Chapter 1: What tragedy transformed Roald Dahl's life and career?
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Chapter 2: How did Dahl's experience as a father influence his writing?
After the nurse's mistake, despite the comfort of having Hellman and Hammett right upstairs, the Dahls decide to get the hell out of this hospital. So they wrap Theo in blankets, pick him up in their arms, and just carry him out. All the doctors are standing around, looking very worried and protesting, Dahl says, but their minds are made up.
To make matters worse, it's a crazy snow day in New York. But then Neil's longtime agent, Harvey Orkin, suddenly materializes with a car. Dahl continues.
It was snowing like hell and we were desperate. But then Harvey suddenly materialized with a car. And he drove very fast and very skillfully through the blizzard, with cars skidding at odd angles all around us. I'd not forgotten that ride. Because here was Harvey, an unhappy-ish chap, a wise, cracky fellow, a person I wasn't so keen on and who doubtlessly wasn't so fond of me.
Yet there was Harvey, still the sort of friend who would drive through the snow for you in an emergency.
I love this detail. Loyalty is such an important theme in Dahl's work. Think of Matilda and Miss Honey, Sophie and the BFG, Charlie and Grandpa Joe. You can just feel how much it means to Dahl that this guy, this agent, who's not even a close friend, has nevertheless shown up in a snowstorm to save them. Harvey drives them to Presbyterian Hospital. I know it well.
It's where I had both of my kids. Here, the doctors evaluate Theo and operate on him for a subdermal hematoma, which is a kind of swelling caused by bleeding into the brain. And they put it right, Dahl says. A huge, huge relief. Still, Theo will stay in the hospital inside an oxygen tent for the next two weeks. It's a terrible period.
Theo goes temporarily blind from cerebrospinal fluid accumulating around his brain, which requires another operation. Remember, he's only four months old. Each operation is incredibly dangerous. Neil somehow stays relatively calm through it all. She has a kind of strength you could only step back from and admire. Dahl later gushes about his wife.
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Chapter 3: What medical innovation did Dahl contribute to during his son's health crisis?
His poor infant son is dying, nothing is working, and instead of just throwing his hands up, he literally invents the solution. It takes two years for them to build it, which is roughly 40,000 years fewer than it would have taken me. The Wade-Dahl-Till valve, named for its three innovators, is so successful that it soon gets manufactured globally.
Dahl insists they not make a profit on it in order to be able to distribute it cheaply. According to the National Library of Medicine at NIH, the device is estimated to have been used in 2,000 to 3,000 children worldwide in the two years after they came up with it. It's especially useful in developing nations where medical devices like this mean the difference between life and death.
Not to take us off topic, but a quick aside just to say that I did a bunch of research around this, and the only similar example I found of anything like this ever happening, a breakthrough medical device getting created by someone without medical training, is exactly one year later.
A guy named Paul Winchell, a TV actor who appeared in lots of sitcoms like The Brady Bunch and The Beverly Hillbillies, and was the original voice of Tigger in Winnie the Pooh, he co-creates the first artificial heart. I have nothing more to say about that except, what the hell was happening in the 60s? For Dahl, creating the tube is another incredible feat in a life full of them.
I think each of these accomplishments was only possible because of the one that came before. They all built on each other. When Dahl was recruited into the Irregulars in his 20s, without any espionage training, he didn't know what he was doing. But in a matter of months, he was hanging out with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. When he decided to write movies, he was completely clueless.
But soon, he was on top of Hollywood, working with Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock. When you go through life like that, with no apparent ceiling to what's possible, with life constantly reinforcing your crazy ambitions, you must start to feel like nothing is out of reach. So when no device exists to help cure your infant son, you don't go to church and pray.
You call a doctor and a toy maker you know and say, let's get to work. Dahl, of course, later puts all of this into his writing. The lead character in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is partly based on the toy maker, Wade. And Willy Wonka has parts of all three men. An innovating scientist, a creative genius, a toy-making savant.
But instead of torturing children like Wonka does, Dahl and his buddies build a device to save them.
Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple.
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Chapter 4: How did Dahl cope with the loss of his daughter Olivia?
Ensuring that while one little girl's laughter was silenced, countless others will echo, thanks to the pages he writes in her memory. Okay, it's 1965 now. Dahl has lost a daughter. He has a son who's in and out of the hospital. His writing is not going well. He still hasn't found his voice or his audience. But at least he's got his wife, right? Again, hold on tight.
Just a few years after Olivia's death, Neil lands a huge acting job. It's the lead in a studio film being directed by one of Hollywood's all-time legends, four-time Best Director winner John Ford.
Back in the 60s, Orson Welles was interviewed, and one of the questions he was asked was who his favorite American directors were. He said, well, I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.
That was director Peter Bogdanovich from a documentary called Directed by John Ford. The movie Ford wants Patricia Neal to star in will be his final film. He's retiring, even though he's less than a decade removed from some of his best work, like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Neil is ecstatic to work with Ford, and it's maybe the only gig she would have said yes to right now, because in addition to everything else going on with her family, she's just discovered she's three months pregnant. Neil brings Doll and the kids out to L.A. for the shoot. She's hoping, praying it'll be a comforting change of scenery for the grieving family.
Neil arranges for all of them to stay in director Martin Ritt's house. Years earlier, Ritt directed Neil to an Oscar in HUD. By this point, his career has been derailed by the Hollywood blacklist for being a suspected communist. One look at his crazy mansion in the Palisades, though, and you know this guy isn't totally opposed to capitalism.
Rip and his family are abroad, so Neil, Doll, and the kids have it all to themselves. When they arrive in L.A., it's February. Neil begins filming. Four days into the shoot, she has the afternoon off. She comes home to give Tessa a bath. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Neil feels a searing headache come on. Headache isn't even the right word. It's like a knife in her skull, she later writes.
She collapses to the floor next to the bathtub. Dahl happens to be in the bedroom, so he hears the thud and comes rushing in. He finds Neil unconscious. He quickly pulls poor Tessa out of the tub. She's crying her eyes out, looking at her mom unconscious on the floor. Dahl's panic only lasts a moment. He's been here before. Almost on autopilot, Dahl flies into action. He's ready for this.
Theo and Olivia have prepared him. First, he calls an ambulance, then quickly calls Dr. Charles Carton, a neurosurgeon who consulted on Theo. It's kind of an amazing twist of fate. Only because of Theo's accident does Dahl have the home phone number of one of the best neurosurgeons in the world.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Dahl face in his marriage after Olivia's death?
We've got knives in the kitchen that will do you up fine, and there are my razor blades upstairs. Or else you can lock yourself in the car and turn on the engine, and before you know it, Bob's your uncle. Nothing to it. Making a joke of it is, of course, Dahl's way to cope. And then he finds another way, turning it into his fiction. Here's Dahl explaining to Michael Parkinson again.
When she started to pick up words, she made them up. I made a whole list of them once, and I don't know where they are. She used to once say, you drive me crazy. She used to say, you've jaked my diables. It's a suspended phrase, you know. She used to call a dry martini a red screwdriver.
Dahl is taking notes on all of his wife's funny, strange turns of phrase, and is going to put them into the mouth of the BFG. If you haven't read that book in a while, here's a typical speech by the giant from Steven Spielberg's adaptation. And then there would be a great rumple-dumpus, wouldn't there?
And all the human beings would be rummaging and whiffling for the giant, what you saw, and getting wildly excited, and then they'd be locking me up in a cage to be looked at with all the squiggling... You know, hippo dumplings and crocodile dillies and jiggy rafts. And then there would be a gigantious look-see giant hunt for all of the boys.
I won't tell. That very unique speech pattern is part of what makes the BFG one of the most indelible characters ever put to print. And it comes right out of his wife's stroke. On the one hand, it's not Dahl's most attractive trait to poke fun at his ill wife's limitations. On the other, turning what must have been intense private pain into his art is what all great artists have always done.
It just comes off a little more comical in Dahl's case. But he does make the BFG's wordplay sympathetic, at least. Like when he has him say, Please understand that I cannot be helping it if I sometimes is saying things a little squiggly. Words is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me. For Neil, of course, it was much more terrifying than funny.
Here she is, years later on Fresh Air, speaking to Terry Gross.
I didn't even know one word from the other when I first became conscious. My son, he used to give me reading lessons. You know, he would say, cat and dog. I mean, they'd be written because he had had to have those cards when he was young. I didn't even know what that meant. I knew what nothing meant. You have no idea. When your brain is operating on you, you have no brain. It's sad.
As you can hear from that clip, Neil did make the amazing recovery that her husband insisted on. What may be most miraculous about the entire ordeal is that despite the intense trauma Neil goes through, she somehow doesn't lose the pregnancy. She was three months along when the stroke happened.
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Chapter 6: How did Dahl's wife's health crisis impact his creative process?
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