DAHL, Roald

Nationality: British. Born: Llandaff, Glamorgan, Wales, 13 September 1916. Education: Repton School, Yorkshire. Military Service: Served in the Royal Air Force, 1939-45; served for Royal Air Force in Nairobi and Habbanyah, 1939-40; manned a fighter squadron in the Western Desert, 1940 (wounded); manned a fighter squadron in Greece and Syria, 1941; assistant air attaché, Washington, D.C., 1942-43; wing commander, 1943; with British Security Co-ordination, North America, 1943-45. Family: Married 1) the actress Patricia Neal in 1953 (divorced 1983), one son and four daughters (one deceased); 2) Felicity Ann Crosland in 1983. Career: Writer. Member of Public Schools Exploring Society expedition to Newfoundland, 1934; Eastern staff, Shell Company, London, 1933-37 and Shell Company of East Africa, Dar-es-Salaam, 1937-39. Awards: Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award, 1953, 1959, 1980; Federation of Children's Book Groups award, 1983; Whitbread award, 1983; World Fantasy Convention award, 1983; Federation of Children's Book Groups award, 1989. D.Litt.: University of Keele, Staffordshire, 1988. Died: 23 November 1990.

Publications

Collections

The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl. 1992.

The Roald Dahl Treasury. 1997.

Short Stories

Over to You: 10 Stories of Flyers and Flying. 1946.

Someone Like You. 1953; revised edition, 1961.

Kiss, Kiss. 1960.

Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl. 1969.

Selected Stories. 1970.

Penguin Modern Stories 12, with others. 1972.

Switch Bitch. 1974.

The Best of Dahl. 1978.

Tales of the Unexpected. 1979.

More Tales of the Unexpected. 1980; as Further Tales of the Unexpected, 1981.

A Dahl Selection: Nine Short Stories, edited by Roy Blatchford. 1980.

Two Fables. 1986.

A Second Dahl Selection: Eight Short Stories, edited by HélèneFawcett. 1987.

Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life, illustrated by John Lawrence. 1990.

Lamb to the Slaughter and Other Stories. 1995.

The Umbrella Man and Other Stories (for teenagers). 1998.

Novels

Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen. 1948.

My Uncle Oswald. 1979.

Fiction (for children)

The Gremlins, illustrated by Walt Disney Studio. 1943.

James and the Giant Peach, illustrated by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. 1961.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, illustrated by JosephSchindelman. 1964.

The Magic Finger, illustrated by William Pène du Bois. 1966.

Fantastic Mr. Fox, illustrated by Donald Chaffin. 1970.

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, illustrated by JosephSchindelman. 1972.

Danny, The Champion of the World, illustrated by Jill Bennett. 1975.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. 1977; as The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar. 1977.

The Complete Adventures of Charlie and Mr. Willy Wonka (omnibus), illustrated by Faith Jaques. 1978.

The Enormous Crocodile, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1978.

The Twits, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1980.

George's Marvellous Medicine, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1981.

The BFG, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1982.

The Witches, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1983.

The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1985.

Matilda, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1988.

Esio Trot, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1990.

The Vicar of Nibbleswicke, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1991.

Plays

The Honeys (produced New York, 1955).

Screenplays:

You Only Live Twice, with Harry Jack Bloom, 1967;Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, with Ken Hughes, 1968; The Night-Digger, 1970; The Lightning Bug, 1971; Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, 1971.

Television Play:

Lamb to the Slaughter (Alfred Hitchcock Presents series), 1955.

Poetry (for children)

Revolting Rhymes, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1982.

Dirty Beasts, illustrated by Rosemary Fawcett. 1983.

Rhyme Stew, illustrated by Quentin Blake. 1989.

Other

Boy: Tales of Childhood (autobiography; for children). 1984.

Going Solo (autobiography; for children). 1986.

My Year. 1993.

Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes (recipe book for children). 1994.

The Roald Dahl Diary 1997. 1996.

Editor, Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories. 1983.

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Critical Studies:

Dahl by Chris Powling, 1983; Dahl by Alan Warren, 1988; Roald Dahl: From the Gremlins to the Chocolate Factory by Alan Warren, 1994; Roald Dahl: The Champion Storyteller by Andrea Shavick, 1997.

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After being severely wounded in World War II, and then resuming his career as a fighter pilot, Roald Dahl was sent to Washington as an assistant air attaché in 1942. It was in Washington that he began writing the short stories for American magazines about his wartime experience that were later collected as Over to You. Although Dahl later wrote more for children, his adult short fiction is included in a whole series of collections—Someone Like You, Kiss Kiss, Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl, Switch Bitch, and Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life. Some of these stories were dramatized for television and published in the two anthologies Tales of the Unexpected and More Tales of the Unexpected. Dahl's current reputation is, however, still largely dependent on his writing for children, and in 1983 he was awarded the Whitbread prize for The Witches. Although the more urbane short fiction was plainly written for adults, its foreshortened psychological and emotional perspectives, as well as other techniques, often bear the hallmark of a writer whose imagination is attuned to that of children.

The short story suits Dahl's imaginative purposes for a variety of reasons. It allows forceful moral points to be made without lengthy psychological analysis or emotional profundity. It permits a reliance on conversational exchange that promotes vividness and allows swift and effective caricature to be substituted for depth of characterization. Above all, it allows Dahl's point to be made in a single episode, anecdote, or escapade, often with his characteristic type of ending. He has been described as "the absolute master of the twist in the tale." Sometimes vicious twists at the end of the stories teasingly challenge the reader's generic expectations, generated by the register and language of the foregoing narration. The need for psychological complexity is replaced by a punchy story line, incidentally making the texts ideal for dramatization.

The literary techniques nevertheless are effective for being relatively unsophisticated. First-person narration is purposefully used to achieve real immediacy. In "Bitch" Dahl even introduces a mirror-system of first-person narrators in Uncle Oswald's diaries and the nephew who introduces them. The absurdity of the plot keeps the reader at a distance, while the mode of narration engages the reader's sympathies. Much the same might be said of "Pig," where the pretended literary form adds a further mine of irony. Dahl purports to be writing a fairy tale:

Once upon a time, in the City of New York, a beautiful baby boy was born into this world, and the joyful parents named him Lexington.

The alliterative "b" sounds, banal adjectives, the child's name, the upper case for "City," and the opening four words all converge to announce a register of amused irony. Lexington is referred to throughout the story as "our hero," portrayed as being sweetly innocent, with blond hair and blue eyes, writing a vegetarian cookbook, and living in the country where he looks after his elderly Aunt Glosspan. When she dies he buries her in the garden and goes to New York, where he is conned by a lawyer and eventually killed in an abattoir. The humor is macabre. The vegetarian not only eats meat, but becomes meat, falling into the boiling water with the other pigs. Writing about how to cook, he becomes cooked. The narrative is straight-faced, with "our hero" used in the last sentence. The fairy story pretense and faintly adolescent humor are deployed in a piece of short fiction dependent on subtle and adult ironies.

The boyishness of Dahl's humor remains conspicuous, locked into the grim period when his imagination was formed, between his famous account of being caned at his prep school (by a future archbishop of Canterbury) and his life as a beer-swilling young officer. He is fascinated by scrapes and how to get out of them, uses obsolete upper middle-class schoolboy slang, with words like "tough" and nicknames like "Stinker," and often uses pastiche of the boys' adventure story as a literary form.

The humor is bizarre, mischievous, sometimes ghoulish. In "Lamb to the Slaughter" a woman kills her husband with a joint of lamb from the freezer. With a dead husband and a frozen leg of lamb as his stage properties, Dahl sends her shopping and unfreezes the meat. The police are called as the murder weapon is roasting, and are prevailed on to eat it. Mary Moloney feels genuine grief, but cannot help sharing the reader's wry giggle as the police, thinking that the murder weapon "is probably right under our very noses," set about consuming it. That sort of humor, based on escapades and japes, runs right through Dahl's work, especially what he wrote for children.

In "The Twits" Mrs. Twit cooks "spaghetti" for her husband. In fact it is a plate of worms. Dahl is playing on what, until the quite recent past, was the average British child's unfamiliarity with pasta, and the xenophobic distaste for it. Mr. Twit invents a disease in revenge. He goes to great pains to convince Mrs. Twit that she has contracted "the dreaded shrinks," and that she is on the point of shrinking into oblivion. Once again children are always being warned against illnesses of which their age-group has no direct experience. The childish impishness of the children's stories is actually often distilled from the adult humor of more ambitious short fiction, like the resonant, alliterated names (Mr. Botibol, Mr. Buggage, Tibbs the butler, and Mrs. Tottle the secretary), or the schoolboy larks of trapping pheasants with raisins (in "The Champion of the World" from Kiss Kiss, which was in fact later reworked into a children's story, Danny, The Champion of the World).

"Vengeance Is Mine" hinges on a similar schoolboy sense of fantasy and justice. Two broke young men set up a business of wreaking revenge on gossip columnists on behalf of the rich people they have insulted in their columns. In less than a week they earn enough to retire. Only adults can know that adult values are so warped that rich people mostly like appearing in gossip columns, and that is Dahl's comment.

Not all the short fiction uses the same stereotype. "Katina" deals with the experiences of a soldier, implicitly Dahl himself, and the horrors that he witnessed in Greece. Simply and unsentimentally, the narrator remembers, but the small orphaned girl of the title is used to imply a sharp accusation against the soldiers who remain unable to consider the actual consequences of their killings. At the end, when Katina is killed, the narrator stands unthinking for several hours. The implication is that at this moment he turned against war. Dahl touches on emotional profundity, but without psychological complexity.

Dahl wrote unpretentiously, and laid no claim to the moral high ground. He wanted to entertain, and wrote with great skill and wonderful directness. But it is the sharp moral focus behind the vision that elevates the entertainment into literature.

—Claudia Levi

See the essay on "Georgy Porgy."