A collection of 11 short stories by Roald Dahl, most published in magazines during the 1950s. The blurb says it contains some of his most macabre stories. Let’s pause a moment to define exactly what that means. Macabre = ‘disturbing because concerned with or causing a fear of death’ but that doesn’t seem adequate. Wikipedia devotes an entire article to the concept and gives some history:
The word has gained its significance from its use in the French phrase la danse macabre describing the allegorical representation of the ever-present and universal power of death. This was known in German as Der Totentanz and later in English as The Dance of the Dead. The typical form which the allegory takes is that of a series of images in which Death appears, either as a dancing skeleton or as a shrunken shrouded corpse, to people representing every age and condition of life, and leads them all in a dance to the grave.
So it’s to do not just with death by itself, but with creating a heavy, spooky, oppressive atmosphere of death and all its trappings. The Wikipedia links off to another article about Body horror which goes a bit deeper:
Body horror, or biological horror, is a subgenre of science fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or to any other creature.
So it’s not about death on its own, by itself, which can, after all, be pretty boring (as my mother’s slow passing in an NHS hospital was surrounded by the run-of-the-mill administration of a terminal ward). It’s about concocting or dwelling on gruesome and horrific and uncanny and generally scary and maybe disgusting aspects of death, especially lurid and melodramatic ways to die.
This then links to the notion of the gruesome, namely ‘causing repulsion or horror; grisly’. So to take just the first two stories, a young man realises that he is being poisoned so that his landlady can kill him, that’s odd but essentially boring, but when we learn she’s doing this in order to stuff him to create a permanent mannequin – now that’s grotesque. And a man’s brain is preserved after his death with a view to having great philosophical thoughts, that’s sort of standard sci fi – but what it means is that, now he is completely at her mercy, his wife can take revenge on him for years of abuse and oppression, now that’s grotesque.
So it’s not about death as such, it’s about horrifying types of death and twisted, perverse, unnaturally cruel ramifications of death.
- The Landlady (November 1959)
- William and Mary
- The Way Up to Heaven (February 1954)
- Parson’s Pleasure
- Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat (1959)
- Royal Jelly
- Georgy Porgy
- Genesis and Catastrophe: A True Story
- Edward the Conqueror (October 1953)
- Pig
- The Champion of the World
1. The Landlady (November 1959: 13 pages)
Bath. Billy Weaver is 17 and keen to make his way in the firm he works for. Head office send him to Bath where he’s to find somewhere to stay then report to regional office the next morning. At the station a porter recommends a pub, but en route to it Billy notices a sign in the window of one of those Regency terraced houses saying ‘bed and breakfast’. When he peers through the window he sees a dachshund dog and a parrot and thinks any place which has pets must be alright, mustn’t it? He knocks and the landlady lets him in and shows him round. She is extremely kind and solicitous. The whole point of the story is that only slowly does Billy realise something is wrong, which comes to a head when he recognises the names of the two previous guests, written in the Visitors Book, as men who were in the news for going missing. Then the landlady reveals that the two previous tenants have never left, they’re still here, ‘upstairs’. Then she reveals that the pets Billy saw are all stuffed. Then she reveals that she herself stuffed them, being a keen taxidermist.
All the while Billy has been drinking the nice cup of tea she made him although it has a flavour of bitter almonds which, as any fan of spy fiction knows, is what arsenic tastes of. So you’d have to be pretty dim not to realise that she has poisoned him, is going to kill and stuff him to join her other ‘young men.’ Super creepy.
2. William and Mary (35 pages)
Oxford. A very macabre story indeed. William Pearl was an unbearably controlling husband to resentful Mary. A lofty Professor of Philosophy at Oxford, he imposed strict rules on her – no smoking, no TV, no lipstick and so on. When they sat in silence in the living room, he reading some worthy tome, she darning his socks or buttons on his shirts, she could feel his cold disapproving eyes on her. He face has sagged, she’s lost her looks through years of joyless, bullied married life.
Then William got pancreatic cancer, wasted away and died but after his death his solicitor hands Mrs P a sealed letter which turns out to contain the most gruesome, macabre idea ever. It is that, on his deathbed Pearl was visited by a doctor/scientist colleague, Dr Landy, who tells him that they’ve been experimenting with animals and were now ready to keep a human brain alive after its body dies – and would he like to be the first human guinea pig for their procedure?
I think there’s the gruesome and macabre right there. It takes pages for the doctor to explain to Pearl the process (the brain will be kept in a vat and have fresh blood pumped through it by a machine) and a while for Pearl to overcome his distaste and all the obvious objections (he won’t have a body so won’t be able to hear or talk or move). The one thing they’ll give him is one eye, carefully extracted from his skull to ensure the optic nerve isn’t damaged. But in the end Pearl says yes to this gruesome experiment.
Back in the present Mrs Pearl reads the long explanation of all this which the letter contains and which ends by instructing her to phone Dr Landy to see how things turned out. He says come over so half an hour later she’s at his laboratory and is taken into the sealed room where her husband’s brain is being kept alive, attached to just one eye. Peering into the basin full of liquids and cables she’s sees something like a large walnut with a loop of spaghetti attached to a round eyeball fixed in position.
So far so much like a cheap and cranky science fiction story. What makes it Dahl, though, is the couple of pages which end the tale in which it slowly dawns on Mrs Pearl that now, after years of bullying, she can get her own back on her husband. He had forbidden her from wearing lipstick or smoking. But she had put on lipstick before coming to the lab and now, in front of the solitary eye, she lights up a cigarette, inhales deeply and blows the smoke out through her nose and – and this is the point – thinks she sees the pupil of the eye contract into a black dot of frustrated fury. Excellent! Suddenly she sees the appeal of the situation and tells the surprised Dr Landy that she wants to take ‘her husband’ home with her where, we get the strong impression, she will enjoy doing everything he ever banned her from doing, in full view of the eye, driving him mad with frustration.
Marital revenge. Revenge of the bullied woman.
3. The Way Up to Heaven (February 1954: 18 pages)
New York, a smart house at 9 East Sixty-Second Street. Elderly Mr Foster looks like Andrew Carnegie and dominates every aspect of his poor wife’s life. She has one particular weakness which is a morbid fear of being late for planes or trains. But more than that, her husband takes a quiet delight in always being late, taking too much time and then more to get ready, thus reducing his wife to a nervous wreck. Emotional sadism.
The story kicks off when Mrs Foster is preparing to fly to Paris to see her daughter who lives over there, is married with children. Mr Foster does everything he can to delay their departure from their house and then, as a thick fog comes in, spends the entire journey (in a chauffeur-driven car) telling her the flight will be cancelled. In the event it is and Mrs Foster a) waits all afternoon and evening hoping it will be reinstated then, when the airport announces all flights have been rescheduled for the next morning b) catches a cab back to their house where her husband says I told you so.
Next morning she is up bright and early and dressed and ready to take the (chauffeur-driven) car back to the airport when her husband once again deliberately delays their departure, coming out of his dressing room late and then continually remembering little extra things. He keeps this low-level torment up even after they’ve gotten into the car when he suddenly claims to remember a gift he wants to give to his wife to give to their daughter, in a little white box, but can’t find it in his coat or jacket and so, despite his wife’s desperate pleas, insists on going back into the house although they are, by now, perilously late.
Suddenly the wife sees the little white box stuffed down the side of the car seat and is overcome with fury. Finally she snaps and the worm turns. She gets out the car, storms up the steps to the apartment building and is poised with her key to open the door when she stops. She stops and listens. She can hear something. She stops altogether, frozen. Then she goes back down to the car, gets in and tells the driver to take her straight to the airport.
She has a lovely six weeks in Paris with her daughter then flies back to New York and takes a cab to the building. First thing she notices is all the mail piled up inside the door i.e. no-one’s been opening it. And the next thing is that the elevator is stuck between floors. The implication, though not made explicit, is that her husband is dead. The lift got caught between floors, he had no-one to help, so was trapped and died. She expresses no emotion or upset but calmly phones the lift repair people.
Marital revenge. Revenge of the bullied woman.
4. Parson’s Pleasure (33 pages)
Buckinghamshire. It’s another story about the clod-hopping yokel Claud Cubbin, linked to the four Claud stories in ‘Someone Like You’. We are introduced to Mr Boggis, an antiques expert who owns a high class antique shop in Chelsea, Eight years previously his car broke down, he stopped at a local farmhouse to ask for help and spotted a priceless antique in their kitchen which he proceeded to buy for a price which made the farmer happy, but then took back to London, polished up and sold for ten times the price.
Thus began Mr Boggis’s standard practice of spending every Sunday systematically scouring quadrants of the Home Counties which he has marked out on Ordnance Survey maps. s a result of trial and error, he’s discovered it’s best to pose as a vicar – the most harmless possible persona – and one claiming to work for an antiquarian society interested in identifying old antiques.
So the story opens on a particular Sunday as Mr Boggins sets about visiting a bunch of farm houses in north Buckinghamshire, the part of the country we know from previous stories is home to Claud Cubbins and crooked old Mr Rummins, with his idiot son Bert.
Long story short: in Mr Rummins’ kitchen Boggis discovers an extreme rarity, a perfectly preserved Chippendale dresser with all the original trimmings of vast value. It might fetch up to £10,000! Rummins has painted it white to fit his kitchen but the paint is easily removed. There follows a wealth of arcane knowledge about Chippendale furniture, along with loads of tricks which crooked antiques dealers to make their merchandise look either less or more valuable – similar in its thoroughness to the lore or ratcatching and especially how to fix dog racing, which featured in the other Claud stories.
Rummins, Bert and Claud are all witnesses to Boggis’s enthusiasm and they’re ignorant but not fools, they realise he’s interested in this old dresser and begin to sniff money. So Boggis makes the fateful decision to hoodwink them by saying it’s not really that valuable, going to the extent of walking away as if he’s not interested, only turning at the door and saying, well, the legs may be useful. He’s got a coffee table at home whose legs are going and maybe he’d buy the dresser for the legs alone; the rest, well it’s little more than firewood.
By dint of this extreme lie Boggis manages to haggle a very suspicious Boggis down to a price of just £20, agrees the sale and hands over the cash. He then sets off walking 600 yards back to the main road where he parked his van, his mind overflowing with images of vast riches not to mention the press coverage, for the press, and all his colleagues in the trade, will be riveted by the announcement of such a rare and precious find.
Unfortunately, Boggis’s long walk back to his van has disastrous consequences. It gives idiot Rummins and Claud time to ponder the fact that Boggis will never get a big dresser like that into the kind of little car vicars usually drive. What’s more he said he only really wanted the legs. So in the five minutes it takes Boggis to walk to his van, Rummins set about sawing the chunky legs off the dresser. Having done this, the pair further reflect that it’s still too big to get into a little car like a Morris Eight or Austin Seven (p.101) and so they do Mr Boggis a favour by chopping the dresser up into firewood. It’s hard work but they manage to completely destroy the priceless dresser just as Mr Boggis drives up with his van.
In a way this is the most shocking and traumatic of all the stories because people are ten-a-penny, and we’re making new ones all the time (the human race currently produces 385,000 new humans every day) whereas priceless old works of art, not so much.
5. Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat (1959: 23 pages)
New York. Mrs Bixby is married to a mousy dentist, Cyril, but is having an affair with the Colonel. Every month she goes to stay with her ‘aunt Maude’ in Baltimore, in reality to have a wile time with the Colonel who is a big virile huntin’ and fishin’ man.
The story starts when, at the end of one of these frolics, she is driven to the station by the Colonel’s groom, Wilkins, who proceeds to give her a large flattish cardboard box as a present. When she opens it on the train she discovers that it contains a) an amazing dark mink coat, made from real wild Labrador mink, that must have cost thousands of dollars and b) a note from the Colonel ending the affair. Oh well, bit sad, but the coat!
Then she worries that it’ll look very odd, returning from a visit to her poor old aunt Maude with an amazing mink coat so, when she gets to New York, she asks a porter where she can find a pawn shop. Plenty on Sixth Avenue he says so she takes a cab there. Here she finds a suspicious pawn shop owner who is prepared to give her $50 for the coat.
When he goes to give her the pawn ticket he goes to write down her name and address and a description of the item, as per standard practice, but she tells him not to. Her plan requires it to be anonymous.
So then she returns back to her husband, there are the usual greetings, he makes her a nice welcome home martini, and in the middle of it all she takes out her hankie to blow her nose and out of it falls the pawn ticket. As if just remembering it she tells Cyril that she found this pawn ticket in the taxi home. The husband looks at it and points out that it has no name, address or description and therefore whatever item it refers to is now hers. Finders keepers. All it has is the address of the pawn shop.
Cyril tells her that he’ll go along to the pawn shop on Monday to pick up the item himself while Mrs Bixby pretends she has no idea what it might be and encourages her husband to speculate widely about its possible nature, all the while muddying the waters and putting him off any possible scent connecting her and the Colonel. When Cyril invites her to go accompany him she has to restrain her fervour and say no because, of course, the pawn broker will recognise her and give the game away.
Anyway, Cyril promises to pop into the pawnbrokers on Monday and Mrs Bixby, pretending to be mad with curiosity for what it is, makes an appointment to meet up with her husband at lunchtime. Monday comes, Cyril goes off to work and then Mrs Bixby catches a cab to his surgery. He confirms that he’s been to the pawn shop and reclaimed the item and he makes a big deal of saying it’s a wonderful thing, much lovelier than she imagined, and she expects any moment to be reunited with her wonderful mink coat. To ratchet up the tension Cyril/Dahl makes her close her eyes as he gets it ready for her, Dahl even teases us by having the dentist say ‘mink, it’s beautiful mink’ before Mrs Bixby opens her eyes and…is horrified to see her husband is holding a mink neckpiece the kind of narrow thing you wrap round your throat, made from the actual body of two minks, with the heads still attached! It is cheap and disgusting.
But Mrs Bixby has, of course, to conceal her horror and dismay and pretend to be thrilled, despite experiencing agonies of disappointment, but also realising that her husband is a liar and a thief. Luckily he interprets her blushes and hesitation as her being overwhelmed.
But worse is to come, for as she steps out into the corridor, dazed with this revelation of her husband’s sneakiness, she sees his secretary-assistant Miss Pulteney swan by wearing her priceless mink coat. Dahl leaves it there, not giving us Mrs Bixby’s thoughts which must be a mixture of rage that her husband has swindled her, dismay at discovering her husband is a sneaky liar, real shock at discovering that he must be having an affair with his assistant, and immense mortification that her cunning plan has backfired so spectacularly.
You can see how all this is better left unexpressed and left for the reader to supply. At which point you realise that it’s a technique and skill of Dahl’s to end his stories at just the right moment, just before the full implications have sunk in or become explicit. Leaving them pregnant with meaning. Less is more.
6. Royal Jelly (37 pages)
This is another horror story – several people I’ve spoken to say this is the Dahl story which most freaked them out when they read it and has most haunted them since.
A young couple, Albert and Mabel Taylor, have been trying for years to have a baby. Finally they succeed but the story starts just a few days later with the young mother, Mabel, desperately concerned that the baby is losing weight and seriously ill, driving herself to distraction, ‘half dead with exhaustion’ in her attempts to feed it. At six weeks old the baby is so poorly that she weighs two pounds less than she did when she was born.
Now the key and central fact in the story is that Albert is a beekeeper. Every since boyhood he’s had a special affinity with bees, they used to crawl all over him without stinging him and he could tend and clean beehives without wearing the elaborate protection normal beekeepers use. This boyhood hobby turned into a job and now, aged 29 (p.131), he owns six acres of land and 240 well-stocked hives and sells high quality honey.
Long story short, Albert, has a brainwave while reading one of his beekeeping magazines which features an article about the extraordinary nourishing quality of royal jelly, the special substance fed to queen bee larvae in a hive in order to make them grow super-big super fast.
So without telling Mabel he starts to mix royal jelly from his hives in with the baby’s milk and lo and behold, the baby starts to thrive, gulping down the new milk feed and bawling for more! Mabel is flooded with relief and gratitude to Albert until, that is, he fesses up to what he’s done.
Two points. Firstly, the story contains a heroic amount of factual information about bees and hives and how the different types of bees (drones and workers and queens) are hatched and fed, and the nature and abilities of queen bees and so on, even referencing particular articles by named experts in specific journals (e.g. the article about the work of Dr Frederick A. Banting in the American Bee Journal, p.151). It displays the same in-depth research as other rural stories such as Claud and the rat catcher or Claud and the greyhound scam.
Second point is that during this whole sequence of events, Dahl has been planting pretty obvious clues as to Albert’s own beelike qualities.
Looking at him now as he buzzed around in front of the bookcase with his bristly head and his hairy face and his plump pulpy body, she couldn’t help thinking that somehow, in some curious way, there was a touch of the bee about this man… (p.152)
Anyway, to get to the conclusion, two more pieces of jigsaw. First of all, over the next few days, not only does the baby put on weight phenomenally quickly, but, if Mabel’s eyes don’t deceive here, is starting to change shape! It body is plump as a barrel and its belly bulges high in the air, yet despite this, its arms and legs seem thin and twiggy, like sticks protruding from a ball of fat. Not only that but Albert points out the baby is starting to develop a nice bit of fuzz on her tummy ‘to keep her warm’, running his hand over the silky yellow-brown hairs that had suddenly appeared on the baby’s tummy. So even slow readers will be realising that their baby is developing beelike qualities.
But the twist (or sting) comes in the tail for on the very last page Albert reveals the secret he’s been keeping from Mabel these nine months which is – that the articles he’d read not only discussed the nutritive qualities of royal jelly but one of them revealed that when fed to rats, it made infertile rats fertile – and so this is why they were finally able to conceive after nine barren years of trying: because Albert has been dosing himself with royal jelly!
And now he’s said it she looks back down at the baby and suddenly sees it not as human but as a big fat white grub approaching the end of its larval stage, preparing to burst free and emerge to the world complete with mandibles and wings!
The story started so slowly and naturalistically and soberly that you barely notice yourself being slowly lured into this world of melodrama and horror. I can see why it still haunts the imaginations of friends who read it as impressionable teenagers.
7. Georgy Porgy (33 pages)
A hilarious rambling account told in the first person by a garrulous, timorous vicar named George. He is of unprepossessing appearance, five foot five tall, with protruding teeth and bright red hair, with a nervous rash and a habit of flicking his earlobe. This dweeb is convinced that all the spinster women in his parish are ‘after’ him, telling stories of them suddenly grabbing his hand or slipping their arms into his.
Dahl gives this character a backstory designed to explain his simultaneous fear of and attraction towards women, stemming as it does from a mother with whom he had an unusually close and intimate bond and yet who terrified the life out of him before meeting an untimely death when run over on a busy highway near their house, when the boy George was just ten.
George the timorous vicar is so worried that it might be him to blame and his lascivious thoughts which seem to attract all the spinsters, that he carries out a gruesome experiment. He takes a pack of rats he’s confiscated from one of his choirboys (!) and separates the males and females for weeks and weeks, enough to render them randy with sexual frustration. Then he sets 6 male rats and 6 female rats in a cage dividing them by a wire carrying a household current of 240 volts. To make it all the more grotesque and/or humorous, he names all six rats after prominent spinsters in his parish – and is then very gratified when one by one all the female rats hurl themselves at the males, trying to duck under the wire or hump over it, but all of them being electrocuted to death. From this gruesome experiment he makes the mad conclusion that the women are to blame.
Women are like that. Nothing stimulates them quite so much as a display of modesty or shyness in a man. (p.179)
In the final part of the story George goes mad, has a complete mental breakdown. He is invited to Lady Birdwell’s tennis party and makes an impression by being unusually rude and forthright. Then the gaggle of spinsters serve him up a sweet drink full of fruit which he wolfs down under the impression it is alcohol-free but there are strong hints that it is the powerful gin-based liqueur, Pimms.
Two glasses of this and he becomes very light-headed, an experience he describes with great vividness as being lifted off the ground by balloons. In this drunken state he allows himself to be taken for a walk by Miss Roach towards the garden’s summer house where, as far as we can tell from his drunken account, she holds his hand, then puts her arms round him, then asks him to kiss her.
This is where the insanity comes in. Early in the story he shared with us the very traumatic story of his mother’s death. This came about because one day, when he was ten, she took him into the garage to witness their pet rabbit, Josephine giving birth. However, to his complete horror, after licking clean the first of the little baby rabbits to pop out, the mother rabbit proceeded to eat it. Not only that but George’s mother then leaned over the little boy to see why he was suddenly gasping and crying and, in his hysterical state, her mouth seemed to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger as if she was going to eat him just like the mummy rabbit. At which point he set off screaming and running down the drive and down the road towards the local main road and it was in pursuing him out onto this very busy road that his mother was run over and killed.
All this explains why, in his drunken state, as Miss Roach leans closer and closer and closer to kiss him, mad George can only see her face and her enormous red mouth opening wide to swallow him. And then the madness takes over. In a vivid, mad delusion he thinks he is being sucked into Miss Roach’s giant mouth. He clings onto her teeth, lying athwart her tongue while avoiding her tonsils and epiglottis before he eventually is sucked free and swallowed down into her stomach and then on through loops and chambers deeper into her guts.
We have a brief vision of the ‘real’ world, in which he appears to have punched out or somehow extracted some of Miss Roach’s teeth (!) before we plunge back into the mad maelstrom of his mind, through whose delusions we eventually make out that he is now residing in a lunatic asylum, in a space he thinks of as the primary section of Miss Roach’s duodenal loop but which is quite plainly a padded cell, in and out of which men with white coats periodically come, along with other lunatics who cater to or try to contradict his delusions.
This obviously strikes the same note as the two earlier stories which plunge us deep into the minds of very disturbed/mad individuals, ‘The Wish’ and ‘The Soldiers’ in Someone Like You.
8. Genesis and Catastrophe: A True Story (10 pages)
Vivid description of the birth of Adolf Hitler, seen from the point of view of his long-suffering mother who’s seen three of her children die already and pleads with God to spare this baby, with bit parts for the doctor who tries to reassure her and Adolf’s drunken father, Alois, who chooses the baby’s name. If you’re going to write a short story about Hitler it better be original and this one sort of is but still feels, in the end, a bit cheap and exploitative i.e. its impact ultimately rides entirely on the charge and power of Hitler’s monstrous crimes, rather than on the power of the ‘story’, such as it it.
9. Edward the Conqueror (October 1953: 27 pages)
Third person story about a middle-aged, middle-class couple, Edward and Louisa, living in a big house without kids. He’s gardening and has made a big fire when she goes out into the garden, calls him to lunch and spots a funny-looking cat by the fire. The cat follows them indoors and she gives it a bowl of milk. After lunch Louisa sits down to play some piano. She’s a fair pianist and goes through classical numbers by Schubert and the like but notices that when she plays a piece by famous Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (1811 to 1886), the cat suddenly sits up and becomes attentive. Slowly, carefully, Dahl describes a number of further incidents or details which convince Louisa that the cat is the reincarnation of Franz Liszt. It sounds bonkers writing it down in black and white which is precisely why you have to read the story and enter into the mindset of Louisa as she plays different pieces and notes the cat’s responses in ever-greater detail. She even pops out to the local library to borrow a book about reincarnation, some of which the story summarises (‘Recurring Earth-Lives: How and Why’ by F. Milton Willis).
Anyway, by the time her husband comes in from an arduous afternoon’s gardening, Louisa has convinced herself that the cat is the reincarnation of Franz Liszt and proceeds to tell her husband that she is going to invite the world’s leading composers to come and meet him! Obviously he thinks she’s gone mad, as she goes on to explain that she hasn’t made him, her husband, any tea yet because she needs to go and cook the cat a special dish appropriate for such a genius and goes into the kitchen to make the cat her best soufflé.
When she returns to the living room the cat has gone and her husband is just coming back in from the garden, sweating a bit and acting suspiciously. When she looks closely she notices a raw scratch across his hand. He tries to persuade her that it was one of the beastly brambles he’s been clearing, but she, and the reader, know better. Without being told we know he’s done away with the wonder-cat!
10. Pig (29 pages)
Gruesome beyond belief. None of the stories are really for adults. Most of them are for impressionable teenagers. This one starts off as if it’s actively for children, what with its cartoon action and silly characters, but it builds to an unexpected and grotesque ending.
We are in New York (again), itself a kind of cartoon version of the Big Bad City as it has been for the past century or so. Lexington is born to two wonderful parents who, on the twelfth day of his existence, decide to hire a nanny and paint the town red. Unfortunately when they get home the nanny is fast asleep and husband has forgotten his keys, so in a drunken larkey way he smashes the ground floor window and is half way through helping his drunk wife up and through it when a carful of cops draws up and shoots them both dead. We know we are in the presence of cartoon satire when the narrative tells us the three homicidal cops were all awarded citations for this murderous action.
Thus just a few days old baby Lexington finds himself an orphan. Next Dahl satirises all the relatives who come along to the funeral and see the lawyer and make umpteen excuses for not being able to take in the hapless infant. Secretly it’s because they all know that Lexington’s family were broke and had mortgaged the house i.e. there’s no money in it for them.
But the problem is solved when in storms Great Aunt Glosspan like a character from a children’s story, aged 70 and still going strong, scoops up the infant and carries off to her remote farm in Virginia. She buys a book about rearing infants at the station and has finished it by the end of the journey, merrily chucking it out the window.
Aunt Glosspann proceeds to raise Lexington very well and he grows into a fine handsome little boy. Aunt Glosspan is a vegetarian and feeds him a wide diet of veggie food. At the age of six she decides to home school him, teaching him reading, writing, geography but above all cooking. She teaches him all her tasty veggie recipes and together they experiment with more.
By the age of ten Lexington is a gifted cook and embarks on writing a big book titled ‘Eat Good and Healthy’. By the age of 17 he has recorded over 9,000 recipes. Then Aunt Glosspan dies. (There is a strong suspicion it’s because of some poisoned mushroom burgers Lexington served her.)
The Aunt leaves a letter instructing him to go down the mountain to the local town and register her death with a doctor, then travel to New York to see her lawyer, Mr Samuel Zuckerman. Lexington is such a newbie that he walks to New York, feeding himself on berries and roots.
The interview with Zuckerman is another very broad satire. There is a hint of antisemitism in it because Dahl paints Zuckerman as an absolute crook who reveals to the startled Lexington that his mother left him $500,000! but then proceeds to announce he’ll have to take 1 50% cut, then there’s the costs of the funeral, then the cost of bribing the right officials because he, Lexington, didn’t fill in the right death certificate or bury Aunt Glosspan appropriately etc etc. In the end he should consider himself lucky to receive $15,000. But Lexington the naive, does consider himself lucky, pockets the money (which Zuckerman gets his clerk to give him out of petty cash) and sets off into the mean streets of New York.
He goes into a diner and Dahl satirises the tired jaded stupidity of the waiter and then the disgusting chef, who has a rash down his neck which he regularly scratches while preparing food. Anyway, through a series of misunderstandings, Lexington gets served roast pork and greens. The point is that after a lifetime of vegetarian food, it’s the first time he’s tasted meat and the tastiest meal he’s ever eaten.
First Lexington asks what it is and when they explain ‘pig’ it takes a while for Lexington to understand that it’s dead pig which has been slaughtered in the city. In a ghoulish aside the chef confides that sometimes they get human meat but you never can tell because it’s difficult to tell them apart. Lexington is wildly waving his money around, foolishly tipping the waiter $100, so he and the chef willingly give him the address of the slaughterhouse where the pork comes from, and off Lexington heads in a taxi.
Here the narrative crosses a line from a kind of satirical child’s story into horror. For the ‘packing-house’ appears a reputable establishment with a big sign reading Guided Tours Here and a number of smart young men and women come into the waiting room to join Lexington, some being taken off before he and his group.
They are shown the enclosure where the pigs are kept, then onto the place where the pigs are corralled and watch an employee slip a chain round a pig’s rear leg, the chain being attached to a moving pulley which pulls the terrified pig backwards then, as the conveyor chain turns upwards and disappears through a hole in the ceiling taking the pig hanging upside down squealing with it.
So far, so gruesome, but nothing prepares you for what happens next, for one of the pig handlers sneaks up behind Lexington and slips a chain round his leg. Before he knows it, he is being pulled backwards by the conveyor belt, then is swung off his feet and lifted up through the hole in the ceiling, shouting ‘Stop, stop, there’s been a mistake.’
Shortly the conveyor chain bends back to the horizontal and drags him along towards a man with a wonderful serene expression sitting by a square hole in another wall, like St Peter waiting at the gates of heaven and, as Lexington comes close, the man leans over and slashes Lexington’s jugular vein!
As he bleeds out the last thing Lexington sees is the series of dying pigs being lowered into a great smoking cauldron of water, although he thinks one had gloves on its hands. In other words the place slaughters pigs and humans indiscriminately. It’s worth quoting the final sentence because it gives the flavour of bitter satire which underpins the whole thing.
Suddenly our hero started to feel sleepy, but it wasn’t until his good strong heart had pumped the last drop of blood from his body that he passed on out of this, the best of all possible worlds, into the next. (p.265)
What comes over is Dahl’s nihilistic anger at a whole range of aspects of the modern world.
11. The Champion of the World (37 pages)
Another story about the character Claud Cubbin who we first met in the four stories about him in ‘Someone Like You’ and again in ‘Parson’s Pleasure’ in this collection, making six Claud stories in all.
Claud is the ox-faced mate of Gordon, who owns and runs a village petrol station and the pair of them are always cooking up crooked schemes, or hanging with vivid lowlifes, as in my favourite Dahl story, about the rat catcher. (In this story we learn, for the first time, that Claud lives in a caravan parked behind the filling station, p.268, and that Gordon’s last name is Hawes, p.288).
Claud’s always been an expert poacher but this year Gordon’s noticed a new vigour about his activities, almost as if they’re a vendetta against the local landowner, self-made brewer and social climber, Victor Hazel who every morning cruises past in his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce, too hoity-toity to mingle with the ordinary folk of the village.
In a great scene Claud shares with Gordon the Three Methods for Poaching Pheasants which were invented by his father, one of the greatest poachers of all time (pages 274 to 275).
Method 1 is soak raisins till they’re juicy and stick a horsehair through each one till an eighth of an inch of hair is sticking out either side then strew them on the ground. When a pheasant eats one it starts choking and hacking to try and clear its throat and doesn’t move so you can walk up and just pick it up.
Method 2 is you get a fishing rod, bait a hook with a plump raisin, wait till the pheasant bites, and then reel it in like a fish. Trouble is the pheasant kicks up a fuss and every gamekeeper comes running.
Method 3 is you dig a little hole then put into it a piece of strong paper cut and curved into the shape of a cone, cover it in lime, chuck in a few juicy raisins, then the pheasant comes along, sticks its head in the cone to peck the raisins but when it straightens up the cone is stuck to its head so it cannot see and it stands stock still. Once again you just walk up to it and pick it up, easy-peasy. So respect to Claud’s dad, the great inventor and innovator of Poaching.
Having listened to all this Gordon now comes up with a fourth method, which is to soak the raisins, then carefully slit them open, then pour into each one the contents of one of Gordon’s sleeping pills, a nice dose of seconal, then carefully sew them up again. Pheasant eats a raisin or two, flies up to a branch at sunset, starts to feel drowsy, falls down onto the ground, Gordon and Claud come along and collect them.
The thing is, Claud has a grand plan. He doesn’t want to pick up one or five or even ten pheasants. Because of his hatred of domineering show-off Mr Victor Hazel Claud wants to ruin the Grand First Day of Hazel’s annual shoot. Every October the fat red-faced man invites all the gentry of the county, the lords and ladies and even the Lord Lieutenant, to the best day’s shooting in the county. He carefully rears upwards of 200 pheasants to lay on a grand day’s entertainment for the nobs, and Claud wants to ruin it.
All this is by way of backstory leading up to where we are now which is that Claud and Gordon have completed the arduous task of soaking some 200 raisins and then inserting the little doses of seconal into each one before sewing them all up, and have packed them into a sack, and are now very cautiously and quietly climbing the side of the hill into the woods and Victor Hazel’s property. Comedy is added because Gordon is scared of being caught so Claud goes out of his way to tell him horror stories about what landowners used to do to poachers in the olden days. Particularly striking is his claim that they used to shoot poachers on sight and many’d the night, when he was a boy, that Claud would find his dad bent over the kitchen table while his mum picked the shotgun pellets out of his buttocks with a knife. Eventually, his bum was so covered in little white scars ‘that it looked like it was snowing’. Locals used to call it Poacher’s Arse (p.282).
So they sneak up the clearing where the pheasants have lived since Hazel’s people reared them and where they prefer to stay. There is one gamekeeper on duty, silent and motionless but Claud sees him. He chucks some raisins off into the distance to distract him and when the keeper looks off in the wrong direction takes all the other doped raisins in his hand and scatters them with one throw across the clearing. The keeper hears it and then notices the pheasants all ducking and pecking and thinks about investigating but decides to stay still and see if anything else suspicious happens. Nothing does so he relaxes and, after a while, Claud makes Gordon crawl away with him, face close to the earth, for a hundred yards or so before it’s safe to get up and run.
Finally they emerge off Hazel’s land and back into a lane which is a public thoroughfare. They’re just sitting on the bank having a fag when the head gamekeeper, Rabbitts, comes along with a labrador dog and shotgun under his arm. Rabbitts is a hard man, identifies them by name, says he’s got his eye on them and tells them to hop it. This Claud does with the measured insubordinate slowness of the criminal youth. In fact he only takes Gordon a few hundred yards down the lane, which is becoming impenetrably black as night falls, before climbing over a gate and hiding in a field. They watch as Rabbitts walks by on his way home for tea.
Once it’s completely dark they make their way back to the woods and on to the clearing and are just wondering whether the whole scam will work when they hear the thump of a pheasant falling out of a tree. Then another one. Then another one. Soon they’re falling like raindrops. Claud runs round in a whirl of ecstasy, ‘like a child who has just discovered that the whole world is made of chocolate’ (p.293). He finds all the pheasants and brings them back into a pile. Soon it’s as big as a bonfire, living but doped pheasants. Eventually the thumping stops and Claud excitedly counts the bodies. Two hundred! A world record! You can see how this is, essentially, a child’s story in adult clothing. No surprise that Dahl expanded it to become the popular children’s book ‘Danny, The Champion of the World’.
Gordon and Claud quickly chuck the doped pheasants into the sacks Claud has brought but Gordon finds his is far too heavy to carry. It’s now that Claud now reveals that he has a partner in crime, toothless old Charlie Kinch who drives a ramshackle old taxi. It’s waiting in the lane. All they have to do is drag the sacks that far. Which they proceed to do, whisper ‘Charlie’ and the toothless face appears in the moonlight, they heave the sacks into the back of the cab and set off slowly and quietly down the lane towards the village.
And only now does he reveal another secret of his trade which is he never goes home with that night’s booty, he always drops it off with Bessie Organ to safekeep for a day or two. Gordon is flabbergasted because Bessie Organ is the vicar’s wife. So Charlie drives them to the vicarage, then round the back where Claud and Gordon stealthily drag their sacks into the coal shed, shake hands with Charlie who drives off, then walk calm and law-abiding back to the filling station.
The scene then cuts to the next morning, when Claud points out to Gordon the figure of Bessie Organ pushing a pram in which lies little baby Christopher Organ and underneath him, a whole bunch of doped pheasants packed tight.
Claud gave me a sly look.
‘There’s only one safe way of delivering game,’ he announced, ‘and that’s under a baby.’
‘Yes,’ I murmured, ‘yes, of course.’ (p.298)
Only problem is the seconal is wearing off and they can see Bessie walking agitatedly and then break into a run and then – horror of horrors – a pheasant flies up out of the pram! Then a second, then a third, fourth fifth. All the time the traffic on the road and passersby are watching. As she comes into the filling station forecourt she grabs her baby in fright and that releases all the other pheasants who fly out of the pram and fill the air above the petrol pumps. Except they’re too dopey to go far and settle all over the garage, atop the pumps, along the roof and concrete canopy and clinging to the sill of the office window. Cars are stopping and people are getting out to get a better look. Worst of all, any minute Victor Hazel’s chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce will drive past on his daily commute and he will see all his stolen pheasants and put 2 and 2 together. Quick, Gordon shouts, lock up the pumps and put the ‘Closed for the day’ sign up. Then they’d better scarper.
Thoughts
The stories are more macabre, gruesome and cruel than the ones in the previous collections, a grotesqueness told with undisguised relish.
Related to this is the way that, although supposedly written for adults, they all have an unmistakable boyish gleefulness. Dahl delights in the twisted sadistic physical and psychological torment he inflicts on his characters.
Also related to this heightened gruesomeness, there’s 1) a greater emphasis on the physical appearance of many of the characters and 2) these appearances are becoming more and more freakish. In the real world most people are boringly samey but in these Dahl stories the characters are vividly individualised, and the physical portraits have become increasingly grotesque.
He was a small fat-legged man with a belly. The face was round and rosy, quite perfect for the part, and the two large brown eyes that bulged out at you from this rosy face gave an impression of gentle imbecility. (Mr Boggis, p.77)
He looked round and saw the three men standing absolutely still, watching him suspiciously, three pairs of eyes, all different but equally mistrusting, small pig-eyes for Rummins, large slow eyes for Claud, and two odd eyes for Bert, one of them very queer and boiled and misty pale, with a little black dot in the centre, like a fish eye on a plate. (p.88)
His was a long bony countenance with a narrow nose and a slightly prognathous jaw (Cyril Bixby, p.115)
He was not a tall man; he had a thick plump pulpy-looking body that was built close to the ground on abbreviated legs. The legs were slightly bowed. The head was huge and round, covered with bristly, short-cut hair and the greater part of the face – now that he had given up shaving altogether – was hidden by a brownish yellow fuzz about an inch long. In one way or another he was rather grotesque to look at… (Albert Taylor, p.152)
He was a small spongy man with livid jowls and a huge magenta nose, and when he smiled bits of gold flashed at you marvellously from lots of different places inside his mouth. (p.250)
Note how many of these trolls are short. Dahl was, himself, notoriously tall, at six foot six. I suppose from his lofty vantage point, more or less everyone looked like dwarves.
Note also how many times Dahl compares people’s appearance with animals.
He had a peculiar way of cocking the head and then moving it in a series of small, rapid jerks. Because of this and because he was clasping his hands up high in front of him, hear the chest, he was somehow like a squirrel standing there – a quick clever old squirrel from the Park. (Mr Foster, p.55)
She turned and faced him, her eyes blazing, and she looked suddenly like some kind of little fighting bird with her neck arched over towards him as though she were about to fly at his face and peck his eyes out. (p.161)
I could watch [women] for hours on end with the same peculiar fascination that you yourself might experience in watching a creature you couldn’t bear to touch – an octopus, for example, or a long poisonous snake. (p.179)
He turned his head, fixing me with pale eyes. The eyes were large and wet and ox-like… (p.272)
Comparing people with animals is self-evidently a dehumanising tactic, emphasising the process of making his characters seem strange and alien. In the hands of a different writer these tendencies might have developed into a fully adult, disorientating strategy, something like the thorough-going psychological alienation cultivated by a writer like Kafka – but instead Dahl a) steers it towards the merely grotesque and, more importantly b) contains it.
These animal comparisons tend to be grotesque moments in otherwise extremely polite and well-mannered prose. OK most of the stories have grotesque outcomes but the very power of this derives from how they are, generally, for the majority of their length, describing civilised people with good manners speaking in clear Standard English. Part of the power comes precisely from the abrupt irruption into civilised middle-class lives of savage or brutal or cruel events.
Anyway, back to the theme of freakish-looking people, the conception of many of them as gargoyles means they’re well on the way to becoming the cartoon caricatures which populate the children’s books.
You can also see this tendency in some of the more florid names: Mr Boggis, Claud Cubbin, Mr Rummins, Nanny McPottle, Great Aunt Glosspan, Bessie Organ. Even fairly sensible names, when they come within Dahl’s sphere of influence, begin to sound faintly ridiculous, such as the regiment of spinsters in ‘Georgie Porgie’: Miss Elphinstone, Miss Roach, Lady Birdwell.
Lastly, a small point, but Dahl had, by this stage, developed a particular style mannerism which is, in his descriptions of characters’ appearances, to drop the personal pronoun (his or her) and replacing it with ‘the’. In the description of Albert Taylor he writes the legs and the head, rather than the more usual ‘his’. He does this throughout and it compounds the sense of detached, forensic examination of alien species. It turns the characters from people into specimens being coldly examined.
The wide frog-mouth widened a fraction further into a crafty grin, showing the stubs of several broke teeth. (p.84)
‘The’ instead of the more natural ‘his’. Or:
A peculiar hardness had settled itself upon the features. The little mouth, usually so flabby, was now tight and thin, the eyes were bright and the voice, when she spoke, carried a new note of authority. (Mrs Foster, p.65)
The use of ‘the’ not ‘her’ creates a distance, a forensic gap. Or take this description of Mabel Taylor’s baby after feeding:
There was no protest from the baby, no sound at all. It lay peacefully on the mother’s lap, the eyes glazed with contentment, the mouth half-open, the lips smeared with milk. (p.158)
Not ‘its’ or ‘her’, just the cold detached ‘the’. In Dahl’s hands, we are all specimens.
Credit
Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl was published by Michael Joseph in 1960. References are to the 2011 Penguin paperback edition.
Books & Boots 