Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

From Katherine Rundell’s essay “Why Children’s Books?” in the London Review of Books:

It’s easier to trust a writer who writes great food: they are a person who has paid attention to the world. Children have very little control over what or when they eat, and evolution has given them a sweet tooth far stronger than an adult’s to ensure they consume enough calories during growth spurts – of course their longings are colossal. Fictional food provokes real hunger: it makes the story into a bodily thing. Food is a way to open the door to the space in which the capacity for imaginative and intellectual freedom is built: you lure them in with real appetites.

Perhaps the best book ever written about postwar rationing is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Published in 1964, ten years after rationing ended in Britain, it has an entire nation’s hunger for fresh tastes and wild luxury encoded in its pages.

And there is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, written in 1950, when sugar and fruit and treats were still scarce (in 1942, according to a survey, many children did not believe that bananas were real): Edmund’s Turkish Delight stands in for every lost and longed-for glory. What child forgets the seismically disappointing discovery that the English version tastes like jellied flowers dusted in soap powder?

Dahl’s Chocolate Boy

Last month I wrote about the suddenly fashionable but not really new news that Roald Dahl had originally described Charlie Bucket as black.

Maria Russo of the New York Times interviewed Catherine Keyser, Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, about the part of Dahl’s early draft for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Keyser identified the agent who advised Dahl against making Charlie black as Sheila St. Lawrence of the Watkins Agency in New York. She had pushed Dahl into giving children’s books a try, so she was a big part of his literary success and wealth. Their working relationship ended in a transatlantic row, of course.

In the first draft Charlie’s status as a “small NEGRO boy” became significant in a scene that Keyser summarized like this:

Charlie ends up in the Easter Room, where there are life-size candy molds of creatures, and one of these life-size molds is shaped like a chocolate boy. Charlie is fascinated by this. Wonka helps him into the mold and gets distracted. The mold closes, and the chocolate pours over his body and he is suffocating and nearly drowning in it. And it hardens around him, which feels terrible. He’s trapped. He’s alive but can’t be seen or heard. No one knows where he’s gone. Then he gets taken to Wonka’s house to be the chocolate boy in Wonka’s son’s Easter basket. . . .

As far as this version goes, I think it is a really powerful racial allegory that might seem very surprising coming from Dahl. I think the mold in the shape of a chocolate boy is a metaphor for racial stereotype. In the early 20th century, chocolate marketing in both the U.S. and England was very tied up in imperialist fantasies and in connecting brown skin with brown chocolate.

I can’t help thinking that Keyser’s reading of the episode as a “powerful racial allegory” is too charitable to Dahl. He was not known for his broad sympathies, after all.

What’s more, the guiding pattern in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that the kids get in trouble because their personal weaknesses draw them toward a certain type of candy, and they end up nastily transformed in some way related to that candy. This Charlie is “fascinated” by the chocolate boy mold, even wishing to get inside. It feels like Dahl was thinking that a black boy would naturally be drawn to the chocolate boy mold. That’s the suffocating stereotype itself, not an allegory for it. Dahl eventually dropped that characterization of Charlie and that episode, letting him sharpen the book’s moral allegory.

Another part of the interview:

When you started your research, had anyone else ever written about “Charlie’s Chocolate Boy”?

No. It was mentioned by Dahl’s biographer, Donald Sturrock, and it was mentioned in Lucy Mangan’s popular book “Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory.”

So actually I think the answer to that question is “Yes.” Even if, as Keyser goes on to state, no previous author had looked at the episode “in great textual detail.”

The Original Charlie Bucket

The press in both Britain and America is abuzz with reports that Roald Dahl originally wrote of Charlie Bucket, hero of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as black. These grew out of a radio interview with Dahl’s widow and his authorized biographer, Donald Sturrock.

In fact, Sturrock reported how Dahl’s early drafts described Charlie as a “small NEGRO boy” back in 2011 in his biography Storyteller. At that stage the novel’s plot turned on Charlie being sprayed with quick-drying chocolate and mistaken for one of Willie Wonka’s “chocolate boys,” an awkward state that nonetheless lets him witness a theft and solve a mystery.

Dahl already had his eye on the American market, with agents in New York and Hollywood and direct contact with editors at Alfred A. Knopf. His widow, who didn’t meet Dahl until a decade after he wrote Charlie, suggested that a part-American sensibility was why he first imagined the young hero as black. Of course, it might simply have been a mental association of chocolate and brown skin.

In the radio interview Sturrock said that an agent recommended that Dahl drop that idea. He didn’t name the agent, but he used the pronoun “she,” ruling out Dahl’s British representative, Laurence Pollinger. According to Sturrock, “She said people would ask: ‘Why?’” Which might have been an unfortunate reflection of the U.S. market, or might have been a polite way of warning Dahl off of a racial stereotype.

As we know, in subsequent drafts Dahl stopped describing Charlie as black and also gave Willie Wonka an enslaved African workforce. That should undercut any simple suggestion that Dahl was unusually enlightened in imagining a black hero for a children’s novel in the early 1960s.

Gauging Jason Segel’s Knowledge of Children’s Literature

The news that actor Jason Segel has published a children’s book made me wonder if he had produced good, or even adequate, literature or if this was yet another celebrity publication.

True, Segel wrote the script for The Muppets and other movies, and he’s not really a household name. But did the level of recognition he’s gained in Hollywood mean he received less editing and more resources than an average first-time children’s author? And why did this book need a coauthor, Kirsten Miller?

This afternoon I heard Segel interviewed about the book on Radio Boston. In response to the host’s mention of the scary bits of the Wizard of Oz movie, Segel immediately asked, “Have you seen Return to Oz?” He described that movie’s use of electroshock but also noted that other scary parts come “from the books.” So I’m ready to grant that Segel knows children’s literature.

One striking pattern in the interview is how Segel cited all sorts of children’s media together: Roald Dahl and The Goonies, the Oz books and the Oz movies, Coraline and The Muppet Show. Is that how young readers/viewers think of their stories in this world of quick and close cinematic adaptation?

That Charlie Chapter

This weekend the Guardian printed a chapter from an early draft of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with new illustrations by Quentin Blake.

And it was crap.

And Dahl knew it was crap. He heavily rewrote this chapter. Comparing it to the novel’s final text shows that Dahl recognized that it was more effective to have five children with particular personalities touring the Wonka factory instead of ten, with two peeled off at each stop. He realized that showing children punished for simple disobedience instead of failings specific to each child would get repetitive. Dahl saw those problems, fixed them in a revision, and filed these early pages away.

In promoting this publication, the Guardian stated:

A lost chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, deemed too wild, subversive and insufficiently moral for the tender minds of British children almost 50 years ago, has been published for the first time.

On first reading, that suggests the chapter was suppressed for being “too wild, subversive, and insufficiently moral.” In fact, it was suppressed by the author for being crap.

The finished book was what ran into trouble when Dahl tried to find a British publisher. Though set in Britain, it took three years after its publication in New York before a London publisher took a chance on Charlie.

That comes from a longer and more thoughtful article by Lucy Mangan, presumably adapted from her book Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory.

Editing Dahl

From Stephen Roxburgh’s recollections of editing Roald Dahl’s The Witches thirty years ago, just published in Publishers Weekly:

On May 16, I sent Roald our American copyeditor’s queries, three closely typed pages of minutiae, most of it involving using American English rather than British English. Roald wrote, “I don’t approve of some of your Americanisms. This is an English book with an English flavour and so it should remain.” Here are a few examples:

“elevator vs. lift: I agree elevator for ‘lift’ because most American children simply won’t know what ‘lift’ means.

“candy vs. sweets: I do not agree ‘candy’ for ‘sweet.’ Your children will know what sweets are and anyway it’s important for the witch to say “Sveet-shop.” So no candy or candy-shops, please.

“tuna fish vs. fish-paste: I won’t have ‘tuna fish’ for “fish-paste.’ Please keep this Anglicism. It’s a curiosity even over here.”

I’m pleased that even though Dahl began with a broad statement about “Americanisms,” he made his actual choices based on how well the text would communicate to young American readers.

Also notable in this article is that Dahl originally thought The Witches needed a more conventional ending, as forecast in its original beginning: “I myself escaped twice from the clutches of witches before I was eight years old, and for that I have to thank my grandmother.”

Willy Wonka to the 33rd Degree

Last month I saw that the National Heritage Museum’s announcement of a conference on Masonic history promised this paper by Bradley Kime of Brigham Young University: “Freemasonry in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”

That amused me as an example of academic triviality, so I went looking for more information. I discovered that as of last fall Kime was a TA at BYU, and I found the abstract for another version of his paper at the ACA/PCA national conference:

The film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, based on Roald Dahl’s famous story, has exercised an enormous amount of influence on American popular culture. The film score was nominated for an academy award and Sammy Davis Junior’s cover of “Candy Man” topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The original film gave rise to a forgettable Freudian remake in 2005, to new lexical items such as Oompa Loompa and Golden Ticket, and to the unforgettable character of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka. Yet, there is more to this morality tale than meets the eye. My research shows that this story is far from being understood or completely unpacked: there are not only strong thematic parallels with Free Masonry, but also biographical details in Dahl’s life that show his own exposure to Masonry. I have used unpublished archival materials, including from the Dahl archives, to outline the remarkable parallels to Masonic ceremonies in the film and to explore possible Masonic influences in Dahl’s life during key moments when the story was inspired and written.

I recognized that PCA/ACA stands for Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. And I realized that I know that because I myself have presented at the New England Popular Culture Association’s annual meeting. And suddenly this effort didn’t seem so amusingly trivial.

Roald Dahl Working Undercover

The Telegraph of London offers an article about Roald Dahl, author of James and the Giant Peach and My Uncle Oswald:

A portrait of Dahl's Second World War years as an undercover agent attached to the British Embassy in Washington is painted in The Irregulars, published in Britain on September 9.

Drawing on previously unpublished letters and other documents, American journalist Jennet Conant has written about Dahl's numerous sexual conquests.

They include Millicent Rogers, the heiress to a Standard Oil fortune, and Clare Boothe Luce, a right-wing congresswoman and the wife of the publisher of Time magazine.

Boothe Luce proved so frisky, Dahl later claimed to have begged his superiors to take him off the assignment, only to be told to get back into the bedroom. . . .

Dahl was moved to Washington in 1942 after being declared unfit to fly after a successful RAF career. . . .

Despite Dahl's reputation as "one of the biggest cocksmen in America", as described by previous biography, he was said to have passed on several useful pieces of intelligence, including his belief that President Franklin D Rooseveldt [sic] was having an affair with Crown Princess Martha of Norway, who had been granted asylum by the US.

FDR's affair with the crown princess is also discussed in Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time and other books. Another member of the same ring was Ian Fleming.