Salvage Heart

One of the joys of reading The New Yorker is that it puts the coin of the intellectual realm's discourse menu right in your back pocket. Except that I am just now ready to talk about the menu items from late May and early June. And so when items come up in popular discussion, such as the mentions of the piece on Roald Dahl, I made a point to not read them because I didn't want to spoil the story.

So I finally read "The Candy Man: Why children love Roald Dahl’s stories—and many adults don’t," by Margaret Talbot (Issue of 2005-07-11 and 18) and am ready to discuss.

Hello?

A copy of the article can be read here. The hype was that it was to be revealed that adults didn't like Roald Dahl but children did.

Instead, it's more a run-through of Dahl's enduring popularity, with a little dirt tossed in on the author's grave (or raked off?)...turns out he was a real bastard to deal with in life. Also includes a cursory note of his short stories, collected here. The summation is apt:
"Most of Dahl’s early writing was for adults," writes Talbot. "He specialized in wartime stories and macabre tales with surprise endings, or what the British call 'a twist in the tail.'" The collection is redundant after awhile; if you are going to read one, I'd recommend "Royal Jelly" which another site on the Internet claims appeared in The Twilight Zone Magazine in February 1983.

I had the notion to pitch a similar piece on C.S. Lewis a couple of years back when it came out that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was being made into a movie (look for a review of the BBC series on the Chronicles of Narnia here in the distant future). But I didn't. I still have The Great Divorce moldering on the basement bookshelf.

Pieces like this are golden to write, but how much do you want to know? Will I stop reading his books to my children because he made anti-Semetic statements? No, but there's also a ignorance-preservation aspect on my part...the more you know about an artist, the more likely that you are going to bring emotional response to that work regardless (irregardless!) of (irrespective!!) of the way the paint sticks to the canvas or the words in the chorus. And I don't need that for Dahl's best, as they are not going to be improved with context.

So you read articles like Talbot's to cheer on the mentions of favorites. And in terms of representing my favorites (while adhering to the timeliness theme), she does a mediocre job.

My favorite two books by Dahl (having enjoyed most the titles for two generations now) are Fantastic Mr. Fox and Danny the Champion of the World, with Danny getting the nod. It has the biting humor, but also an incredible emotion that resonated with me as a blueprint for being a great dad (again here, I don't need to know that Dahl was not this father). Of course the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and ...and the Great Glass Elevator are lovely (the original material being stronger by half), as well as James and the Giant Peach and the BFG (who first appears as a bedtime story in Danny the Champion of the World). Other notables...The Magic Finger is weird but fine (I confuse it with Edward Eager's Half Magic, and my son loved The Twits, which I thought was a lazy idea that ran out of gas once it stepped beyond character sketch.

I also learned the word "slut" (but not its meaning) from Dahl's Revolting Rhymes collection, which earned me either a mouthful of soap or a swat on the ass. Thanks Roald. Here are the rest of his books; I am tired of linking them individually.

Finally, I recall The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More to be a worthwhile collection of short stories...in particular "The Hitchhiker." Stories that tell...a story. Rarer than one would think.

The official Roald Dahl site is http://www.roalddahl.com/. There are a number of discussions regarding this article, none of which, as it turns out, I have read. In fact, I can't remember which it was I avoided reading to begin with.