl was "fixed" at Repton. Already immensely self-reliant, he now further turned his back on English protocol and pecking orders.

I thought this was funny (particularly coming right after RD called missionary work “fatuous”):

[Upon graduating,] he joined an oil company to go work abroad. His mother, "desperate" at what she saw as his lack of ambition, sent off to have his horoscope professionally read. Years later, she told Else that the psychic predicted Roald was going to be a writer.

You can’t get much more fatuous (silly & pointless) than consulting a psychic.

Chapter 5 - job @ petrol co., Africa, joins the RAF in 1940

RD joined an “Exploring Society” and took a trip around Newfoundland right after graduating, where he became friends with Dennis Pearl. The trip was led by “Admiral” Murray Levick (not really an admiral). Page 95:

The "Admiral" defecated publicly each morning in full view of anyone who happened to be around: "The Admiral craps in the middle of the camp -- quite unashamed and very successful -- we all wish he wouldn't."

After the trip, he went to work at a petroleum company. For four years, not much happened – he lived with his mother and sisters, worked in an office, set up a darkroom, did some writing, played golf, bet on horses. His sex life apparently included at least two adulterous affairs connected to his golf club. [How many biographies have a I read recently that included adultery? Oppenheimer, Feynman, LBJ, and now RD. Only TR seems above it.]

Eventually, RD gets a post in Africa with the petroleum company, as he hoped. He has pets (a dog, Samka; and two cats, Oscar and Mrs. Taubsypuss). A young African, Mdisho, is his personal servant (p. 108); in the original draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie was black and possibly somewhat based on Mdisho. He writes home often (always including TMI about his bowel movements, which information is apparently appreciated, p. 106).

Page 113: “It was quite against his nature to admit that he could ever be in the wrong.”

At a club shortly before England entered the war, he and two friends drew a naked picture of Hitler and made up a game involving throwing darts at it. There was a complaint from a German member of the club, and RD was formatlly reprimanded. “The only lesson he had learned was: ‘Don’t throw darts at Hitler’s balls in public. They’re private parts.’” (p. 116)

Upon the outbreak of war, RD saw an opportunity to see more of Africa. He chose to join the Royal Air Force. “It was a fateful decision, perhaps the most important he ever made.” The chapter ends in 1940 with him heading for action, flying a biplane into the Western Desert of North Africa.

Chapter 6

He was trained at RAF Base Habbaniya in the middle of Iraq. Studying diligently now, he passed third in the group of 40 students; the only two who did better had previously flown commercially. He was assigned to a post with 80 Squadron in the Western Desert of Egypt. Flying to join his squadron at dusk, he couldn’t find them and ran out of fuel. He attempted a forced landing, but his plane crashed and caught fire, and he was knocked briefly unconscious. He then crawled out into the sand, and as the burning plane heated up, his own machine guns became active and began firing bullets into the sand around him. He fell asleep.

Another pilot (Douglas MacDonald) had been flying with him in a second plane. MacDonald rejoiced to find RD alive, and he cared for him until some others came. RD spent 7 months convalescing in Alexandria and at a base near Cairo, including getting a surgery to reconstruct his destroyed nose, then was sent flying into Greece to join his squadron.

Meanwhile, his family home was destroyed during German air raids, but his family survived. His own close brush with death (and possible postconcussive syndrome) left him with even fewer inhibitions and more of a desire to make a mark on the world. It “made him more aware of his vulnerability, more reflective, yet also intensified the sense of himself as a survivor, as a figure of destiny.” (p. 136)

Chapter 7

He fought in the Battle of Athens, in which RAF pilots were seriously outnumbered by Germans. He survived, was sent around to various places, and eventually was sent home. “Combat… made him more reflective, more inclined to relax and celebrate life.” (p. 152) He would now live his life in a “lower gear.”

Chapter 8

“Food rashioning and blackout restrictions aside, for the average British citizen there was little tangible sense of being involved in military conflict.” (p. 156) RD is sent to America to tell his war stories, drum up support for the war effort, and help the Americans feel a bond of unity with the British.

RD was sent to Washington, D.C. to boost relations with the US, drum up support for the war effort, etc. Although the facts about RD are kind of boring in this chapter, it gives a good overview of England’s entry into the war:

The main powers in Europe were Germany, England, and France. On April 10, 1940, Germany invaded Norway, England’s ally, forcing England to fight. The battle was badly mismanaged, eventually leading to Neville Chamberlain’s resignation and Churchill becoming prime minister.

The very day Chamberlain resigned, Germany invaded Luxembourg, Holland, and Belgium. Within 48 hours, they were invading France, too. By mid-June, Paris was occupied. (This reminds me of the kind of quick, decisive action taken by Roosevelt or LBJ – always ready with a plan, never missing an opportunity. Clearly, Hitler knew that England would be least able to help France in the midst of this regime change, and that Churchill would bring stiffer opposition, so he wasted no time.)

Germany wanted to execute Operation Sealion, a land invasion of England, next. First, they tried bombing England’s air bases, but the RAF – in maneuverable planes and using the newly-invented radar) fought them off. During an RAF raid on Berlin, 10 German civilians were killed, to which Hitler responded with the Blitz, sending waves of hundreds of bombers over London, sometimes bombing the town for hours at a time.

Chapter 9

RD wrote a story called The Gremlins, about mischievous creatures that wreak havoc on airplanes and cause problems for RAF pilots. His RAF handlers reviewed it and didn’t really see the point, but somehow (via the Ministry of Information) it ended up being sent to Walt Disney, who was very interested.

Walt Disney liked RD. He had trouble pronouncing “Roald,” so he nicknamed him, “Stalky.” RD flew out to Disney repeatedly, worked with animators, etc., but ultimately the idea of a Gremlins animated film didn’t work out.

(The word gremlin is possibly from the Old English greme, meaning, “to vex.”)

The Gremlins was published in Cosmopolitan, with proceeds being donated to the RAF for benevolence to war widows, etc. It was later published as an illustrated book in 1943. RD sent out many copies, including one to Eleanor Roosevelt, “who replied enthusiastically that she found the story ‘delightful.’”

He wrote other stories, with all his royalties going to charity – with one exception. He spent $380 on a “splendid new set of false teeth” with a gold/platinum plate. RD “believed that in most cases real teeth were more trouble than they were worth.” He had his removed years earlier (at age 21), thinking to avoid “years of infection, toothache, and expensive dental treatment.” He convinced his mother to do the same. He was frustrated that he could not convince his sisters, but his brother-in-law, Leslie Hansen, went for it. “Hansen’s subsequent decision not to have any new teeth fitted at all and to live the rest of his life chewing on his gums surprised [RD].” WEIRD!

An eccentric Transylvanian gypsy movie producer/director named Gabriel Pascal read The Gremlins and wanted to work with Dahl on a project funded by Vice President Henry Wallace. “Soon Dahl was meeting Wallace almost every day,” and he met with President Roosevelt as well. “His Widgets and Fifinellas [from Gremlins], so scorned by the top brass of the RAF, had obtained for him the ear of the most influential politicians in the country.” (p. 196)

He wrote other stories and got a new agent, Ann Watkins. Although the movie thing with Wallace didn’t work out, he and Wallace became tennis partners, and he was invited to dinners at the White House by Mrs. Roosevelt, who had become a fan.

Chapter 10

Dahl worked for the BSC – British Security Co-ordination, an organization set up by MI6 in New York during WWII.

He met Charles Marsh, the newspaper owner who also appears in LBJ’s life. LBJ had an affair with Marsh’s wife, Alice Glass. Both RD and LBJ spent time at Marsh’s palacial home, Longlea, in Virginia. RD and Marsh became best friends.

From p. 212, prefiguring Ted L. Nancy: “Under the names of Roald Gordon and Mr. C. Bell Ball, for example, they wrote a series of long-winded letters to a preposterous Californian mystic called Dr. Edmund J. Dingle, who dubbed himself, ‘Preceptor Emeritus of the Institute of Mental Physics.’ Apparently treating his philosophy with the utmost seriousness, they two men pushed to the limits of absurdity Dr. Dingle’s professed beliefs that his patented breathing techniques, learned in the high mountains of Tibet, could prolong human life by up to forty years.”

RD feared that America was setting up to be dominant in commercial air travel after the war. He was probably right. “Shortly after the US entered the war, they guaranteed to supply all UK air transport requirements in return for the British gov’t agreeing not to build any new cargo plains until Hitler was defeated.” This turned out to impede British development of their jet engine and gave the US time to catch up. (p. 219)

He hobnobs with some interesting people, including VP Wallace, Charles Marsh, Ernest Hemingway (p. 226), and of course FDR, who “treated me as a friend of Eleanor” (p. 229). Dahl passed along what he learned from FDR and Wallace to the BSC – at one point, Marsh showed him a paper Wallace had written, and RD had a BSC car meet him on the road, handed it off, the BSC drove off and made a copy, and then they returned it to him to give back to Marsh.

There is a ton of adultery here. Lots of relationships with older, married women.

His back gave him serious trouble in 1944, and at Marsh’s suggestion, he went to the Scott & White clinic in Temple for surgery. It took a couple of tries, but they were ultimately successful. Shortly after returning to Washington, he got very sick one night, and ended up in the ER being operated on for appendicitis.

In 1945, he returned to England.

Chapter 11

“Dahl opted to live in the countryside, ‘amongst the cows and the sheep and the slow spoken types with straw in their hair.’” (p. 250) He was inspired by a poem he’d read at Repton: The Scholar-Gipsy, by Matthew Arnold.

[Aside: I’d never heard of Matthew Arnold until I started reading For Lancelot Andrewes (T. S. Eliot), in which Arnold is the foil in one of the essays. Then, reviewing The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, I discovered that I actually had heard of Arnold and forgotten the name. When TR went to retrieve his stolen boat in Dakota in the middle of a harsh winter, he brought the works of Matthew Arnold along on the raft and read them (along with Anna Karenina!). Now, finding the name pop up again in this book, I felt compelled to read something by Matthew Arnold. I read Dover Beach, apparently fairly famous, and I should probably also read The Scholar-Gipsy, but I haven’t yet.]

He wrote his first novel, Some Time Never, featuring the gremlins. He was attempting “to write a grand, significant satire about burning issues of the time,” as well as “his own existential struggles.” (p. 257) It involves World War III and the destruction of humanity, seen from the gremlins’ point of view.

The reviews were mixed, and RD ended up hating the book, years later not wanting even his own wife to read it.

From p. 269: “He had not been to university. Yet he was neither working class nor an eccentric aristocrat. He was classless. He was political without a party affiliation. He loved good wine and glamorous company, yet he lived in a country cottage with his mother surrounded by a menagerie of animals.” Along with this, he felt lacking in literary sophistication (cf. the story about Kingsley Amis at the end of chapter 1), and he rarely wrote book reviews or openly criticized an author’s work, thinking himself vulnerable.

After Some Time Never, he wrote a number of short stories, but nothing connected until he sold a story to Collier’s “about the man who collected little fingers.” (I read this a while back in Tales of the Unexpected). He followed that up with another sale that brought him into the black financially, and it gave him the money to pursue grayhound racing, which, while it ended up being a financial drain, put him in contact with a lot of seedy characters to feed his literary imagination.

Chapter 12

His second novel, Fifty Thousand Frogskins, was never published. A manuscript survives, but that’s all. It features poachers, gambling, dog racing, etc. At one point during this time (1950-ish?), RD and his friend Claud Taylor actually did poach pheasants by feeding them raisins laced with sleeping pills; this later became a scene in Danny the Champion of the World.

He became friends with British artist Matthew Smith (“one of the most important British painters of the twentieth century” (295)). MS painted RD at one point. RD became involved in buying and selling art and later furniture, and also tried his hand at art forgery and other frauds. He became Charles Marsh’s antiques buyer, “which helper keep him solvent” after the war.

Marsh’s advice to RD when RD returned to England: “Work hard. Talk little. Be truly a miser of time.” This may be good advice for authors trying to complete books, but it surely exalts yourself above others.

Marsh came to visit RD and nearly drove his brother-in-law insane. Leslie Hansen, husband of Alfhild, was not that sane to begin with. When he met Marsh, he began to believe CM was Jesus Christ, he searched the Bible for support, and generally went mad. RD spent a lot of time bringing him back from the precipice, and in the end Leslie was not institutionalized, but it was “a near thing.”

RD’s papers from 1950 include a list entitled “Things I Hate,” which includes:

• Women who say, “What are you thinking?”
• Bookshelves with an unread look.
• Men who wear rings that are not absolutely plain. The larger the ring, the worse it is. A diamond worst of all.

The theme seems to be “things RD finds pretentious.”

Chapter 13

He married Patricia Neal in July, 1953. Her fame as an actress eclipsed his, which he did not like, and he pretty quickly suggested a divorce. Also had a dalliance (though apparently not consummated) with heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. But they worked through it, and their daughter Olivia Twenty Dahl was born April 20, 1955. Pat worked a lot, and RD did a good amount of the caretaking, which he apparently enjoyed.

Lots of missteps related to theater and movies, which I mostly skimmed over. He worked on a movie script of Moby-Dick, of which a draft had been written by Ray Bradbury, but RD was ultimately not credited (342).

His second book of short stories was getting a negative response from his publisher (Knopf). Sheila St. Lawrence at the Watkins Agency repeatedly suggested that he try writing a children’s book. Eventually, in 1959, he decided to try, and this led to James and the Giant Peach.

As he was considering the idea for James, he evaluated it carefully (352), knowing that “once you start you’re embarking on a year’s work.”

Chapter 14

His son Theo Matthew Dahl was born July 30, 1960 (367) in New York. On December 5, “the pram carrying Theo was hit by a cab on the corner of a NY street and crushed against the side of a bus.” The cab driver panicked and hit the accelerator instead of the break, launching the stroller 40 feet through the air. Theo took most of the impact with his head.

He did not die. They rushed to the hospital, emergency surgeries, etc. They drained fluid from his brain. When he eventually went home, they found that he was okay for a while but then went blind. Back at the hospital they drained fluid again, and his sight returned.

They installed a shunt – an “internal drainage tube into his heart.” (372) But the valve in this would become blocked after a while, fluid would build up, he would become blind again, they would rush him to the hospital again, and they would again drain his brain (and clear the blockage). This happened repeatedly.

Dahl was understandably not impressed by the valve in the shunt. He contacted friends in England to see if there was a better valve available. There was, so they tried that the next time, but “it too failed to function effectively.”

So, he contacted Stanley Wade (374), a craftsman and toymaker capable of very precise manufacturing. Together with a pediatric neurosurgeon named Kenneth Till, they designed a new valve. They watched Till perform surgery and learned about what was required. Within a year, the Dahl-Wade-Till (DWT) valve was ready. “It was a massive improvement on what had existed previously, and had been realized almost entirely by Dahl’s practical initiative and his refusal to accept the status quo.” The three men agreed not to make money from their invention, so the valve was also cheaper than its predecessors. “Before it was eventually superseded, the valve was used successfully on almost three thousand children around the world.”

Partly blaming NYC for what happened to Theo, they moved to England. In November 1962, while RD was working on Charlie’s Chocolate Boy, Olivia got the measles. She complained of a headache, then had seizures and was rushed to the hospital.

Chapter 15

Olivia died. RD: “I wish we’d had a chance to fight for her.” (388)

Struggling for consolation, he met with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher. “Dahl was always touchy about religion and would later claim that the conversation with Fisher finally convinced him Christianity was a sham.”

“Two years before, in Manhattan, he had blamed a peacock and a white-faced boy for Theo’s accident. They had semed like omens of disaster… At one point he seriously considered having a male witch come and exorcise malignant spirits from the house.” Christianity is a sham, but peacock omens are not? If people don’t believe in Christ, they will believe in anything.

Theo’s shunt was removed (394), and he never needed the DWT valve his father had helped create.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published Dec. 30, 1964. Comparisons between RD and Wonka:

• capricious, entertaining, brilliant
• adult with the sensibilities of a child
• devoid of sentimentality
• funny, private, elusive
• had a dark side
• could seem aloof, but underneath had a kind heart

RD wrote another story using a pre-assigned vocab of 250 words. It was eventually published as The Magic Finger.

May 1964: Ophelia Magdalene Dahl was born.

Feb. 1965: Pat was pregnant again. While in Hawaii filming a movie, she suffered an aneurism and nearly died at the hospital, leaving her in a near vegetative state.

Chapter 16

RD had a “brutally positive attitude” following Pat’s stroke, giving her intense stimulation with no opportunity for self-pity. “Unless I was prepared to have a bad-tempered desperately unhappy nitwit in the house, some very drastic action would have to be taken.” This was apparently pretty effective, although it took time.

On 8/4/65, their last child Lucy was born. Pat went on to act again in The Subject Was Roses in 1967 and was nominated for an Oscar. (She previously won the Oscar for Best Actress for the movie Hud in 1963.) Before that, she was offered the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. When she turned it down, her friend (and wife of Mel Brooks) Anne Bancroft took the role.

RD worked on the scripts for You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, both based on Ian Fleming novels. As usual for his Hollywood work, it was frustrating but lucrative.

He made even more money from his children’s books. By March 1968, Knopf owed him $1M in royalties! Strangely, he still had trouble finding a UK publisher. He eventually went with Allen & Unwin, with whom he made an unusual deal. They would pay him nothing until they recouped the printing costs, but then they would pay him a 50% royalty – much higher than the usual 10-20%. This gamble paid off for RD.

He published Fantastic Mr. Fox in 1970. But his marriage was beginning to crumble.

Chapter 17

Five years to the day after Olivia died, RD’s mother Sophia died on 11/17/67. “There is little doubt that the Norwegian grandmother in Dahl’s 1983 novel The Witches, ‘a wonderful storyteller, tremendously old and wrinkled, with a massive wide body smothered in gray lace,’ is his own literary tribute to her.” (452)

He met Liccy Crossland and began having an affair with her. She was not his only affair, but this one eventually ended his marriage with Pat. The children were caught up in it; Tessa found out and had to decide whether to tell Pat and blow things up at home or to become complicit by keeping the secret. She told Pat, and Roald and Liccy stopped seeing each other for a couple of years. But he was miserable without her and grew more distant from Pat. They were eventually divorced in 1983.

Page 464 mentions RD writing a “cogent and thoughtful case for cohabitation before marriage, so that young people could ’test their love for each other and check their chances of a successful partnership.’” This is certainly a common view, but his own life illustrates the flaw in it. He and Pat had been “cohabitating” at least since their marriage in 1953, but twenty years later it all began falling apart. Would any amount of cohabitating have helped them avoid this? In fact, their marriage failed because of RD’s unfaithfulness – and isn’t cohabitating a kind of unfaithfulness to one’s future spouse? In that case, favoring cohab. (and sleeping around in general) before marriage should have been a red flag for Pat not to marry him in the first place. The problem was RD’s own lack of faithfulness and commitment – astounding after all they had been through together! And his own selfishness, wanting to be taken care of more as he aged. I can understand that his injuries and Pat’s personality changes after the stroke caused him pain, but the only response to this must be, “husbands, love your wives…”

1975 - He published Danny The Champion of the World.

Chapter 18

Lots of examples in this chapter of his obstinate nature. Pat Neal said, “[Success] did not mellow my husband. Quite the contrary, it only enforced his conviction that although life was a two-way street, he had the right-of-way.” (482) “RD had a great sense of justice, but he just couldn’t get his head round it in relation to himself.” (515 – like a Pharisee) “[Nicky Logsdail] could not ever remember his uncle [RD] apologizing about anything.” (516)

When news leaked that Charlie would be made into a film, the NAACP objected on the grounds that the book was racist! (493) In the book, the Oompa-Loompas are African Pygmies “from the deepest and darkest part of the jungle where no white man had ever been before.” They said that even the word “chocolate” in the title had racist overtones.

RD changed the Oompa-Loompas, but the NAACP also did not want the movie to have the same title as the book, since they did not want the movie promotions to also promote a racist book. That’s why the movie is titled “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” !!!

“A grown-up talking about a children’s book is like a man talking about a woman’s hat.” (498)

His devotion to Dixon Ticonderoga #2 5/10 Medium pencils was fierce. He had always relied on his American publisher (Knopf) to get them for him, and when Random House failed to get them (p. 504), it seemed to really hurt the relationship.

Chapter 19

Not much noteworthy here; he got a new editor (Roxburgh) who he liked. In 1982, he published The BFG, his own favorite of all his works (522). The DWT valve he invented was used on his godson, Edmund, and saved his life following a car accident! (532) He tried to make Theo become a baker, then an antique dealer, among other things. Nothing worked. Eventually, Theo would work at a grocery store, then marry and start a family in Florida. (540) And several acts of kindness (giving money to people in need, a cigar to the cable-car operator, etc., 545)

“The mind of a child is a dark wood. It is full of secret half-civilized thoughts that are forgotten like dreams a short time afterwards.” (RD, quoted on p. 518)

Page 521 describes his time in a flow state in his writing hut:

You become a different person, you are no longer an ordinary fellow who walks around and looks after his children and eats meals and does silly things, you go into a completely different world... Time disappears completely... So when you meet a musician or a writer, you shouldn't be surprised that they look exactly like ordinary people, because in part of their lives they are. All the best artists that I've known, like Hemingway and Steinbeck and EB White and Thurber, behave very normally in their private lives... They are ordinary people who have a secret compartment somewhere in their brain which they can switch on when they become quote alone and go to work.

Chapter 20

Liccy’s daighter Lorina died unexpectedly from a brain tumor and aneurysm at age 26. RD’s health began to wane due to a rare form of leukemia (558). He wrote more stories, including Esio Trot and The Minpins. Much of his final months seemed dedicated to arranging things for his wife and children to be provided for after his death.

Many touching moments in the hospital at the end. At one point he said to Ophelia, “I am not frightened of falling off my perch. If Olivia can do it, so can I.” He told Tessa he loved her “very much indeed.” He said his main regret about dying was that he “will miss you all so much.” There is no mention of any thought about an afterlife. Everyone was well provided for financially, so he felt he had done his job and “he’d cleared his desk.”

He died 23 November 1990. Ophelia looked at his hut a few weeks after he died and of course found partial stories; there was every indication that he would have gone on and had plenty more ideas, had he lived longer. One of his favorite fragments of verse (564) sums up his life (indeed, all our lives):

My candle burns at both ends / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— / It gives a loveley light.

Vocab

• But Charles [Marsh] knew Roald well. This Scholar-Gypsy was also a sybarite (319). – a self-indulgent person, fond of luxury
• Despite his success, he was still merely part of the “juvenile division,” and Gottlieb was only dealing with him on sufferance (506) – tolerance, absence of objection
• When things fell apart with Random House, “his amour propre had been dented.” (508) – self-respect, sense of self-worth