You've got to be cruel to be kind: the life of Roald Dahl

Near the end of Roald Dahl’s life, as Jeremy Treglown notes in his biography, an average of one in three British children bought or received a Dahl book every year. Though many authors of adult fiction have tried their hand at writing children’s books, the list of those famous in both fields is small indeed. For years an exemplar of this versatility, Dahl has lately come under the same kind of cloud that has rained on more single-track authors such as H. L. Mencken and Philip Larkin, accused of everything from anti-Semitism to xenophobia. It is to Treglown’s credit that he neither over-valorizes his subject nor serves up what Joyce Carol Oates once termed pathography.

Treglown is not Dahl’s official biographer, but he has done the kind of interview and background work one expects of an authorized study. And, as Dahl made a habit of knowing everyone (or everyone famous or otherwise useful in his career), this makes for a celebrated supporting cast. Authors and politicians from Ernest Hemingway and Ian Fleming to Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman came into contact with this charismatic ex-R.A.F. pilot. Yet he also had his dark side, most apparent near the end of his life. As Treglown notes: “He was famously a war hero, a connoisseur, a philanthropist, a devoted family man who had to confront an appalling succession of tragedies. He was also, as will be seen, a fantasist, an anti-Semite, a bully, and a self-publicizing troublemaker” (9).

Dahl’s story has been told before, both in Mark West’s 1992 biogra- phy and in Dahl’s own autobiographical Boy (1984) and Going Solo (1986). Born in Wales of Norwegian parents, Dahl was brought up by his strong-willed, widowed mother Sofie. At school, Dahl displayed the kind of mental and physical agility so useful for prep school games, but his grades were not good enough to attend university. Instead Dahl went abroad, securing a posting at the Shell Oil company in East Africa, comfortable enough employment until it was interrupted by World War II. During the early 1940s, he flew against daunting odds for the R.A.F. in Libya and Greece. After a bad crash sidelined him for the duration, he traveled as an assistant air attache to Washington D.C., where he was engaged in the bolstering of Britain’s military reputation, in some ways his first professional efforts at altering fact into fantasy. His writing career actually began with a doctored, 1942 account called “Shot Down over Libya,” which, as Treglown points out, was really the beginning of his fiction writing. Decades later, Dahl played with the facts similarly in Boy and Going Solo, which is why autobiographical works are no substitute for a scrupulous biography.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, Dahl established a name for himself as a writer of dark, twisted stories in the manner of John Collier and Saki. Collections such as Someone Like You (1953) and Kiss Kiss (1960) remain classics. His children’s books began to emerge in the early 1960s, starting with James and the Giant Peach (1961). The stories, he told interviewers, were meant to amuse his own children, and besides, he found it increasingly difficult to come up with darksome visions for his adult fiction. In fact, Dahl did not suddenly bloom into a writer for children but wrote a piece on gremlins for Walt Disney in the mid-1940s, as well as a deservedly forgotten novel on the same subject called Sometime Never (1948). Moreover, Dahl’s gruesomely entertaining adult narratives found increasingly smaller audiences as the public’s taste shifted to more open-ended realism.

The source of Dahl’s imaginative vision can be traced, in part, to the Norwegian and Welsh tales he heard as a child. Treglown and others are right in saying that much of Dahl’s cruelty is grounded in folklore and myth. But what makes Dahl’s works...