A darker shade of Dahl

Ahead of Roald Dahl’s 100th birthday this month, here’s our guide to his least read – and most disturbing – works

Over to You

In September 1940, Roald Dahl crashed his biplane in Libya and was blinded for two weeks. He telegrammed to his mother: “Crashed in desert two weeks ago absolutely OK soon… don’t expect any letters.” After this “monumental bash on the head”, debilitating headaches invalided him out of the RAF and he was posted, in 1942, as air attaché to the British Embassy in Washington. There, he wrote his first published story, “Shot Down Over Libya”: “I remember seeing some rocks lying in the sand beside the camel-thorn, and the camelthorn and the sand and the rocks leapt out of the ground and came to me. I remember that very clearly…” It appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and, retitled “A Piece of Cake”, became the centrepiece of Over to You (1946), Dahl’s first collection of stories. Each deals with a different aspect of the war: there are white-knuckle descriptions of aerial dogfights; elsewhere, there is black humour, and a quirky tale about soldiers rescuing girls from a Cairo brothel. The New Yorker noted the writer’s “original turn of mind”, but the book is also a masterpiece of brutal honesty: “Oh God, how I am frightened,” reads the opening line.

The Gremlins

Buoyed by the success of “Shot Down Over Libya”, Dahl continued to write and, in 1943, published his first novel – a children’s book about gremlins, nuisance creatures which, in RAF folklore, cause all the little mechanical failures in an aeroplane. Dahl set out to explain why gremlins should bear such a grudge: “In this most beautiful green wood there lived a tribe of funny little people... They had funny horns growing out of their funny heads and funny boots on their funny feet, and... they could walk upside down under the branches of the trees. Oh, it was a happy and peaceful life that these little men led – until the humans came.” The gremlins’ wood, it turns out, was flattened to make way for an aircraft factory, hence the tiny mites’ dislike of pilots. But one RAF fighter, Gus, tames them with the bribe of transatlantic postage stamps, a delicious food; then the gremlins help him defeat the Nazis. Dahl sent a copy to Eleanor Roosevelt, who read it to her grandchildren; Walt Disney almost made it into a film. Preoccupied with adult stories and screenplays, Dahl didn’t publish another children’s story until the Fifties. When he did, he is said to have asked himself: “What the hell am I writing this nonsense for?” The nonsense, of course, turned out to be very lucrative.

Sometime Never: a Fable for Supermen

But if nonsense is to be lucrative, it has to be light. Soon after The Gremlins, Dahl began work on something more ambitious, an apocalyptic fantasy for adults called Sometime Never, which was the first novel ever to depict an atomic explosion. Oddly, Dahl kept the gremlins, elevating the mites to the divine machinery (where, reviewers said, they caused the novel as many problems as they had the pilots). The plot is that, after meddling in the Battle of Britain, the snozzberry-eating gremlins work out that mankind doesn’t need any help destroying itself. Dahl’s descriptions of London after the atomic blast, particularly a barbecued doubledecker bus, are powerful: “through the open glassless windows… the bus was full of people, all sitting in their places, silent, immobile, as though they were waiting for the bus to start again. But their faces were scorched and seared and halfmelted and all of them had had their hats blown off their heads so that they sat there baldheaded, scorch-skinned, grotesque, but very upright in their seats. Up in front, the black-faced driver was... looking straight in front of him though the empty sockets of his eyes.” Dahl’s editor at Scribner US was Maxwell Perkins, the man who had discovered Hemingway and Capote, but he died before he could read Sometime Never. The book was published in 1948 to tepid reception in the United States and Britain, and Dahl tried to forget all about it. When a new edition was later proposed, Dahl snapped: “Why in God’s world anybody should want to paperback that ghastly book I don’t know.” But as a Cold War curiosity, it has ample merit for a second run.

Someone Like You

In this 1953 collection are some of Dahl’s greatest and most macabre stories: “Skin”, “Neck” and “Lamb to the Slaughter”. It was also from this collection that Dahl drew material for his only stage play, The Honeys. Taking three of the stories, the play follows “a woman through three marriages with three different men… In each case the husband is murdered because he deserves it,” as Dahl explained. It sounds rather wonderful – worthy of Patricia Highsmith – but it turned out to be a low moment in Dahl’s career. In 1955, the play bombed on Broadway, despite a cast of Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy and Dorothy Stickney. The New Yorker described it as “tedious” and “unpleasant”, and it ran for only 36 performances. To double Dahl’s punishment, it was staged a year later in London as Your Loving Wife. It bombed again, not surprisingly – that year, the London stage had seen the future