Children’s author Roald Dahl

SEAN NAUGHTON, in the latest issue of Culture Wars magazine, looks at the life and works of the famous children’s book author Roald Dahl, of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fame. Naughton calls Dahl the “bad granddad of children’s literature.” (If you don’t have a subscription to Culture Wars, you can buy the October issue for only $4. This article is well worth the price.)

He writes:

Like any good grandfather, Dahl really does want to bring joy to the children; as with his own five children to whom Dahl first told the tales as bed-time stories, his young readers are plied with an intoxicating, psychedelic cocktail of possibilities and i

mages and wordplay. But for all the phizzwizardry of his tales and for all the whoopsy-wiffling of his telling, each of his gloriumptious confections has an unmistakable bitterness in the coating and a deadly poison at the centre. For all the deftness of his writing and the playfulness of his story-telling, Roald Dahl cannot hide the cruelty of his gaze, nor the coldness and cruelty of his merciless, iconoclastic heart.

He cannot hide these things because he does not see them himself. He thinks that all the voyeurism and vengeance in his books is just childish fun. This is because he himself never grew up. I think the same can be said of his adoring fans. He remained all his life a playful, treat loving, self-centred child, with a loose tongue and a taste for revenge. There is something monstrous about a grown man who is clever and powerful but remains at heart a vengeful child. There is something monstrous about Roald Dahl. Bad Granddad.

[…]

Despite the hatefulness of his books, it is hard not to like Roald Dahl the boy and the man. Reading the biographies, you recognise a thousand weaknesses that we men must do battle with daily. He is a living warning, ‘a caution against the stumbling stone.’11 You get to like him with the kind of sympathy a classmate feels for the biggest guy in the class who gets drunk on his first night out and needs someone to stay and look after him until he is finally able to get up and stagger home. There is an Asperpger’s like frankness and coldness about the way he judges others and an abiding callousness, and yet he shows great loyalty, courage and spontaneous generosity, ever‘the present giver and treat maker.’

[….]

He was a kind of proto-hippie, always dreaming of the bohemian, gipsy life, “that was almost an extension of the delights of childhood,”16 but ruthlessly money-minded in pursuit of the means to live this way. He is “the best uncle a boy could wish for”17 but goes on later to corrupt that same nephew, Nicholas Logsdail, encouraging his “sexual adventures.”18 This I think gets to heart of his moral decline and is the key to reading his children’s books. He is a fornicator and an adulterer but he wants to be a good man and he has a genuine desire to find the truth. The confusion, guilt and moral blindness brought on by sexual sin can only be dispelled by repentance: instead Dahl looks for answers in all the wrong places ….

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