Arnon Grunberg

Boarding school

Buttons

Roald Dahl again – Colin Burrow in LRB:

“All the ‘author’ has to do is press a button (‘historical, satirical, philosophical, political, romantic, erotic, humorous or straight’) and choose a style (‘classical, whimsical, racy, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, feminine etc’), and the machine will do the rest. The story says a lot about Dahl. ‘Feminine, etc’ is a nasty touch: for Dahl it appears there were no distinguishable female authors, and ‘Hemingway’ was by a wide margin his own favourite stylistic button to push. The machine also has a foot pedal which is used to boost the most valuable ingredient in fiction, ‘at any rate financially’: passion. Inexperienced users press too hard on that pedal, with queasy-making results.
‘The Great Automatic Grammatisator’ was written after the New Yorker had turned down one of Dahl’s stories. It is, like a lot of his fiction, simultaneously a vengeful satire and a wish-fulfilment fantasy. If you want to make a fortune as a writer all you have to do is push buttons, master the clichés of each genre and feed your audience what they want – but soft-pedal on the passion.”

(…)

“He survived the beatings and misery of an English boarding school and got a job with Shell. When war broke out he volunteered as a fighter pilot. He had a bad crash-landing in Libya while flying to join his squadron. That fractured his skull and left him with permanent back trouble, as well as giving rise to various tall stories. These include a tale called ‘Shot Down over Libya’ (though Dahl was not in fact shot down), in which a pilot survives in the desert on his own (though, as he acknowledged in a later story called ‘A Piece of Cake’, he was not in fact alone, since a fellow pilot who had seen him land watched over him all night).
Dahl later said the crash gave him a bang on the head which turned him into a writer. After months recuperating in Alexandria he joined a tiny squadron of pilots tasked with defending Greece against a far greater number of German planes, and was lucky to survive. His earliest stories were about flying, and fuse together blood and battles with visionary experiences. In ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’ (1945), an airman sees row on row of angelic aeroplanes flying into ‘a bright white light, shining bright and without any colour’ in a story that gives a gritty top-dressing of Hemingway to a wartime visionary mode that anticipates Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death by a couple of years.
Dahl’s injuries led to headaches and blackouts which prevented him from flying, so in 1942 he was transferred to Washington as an assistant air attaché. He became a genial, seductive, clubbable but outspoken spy, rumoured to have slept with ‘everybody on the East and West Coasts that had more than fifty thousand dollars a year’.”

(…)

“Dahl could also do domestic violence to detective fiction: in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’, written shortly before his marriage to Neal, a young wife murders her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, which she then cooks and offers to the detectives when they come looking for the murder weapon. Father Brown would have loved it, though like most of Dahl’s stories it has the emotional boniness of a shaggy dog story: it rests on a sharp punchline, but there is no love for or between the people in it. The tales from this period generally conclude with a snappy but mechanical twist in which the cheat is cheated, or the person trying to defraud someone else by betting or gambling or undervaluing antique furniture loses, or is killed, or is infected with leprosy, or gets some other kind of grisly narrative comeuppance. Indeed the ‘comeuppance’ button on Dahl’s personal automatic grammatisator was worked almost as hard as the letter ‘e’ on his typewriter. These stories came to be marketed as Tales of the Unexpected (1979), a title borrowed by Dennison for this new biography, though actually after you’ve read a dozen or so of them their twists cease to be at all unexpected. Dennison’s biography has the virtues of clarity and brevity, but despite declaring itself ‘unofficial’, which might suggest it offers shocking new revelations, it adds little to the very good duo of earlier Dahlographies, the first unofficial one by Jeremy Treglown (who busted many of Dahl’s many self-mythologisations) and the huge ‘official’ one by Donald Sturrock, which, while seeking to bring out the best in Dahl, doesn’t conceal his self-aggrandising side.”

(…)

“Then in 1962 their daughter Olivia contracted measles and died suddenly of encephalitis at the same age – just seven – at which Dahl’s sister had died. Dahl never talked about his grief for his daughter, though he kept a notebook in his desk drawer headed ‘Olivia’, which wasn’t discovered until after his death. It contained a dispassionately factual account of her illness: ‘Olivia lying quietly. Still unconscious. She has an even chance, doctor said. They had tapped her spine.’ Being dispassionately factual was Dahl’s antidote to despair.”

(…)

“His fiction thoroughly absorbed mid-20th-century behaviourist beliefs that human beings and animals alike are driven by appetites that can be conditioned by repeated exposure to external stimuli.
The behaviourism of B.F. Skinner was part of the lingua franca of 1950s America that Dahl absorbed. Some version of it underlay his effort to retrain his wife in the art of speech. It also lies beneath his early children’s fiction. Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) is often represented as the great eccentric who cares only for the success of his confectionary inventions. But he is also the master of manipulating appetites. Every child who tours his factory, apart from the saintly Charlie, is subject to a primitive passion which is violently corrected. Mike Teavee is shrunk because of his frenzied love of television, while the fat and greedy Augustus Gloop is squeezed thin when he’s sucked into a pipe meant for melted chocolate.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is rooted in Dahl’s experience of moving from the austerity of England in the 1940s to the glittery self-gratifications of America in the 1950s, which seemed by contrast to be a land flowing with chocolate and honey. The overt moral of the book – that the impoverished English boy who can slowly savour a chocolate bar and keep his appetites under control will win the game of life and inherit the earth, aka the chocolate factory, while the fat greedy kids and the spoilt rich kids will be driven by their appetites towards self-destruction – makes it seem benign, a kind of bastard fusion of Alice in Wonderland and the Sermon on the Mount. But it’s primarily an exercise in sugar-painting the infinite gratifications of commercialism.”

(…)

“The Fantastic Mr Fox originally saved his family from starvation by digging his way into local supermarkets. Dahl’s publishers suggested that shoplifting might not be quite the thing to encourage kids to do, and that it might offer more in the way of poetic justice if Mr Fox instead dug his way into the cellars and henhouses of the farmers who are trying to kill him. Dahl – though he could be monstrously aggressive with publishers – obliged. The heroine of the manuscript version of Matilda was a vengeful nightmare of a child who tries to fix a horse race (again harking back to the series of adult stories about Claud, who tries to fix greyhound races), and the teacher who becomes the lovely, oppressed Miss Honey had originally lost all her money through compulsive gambling, not (as in the final version) through the plotting of the vicious headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. Dahl’s American publisher Stephen Roxburgh – with whom he fell out after taking his advice – suggested that he rewrite the story, and the revised, charmingly moralised vengefulness of Matilda, who channels her rage into telekinesis and frees darling Miss Honey from her horrible aunt, became something adults might feel happy to read to their kids. It sold half a million copies in its first six months.”

(…)

“Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, published in 1972 to cash in on the film of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory released the year before, is based on the assumption that kids like spaceships and space monsters and they loved Willy Wonka, so let’s put Willy Wonka in orbit, throw in some space monsters, and add in the president of the United States, because that’s where Dahl’s biggest market was, and because all of that doesn’t really amount to a story let’s also have Willy Wonka invent a potion that will make Charlie’s aged grandparents get younger by twenty years – oops, too young if they overdose, so let’s throw in a maths lesson or two about how to count in twenties – because kids love magic potions, and adults love kids’ books that also teach them maths. Ker-ching. The crazily concocted potion as a subject of fiction which is itself a crazily concocted potion persisted through to George’s Marvellous Medicine(1981), in which everything is thrown into George’s pot – paint, flea powder, curry powder, engine oil – in order to make a medicine that produces supersized grannies and cows, and also in order to fulfil the terms of a four-book deal that Dahl had made with Knopf in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid paying tax on his enormous royalties. He ended up with a bill of more than £700,000 in 1987 when the taxman got wind of the deal. But even the Great Automatic Grammatisator itself would have blushed to spew out a pile of sugar-coated tripe like Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.”

(…)

“The BFG (Big Friendly Giant) of 1982 is by some distance his best book, because it has a different relationship with the unspeakable. It has oodles of charm and always keeps fear in view. In it the children of England and Europe are being eaten at night by horrible giants ‘as big as bumplehammers’, who in their hairy, toothy awfulness were perfect material for the pen of Quentin Blake. There is one, very Dahlish, nice giant, who is smaller than the rest. Like his original in Danny, the Champion of the World he blows dreams through children’s windows at night. He saves Sophie, the heroine, from being eaten and, with the aid of the queen (Dahl very much wanted a knighthood, and also knew that American audiences would love a scene in which a giant farts in front of British royalty), captures all the nasty giants. Many helicopters are involved, because Dahl thought all children love helicopters.”

Read the review here.

This review is harsh but slightly more benign than the funny but all too explicit piece by Merve Emre.

It’s better to analyze the monster (“He knew himself well enough to keep hidden the things that he needed to keep hidden in order to make fiction.”) than to judge it relentlessly, at least outside the courthouse.

Also, Colin Burrow is softer on Mr. Dahl’s books, which makes his verbal knife stabs (“But it’s [Charlie and the Chocolate Factory] primarily an exercise in sugar-painting the infinite gratifications of commercialism.”) only more deadly.

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