This just in: Roald Dahl was a dick

Portus · Jun 6, 2011

This came up on Instapaper and as my daughter is now plowing through all of Dahl's books, I decided to give it a go.

Excerpt from the article said:

In 1942 Dahl came to Washington for the first time, after being invalided out of the Royal Air Force. He was six-foot-six, a gargantuan man who still desired to be a boy. The young diplomat presented himself as full of charm, and he put that personality to work on the immensely wealthy publisher Charles Marsh, who had counted Lyndon Johnson as a protege. The idea of being a writer for children had surely entered Dahl's mind. He possessed a photographic memory for stories, recalling ones he had read or heard often in letters. In school he had been a mediocre student.

An unhappy and bullied little boy, in adulthood he longed for the kind of dominance he never achieved as a child. Even from his earliest days, he was a hateful little fuck. He began one prep school essay, "Sometimes there is a great advantage in traveling to hot countries, where niggers dwell. They will give you many valuable things." From a very young age Dahl found himself attracted to older women, cultivating many secret relationships throughout his life, including a variety of affairs with married women.

In 1938, his desire for a diplomatic posting had assigned him to Tanzania, formerly German East Africa. By the time he reached Washington, his capacity for pleasing females reached a fever pitch. Most of his opposite numbers considered Dahl a beautiful young man, and when the heiress and socialite Clare Boothe Luce was placed beside him at a table, she pounced on the opportunity to bring him home. In Jeremy Treglown's biography of Roald Dahl he reports that according to a friend, Dahl said:

I am all fucked out. That goddamn woman has absolutely screwed me from one end of the room to the other for three goddam nights. I went back to the Ambassador this morning, and I said, "You know it's a great assignment, but I just can't go on." And the Ambassador said, "Roald, did you ever see the Charles Laughton movie of Henry VIII?" And I said "Yes." "Well," he said, "do you remember the scene with Henry going into the bedroom with Anne of Cleves, and he turns and says 'The things I've done for England'? Well, that's what you've got to do."
Click to expand...

I LOL'd. The rest of the article is pretty inflamatory as well, and the comments are a mixed bag. I've never been to this site before, and I may be stuck there for a while yet.

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This just in: Roald Dahl was a dick

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This just in: Roald Dahl was a dick

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