Roald Dahl used power of words to waltz his Matilda
The letters of Roald Dahl are being collected for a new book to celebrate next year’s centenary of the famous writer’s birth
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In October 1989, the famous British author Roald Dahl wrote a letter to the director of a stage adaptation of his 1988 children’s literature classic, Matilda.
“Dear Mr Watkins,” Dahl wrote.
“I believe you are casting for Matilda around about now. I hope you are considering the question of casting a man in the part of Miss Trunchbull. If you got the right one it could be awfully funny. Yours sincerely, Roald Dahl.”
A week later, Dahl wrote again.
“Dear Mr Watkins. How wonderful that you have cast a giant male in the part of Miss Trunchbull. I hope he can bring it off. I hope also that you will be able to have some wires working to lift children off the floor.
“If you can have the Trunchbull throw a little girl into the wings by her pigtails that would be the greatest triumph of all. I bet you are thinking about that one.”
Dahl signed off, declining Watkins’ invitation to come to a rehearsal — because “it’s far better if I do not interfere”.
Dahl was a prolific and forceful author, and never more so than as a correspondent.
“Dahl was famously blunt and often slagged off people in quite strong terms,” says Dahl biographer Donald Sturrock, who is assembling a follow-up book of the writer’s letters for the centenary of his birth on September 13, 2016. “He was a prodigious letter writer,” Sturrock says.
“He wrote probably five to 10 adult letters a day most of his life, and when he became a successful children’s writer he was answering hundreds of letters a week from children.”
Sturrock found the Matilda letters in Dahl’s archives while researching his new book.
“Everyone I’ve mentioned them to — including Liccy (Felicity, Dahl’s widow) — has been surprised and delighted by them,” Sturrock says.
He doesn’t believe the creative team behind Matilda The Musical was aware of Dahl’s suggestion of a male Trunchbull. They have, nevertheless, cast men in the role of the headmistress from hell, including James Millar for the production currently playing at the Sydney Lyric.
“They’d obviously got into the Dahl vibe without realising,” Sturrock says.
Dahl died in 1990 at the age of 74 after a truly extraordinary life. As a dashing RAF pilot, and afterwards in America, he had romanced glamorous women including Ginger Rogers, Gloria Vanderbilt and Elizabeth Arden. As a writer he had drawn from his imagination a cast of unforgettable characters in books including James And The Giant Peach, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, The BFG and, of course, Matilda.
Sturrock met Dahl while making a BBC documentary about him and later wrote a biography of Dahl called Storyteller. His follow-up book has entailed painstaking detective work as he tracked down Dahl’s letters to his mother, his publishers, his wives, children, lovers and countless others.
“It’s amazing how many survived,” Sturrock says.
Many of the letters were to young readers and are tiny jewels of Dahl’s quirky writing.
About half of Sturrock’s new book will be devoted to Dahl’s letters to his mother, Sofie Magdalena, who was widowed when Dahl was only three.
These letters reveal Dahl as “bossy and protective”, even from the age of about nine, Sturrock says. Sofie Magdalena put the letters in neat bundles and kept them until she died.
Other letters include a heartfelt one to the widow of a fighter pilot who had come to Dahl’s aid during the war.
Dahl had force-landed his plane in North Africa in 1940, sustaining bad injuries in the process.
From the mid-1970s, Dahl’s letters were typed by a secretary and carbon copies kept.
“But for most of his life his letters were handwritten on this famous yellow lined paper,” Sturrock says.
His nastiest letters could be “explosive”.
One woman managed to get the better of Dahl.
After receiving a letter which amounted to a rude tirade, the headmistress of a school attended by one of his children politely suggested Dahl should feel free to remove his daughter.
“He writes back this lovely letter — something like ‘I’m really sorry, I did go over the top. I should stick to writing stories and stop writing letters’,” Sturrock says.
She was no Trunchbull, but that particular headmistress “gave him as good as she got”.
Originally published as Roald Dahl used power of words to waltz his Matilda
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