The Truth About Roald Dahl

The Twits, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda. Roald Dahl wrote some of the world's most loved children's books. But what do we know about the man himself? Was he really a spy? Was he a good husband? And why have some editions of his books been edited? Kate is joined by Rosie Gailor, who is on instagram as @rosieandroald. This episode was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters! It's me, Kate Lister, and you are you, and I am me, and this is Betwixt the Sheets. Hello! Thank you for coming back. Always a pleasure, never a chore. But before we can keep going, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, to other adults, about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too! Oh, my god, I feel safer. Do you feel safer? Well, that's the main thing. Right, let's crack on.

• 1:01Kate Lister?

  Welcome to the whimsical world of Roald Dahl. Just look at that enormous peach rolling down the hill into the sea. Will it float? And over there, giants are stomping around, and there are witches all over the place. And what's that? Is that a crocodile in a tree? There are chocolate rivers, and fantastic foxes, and George's marvellous medicine. It's fantastic! It's iconic! It's part of everyone's childhood. But what do we know about the man behind the magic? Huh, now buckle up, Betwixters. Let's get into it!

• 1:59Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex Scandal in Society, with me, Kate Lister. Roald Dahl authored over 40 books, including the much-loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, The Witches and loads of others. His books for children are daring and cheeky, darkly comic, sometimes they're grotesque, and people around the world love them. I love them. Which is why, once again, we have to get to that thorny question: is it ever possible to separate the art from the artist? Can you still love a book if it was written by an asshole? Dahl was what you might call a complicated man. He said and he wrote horrendously racist

• 2:44Kate Lister?

  things, as well as misogynistic things, anti-Semitic things, I can't sugarcoat that one for you, so much so that in the 2023 editions of his books, the publisher Puffin changed hundreds of potentially offensive words relating to race, mental health and physical appearance. So what do we know about Roald Dahl? Well, that's an enormous question. And today I am joined by Rosie Gaylor. And if anyone can help us tease this one out, it's her, because she has spent years investigating Dahl and his work. So are you ready to have your childhood ruined? Yeah, me too. Let's do this.

• 3:24Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Rosie Gaylor. How are you doing?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  I'm doing really well. How are you?

• 3:32Kate Lister?

  Oh, well, apart from the fact that it's very November-ish, isn't it? It's grey and it's overcast and it's miserable AF and there's no sun and it's dark by like 2pm. It sucks. Sorry, I'm on a tangent already.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  All of that is true. No, that's fine. I mean, it hasn't stopped raining here for three days straight, if that makes you feel any better.

• 3:49Kate Lister?

  It does slightly. But you're here to brighten my day, anyway, or maybe horrify it, I'm not sure. We're here to talk about, I'm gonna fuck his name up already, because I'm gonna say Roald Dahl, but that's not right, is it?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Well, so yeah, there are a couple of clips that I found where he pronounces that as Roald, but then in another book, Roald, because he has a Norwegian family. So he was born in Cardiff, but all of his family are Norwegian and they spent most of their summers in Norway. So I think it is meant to be Roald, but then there's a book by Barry Farrell called Patton Roald, where he says it's pronounced Ral.

• 4:22Kate Lister?

  Oh, fuck.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  So there's a couple of different in there. There's a couple of different versions. And like, the museum will always say Roald, it's like the storyteller in the museum when they use their social media, it's always Roald Dahl.

• 4:32Kate Lister?

  They say role as in like rolling around, rolling the hay, don't they?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Yeah, rolling the hay. I think that suits him up, yeah.

• 4:41Kate Lister?

  What did he say his name was?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  So there are two clips. So in an interview and in one of the first series that he was an introducer for, Way Out, which was an anthology series, much in the style of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and then later Tales of the Unexpected, where he would do a little monologue introduction, and then some of his work would be adapted for screen, as well as some other short stories. He was introduced as Ruwel Dahl. And then there's a later interview, I think in the 70s, where he corrects the interviewer and says, "Ruel," when she addresses him.

• 5:12Kate Lister?

  I wonder if he'd have been pissed off with people mispronouncing his name, or if he just went, "Oh, whatever." Like Van Gogh, Van Gogh, his Dutch pronunciation. He just eventually just let it go and was like, "Now, we'll just, whatever you want."

• 5:23Speaker 01

  I think it probably was a little bit of that, to be honest.

• 5:25Kate Lister?

  So what brought you, because you're a PhD student, so what brought you to study Ruwel Dahl? I'm going to assume that you first encountered him, like most of us do, when you were a small person.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, I have a very vivid memory of when my brother was younger, he was in a swimming club, and he's a little bit older, so I wanted to impress all of his cool swimming friends. And so when I had to go with him to swimming practice with my mum, I would bring Charlie in the chocolate factory to make myself look really cool and intelligent.

• 5:50Kate Lister?

  Oh, well played.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Thank you. It did not work.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  But I read his books, yeah, throughout my childhood. And then when I was in university, I started discovering his adult fiction, which is much darker. And there was a collection in particular called Skin, which I think is a really good one for people unfamiliar with his adult work to start with, because it covers a wide range of stories. And it's probably one of the least misogynistic examples of his books, because there aren't that many women in it. So it is a really good one to start with. And it was reading some of the adult fiction that I noticed some of the parallels with his children's fiction. And so I sort of always knew that I wanted to do a PhD at some point, but I wasn't ever really married to an idea. I didn't really know what that was going to look like. And then

• 6:37Speaker 01

  the more I started reading his works and sort of noticing these overlaps and narrated parallels and like narratorial positioning that was very similar, I thought, well, I think this is worth investigating really. And so that is what my PhD does is it looks specifically at the portrayal of women and girls in his children's fiction and his adult fiction, of which there is a lot. So I have to be very narrow in my scope. And then I look at how some adapters have dealt with misogyny when they have been bringing his work to the stage and screen. And so I have one chapter that is a case study of the various versions of Matilda, which was so much fun to write. And then I do a couple of comparisons with some of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes with some of the Tales of the Unexpected

• 7:19Speaker 01

  episodes, because there was a little bit of overlap for those. So yeah, I'm almost done with the thesis. Deadline is looming. But yeah, I mean, I've loved doing it.

• 7:28Kate Lister?

  Dark clothes is it's oh.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, January. Yeah.

• 7:31Kate Lister?

  Having flashbacks. You'll be fine. We're gonna cover a lot of ground about why there's a lot here to violently dislike about Roald Dahl, Roald Dahl. But before we even get to that one, why do you think that he's so beloved? Because therein is gonna lie the crux of this, because everyone has to try and square this circle eventually, which is that, oh, he wasn't a very nice person in a lot of ways. And yet I love his books. Why do you think that he is so beloved? What's the appeal?

• 8:01Speaker 01

  So my opinion is that there are a couple of things at play here. So pop culture has a lot of nostalgia in it, and Roald Dahl is a cornerstone of British pop culture. We have accepted him as one of our own, even though throughout his life, he always felt like a bit of an outsider. And I think one of the things specifically with him being a children's author is that it becomes a very precious memory for a lot of people. And it becomes, I think, most of childhood does, doesn't it? You look back very fondly at the time of innocence and like, childhood as like, a concept is seen as a very innocent time of life and a very innocent sort of embodiment of humanity. And Roald Dahl's books in particular. One of the reasons they stood out in the market is because they spoke to the child on the child's level.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  So one of the things, I think there's a really good quote where he says he likes to get down on his hands and knees and look at the world as a kid. And a lot of his biographers have said that he never really grew up, which is part of the reason why he was able to write so well for children. So having his books be a little bit subversive and a little bit violent and having some euphemistic jokes and innuendos that we can only appreciate as we get older. There's something about that that we cherish. And as we get older, we look back and we think, well, yeah, Roald Dahl really told us how it was. He really spoke to us on our level. And so that's why he stands out against. Beatrix Potter is a really good comparison because it's her books that led him to create the insect-like creatures in James and Giant Peach. Because he was, you know, looking at what gaps were in the market.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  He saw that she had basically covered all of the cute animals. And he was like, well, to stand out against her, I need to do something a bit weird. And so that's how we got the bugs. Thank you, Beatrix. But I think there's a lot of nostalgia at play. And one of the things I've noticed sort of anecdotally when talking to people, when I mention some of the naughtier parts of his personal life is people feel quite attacked because they sort of interpret my words as saying, your childhood isn't as good as you think it was. This thing you've held like held dear to you, I'm going to spoil it for you a little bit. I'm going to take off the rose tinted glasses. And there's, again, for adults buying the children's books for their kids, there's a lot of anti-television and sort of anti-media themes in it.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  And so it goes back to that sort of like, oh, back in the good old days when things were simpler and everyone was like just talking to each other and just had paper and analog media. It's, yeah, again, a very nostalgic thing. And like, he was writing these books in the 60s where after the war, there was a huge change in the way people lived and the technologies that we were using and the way people were not even working in the workplace, but at home and in schools. Culture in the UK and the US was like really fast track changing. And so what Dahl was doing was he'd be sort of looking back and saying, well, remember the time without media? How good was this? Books are amazing. And so I think it works on both. The adult and the child level in that way.

• 10:54Kate Lister?

  It's easy to feel, like you said, personally attacked. I think that's a good way of describing it when you realise that the artist who produced art that you like is a bit of a shit, to say the least. You become so personally attached to it. It's like finding out that your best friend did horrible things. It's like you're now a bad judge of character because of that, even though there's no way that you could possibly, possibly have known the things that he was doing. It's a weird parasocial relationship that we have with authors and artists sometimes. But let's talk about him. So everyone buckle up because we're gonna be rampaging through your childhood quite badly. But let's talk about his childhood. What's his origin story? Where did he come from?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  So Norwegian family, born in Cardiff. So when he was three, really sad series of events for his family. His dad died and his older sister died. And so his mum relocated to Cardiff to be near her brother-in-law and used the money that she inherited to send Roald away to boarding schools, which he never enjoyed. He tried to run away from school so many times. He faced having the measles because he knew one of his siblings has had it. And so he mirrored those symptoms, lied just to try and get home. He and his mother had a really interesting relationship. So he was one, I think he had five sisters. But he was known in the family as the apple because basically she like had a favourite and it was Roald.

• 12:17Kate Lister?

  Mums, eh?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Boys' mums, yes. And as the only boy in the family, I think he very much embodied the like man of the family role. And that happened even when he was away at school. So he would constantly be writing letters sort of advising on his sisters. And there's a really interesting book called Love from Boy, which is curated by Donald Sturrock. And that is a series of letters Roald wrote to his mum throughout his life. And his mum kept every single letter that he ever wrote her. As a wayside, sort of, I think it's really interesting. He never kept a single one of hers.

• 12:52Kate Lister?

  That sounds right.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  She kept every single one of his.

• 12:54Kate Lister?

  I think you've just summed up the patriarchy just quite well there.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think he really struggled in school because of the corporal punishments that were there. He really struggled with those. And there were a lot of like head boy abusing, like they used to call the youngest students, so when years in seven and eights, the F word slur. And that was what they were known as in those years because they had to go run around and do whatever the head boys told them to do.

• 13:18Kate Lister?

  Oh, oh, yeah, okay.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  And there were a lot of like pants down canings.

• 13:21Kate Lister?

  Okay, yes, yeah. I thought, I thought you meant fuckers there. I was like, no, there was like a system within posh schools, posh boarding schools, where older kids basically make younger kids be their servants. And, and yeah, it's a system known as fagging, wasn't it?

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so there is one particular example that I think is just really bizarre. Is that the younger students would be told to go to the outhouses or the bathrooms and like warm up the toilet seats before the head boys wanted to come in and use the toilet.

• 13:49Kate Lister?

  It's weird.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Isn't it weird?

• 13:51Kate Lister?

  This sounds like a complex childhood, I think, that we could probably say.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. And so after he left school, he decided he didn't want to go to university. He, I think in his last few years of school, he went on an expedition with some other schoolmates and they basically braved it out in the wild and that gave him a real love of adventure. And so instead of going to university, he decided that he was gonna work for Shell. And so at first he worked in the London offices. And then later he was stationed out in Africa. And so that for him sort of was a big box tick of some adventure in his life. You can read more about this in his autobiography, Going Solo. He talks a lot about it there. And in his first short story collection called Over To You, he mentions both his wartime stories

• 14:40Speaker 01

  and like mentions some of his life when he was living in Africa. And so, yeah, he was living away for a long time. It was there, he was out there when the war struck. And then he immediately enlisted in the RAF. He was at six foot six. He was not considered the ideal candidate because his head, you stick out of the cockpit. One of the books, I think it's Donald Starrett's books, described him as almost crawling into a fetal-like position to like fit inside the plane. And that might explain why when he did crash, I think this was in 1940, really, really bad crash, his nose went all the way back into his face and had to be reconstructed. He suffered a spine injury and that caused him chronic pain throughout his life. And that is probably because he was a bit too tall for

• 15:25Kate Lister?

  Right, okay.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  the actual vehicle. Yeah.

• 15:28Kate Lister?

  So he's in the RAF, he's a bit too big for his plane really, crashes it, that's not good. And then does he become a spy? Or have I misremembered that?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  He becomes a spy. So after his first crash, he then goes back and is in active battle in the war. And then after that, he comes back to his hometown, he's in another crash, he comes back to his hometown to convalesce with his mum. And through his connections, he is posted as an assistant air attaché in Washington in the British Embassy. So he did not want to do this, but he didn't really know what to do himself because he didn't want to stop flying. But he also didn't want to go back to the RAF and be one of their instructors. And so he was given what he called a whiskey warrior job of going and basically being a schmoozer and a bit of a shagger. So he would go.

• 16:19Kate Lister?

  What job's that? Where's that in the army? I don't recall that at work experience day or careers day at school. That's not an official job. Top shagger while in America.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  No, they should put that on the posters, shouldn't they?

• 16:32Kate Lister?

  Certainly should get enough recruits. What's a go- tell me what you mean by that? He got a job as a schmoozer. What's that?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  He got a schmo- job as a schmoozer. So he was working first for the British Embassy, and his job was basically to get American sympathy for the British war effort. And so that basically meant high-flying friends, talking with them, trying to get funding and sort of like get media articles and like information passed over to the UK. And so that was his whole job, was to try and get the American sympathy, basically to get them into the war effort themselves.

• 17:07Kate Lister?

  And he did this by shagging their wives?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did this by shagging their wives and also working with Walt Disney.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Like this is, it's a really busy period of his life. So when he's first over in the States, he's working with Walt Disney and they're gonna make basically a propaganda film about the RAF and it's The Gremlins. And so it's gonna be a short film and it's, The Gremlins are basically this bit of RAF lore. And anytime that something would go wrong with the planes, the RAF pilots would come and sort of, in order to make it a less angry environment, they would say, those bloody gremlins are at it again, they've done this to my plane, they've done this to my plane.

• 17:45Kate Lister?

  There's gremlins in the works. Yeah, I've definitely said that before.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  And so that became an idea for a film, which Walt Disney was personally really involved with. But because the studio couldn't actually decipher who was the intellectual property owner, that never went any further and it ended up being a book. And so the book, The Gremlins, it sold pretty well, but because of wartime paper scarcity, there was only one print run and so editions are really, really rare. There was a reprint, I think in the 1950s, but for first editions, you mean, some people pay upwards of like $10,000 for them, like they are, it's nuts. So he did that and that was actually his first children's fiction publication was The Gremlins. And he didn't start writing for children again until 20 years later.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  This is all going on while he's working for the British Embassy and he crosses a few lines because he liked to write jokey letters, sort of making fun of his bosses and various like American politicians. But of course, being a spy, all of his mail was read and so he would have an audience and I think he sort of liked that. Not a very good spy. So then he was, because he was really good friends with an oil magnate, a newspaper, sort of tycoon, Charles Marsh, who was a mentor of Lyndon B. Johnson, through that connection, he was then enlisted in this like very secret unofficial service called the BSC, which I think is called the British Security Coordination.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  And it was nicknamed Churchill's Secret Army. And it was a sort of like quite informal position where it was basically subterfuge, sabotage and espionage. And so while he was in this very, very elite group, he became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt and he made friends with her by sending her a copy of The Gremlins for her to read to her grandkids.

• 19:35Kate Lister?

  Now, these are high-flying circles he's moving in.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Really, really high-flying circles. David Ogilvie is one such friend. Ian Fleming was part of that group. But yeah, really just like you can't get much higher than the bloody President of the United States. And so all his information was, was like, get information, feed it back to his services. And then there was one woman, her name is Millicent Rogers, and she was an oil tycoon and she was married to the owner of Time and Life magazine. And so he basically started sleeping with her to try and convince her to get her husband to post like articles in his magazines about the British war effort and the RAF. And so it was like just pillow talk. Yeah.

• 20:21Kate Lister?

  Oh, it's an interesting tactic.

• 20:28Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Rosie after this short break.

• 20:41Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right. It took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 21:21Kate Lister?

  Now, what I've read about Roald Dahl is that he was having sex with everybody at this point, pretty much. There was...

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:27Kate Lister?

  I can't remember who said it, but they were like, he pretty much spent most of his war having sex up and down the Western Front of America.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is pretty much it. Roald Dahl was a shagger. There's no other way to put it. Yeah.

• 21:38Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  I have got a list here of some various conquests. So like-

• 21:42Kate Lister?

  Hit me. Yeah, let's do it.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Donald Sturrock's book is a really good resource, and Jeremy Chaklon's book is also really good. The, like, Donald Sturrock's is the official autobiography, and he had access to the private letters and everything, which Jeremy Chaklon at the time didn't have, because that was published in 94. Sturrock's book was in 2010. But I've got a list of various people. So, when he first arrived in the US, he started sleeping with actress and socialite Phyllis Brooks. And in a letter to his colleagues, he said he made it his business to organise her for his trip. And then later, when a colleague was coming out of the States to visit him, Dahl said, "She wants to shoot me. So if she sees you, she'll probably shoot you as well." So, it's safe to say, I don't think things ended particularly

• 22:24Speaker 01

  well. And he seems to have a penchant for actresses, because he also slept with Leonora Corbett and Annabella Suzanne Charpentier, who's a French actress. And in Sturrock's book, specifically for Charpentier, Dahl is said to have told his second wife Felicity that she taught him a lot about sex, which he then put to practice. And-

• 22:46Kate Lister?

  Oh, love somebody did.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  One of the things I think is really interesting, he actually slept with Elizabeth Arden. He went to her New York boutique. He was suffering from acne at the time. He went in, and she was 40 years older than him at this point, and they just started shagging.

• 23:00Kate Lister?

  As you do.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Elizabeth Arden. Liz, like, the Elizabeth Arden. Yeah.

• 23:05Kate Lister?

  See, the thing is, is when people think about Roald Dahl, they will be imagining the very much older Roald Dahl, and he's got his bald hair, and he's kind of a bit hunched, and he looks very much like your grandpa. And it's a bit weird to imagine him doing this. Google "young Roald Dahl." Google "young Roald Dahl in his army outfit", and you might understand what's going on, I think. Because I think he was an attractive man.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  By all accounts, yeah, attractive. And basically, every single woman that he slept with who is interviewed or has, like, written letters says how charismatic he is. And so I think he was just, like, very exuberant. And I think because he was quite difficult-

• 23:41Kate Lister?

  I'll do it. That'll do it.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  That he was just very, he came across as very authoritative.

• 23:46Kate Lister?

  Right, so so far, so good. Not, I mean, it depends how you want to look at it. He's, he's, he's good with the ladies, he keeps having sex with people's wives, but he's a spy and he's a war hero and he's, he's writing stuff. So like, we should talk about his first wife, because that might lead us in nicely to things going a bit.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Yes, so Patricia Neal, Oscar-winning actress.

• 24:04Kate Lister?

  Another one.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Hugely famous in her own right, yes. So by the time they had met, I think she'd already won an Oscar for HUD. And then during their marriage, she was nominated for The Subject Was Roses, which I think was the first or second film that she made while recovering from her stroke.

• 24:21Kate Lister?

  Yes, she had a series of strokes, didn't she?

• 24:24Speaker 01

  A series of strokes while pregnant, really, really difficult time. And it was not long after their son had been hit by a cab while in New York. And so he was obviously suffering from catastrophic injuries. And yeah, Patricia Neal then, she had a series of strokes, left her very disabled for a long period of time. And she has recovered since then. It was a very long and arduous recovery. But the way that she recovered, it's a really interesting and knotty part, because by all accounts, everyone says that Rod was too hard on her. He was borderline abuse, right?

• 24:59Kate Lister?

  Yeah, like, like, give me an example of what he was doing when they said, like, too hard on her. What's he doing?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  So he was like calling her names, calling her nitwit, describing her as like a pickled pink cabbage and stuff. And whenever she would say the wrong word, so sort of if she was asking for coffee and she was saying the wrong word, he wouldn't give it to her until she said the right one. And he would put her through hours and hours and hours of like speech rehabilitation and sort of got friends to sit with her. And whenever the friends came, they were always sort of a bit shocked by not only how unwell Patricia was, but how almost cruel Rod was being to her. But I mean, it worked. And actually, the Stroke Association use a lot of what happened between him and Pat in their legislation and sort of their guides for stroke victims. Like, that's still in use.

• 25:47Kate Lister?

  They can't be recommending be a dick. That, that must like.

• 25:52Kate Lister?

  Which bit of it is it that they're recommending? Like, just like, keep at it, like, be relentless?

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's like the rigor of it, rather than like the cruelty. But yeah, by all accounts, it was not a particularly happy marriage. I don't think it was a particularly romantic marriage. Patricia Neal, in her autobiography, certainly says that she wasn't in love with him when she accepted his proposal.

• 26:13Kate Lister?

  That's not good, that. That's not a good start.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  No, she had not long broken up with Gary Cooper, who, another serial womanizer. She had a three-year-long affair with, I think, and then she met Rod shortly after. Very short courtship. She actually turned him down the first time that he phoned to ask her out on a date. She was like, absolutely not, you were really rude to me at dinner, I'm not going to go there. But then when he called again, she relented. And then, again, when he proposed, she turned him down and then later changed her mind because she wanted children. And so she was still sort of getting over Gary Cooper and Rod was basically there.

• 26:49Kate Lister?

  The rebound.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:51Kate Lister?

  He wasn't faithful, was he? That, we're getting into a bit more territory, shouting at his sick wife, and he was also not being faithful.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Yes, there was one particular time, I think this was in the seventies, where he was dating a gangster's daughter. And so we don't know her name, as you do. And he told Patricia Neal that this was just a friend and she was visiting from the States. And so he said, we're going to throw her a dinner party and made Patricia organise this dinner party for her, this affair partner. And during the dinner, Patricia realised that they were sleeping together. And so she's just sort of looking him across the table. And she recalls that she was like, there was a moment where Rod realised that I knew and he seemed to enjoy it.

• 27:33Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's, that's ugly. That's...

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Icky.

• 27:37Kate Lister?

  Yeah, it is, isn't it? That's, you hit these kind of things with historical figures and authors and people that you love once in a while. You just kind of, something hits you like, no, it's not coming back from that. That's, can't defend that one. That's just got to stand as it fucking is. All right, but then there is more tragedy because they lose one of their little girls as well. So the little boy has been knocked over, Patricia's had a stroke, he's nailing anything that'll come near him. What happens to the daughter?

• 28:02Speaker 01

  So Olivia, so she died from the measles when she was seven. It was really fast, really sudden. And one of the real tragedies of that situation is that the measles vaccine was available, but just not to them because they were living out in the country. And so it sort of started as most accounts do. She was feeling unwell and so they sent her to bed. And then by the morning, they had sort of realised they had sent for a doctor. She'd gone to hospital and then she just, she died very, very quickly. Um, and yeah, really, really distressing time for the family. And again, the biography sort of suggests that Olivia was Rod's favourite. And so that he was depressed, as you would be for a really long time after that, and sort of became a bit more isolated, spent a bit more time in his writing hut.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  And his other daughter, Tessa, who wrote a semi-autobiographical book, which I think is called Working for Love. She recounts this time and she always felt like a bit of an outsider and she always felt like she had to perform for her love. That's what she suggests is that there was a bit of a fractious relationship because of that. I don't think Dahl ever really recovered. But yeah, really notable and really sad. Like as a family, they went through their series of tragedies for sure.

• 29:11Kate Lister?

  He lost his faith as well, didn't he, after the death of his daughter?

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's something that is quite sweetly portrayed in the play Giant that's currently running in London. Is that there's this omnipresent toy chest sort of sitting at the back of the stage. And it only halfway through, they mentioned that that's Olivia's toy chest and they're looking, keeping it in a safe place while the house is being renovated. And I think that just sort of mirrors the omnipresence of that grief, as I think he always really carried that with him.

• 29:42Kate Lister?

  It's sad, isn't it? There's an awful lot of loss going here.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  It is really sad.

• 29:46Kate Lister?

  They do get divorced though, don't they? Eventually. It doesn't, just by all this work.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they were married for thirty years. I think they divorced in nineteen eighty-three, thirty years.

• 29:55Kate Lister?

  I didn't think it was thirty. Wow. Wow, okay, thirty years.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, thirty years. But the only divorced when Patricia found out about his eleven-year affair with his second wife, Felicity Dahl.

• 30:06Kate Lister?

  There it is. There it is. I was about to say, thirty years. Why are you divorcing after thirty years? Like, you're in it for the fucking long haul now. Like, I shouldn't say, that's a terrible thing to say, Kay. An eleven-year. Affair.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Eleven year affair.

• 30:22Kate Lister?

  Stuff like that, Rosie, like I, the admin of that, like attempting to live for 11 years, I couldn't be bothered with that.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Eleven years, I know, it was a lot. One of the things I find, well, one of the things that's really sad is that they met through Patricia Neal, so Patricia was booked for a coffee commercial and Felicity was working in the wardrobe and costume department and Roald went on set with Pat and that's how they were first introduced. She actually became Patricia's friend and they were friends for those 11 years and they were like, yeah, so they used to have dinner parties together, they would meet, so Felicity, I think, was living in London, the dolls were just outside of London in Great Missenden, so they used to go up to London pretty regularly. They had dinners parties together, like Felicity would come down and visit them in their home in Great Missenden, they actually went on holiday together and that was the first time

• 31:15Speaker 01

  that Patricia noticed, who was like, I think something is up because like those two would hang out together themselves, like those two women would go and like just be friends, as you would be. And one time when Patricia was in Felicity's house, she sort of notices a men's dressing gown hanging on the back of the door and she's like, are you, are you sleeping with someone, Felicity? And Felicity's like, I am, but he's married and he's got kids and so, you know, he's not gonna leave his wife.

• 31:41Kate Lister?

  That's nasty. No, I'll put my foot down with that one, the sisterhood there, come on.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I know, and this is so, it's all, that's all recounted in Patricia Neal's autobiography, which is a really interesting read. Eleven years. And it's during that time, there's a really, again, a really sad episode. So Tessa Dahl, when she was 16, she, much like Roald did in his early years, she really struggled with school when she was at a boarding school. And so she actually decided to leave school at 16, she was like, I don't want to do it anymore, I want to come back home. And so Roald, who had been conducting this fair and used to this child not being at home, he wanted to call Felicity from the house instead of having to go to a local phone box. And so he gave Tessa a sleeping pill, which was not unusual because she was having quite significant mental health problems and Roald in.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  As Donald Storick says in his book, Roald didn't trust psychiatry or psychiatrists. And so he would give Tessa barbiturates. And so Storick had interviewed Tessa and has used her book, Working for Love, to sort of corroborate this story. But yeah, so Dul gave Tessa a sleeping pill, but it didn't work and she woke up while he was on the phone. She noticed that he was being a bit cagey and so she asked him about it. And upon being sort of confronted with his daughter, he called her a bitch and said, I don't have time for you. Get out of my house. And while she was packing, he came in and said, okay, no, that was a bit too much. I take it back. He invited Tessa to have lunch with him and Felicity.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  And during this lunch, these two grown adults told this quite emotionally unstable 16 year old. It's up to you if you tell your mom about the affair because we don't want to upset Patricia. And they said, you can tell her, but you know, it will make Patricia really sad. Obviously, as a 16 year old who already felt that her dad didn't love her as much as her dad's youngest sister, Olivia. She decided to keep the secret because, and this is really beautiful in Donald Storick's book. She wanted to get closer to her dad and she thought she might basically earn a bit more of his love by keeping this secret.

• 33:51Kate Lister?

  Oh, he's a, he's an awful person. This is her, this, there's no possible excuse for this. That's just, that's wall to wall awfulness. That poor kid. Holy, but it is going to get worse though, isn't it, than this when it comes to what kind of person he was. And it's interesting that your work and your research is about the misogyny in his books. When, when you actually start to look for it and you actually start to be a bit more wise to it, it's riddled with it. It's everywhere. So if I was to like ask you, it's a really difficult question because they, I don't know how anyone answers this. But what were his attitudes to women? Because from what you're saying in his personal life, this isn't someone who respects women.

• 34:32Kate Lister?

  Or, but though he seems to be obsessed with them and needs them for validation, like what, I'm guessing, what's your take on that?

• 34:38Speaker 01

  I think that is a really good way to put it. And I think that gathering from the sort of private letters I've read, but again, published in Storick's book, there is. A really tricky relationship with women. And I think if you look at his relationship with his mum, where he was a little bit overbearing and ordered her and told her what to do with her money. And then with his first wife, Patricia, he basically wanted to act like the breadwinner, even though he wasn't earning the breadwinning salary. That was Patricia. He wanted to manage all the money. He wanted her to be more housewifely. But then also was quite sexually prudish. So there's a really interesting line in Jeremy Struglone's book where he says that Doug's work sort of has this pattern of an invasive, repelled attitude towards sex.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  And there's an anecdote from Patricia Ann Roll's honeymoon that I think sums this up, where she's coming out of the bath and she's standing naked, deciding what to wear. And I'm going to quote from her book now. "I loved my body. I stood there admiring myself and Roald looked up from his book. My god, will you stop that? Put some clothes on. I covered myself at once. I felt wretched until in the dark he became, as always, a most fulfilling and considerate lover. But never again did I appear in front of him naked, not until my stroke, when he had to help bathe me." And I think this sort of prudishness is really interesting, that you can be this like sexual provocateur, but then also not want it to be done in the daylight. There's something about it being secret and in the dark.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  And maybe like that would explain why there's so many sort of secret affairs where it's just one and done, little bit of excitement and then leaves them. But certainly-

• 36:17Kate Lister?

  I can see why he didn't like psychiatrists. They'd have a field day with that.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Yes. Oh, my god, can you imagine?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  I think there's definitely an issue. And there's one anecdote as well. So when he was, I think, visiting, I can't remember if he was visiting the States with his brother-in-law, he put a fake job advertisement in the hotel window saying that a wealthy businessman was looking for someone to come on like a business trip, all expenses paid. They would have a new job, new life. And a queue of women sort of going for streets responded to this job advert, which didn't exist. And I think that sort of carelessness, there's something about that that never sat right with me. And I'm sure that's not the most egregious example, but it certainly feels, yeah, it's nasty.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  I'll be back with Rosie after this short break.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  What started the civil war? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America? I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.

• 38:20Kate Lister?

  Let's talk about his work. Where does this misogyny crop up? You could make the argument that that most of the characters in his work are grotesque. So why do you think that he's particularly aggressive towards women?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  I'm not sure if I can reason why, but I can certainly say that there is a pattern of the way that he treats women. And there's sort of are these like sets of rules that he uses and like women are more or less judged on their appearance in a way that he doesn't do with men. So although men, like men, male villains, they're not described in nice terms, but it's certainly their appearance isn't the crux of why they're considered to be bad. But for women, it certainly is. Like if you think of Miss Trunchbull, you think of Mrs. Twit. The worst thing that Dahl has to say about Mr. Twit is that he has a really horrible beard and goes in depth about all the other things. But for Mrs. Twit, it's like she's fat, she's smelly, she has a glass eye, she's got horrible hair.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Like it's, there is a lot. And even for like Mrs. Wormwood, he really goes in on like her platinum hair and he says, well, you can see the roots and so you can tell she's not like a natural blonde. She has too much makeup and her body's all strapped in, but you can see the parts that are coming out. And so fat phobia is... Everywhere in his books again, but in the way for women, it is very much like, well, this is the reason she's not attractive. And so therefore she's not a good person.

• 39:45Kate Lister?

  We've got to talk about the witches then, because that's probably one of the most spectacular examples of misogyny in his book.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  And there are some really, really good bits of work. So there is a review by a woman called Catherine Itzen, writing for the Times Educational Supplement in 1985, where she describes the book as having woman hatred at its core, which I think is such a powerful quote. And she compares it to the Malus Maleficarum, I think I'm saying that correctly, which was published in the 1400s and is basically one misogynistic witch hunt of directed towards all women under the guise of being about witches and like retaining Christian values and everything, lower bullshit. So there's a quote here from Catherine Itzen saying, so it has a striking similarity to Melipus Maleficarum. Both texts, although separated

• 40:33Speaker 01

  by over 500 years, matched the anxiety of the authors to reassure themselves that women, not men, could be witches. This is a dangerous publication. And I think one of the things that is always used as a defence against the witches is that Grandmamma is this lovely character. And yeah, she is a lovely character, but she's also very masculine. And one of the, again, one of the defences is that the narrator clarifies that all witches are women, but not all women are witches. But then throughout the book, uses witches and women interchangeably. So they're both conflated. There's, there's no separation. And again, all the sort of associations of the witches with devilry and like serpents, there's a lot of biblical

• 41:15Speaker 01

  imagery. Yes, a lot of children eating. And there's also, it overlaps very neatly with his antisemitism because of the way they're described as this secret society who don't like people who aren't like themselves. They print their own money. They own a series of businesses. And there is one line in particular in the book where the narrator sort of laments that he can't round them all up and grind them in the mink grinder.

• 41:41Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  And so there's a lot of crossover in that book.

• 41:44Kate Lister?

  He was violently antisemitic. He was, some of the things that he said on record, out loud for people to fucking hear and read is just quite astonishing in its, I mean, there's, there's no like debating whether or not there's, there's a subtext or anything. Tell me some of the things that he said, and we'll also caveat that by saying that his estate and his family have since apologised and are clearly mortified by this, but let's, let's talk.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there was an official apology in 2020. And again, the play Giant is all about his antisemitism. And like, if you do have the chance to see it, I would recommend it. I think it's a really accessible way that they deal with it. And they put it as like a sort of public forum debate. And it goes through some of the quotes, and the quotes are unchanged in that play, but I'm going to go through some of them now. So this all came about after Dahl was asked to review a book called God Cryed by Tony Critton, which is a photography book, all about the Lebanon war. And the review is called Not a Shiverous Affair, and it's published in the Literary Review. You can still find that in their archive, but I think you need a login to get it. But it was published in 1983. And in this review, he says, the Jewish people switched rapidly from much pitied

• 42:53Speaker 01

  victims to barbarous murderers. That is a direct quote from the piece. And then there was immediate backlash. And he then gives a call to someone at the New Statesman. This was a recorded interview. This wasn't a private conversation. This was, Dahl knew these comments were going to be published. And so again, this is a direct quote. There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. I mean, there's always a reason why anti anything crops up anywhere. Even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason. He doesn't make any comments for a few years. And then in 1990, writing for the, well, interviewed for the Independent, he says, and this is a direct

• 43:33Speaker 01

  quote again. So, speaking on the Lebanon invasion, Dahl says, they killed 22,000 civilians when they bombed Beirut. It was very much hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish owned. There aren't any non-Jewish publishers anywhere. They control the media. Jolly clever thing to do. Yeah, and that is in nineteen ninety years a year that he died, so he didn't really have an opportunity to go back on that. But the Royal Mint in twenty fourteen actually rejected a push for a commemorative coin for Dahl. They said, no, he doesn't have, I think they called it, he doesn't have the highest reputation. So they said, no. And then that was sort of

• 44:15Speaker 01

  shortly followed by an official apology. But there's also like other references to sort of like Nazi culture in his books. So there's one short story called Genesis and Catastrophe, in which he writes about the birth of Hitler. And there's another one in his My Uncle Oswald book. The main character sort of collects a variety of things, including walking sticks of famous men. And he has one that used to be owned by Goebbels. And he delights in making a woman use it and touch it. And he says, like, can't you feel it trembling? Can't you feel it like the electricity up your fingers?

• 44:47Kate Lister?

  Shit, man.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is everywhere.

• 44:50Kate Lister?

  It really is, isn't it? I mean, there's no coming back from it. You can't defend it. You can't, I mean, why would you want to? It is what it is. And it's not even a little bit antisemitic slash racist. It's grotesquely. So.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:02Kate Lister?

  Oh, I didn't expect you to come on and defend him. But I didn't expect it to be as bad as it is. I mean, it's really bad.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm so sorry. It's really fucking bad. Yeah.

• 45:13Kate Lister?

  It's not your fault, Rosie. It's not your fault. But just, you know, to try and round this off. And people can go away and look all of this stuff up as you want to. As you said, it's already, the information is out there. But as a final question, then, and this is one of the most difficult ones, but where does this leave us with his legacy? How do you square this circle? How do you listen to these things that you've said, which are abhorrent? And how? Rosie, tell us how. Tell us the way.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Sure, I wish I could. But like, one of the things that I really struggle with is that obviously everyone's yardsticks are going to be different, right? Everyone's going to have a different threshold for what they can and can't, like you say, square up. And nostalgia plays a really tricky part in this, because what it means is that any sort of ways that we have self identified in our childhood, or like found ways of expressing ourselves, or found like a cure for loneliness in these books, or like been inspired by, for example, like Matilda's bravery, whatever. We have to say, well, I can't believe in that anymore. And it's like losing a part of yourself. And so there are some really, really good books out there. So in particular, there's one called Should We Burn Babar, which deals with a lot of like controversial authors.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  But for me, what is a difficult thing about that question is he will always be a point of academic interest for me. And so it's difficult for me to advise or sort of suggest what we should do because I'm always going to have to have some sort of relationship with him. Because I'm always going to be intrigued and I've spent the last four years of my life sort of looking at him and like sort of becoming enmeshed with him. But everyone is always going to have these different yardsticks. And I think it's whether or not people can separate the art from the artist and some people can and some people can't. I think personally, given how many like life influences you can find in his work, I would say that is probably more difficult to do with someone like Dahl.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  But it's sort of a personal yardstick, but it is hard. It is really hard because I think nostalgia and like the fact that he was a child's author makes it a very precious and sort of like innate thing. And people look back very fondly on these childhood memories.

• 47:14Kate Lister?

  We should probably say as well that like publishers have made efforts to like remove some of the more offensive words and things from his book already, haven't they? They have tried that.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, and that again, sort of proves the nostalgic element because there was a lot of backlash to that decision. So when Puffin announced huge, like people from the royal family, MPs, celebrities, even Salman Rushdie, who Dahl and him famously like did not like each other. He said, no, you shouldn't ever do this to an author's work. But they hired a sensitivity reading group and they changed a lot of work. And there is a Times article that details every single change. They go book by book and sort of do line by line of what has been replaced or removed. So that's worth reading. But it's a lot of instances of the word fat. There's a lot of like fatphobia that's been removed. There's a lot of, for example, mum and dad is replaced by parents. And so it's a real mixed bag what's changed.

• 48:05Kate Lister?

  See, I think fat's the least of it. After everything that you've said, actually, that's, that's, that's, that's comes really far down my, my scale.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  There was a massive backlash. And so then what Puffin? Have decided to do, which I think is a very savvy business decision, is they've now created two revenue streams by separating them. And so you can buy the revised editions, which are the ones with the more colourful book covers, or you can buy the originals or the classics, as they've now been branded, they've got their own special covers, they're like stripped back. I think I've got an example of one somewhere, but they're stripped back with gold foiling. And so they look more like heritage books. So if you go and like find them, so you can see, like, that's one of the classic editions of the enormous crocodile. And so it's like, really, it's almost like an adult version. It's like collector's item.

• 48:55Kate Lister?

  Ultimately, that just shows that you are damned if you're doing, you're damned if you don't, because like, you can tweak the words and stuff, but like, calling people fat is the absolute least of this, of the catalogue of issues that are there with it. But, oh, Rosie, thank you so much. You have been fascinating. I don't think we've resolved anything. I think we've just complicated things for people even more. But you know what? That's all right. You can just do that sometimes. But the very best of luck with your Viva. You're gonna, you're gonna absolutely smash it. And if people want to know more about you and your work, to say nice things to you, where can they find you?

• 49:33Speaker 01

  So I'm on Instagram at Rosie Anne Roald, or I have a website, rosiegala.com.

• 49:38Kate Lister?

  Amazing. Thank you so much for coming by. You've been magnificent.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Thank you. I've loved this. That's great. I love a little yap sesh.

• 49:47Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Rosie for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we are meeting the scandalous Midford sisters and heading back into the bedrooms of the ancient Egyptians. Did they have bedrooms? I suppose they must have. Did they? I don't know. I don't know if they had bedrooms. That's a good question. Maybe we'll answer it on that episode. And if you would like us to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, if you wanted to tell us if ancient Egyptians had bedrooms, then please email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Sophie G and the senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheet, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.