Even from his earliest days, he was a hateful little fuck. He began one prep school essay...I hope when I'm famous they don't dig out my grade school essays where I write about shooting African poachers until they are dead.
Dahl's editors "saw the story as essentially Victorian in character –– a 'very English fantasy'" so they disregarded any racist misgivings about the story. Indeed, when the book first appeared in the United States in 1964 it was regarded with only acclaim and enthusiasm. It wasn't until 1972, nearly a decade later, that a wide–ranging attack on the book was published by American writer Eleanor Cameron and the political agenda of the story finally began to be debated.posted by web-goddess at 5:32 PM on June 3, 2011 [1 favorite]
After Dahl and Cameron had many public back–and–forths in various American literary journals (over much more than just charges of racism - see the Horn Book's excellent virtual exhibit to read the letters for yourself), Dahl's publishers decided that "to those growing up in a racially mixed society, the Oompa–Loompas were no longer acceptable as originally written. The following year, to accompany its new sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, a revised edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory appeared, in which the Oompa–Loompas had become dwarfish hippies with long 'golden–brown hair' and 'rosy–white' skin." [Jeremy Treglown's Roald Dahl: A Biography]
"The Witches" is finally a love story – the story of a little boy who loves his grandmother so utterly (and she him) that they are looking forward to spending their last years few exterminating the witches of the world together. It is a curious sort of tale but an honest one, which deals with matters of crucial importance to children: smallness, the existence of evil in the world, mourning, separation, death. The witches I've written about are far more benevolent figures, yet perhaps that is the point of witches – they are projections of the human unconscious and so can have many incarnations.posted by web-goddess at 6:18 PM on June 3, 2011 [1 favorite]
w0mbat: What is this crap? Dahl was an allied war hero. The Nazis shot his plane down. He was big on Palestinian rights but that doesn't make him an anti Semite.But the Nazis didn't shoot his plane down. He got hopelessly lost on a routine ferry flight and crashed when he ran out of petrol. As for his alleged "heroism," well, he was a serial confabulator throughout his life. Why should his own accounts of his wartime experiences have been exempt from this?
ovvl (quoting Wikipedia): Dahl saw his first aerial combat on 15 April 1941, while flying alone over the city of Chalcis. He attacked six Junkers Ju-88s that were bombing ships and shot one down. On 16 April in another air battle, he shot down another Ju-88.OK. But the source for that is Dahl's own Going Solo, which is a member of that rather shabby genre, the old man's self-aggrandizing war memoir. Let's look at Dahl's account of that supposed first combat, shall we? Dahl, the naive yet brave ingenue, flying alone, encounters a flock of Ju88s. Applying the lessons from the crash course in deflection shooting he received the previous night from a Battle of Britain veteran, he succeeds in shooting one down. (The crew conveniently bail out, saving him from the taint of bloodlust.) He goes on to claim four more planes, a sum that just so happens to make him an "ace." Sounds like a boys' adventure story, doesn't it? Which, in fact, it probably is. Aviation historians Christopher Shores and Brian Cull attempted to verify Dahl's claims, but found that there was no matching loss in the German records. Similarly, if Dahl made a claim for it to his own squadron's intelligence officer, that claim has not survived.
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That said, off to read the article.
posted by penduluum at 2:23 PM on June 3, 2011 [9 favorites]