The big, ugly truth about Roald Dahl
IT’S A TALE OF THE UNEXPECTED: HOW THE AUTHOR CENSORED HIS OWN BOOKS
Roald dahl was a contrarian. he loved to take people by surprise, and to go too far. he once said: ‘I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty and very bad and very cruel. and if they’re ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That I think is fun and makes an impact.’
Those close to him recognised his need to shock. according to his agent he wanted ‘to be a provocateur . . . to say outrageous things just to get a reaction’. hoping to enliven a dreary dinner party, he would hurl a conversational firework like ‘Isn’t Beethoven a crummy musician?’ into the air. he would then delight in the explosion of outrage.
over dinner at the oxford Union, he once told Winston Churchill’s grandson Rupert Soames that his beloved grandmother, Clementine, was ‘a boring non-entity’.
he might best be described as a wind-up merchant.
In 1989, when
Iran’s ayatollah Khomeini issued a death sentence on the novelist Salman Rushdie, dahl perversely took the ayatollah’s side, condemning Rushdie as ‘a dangerous opportunist’.
This least sensitive of writers went on to attack Rushdie for his insensitivity. Why, he asked, had Rushdie not exercised self-censorship before publishing his book?
‘The primal desire to annoy was never far away,’ observed his biographer, donald Sturrock.
like one of his own mischievous creations, dahl delighted in confounding expectations. What would he have thought of recent events?
Puffin Books have altered the ‘old hag’ in The Witches to an ‘old crow’, and ‘ You must be mad, woman’ to ‘ You must be out of your mind’. The ‘fat little brown mouse’ is now a ‘ little brown mouse’. In The Witches alone, 59 changes have been made.
Miss Trunchbull, the scary headmistress in Matilda, has lost her ‘ great horsey face’: now, it is just a ‘face’. Everything has been made duller and more agreeable.
In Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, augustus Gloop is no longer ‘fat’, and where once the oompa loompas were smuggled into the factory ‘in large packing cases with holes in them’, they are now volunteers who ‘love it here’. In The BFG, the Queen’s maid who used to go ‘white as a sheet’ now goes ‘still as a statue’, to avoid any hint of racism. Mrs Twit is no longer ‘ugly and beastly’: she is just ‘beastly’.
In George’s Marvellous Medicine, ‘Maybe that will brighten up those horrid brown teeth of hers,’ becomes: ‘Maybe that will brighten up her smile.’
In James and The Giant Peach, aunt Sponge used to be ‘enormously fat’, but now she is only ‘quite large’. dahl’s vivid, vulgar world has turned beige and tasteful.
all sorts of authors have expressed shock at these priggish alterations. Sir Salman Rushdie, who has good reason to get his own back on dahl, has instead leapt to his defence, tweeting: ‘ This is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the dahl estate should be ashamed’.
dahl himself once said that if anyone changed a word after his death: ‘I will send the enormous crocodile to gobble them up.’
all well and good. But readers of Roald dahl’s macabre adult short stories know to expect a twist in the tale.
So here comes the twist. during his lifetime, Roald dahl regularly softened his books to comply with his publishers’ demands. he liked being rich, and never wanted to jeopardise it.
‘I will try to think of another word for spade,’ he wrote to the U.S. editor of Fantastic Mr Fox about the term sometimes used as a racial slur. ‘Shovel will not do because that is used in the story for mechanical shovels.’ he also agreed to change the expression ‘black with rage’.
AFTERa complaint in the U.S. from the National association For The advancement of Colored People, he changed the colour of the oompa loompas from black to white and cut the passage about them emerging ‘ from the very deepest and darkest part of the jungle where no white man had ever been before’.
of course, those of us who want to stop Puffin books altering dahl’s original words are still in the right — and it’s telling that the publisher has now agreed to publish his uncensored works alongside the airbrushed versions.
But perhaps we should also recognise that, somewhere in the great beyond, dahl will be mischievously preparing to pull the rug from beneath our feet, and will delight in watching us tumble.