Roald Dahl by Jeremy Treglown

Preface and Acknowledgments
    In the mid-1980s, Roald Dahl published two autobiographical books for children: Boy , about his childhood, and Going Solo , which takes the story up to his departure for Washington at the end of 1941. He was helped with them by his most recent American editor, Stephen Roxburgh, whom he subsequently authorized to write a full biography. Later, Dahl fell out with Roxburgh over his editing of Matilda , 1 and the project was abandoned.
    After Dahl’s death in November 1990, responsibility for choosing a new biographer fell to the third of his four surviving children, Ophelia. 2 She decided that she would in due course write the book herself, and her stepmother, Felicity Dahl (the author’s widow by his second marriage), asked close relatives not to cooperate in any similar project. They are a tightly knit family, centered around Dahl’s old home, Gipsy House, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, where Mrs. Dahl still lives and from which she runs both her husband’s literary estate and a charitable foundation named after him. Readers may ask the question I often put to myself when I began researching the book: should I have given up and gone away?
    Morally, I reckoned that quite apart from his interest as a hugely successful writer, Dahl was so active in encouraging hisown, often controversial, public myth that it would not be wrong for an outsider to look into it. I have tried to be tactful in various ways, while assuming that the family and friends of so quarrelsome a man are used to the fact that not all that is said about him is admiring. And I have respected the stipulations of those I have interviewed. Most of the people who spoke to me did so unconditionally, but some asked me to leave certain of their remarks unattributed, and a few—not the most critical of Dahl—wanted to remain anonymous.
    In practical terms, the fact that the book was “unauthorized” wasn’t as much an obstacle to research as I feared it might be when I started. Most of Dahl’s acquaintances whom I approached agreed to talk to me, from people who were at school with him to those who edited his last books. One interview led to another, and as time went by, some members of the family decided to meet me, after all. I had, of course, read the autobiography of Dahl’s wife of thirty years, Patricia Neal, As I Am (1988), and the moving fictionalized memoir, Working for Love , published in the same year by their oldest surviving daughter, Tessa Dahl. Early in 1992, Patricia Neal allowed me to interview her at her Manhattan apartment, and about a year later we spent time together in London and Great Missenden. Soon afterward, I talked at some length to both Tessa Dahl and her younger sister, Lucy. I also interviewed, among the many other people listed below, the actress Annabella (Suzanne Charpentier), whom Dahl met in 1944 and to whom he remained close for the rest of his life, and Dennis Pearl, a friend for even longer, and eventually a relative by marriage.
    There was another route to Roald Dahl, or set of routes: his letters. He was a voluble correspondent, and because he lived and worked in both the United States and Britain, his friendships, as well as his dealings with his publishers, were often carried on by mail. In the 1940s and ’50s, he was one of the protégés of an American newspaper owner and philanthropist, Charles Marsh, whose secretary, now his widow, Claudia, kept both sidesof their substantial correspondence and gave me access to it. And for thirty years from the day when the publisher Alfred Knopf first read Dahl’s New Yorker story “Taste” and signed him up for a book, Knopf’s staff kept their letters, memos, readers’ reports, legal agreements, and other files, which are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I read Dahl’s exchanges with some other publishers, too (particularly