Roald Dahl's adult stories

The late Roald Dahl (1916-1990) is known principally in the U.S. as the author of Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, children's tales with an edge. An Everyman plucked from the general public, if quizzed, might not identify him at all, and even those who know all about Matilda's nemesis, the evil schoolmistress known as The Trunchbull, may not know that Dahl was a prolific writer of fine short stories for adults.

Thus I offer a suggestion for any private library: Dahl's Collected Stories, published by Everyman's Library in 2006.

When it came out, Collected Stories received a few nice reviews, but by now his work may seem a trifle dated— focused, as it often was, on the comfortably fixed Brits he knew. This dismissal is a shame, because it ignores a graceful, congenial writing style intriguingly at odds with the very odd world that Dahl created in his books. While Dahl's characters often inhabit a comfortable, gratefully victorious England of the late '40s and '50s, they aren't all like that.

Pam Ferris's Agatha Trunchbull in Danny DeVito's 1996 film of Matilda, for example, only hints at the strangeness Dahl saw around him and formed into adult fiction. Taken together, in fact, Dahl's characters go much farther, creating a kind of universe out of the wealthy victims of domestic strife and down-and-out scam artists, flyboys and true oddballs, the meek and the pompous, with vengeance all around "“ except for the fighter pilots, who are killed off with horrifying regularity just as the reader "gets to know them." (Dahl served in the RAF himself as a flier and was seriously injured in a crash landing.)

Punching out gossip columnists

Most of these stories, however, are as tightly constructed as a Morgan roadster, and many are as disturbing as Millay's best sonnets. Vengeance Is Mine, Inc., for example, is a story of a pair of knuckleheads who start a business based on punching out (or otherwise tormenting) gossip columnists who insult the rich. The reader logically presumes, well before the end, that something will go wrong, but the author surprises him: Nothing of the sort occurs.

Some of the really striking stories fall into the twilight zone best represented by the likes of Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling"“ except that Dahl's work is edgier. The Great Automatic Grammatizator oddly anticipates today's Internet sites that "write poetry" for their users at the push of a button; William and Mary, shockingly, almost predicts what will happen to the late Ted Williams's currently frozen head "“ that is, if Ted had been married at his death to a deeply dissatisfied wife.

Two aviators in a bar

Not to be overlooked, either, are Dahl's early war stories, which are sometimes merely promising, but in one case exhibits a fully formed and illuminating sensibility. Someone Like You is a quick glimpse of two fliers quietly getting drunk in a bar and turning over in their minds what we've all been told they never consider: the people they kill on the ground:

He said slowly, "I bet I've killed lots of women more beautiful than that one."
"Not with bosoms like that."
"I'll bet I have. Shall we have another drink?"
"Yes, one for the road."
"There aren't any other women with bosoms like that," I said. "Not in Germany anyway."
"Oh yes there are. I've killed lots of them."

Graham Greene would have approved entirely, not only of the moral dimension of this bit of dialogue, but also of the sly expansion of it by the narrator's "double tap" insistence that still doesn't ease his friend's qualms. Blink and you miss it. You might have been thinking of "bosoms."

A few of the 48 tales in Collected Stories start strongly but end up begging for an ending as sharp as the start. Skin, the story of a man tattooed by the artist Chaim Soutine, probably belongs in that pile. Ditto for an odd, partitioned story called Claud's Dog. But the pile isn't very big.♦


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