Book review: Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, by Donald Sturrock

Published on Monday 23 August 2010 14:17

HarperPress, 655pp, £25

ROALD Dahl hated biographies, and certainly biographies about writers. They're all bores, he said, and biography was boring too: why bother with tedious assemblages of boring facts about such boring people's lives when one could read their fiction instead? Or at least that's what, in 1986, when he was a 69-year-old internationally bestselling children's writer, he told the young man from the BBC who?had arrived at his home in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, to discuss a proposed documentary about him.

Did he really think that? Possibly not. But by the time you've followed Donald Sturrock's superb biography of Dahl into his triumphant late sixties, you know that's exactly what he would have said, daring the young man - Sturrock himself, as it happens - to come back at him, to spark a conversation. Digging in to defend a remark he mightn't have wholeheartedly believed in. Getting irascible, insulting even, if the younger man wouldn't rise to the challenge.

A bullying egotist, then? Not always. Dahl could be mercurially charming too, at least at first, although as almost all of his publishers found out, his affability would freeze at the teeniest perceived slight.

Sturrock must have realised immediately what a gift to a biographer such a biography-hating man would be. Here was, after all, a loner who befriended presidents and poachers alike. A war hero. A spy. A lothario who married an Oscar-winning actress and masterminded her recovery from a debilitating stroke. A gambler, a connoisseur of great art (his collection of Francis Bacons) and great wine (his thousand cases of 1982 Bordeaux). A father emotionally scarred by devastating tragedy. And yes, an internationally famous writer of dark, dazzlingly inventive children's stories too.

As with JG Ballard, the key to understanding the particular twist of Dahl's imagination lies in realising just what happened to him in the Second World War. Before then he had been a listless young assistant manager of an oil refinery in Dar es Salaam with a sufficiently large trust fund to keep him from worrying too much about his future. He had always stood out - 6ft 5in teenagers at English public schools tend to, even ones who aren't also Norwegian - but wasn't particularly accepted by his contemporaries. Not one of us, they probably said at Repton; good at games, but not quite prefect material. Bloody foreigner anyway.

In later years, he found he could always remember what being a child felt like. He didn't remember much about his father who died when he was three, and certainly in his fiction childhood bereavements are always handled without a hint of sentimentality. He always paid tribute to his mother's abilities as a storyteller, but even as a child had a darker vision of life (full of foul things and horrid people) than his contemporaries.

So far, so lonely. But in the Second World War that loneliness sharpened to an existential edge. He sometimes said that that it was the ?monumental bash on the head? he received when he crashed his plane in the Libyan desert in 1940 that made him a writer (stiff upper-lip speak for an accident in which he was nearly killed and which left him with permanent back pain). But that crash felt like a mark of failure, not a badge of honour. Once he had recuperated, what he experienced in the skies above Greece left a far deeper impact.

In April 1941, he flew his Hurricane against the enemy for the first time. Most of the rest of the British forces were already fleeing to Crete, but the RAF stayed behind, preposterously outnumbered: in the battle of Athens, 15 Hurricanes were ranged against 152 German planes.

Going up each day against such odds almost certainly left Dahl with an indifference to risk, and a colder eye on life. When his squadron was finally evacuated, he had five?kills?to his name and far more dead fellow pilots in his memory.

In Washington, where he was seconded as air attach to the British Embassy, he was the dashing war hero. His fanciful stories about the evil creatures called?Gremlins?that British pilots had to guard against became wildly popular in the United States. Walt Disney wanted to make a movie about them and got as far as designing the merchandised toys. Dahl was invited to Hollywood, a tall, handsome, rather exotic Englishman of the altogether more appealing, non-plummy variety. Hollywood loved him. DC loved him. His jealous superiors didn't, but even they couldn't do anything about it.

Because by now Dahl was not only a spy, but a particularly well-connected one: not only friends with the Roosevelts but best buddies with Henry Wallace, FDR's radical vice-president. Indeed, without Dahl's access to secret US papers, the British might not have realised as early as they did the extent to which post-war US foreign policy was predicated on trimming the British Empire.

By the time he left the British Embassy in 1944 (and what a place it must have been: the snooty Lord Halifax as ambassador, Isiah Berlin as information officer, farceur Ben Travers working in security), Dahl's maverick credentials were firmly established.

American publishers? - invariably more supportive of his work than British ones - were falling over each other to publish his short story collection Over to You. But as the war ended his decision to opt for a career as a writer looked in jeopardy: his first novel attracted poor reviews, his second was deemed unpublishable.Only in 1959, when he started writing James and the Giant Peach, did he finally land on his true metier. Suspicion of authority (the evil aunts Sponge and Spiker) mixed with fantasy (the giant peach itself) and flying (James's journey across the Atlantic to New York) in a story told firmly, and unsentimentally, from the child's point of view. Rightly, Sturrock isn't too reductionist in drawing out the links between the life and the work, but the threads between them are obvious.

By then he had been married to Patricia Neal for eight years. It wasn't a particularly warm marriage to begin with and, one suspects, it was largely bound together by tragedy. Just look at how closely packed that tragedy was. 1960: his baby Theo's pram is hit by a taxi and slammed 40 yards into a bus, shattering his skull. 1962: his seven-year-old Olivia dies of encephalitis. 1965: Patricia has a near-fatal stroke from which she only recovered through her husband's Draconian, unpitying regimen of recuperation. Even before then, she had told gossip columnist Louella Parsons, "It as as though the family were living through the Book of Job".

Yet through all this tragedy, triumph too. 1961: the writing of Willy Wonka, that most exuberantly capricious of children's books. 1963: Pat's film Hud, opens to rave reviews, winning an Oscar the following year. 1965: Dahl is paid $165,000 for screenwriting You Only Live Twice.

And, to all of this, add something I didn't know anything about: his co-invention in 1962 of the potentially life-saving Dahl-Wade-Till medical valve, a non-leaking shunt he developed to help drain the fluid from baby Theo's brain. Some 3,000 have been used: as Sturrock points out, there are people walking around with them in their heads even today.

No life could continue at such a pitch of dramatic intensity, although Dahl's bust-ups with his publishers and the uncovering of his love affair with Felicity Crossland, whom he married and with with whom he found domestic contentment, might have made it seem otherwise. Thanks to her, his last decade (The BFG, The Witches, The Fantastic Mr Fox etc) was the most productive of all. The rising status of children's writing might have helped too

Away from the dark cocoon of his writing shed - where he wrote in an enormous armchair that, he said, made him feel as though sitting in the cockpit of a Hurricane - he could be a trial to live with. He had survived vicissitudes that would have felled other men, and they had left him with an enduring sense of self-importance. Yet he could also be absurdly generous, wildly funny, and built a lasting legacy on his ability to tunnel back at will into frightened, magical, wildly imaginative world of childhood.

He may have distrusted biography, but the best examples of the genre can provide the greatest miracle of all: bringing a dead man back to life. Donald Sturrock's resurrection of Roald Dahl, a writer whose life was just about as far from boring as it is possible to be, is a near-perfect example of the art. "Make him come alive," his wife Felicity and daughter Ophelia urged him, when they gave him free access to Dahl's entire archive. Well, he's done just that.