The antisemitic Roald Dahl was one of the most unpleasant people who ever lived

The Roald Dahl Museum in England, founded by the widow of the children’s author, has acknowledged the author’s antisemitism was “undeniable and indelible.” It adds that it “fully” supports an apology released by the Dahl family and Roald Dahl Story Company in 2020 for the author’s antisemitic views. Unlike some American states, the Museum does not try to whitewash history. The truth is the truth, no matter how much you try to deny it.

Dahl himself was not shy about declaring his antisemitism. he once said:

“There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

And there is more to Dahl’s bigotry than just his racism.  

Dahl is famous for writing beloved and charming children’s fiction. Generations have embraced the classics: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and James and the Giant Peach. However, the man himself was a most unpleasant person.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory offer clues to his personality and beliefs. Four of the five children with the golden tickets are awful human beings — fair enough. However, Dahl has Willy Wonka dispatch them with a fair degree of sadism.

Dahl also had Wonka explain that he found the Oompa-Loompas ‘in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before.’ They were near starvation, living on vile caterpillars, so Wonka smuggled them to England for their own good.” It was early-1960s Britain. And Dahl’s regret of the fall of colonialism is blatant.

Dahl was also a prolific adult short story writer. In those tales — definitely NSFW and inappropriate for children — he explores the darker side of sex, pain, cruelty, and other ‘mature topics.’

I will grant you that in the absence of anything else, an author should not be confused with their work. There is no evidence to suggest that Nabokov was a pedophile. Or that Dostoevsky had a habit of murdering old female pawnbrokers.

On the other hand, Dahl provides plenty of evidence that he was an unmitigated shit. His first wife, the American actress Patricia Neal, nicknamed him “Roald the Rotten.” And his American publisher for 20 years, Alfred A. Knopf, fired him in 1980 despite his enormous return on their investment.

In his memoir Avid Reader, Robert Gottlieb, who was a senior executive at Knopf from 1963 to 1987, described working with Dahl:

His behavior to the staff there was so demanding and rude that no one wanted to work with him, and in any case, there was no one there who was elevated enough for him to deign to deal with. Roald was a tremendous charmer . . . but his behavior at Knopf grew more and more erratic and churlish. Secretaries were treated like servants, tantrums were thrown both in person and in letters, and when Bob Bernstein, as head of Random House, didn’t accede to his immoderate and provocative financial demands, we sensed anti-Semitic undertones in his angry response.

The end for Dahl came when he lost his mind after Knopf sent him the wrong kind of pencils. In a letter to Gottlieb, the author mistook the publishing house for a stationery store. Dahl said he was running out of pencils (Dixon Ticonderoga, 1388–2-5/10 Medium), and requesting that Gottlieb have someone “competent and ravishing” bring over six dozen.

Gottlieb dismissed the request as a joke. Dahl wrote again three months later. Gottlieb’s assistant wrote back, and lacking the specified item sent the closest substitute she could find. Dahl reacted with fury and in a miasma of complaints and other demands, threatened to take his books elsewhere.

Gottlieb responded in part:

“In brief, and as unemotionally as I can state it: since the time when you decided that Bob Bernstein, I and the rest of us had dealt badly with you over your contract, you have behaved to us in a way I can honestly say is unmatched in my experience for overbearingness and utter lack of civility. Lately you’ve began addressing others here—who are less well-placed to answer you back—with the same degree of abusiveness.

Your threat to leave Knopf after this current contract is fulfilled leaves us far from intimidated. Harrison, Bernstein and I will be sorry to see you depart, for business reasons, but these are not strong enough to make us put up with your manner to us any longer. I’ve worked hard for you editorially but had already decided to stop doing so; indeed, you’ve managed to make the entire experience of publishing you unappealing for all of us—counterproductive behavior, I would have thought.

Dahl was a serial adulterer who was both dismissive of his wife, the American actress Patricia Neal, and jealously overbearing. Neal, on her part, was clear that he was a dominant and demanding husband, although she blamed herself for his abuse. The couple had five children. The four who survived to adulthood said their father loved children in general. Just not his own.

However, none of this is justification to edit his books for modern sensibilities. Book burning is considered a conservative pastime. But liberals can be equally agenda-driven when it comes to bowdlerizing the arts. Authors write what they write in their time. And no subsequent censor should decide which language obeys the rules and what they should discard — otherwise, half the Western canon would have to be rewritten.

Anyone who has ever been a child should remember that the young have a mental fortitude that many of their elders have shed for some reason. As much as some adults want to wrap children in cotton wool and work on their self-esteem, kids live in the world. The effect of anything Dahl might have written pales in comparison to the influence of their peers and the constant commercial reinforcement of ideal types that exist only in fiction.