Here's how poet John Berryman differentiated between writers and non-writers: "Some people certainly feel that it's the price you pay for an overdeveloped sensibility. Namely, you know, the door sticks, as I try to open it, it sticks. Okay, so I have a nervous breakdown. The guy at the corner of Fifth and Hennepin, the door sticks … he fixes it and opens it. No sweat." Such a demarcation of character would be anathema to children's writer Roald Dahl.
Not only was Dahl the world-famous author of, among other children's classics, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, he was also a Shell Oil employee in Africa; a Second World War fighter pilot; a high-ranking member of the British air ministry stationed in wartime Washington (where he also acted as a British spy); the co-inventor of the Dahl-Wade-Till (DWT) valve, a surgically implanted tube that allowed cerebrospinal fluid to be drained from the brain into the heart where it could be safely reabsorbed (finding the urgent need for such a device after his young son was hit by a New York cab); an outspoken and controversial advocate of a Spartan recovery regime for stroke victims (after his first wife, Academy Award-winning actress Patricia Neal, was so afflicted); an avid antique collector, gardener and oenophile; and a luxury-loving playboy in his youth (one wartime friend remembered how he "slept with everybody on the east and west coasts that had more than fifty thousand dollars a year").
He was also the beloved, if occasionally exasperating, father of five children and stepfather to several more.
Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl, by Donald Sturrock, reveals that Dahl was emotionally distant from friends and family alike, reticent to show outward forms of affection, and intensely protective of his solitariness. Even those who loved him, or were at least enthralled by him (and there many), were prone to wonder if the intensity of their emotions was returned. Of course, another way of saying Dahl was prone to emotional detachment and was happiest when alone is to say he was, above all else, a writer.
Initially not a writer for children, either. Dahl was best known in the 1940s and '50s for short stories that Sturrock describes as "suspenseful, devious, fantastical and often a bit grisly." Dahl's books for children, even his earliest efforts, were something else entirely; the need for creating morally complex characters and to manipulate language in fresh and interesting ways was only an impediment to the successful children's author.
Dahl's originality and attraction from the start was in the admittedly two-dimensional characters he created that were, nonetheless, livelier, earthier and simply more interesting than most that had come before. His villains, for example, were "of a different order from most found in existing children's literature. They were cruel, selfish, greedy, lazy and violent - comic grotesques, whose vices were described with a relish for crude and disgusting detail that was already distinctively Dahl's own." Children may not be interested in reading about moral ambiguities or witnessing linguistic wonders, but they do demand to be constantly engaged and entertained, a skill at which Dahl was prodigiously proficient.
Whenever one sees the words "Authorized" and "Biography" strung together, wariness is justified. But although Sturrock acknowledges both the extensive co-operation of the Dahl family and his status as a pre-official biographer and family friend, he distinguishes himself by his balanced, even occasionally unsavoury - if fundamentally admiring - portrait. His writing, however, isn't nearly as distinguished.
Storyteller is cluttered with clichés ("Roald himself was no shrinking violet"; "a stone's throw from where his brother lived"; "but these halcyon days were not to last"); banalities (praising Dahl's "idiosyncratic talent for interweaving truth and fiction," something every writer possesses, if any good at all); irksome generalities (describing in a footnote, for example, how Dashiell Hammett "was in prison for his political views" without noting what these views were); and linguistic clumsiness ("This eccentric Arcadia, however, was by no means immune to the disillusion that was infecting the rest of the country").
Storyteller is aptly titled. Above all else, Dahl was a writer, whose greatest joy was in exercising "an infinite capacity for taking pains" with his books, whose primary passion in life was "to get down to it and work and work and work and work. … Rewrite and rewrite and rewrite." In spite of the personal tragedies everyone must endure over a lifetime, and his life-long resentment that he was never accepted by the literary establishment as the "serious" writer he set out be, Dahl lived and loved his own way and wrote the books only he was capable of writing. No writer can ask for more.
Contributing reviewer Ray Robertson's most recent novel is David. His next book, Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live, will be published in 2011.