A Royal Biographer’s Affair with Matthew Dennison

0:05Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:46Today, I'm talking with British biographer Matthew Dennison. As Matthew tells me in our conversation, writing a biography is a little bit like having an affair. You must live obsessively with the person to really get to grips with who they are. I'll tell you, not that people are queuing up for the gig, but God help whoever writes the Anthony Scaramucci biography. Matthew has had some great affairs demonstrated through his fantastic books, from Queen Elizabeth herself to his most recent on the much-loved author, Roald Dahl. So, what don't we know about UK's longest reigning monarch? How will King Charles fare?

1:28And which one of Matthew's subjects was really a spy? You'll find out all of this and more on today's open book.

1:41So joining us now is Matthew Dennison. He's an award-winning author, and he wrote a brand new book, Roald Dahl. Hopefully, I'm pronouncing Roald Dahl's name right. You'll have to educate me. Teller of the Unexpected. What a brilliant book. And so for many of us, we grew up with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, the BFG. Just an incredible story, Matthew. Thank you for writing it. Why don't we get started with Roald Dahl himself? Why did you pick him to write a biography? I was fascinated by the idea of somebody who had shaped generations of childhood landscapes, someone who had had such an incredible impact on the imaginative life of children now for 50 years.

2:26And I had a suspicion that he was going to be somebody who turned out to be personally complex. And of course, that's always exciting for a biographer. He describes himself as an ordinary fellow, just slightly taller than the average person. But he's way more than that. He's a very complex human being. Let's start with his mom, Sophie Magdalene, for a second, who was a great teller of tales, particularly with the loss of his father, Harold. and I want to get into his father, Harold, and his sister, Astrid, all of which impacted him greatly. There's a theme here around their tragic endings. And maybe you could share a little bit of that with our listeners.

3:06I think the key things about Dahl's childhood is the sense of male absence, followed by family tragedy. And of course, the two are related. Dahl loses his father when he's only three. He has two elder sisters. At that point, his mother is pregnant. She has another daughter. He has a stepsister, so we're up to four sisters and a mother. He does have a much older stepbrother, but he's essentially a fairly absent part of the family. So here we have a boy who grows up in this house that's thick with sisters, who's referred to by his mother as boy, not by his Christian name. So he's defined by gender.

3:40He's also his mother's favourite, so there's a sense that gender makes you special. And I think that that idea that Dahl has of being a man or a boy and that being absolutely key to his identity, but also key to his specialness, is something that shapes him throughout his life, particularly as he's born into a kind of broken family, not broken in the sense of divorce or any kind of abusive behaviour, but broken in the sense of death and loss. And what Dahl seems to absorb from that is an idea that he should be able to fix stuff. So maleness is important, but maleness, remember we're talking the interwar period, it's a long time ago.

4:17Maleness implies being able to do things. It's an active role. And he clings to that right up until his death in 1990. Let me set the scene for you, okay? It's 1974. I'm 10 years old. I'm in the fourth grade, which is elementary school in the United States. And I'm reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What do you think Mr. Dahl wants me to feel about that book? And how do you think he wants me to be influenced by his writing? I think he wants you to have a sense of excitement. He was evangelical about the idea that it was so important for children to be readers. And obviously, what makes children read as well?

4:57Absorbing books. Dahl, although he's genetically entirely Norwegian, genetically he has no British or English blood at all, defines himself as British and picks up on a number of British prejudices. And I have to say, one of his early prejudices was a kind of snobbishness about America, which he subsequently lost. And one of the things that he didn't like about America was he felt that television had that nation in its grip. And television, Tadal, threatened the power of writing, the power of reading. And so I guess one of the things we take from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is everything that's going on with my TV.

5:32What else does he want you to think? He wants you to think that dreams come true. He wants you to believe that the underdog will make it. And he wants you to believe that there is always hope wherever there is love and an ability to believe in things. All right. So I, you know, and I found that book fascinating. I read it to my children. I've also read James and the Giant Peach, which we'll get to. Gene Wilder also had a big impact on me. I'm just wondering, what did he think of Gene Wilder's rendition of Willy Wonka? Well, he hated that film, but he hated anything really that kind of came between his writing as originally written and as received.

6:11So he wasn't somebody who was ideally placed to have film adaptations because any kind of adaptation inevitably involves some form of change or transformation and Dahl resisted that. So he didn't like that film and he didn't like Gene Wilder as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But I agree with you. I love that film. Yeah, you know, listen, the film was a great childhood memory for me. Of course, Gene Wilder being one of the most accomplished comedians of our time. He's an interesting guy. I mean, I'm reading about him. I'm going to ask you a couple of yes or no questions. Was he an anti-Semite?

6:43He said no. He said that he was anti-Israel. Yeah, so he was an anti-Zionist. Yes, he was. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there are some pretty explicitly anti-Semitic statements behind the idea of Israel. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because here's this childhood symbol of creativity and virtue and the underdog and so forth. And yet, you know, he had these elements of biases and predispositions, you know, which is so fascinating about human life because we have so many contradictions about our own personalities and the way we think about the world. He had a brush with death. You write about it eloquently.

7:20He spent some time in the Royal Air Force in Africa. And then obviously what happened to him in Greece, he says, you know, you report that he cherished his brush with death. Why is that, Matthew? Why did he cherish that? I think because he aspired to heroism. This idea of himself as hero fits with this idea of himself he absorbed as a boy, as rather the boy in the family. And so, you know, the idea of kind of wartime daring do and distinguishing yourself in a situation of extraordinary bravery, but that can also kind of buy into some patriotic narrative. And remember, he is of an imperial generation.

7:57So that kind of old fashioned patriotism is still in his mindset at this point. I think it's really important. I think it was also a moment of incredible freedom for him. It was a moment when he was totally absorbed by what he was doing. The war usefully came to his rescue. He was somebody who craved adventure and he was terrified of the commonplace, the ordinary. So he was terrified of the idea of just having to do an ordinary job. And somehow the war rescues him and it parachutes, no pun intended, parachutes him into this kind of incredible action man world, which absolutely suits his idea of himself as immensely tall, good looking, heroic, active, effective man.

8:38Well, you know, during the war, he had a couple of different vocations, didn't he? Tell us about the Roald Dahl that we wouldn't know as an author. What was he doing during the war? Well, I guess what we could easily lose sight of nowadays when he's become a rather controversial figure is that essentially he was on a paid charm offensive to the USA. You know, he was a disabled airman who was tall, good looking, looked kind of fantastic in uniform. He was there to decorate Washington drinks parties and persuade isolationist Americans that maybe they should step in and help the British in their mission to rescue the world from what felt like a very dark evil.

9:19But at the same time, there was clearly a kind of overlap into a world of subterfuge and something that he would later describe as spying. We will never know to what extent that was official, to what extent that was something he embraced, because again, it fitted with his narrative of excitement. his inability ever to obey rules. But suddenly, you know, he got close to President Roosevelt. He mixed in very high circles. He moved information on, although he always claimed the people whose information he moved on knew that he was doing it. Would you characterize him as a spy? I think he's probably much too indiscreet, really, to be a spy.

9:53But I think what he loved about spying was the Bond dimension of it. You know, that kind of intelligence agent absolutely appealed, I think, to Dahl's sense of himself. So the reason I find your work so fascinating is that in doing a biography, you have to capture the personality of the human being. And here is a very erudite man. He's incredibly sophisticated. He's had a loss that he's had to deal with. He obviously lost his daddy, sister. He lost his daughter, Olivia, to measles in 1962. 62. And so he's this complex guy, but then he's writing about wonder and excitement and the simplicity of being a kid.

10:38You know, I just did the, I was the guardian for the recess for my six-year-old today, and he was running around in the playground. And I was thinking of the innocence and the cluelessness, you know, and the lack of awareness of what's going on. And they're just in this little bubble of security. And here is Raoul Dow with all of the smoldering passions underneath him writing about this simplicity. When you finished this book, what was your reaction to his personality? He's the third children's author I've written about. So I wrote previously about Beatrix Potter and also Kenneth Graham, the man who wrote The Wind in the Willows.

11:14And what joins all three of them is that despite having difficult circumstances as children, they idealize a concept of childhood. And it's partly that I guess all three would have liked to have gone back and it been better, but also all three felt kind of passionately about the importance of childhood to other people. I guess we could easily say there's an element of kind of self-therapy going on here with Dahl, but I think also this is somebody who felt constrained by the restrictions of adult life, sometimes constrained by the responsibilities, although he embraced a certain amount of responsibility in terms of his kind of sense of himself as male within a family.

11:52Childhood, of course, is a time of a potentially extraordinary misrule, but it also for some people feels like a time when you can make stuff happen just by wanting it to happen badly enough. And I don't mean that in some kind of, I don't know, kind of corporate job preparation sense. I just mean in that transformative personal epiphany sense. And here was somebody who never lost the idea that really he would be happiest climbing a tree and he might just get up the tree and find that there was something magic there. And I think that belief in magic, albeit he stressed it, was something that he did feel at some deep level and it exasperated him that other adults couldn't connect with this idea.

12:36You know, listen, I mean, I think about him often because, you know, he was a big part of my childhood to read those books. And he certainly captured my imagination and helped me with my love of reading. And as you get older, though, as I guess somebody said, and maybe it was Churchill, that there is no hero, Matthew, to a man's valet. Is that a fair assessment of life, that we all have our frailties and we all have our indiscretions and weaknesses? Yet, when I finished this book, this was a life well lived by this man. What am I missing? What do you think his legacy is, basically? I mean, I agree with you.

13:10I think it is a wonderful and rich life. And there are many facets of this life that are immensely inspiring. I think, for example, if there are people out there who are maybe middle-aged people considering a change of career, Roald Dahl was super successful starting in his mid-50s. It didn't happen to him in his 20s. And he never gave up. And he was always convinced he could make this happen. He also really wanted to give something to people. And he gave something to people. And And in enriching other lives, he enriched his own life. Are you missing something? No, I don't think so. If you write biography, it's a little bit like having an affair.

13:49You live with someone obsessively throughout the period. They kind of overwhelm your life. They overwhelm your dreams and your subconscious. There's an old idea that as a biographer, you mustn't fall in love with your subjects. But I think you also can't write about someone whom you don't deeply admire at some level. And albeit Dar, like all the rest of us, is a multifaceted character and there are points of darkness, there is much that's hugely admirable about him and I think immensely inspiring and exciting. And that's why 300 million copies of his books have been sold. And just as he appealed to us, maybe the first generation of his child readers, he now appeals to our children in much the same way.

14:30I think what I'm most interested in about his life, which I'd like to get your reaction to, is there's a universality of kindness in these books. There's a universality of the good guy is going to win. You have to believe in yourself. You have to take the risk, the golden lottery ticket, or you have to take on something that you're fearful of and you're going to overcome. And I guess what I'd like to ask you is, did he have to do that for himself? Meaning, when you think about his life and the complicated upbringing and time in the war, is this almost a part of himself that he's writing about as almost a form of symbolism of his own life?

15:15Yeah, I'm sure so. Although I'm also equally sure that he would say no. I think if we were to put that question to him now, a kind of old fashioned Britishness would kick in and he would deny all of it. But I think you're spot on here. Right. So let's go to the world that we live in today, Mr. Dennis. And we live in a fairly complicated world. It's a righteously critical one. We have a tendency to get very upset at each other for words. I was watching the comedy Anchorman on the way back from Europe and I was like, okay, this can't be produced today. I mean, there was just, they wouldn't allow this in Hollywood now.

15:54Mr. Dell is being censored by one of his publishers. They're taking out words. What would he think of the world of social media? Would he have a Mike Instagram as opposed to a Mike TV? Would he find this whole time to be abhorrent? Would he like it? What would your reaction to censorship and social media? What would his reaction be in your opinion? Censorship, he'd be furious because he was a man who had significant input on the part of his editors. And yet he was somebody who really cherished the concept of his own creative talent. He did not undermine his ability. He rated his own ability incredibly highly.

16:36and albeit some of his novels involved an element of collaborative effort between him and his editor, either his editor in London or his editor in the States, he would still take full credit for that. And he did agonize about his writing. He devoted a year, seven days a week to these books for children. That was a lot of time spent writing and rewriting and listening and then resounding. So he would be cross at rewriting, not least because of course he's writing books for children. If you write for children, there's an anticipation those books will be read aloud. If a book is read aloud, then the prose has to have a rhythm and cadence.

17:10Change the words, you change the rhythm, you change the impact. Suddenly you've changed the story. So he'd be pretty cross, would be my feeling. He also felt that the people who tinked with children's books were grown-ups, and he said he didn't care about grown-ups. He cared about children. And what about social media? Would he be enthralled with social media? Because it's obviously curtailed all of our willingness or wanting to read. What do you think he would feel about that? He was not averse to publicity. So I've got a feeling that he would have been deeply tempted by social media. But, you know, there's an element of self-destruct about Dahl's public pronouncements that makes me fear that social media could have been dangerous for him.

17:53Interesting. I want to go to the royal family for a second. They're in the news. You wrote a brilliant book about Queen Elizabeth II. What is the legacy there? Obviously, this great loss, this woman was with me and you for our entire lifetime. She had an incredible way about her, which I obviously greatly admired. Tell us a little bit about Queen Elizabeth and her family. I guess in terms of her legacy, you know, the truth is that by the time the queen died, there was a reverential attitude towards her among many people in this country. and it was partly that the turbulent period of the early and mid-90s was a long way behind her.

18:30She'd sailed into calmer waters, perhaps sort of intemperate criticism that things that happened in some people's marriages was her fault had been set aside. I think we recognise in this country and people across the world recognise that she did embody virtues that though societies, cultures and individuals don't necessarily practice. Many people pay lip service to and recognize the value of them. And somehow in her last years, there seemed to be a growing acknowledgement that that creed of others before self, of a kind of dogged continuance, of a sense of unchanging values, unchanging verities, of a kind of compassionate engagement with the world at large was immensely valuable and something that perhaps wasn't mouthpiece as broadly as it could, you know, in all cultures across the world, you know, in our own nation.

19:25So, you know, she was, for us, a lone spokeswoman over that 70-year period. Nobody else trumpeted those virtues through, you know, what was going into eight decades. And the British royal family occupies a different position in our national life from any other royal family than the Japanese, apart from the Japanese family in Japan, it is different from other European monarchies in that there has always been a kind of bond of affection between crown and country. You know, the crown is part of the political executive of our nation. Nothing can become law without royal assent. The crown represents a kind of stopping block to political extremism, but it also is a kind of focus for emotion and affection.

20:08And that's not simply wishful thinking on the part of monarchists, we see time and again, this kind of unifying force, which we saw on a huge scale at the Queen's death. Do you think Roald Dahl had British values in that sense? Well, he certainly thought he was. He would say of himself that he was an Englishman, that he was very English. I mean, you know, nowadays people who are genetically English define themselves as British. Before the Second World Wars, somebody who was British might call themselves English. So when he says English, he means British. I think that kind of batting for the underdog in his fiction is something that in Britain we've always regarded as a British feeling.

20:46I think the fact that though he was a perfectionist and incredibly disciplined about his writing, he liked to pretend that it just happened. He is part of that kind of British cult of the amateur. He was very generous in many ways. If people wrote to him with an ill child, He would write very significant checks for hospital equipment. In that way, he had a sense of giving back, which obviously is not uniquely British, but he felt it was a British thing. Yes, he was. But of course, he also was aware that his Britishness was a thin veneer. And I think part of the spikiness in his character is this funny sense that he was an insider outsider.

21:28outsider. He had a kind of standard upper middle class education, but he wasn't one of those people with kind of long roots in this country. You know, when I think about the royal family and I think about the tradition, I think of Dal himself as a traditionalist. We're now in this sort of cross current of new traditions being built. And it seems like a younger generation wants to rip up the past or relitigate the past and then designate who are the winners are, who are the losers, you know listen there's some atrocities that have happened in the past i'm not here to give alibis to any of these atrocities whether there's colonialism imperialism slavery i'm not saying that but i think not recognizing them for what they were and trying to revise them i think puts us in great danger it's almost orwellian and i'm just wondering your reaction to the censorship issues and the wokeism and what do you think mr dow's reaction would be I have read a lot recently about the relationship between British slave-owning families and the people who lived in the areas in which they owned plantations and also slave labour.

22:39And there has been, unsurprisingly, a movement in Britain among people who are descendants of those families to go out to the Caribbean to see these places. And you won't be surprised to hear that what people say to them when they get there is white British people apologising doesn't get them anywhere. You know, what matters in life is action. And in a similar way, Dahl was somebody who believed profoundly in words as something that could shape dreams and could improve lives, but also recognised that there were moments when there had to be actions, that words on their own weren't enough. and that sometimes words could be inappropriate, that sometimes people use words maybe to make themselves feel better rather than to make other people's lives better.

23:23I think Dahl would have been intolerant of wokeism simply because his mind was formed in a culture that was so profoundly different. But if he recognised that really what wokeism, what political correctness is doing is a kind of enforced good manners to other people, a sort of enforced consideration and enforced compassion, then he would feel that he was all for that. Albeit at different moments in his life, he was incredibly rude to any number of people and occasionally uncompassionate. I just find it fascinating that we were at this crossroad because obviously the protests related to the censorship, we now have two versions of his book.

24:05It's sort of like Coke and original formula and new Coke. I'm wondering what you think of that. Do you think that this is a moment in time where people 10 or 20 years from now will say, wow, that was absolutely ridiculous. We're going back to the original text. Do you think that we'll have two versions of these stories going forward? Or do you think that the new version will eventually win out? What is your opinion there, sir? I'm not convinced the new version will win out. For example, in one of the books, the word black was taken out. So the BFG wears a black cloak. In the new version, he wears a dark cloak.

24:40In Ezio Trot, the word dark is taken out every time and replaced with something different. There's no consistency about any of this. And the truth is, I think a child that reads about a piece of clothing that's described as black recognizes that that is not connected to skin colour. It's not connected to race. There is no implication, either pejorative or positive, about that. Obviously, we live at a time when we elevate choice. Choice is a kind of ultimate virtue of our time. And so suddenly what's going to happen in Britain is that people will have the choice to buy the new version or the old version.

25:13Part of the protest in this country was that if you had dial books on your Kindle, they were automatically updated to the new version, even if you bought the old version some time ago. And that seems wrong, doesn't it? Because that's a denial of choice and it's a kind of imposition of a political agenda. Dahl's publishers, certainly in Britain, have been forced to agree to keep the original versions in print. And I suspect those versions will remain popular, certainly in the short term, because those are the versions that parents like you and I had when we were children that we remember. And we may even have our own copies, which is what we share with our children.