Afternoon television is a rare indulgence for me. I only watch it when I really have an awful lot of work to do and many pressing deadlines. On one such recent occasion, I found myself idly flicking through the options until I came across a channel showing Tales of the Unexpected, the adaptations of Roald Dahl’s brilliantly evil short stories.
I’d watched many of these in the early eighties, when they seemed to me to portray the epitome of wicked adult glamour. And so I learned that my idea of ‘glamour’ was drunk people in hats driving Morris Minor cars, and making calls from phone boxes outside pubs steeped in cigarette smoke. Everyone’s clothes, even the posh people’s, looked like they’d been bought from the Grattan catalogue circa 1979. And the way they talk! It’s all soooo late 1900s.
Then, in the midst of one twisted tale of betrayal and murder, something happened that broke me out of my nostalgic reverie. Let me set the scene. Two men are drinking in a dingy pub. They’re telling each other about their lives since last they met. They’re angry and they hate each other, and both of them harbour terrible secrets. In the middle of their charged conversation, one man bitterly admits to the other that the woman he married “smells like the inside of a tart’s handbag.”
Reader, I had to press pause for a moment, to let that gloriously evocative simile sink in. I savoured it. The sheer, brutal economy of it. The lurid way it expresses everything we need to know.
And I thought, they’d never let a writer get away with that these days. The moment the words fell from a character’s lips, there would be a flurry of tiktokkers and tubes denouncing the writer for even imagining such a thing. Erm, I think you meant to say “a sex worker’s backpack,” actually. And it probably smells of a nice perfume, like a Britney Spears one, or like organic chia seeds, or just a leaky Stanley cup and the phone number for a domestic abuse hotline.
Of course, Roald Dahl wouldn’t get away with anything he wanted to write these days. His brilliant books for children have been worked over by illiterate thugs and you can’t even mention his name without some twit gently reminding you that he wasn’t very nice to his wife, you know… Like I give a fuck. What’s his wife to me? Did his wife write some of the greatest stories in the world, ever? Did his wife come up with a line as fabulously nasty as “she smells like the inside of a tart’s handbag?” No? She can fuck off then.
I don’t care. The same way that I don’t care what horrible things Dickens did for fun, or the fact that Brett Easton Ellis wore sunglasses indoors, or that Patricia Highsmith was a cold-hearted cow. (Incidentally, or significantly, depending on how you look at it, Patricia Highsmith’s mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. So, you know, she was way ahead of some of you booktubes going about trying to get Ripley cancelled for being too murdery.)
The history of writers is the history of nasty, damaged people leaving a trail of destruction in their path. And, as they didn’t say in the late 1900s, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
There’s so much pressure on writers these days to be good people. And being a good person is more than a simple matter of not breaking too many of the ten commandments (with the exception of coveting your neighbour’s ass, because I mean, who doesn’t?) To be good these days means to actually be saintly and flawless according to the ever-changing commandments of some nebulous internet god. And above all else, to #bekind.
Well, it’s not very kind to describe the Twits as filthy and smelly, or the Witches as ugly, or Augustus Gloop as a greedy fat boy who deserves a dunking in a vat of chocolate and to be carried off by the (colonised and oppressed peoples formerly known as) Oompa Loompas. But that is the glory of Roald Dahl’s children’s books. He is mercilessly vicious towards anyone who stands against justice, sanity, or yes – kindness.
Now, the benighted and ignorant censors who suggest kids will be traumatised by having to read about fat, ugly people who pretend to be helping children while really hating them and trying to destroy their spirit will not appreciate the layers of irony with which they are engaging. But Roald Dahl’s popularity is precisely due to the fact that he’s not kind. And he’s certainly not nice. In fact, he’s the opposite of nice. He’s honest.
Listen. The whole point of being a writer is that you’re this raw, weird, uncomfortable, unconventional, misunderstood, overwrought, selfish, disgusting, obsessive monster who prowls beyond the comforts of the metaphorical campfire to watch people with all the cynicism, distance, and honesty of a true outsider. You observe. You judge. You notice all the common little uglinesses and absurdities that nice people train themselves not to see. And then you tell the people you’ve been watching all about themselves and who they really are, and this makes them clap their hands with glee, because someone has seen them in all their nasty, stupid horror.
I mean, that’s if you’re any good.
Sure, maybe Roald and Patricia and Brett should have made more of an effort to act like nice people, at least on the surface. Maybe - and bear with me here - Dickens shouldn’t have tried to lock his wife up in the loony bin, and Anne Perry shouldn’t have bludgeoned her girlfriend’s mom to death, and Mary Shelley shouldn’t have shagged her husband on her mother’s grave. Or carried his heart around in a jar for thirty years.
It’s also true that not every terrible person is a great writer. In fact, most terrible people aren’t even very good writers. Then again, most nice people are really bad at writing, too.
But every great writer is a terrible person by today’s standards. And some of them are terrible by anyone’s standards. And I’m okay with that.
The demand for unproblematic writers and books is an illiterate demand. A person who never caused a problem will never write a great book. And a great book will never be bland and inoffensive. Expecting writers to be original, revolutionary, brilliant, inspired, chaotic, wild, free, brave voices railing against convention, but also pleasant, hygienic people you’d want to do yoga with is just daft.
What I’m saying is, you can be a great person or you can be a great writer. But you probably can’t be both at the same time. Also, your mom smells like the inside of a tart’s handbag. Deal with it.
Crimplene zigzag collared button blouse in ivory cream, £6.99. Murder victim, model’s own.
It's basically a form of censorship, isn't it? If you read this and write that, then you are an unworthy and horrible person who thinks unworthy and horrible thoughts. But who is going to write these new kind of "acceptable" books, to fit this brand new form of saintly kindness? Won't these books be without both plot and character development? Completely bland?
Amen to this. I was just reading Dahl's "The Enormous Crocodile" to my three year old and five year old the other day and I was chuckling over how you would never find a book like this anymore where the crocodile is rhapsodizing about its desire to feel the bones of children crunch and their juicy flesh squish in its mouth. They were wide-eyed but transfixed. They loved it