Roald Dahl’s early years are illuminated in a compact biography mostly purged of unsavoury details
Several biographers have attempted to fill the gap between these polarities. Jeremy Treglown’s 1994 bookset the parameters. Unauthorised by Dahl’s second wife and children, but with access to many of his letters, and to his first wife, the actor Patricia Neal, Treglown offered a seductive analysis of the writer’s psychology.
He is good on the strangeness of the early life. Dahl’s father, Harald, had left Norway for Paris to be an artist. Somehow he ended up in south Wales, with a hugely successful business selling Norwegian timber as pit props to coalmines. After his death, Dahl, always preternaturally tall – he was 6ft 5in at the age of 15 – was forced to grow into a role as the man of the house.
The competitiveness expressed itself sexually before Dahl’s writing took off. In the US after the war the young fighter pilot was a magnet for wealthy married women of a certain age. One contemporary recalled that in that period: “I think he slept with everyone on the east and west coasts that had more than $50,000 a year.” Six months into his marriage to Neal, Dahl was convinced he should leave her: “I make the coffee in the morning,” he wrote to a friend. “She stays in bed.
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