I hope you all don’t mind a bit of a digression.
I have to suspect that, for others as well as for me, watching the debate about VS Naipaul and the latest go-round of the Wagner question on the Internet the past week has been tiring and lame. It’s a little like watching someone discover death way too publicly and way too late in life. It’s not that you lack sympathy for what the person is going through, not at all. It’s just that the public airing of those growing pains, by adults, can’t help but appear vulgar and crass. Yes, it’s true. Naipaul’s an asshole. Gauguin was a monster. The guy who wrote Ender’s Game is a lunatic and Phil Spector shot a woman in the face. Film at eleven.
And now Alex Carnavale is making the case against Roald Dahl, not a genius, but indeed something of a monster. I don’t much care for Roald Dahl. I find the playfulness of his writing mannered and I find the darkness that attends his work, however better than the sunny bullshit that animates most children’s literature, to be dishonest in its unearned prurience. But I do believe that there was an admirable precision in when and where that darkness was deployed. Despite what Carnavale says, many children’s authors employ cruelty and perverse sexuality in their work, however obliquely. Few recognize just when to do so with the consistency of Dahl.
It’s not every day I read an essay that provokes me to say of an anti-Semite and woman hater “this guy deserved better.” Carnavale “accuses” Dahl and his work of being macabre, unpleasant, and filled with unhealthy sexuality, which is a little like accusing Hemingway of being terse. Carnavale knows that this is the point of Roald Dahl, but can’t let anything get in the way of his argument Or perhaps I should say, get in the way of his observations. The post is researched the way a junior high school student researches a report about the tides: the act is accumulation, not construction.