By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, February 20, 2023
On November 23, 1990, my parents took me out to our
family’s usual pizza restaurant and broke the news to me gently: Roald Dahl, my
favorite author, had died.
I immediately burst into tears, and, for days after, I
was inconsolable. By the age of six, I’d already read his entire back catalog
— Matilda, the last one I finished, had been my birthday present a
few weeks before — and I understood well the implications of what I was being
told. No more Roald Dahl meant the unthinkable: no more books by
Roald Dahl. Until that point, I had simply assumed that Dahl would keep
churning them out forever. Suddenly, it was over.
Or, rather, it ought to have been over.
Because, alas, nothing is ever really over once the utopians
get involved, and, in their endless quest to re-sculpt the past in their own
image, those utopians are now coming for Roald Dahl, too. Per the London Telegraph, Dahl’s publisher, Puffin,
in preparing new editions of Dahl’s books, “has made hundreds of changes to the
original text, removing many of Dahl’s colourful descriptions and
making his characters less grotesque.” Or, as CBS put it, “alterations to
author Roald Dahl’s books have been approved, in an effort to make his books
more inclusive.”
“Inclusive” of whom, I must ask? Is some of
Dahl’s writing offensive? Sure, if you’re wired that way. But who cares? In
free cultures, writers are permitted to be offensive, colorful, and even
“grotesque” without worrying that such choices will lead to exhumation.
According to Dahl’s publisher, each of the newly bowdlerized books will feature
a promise of perpetual recension, in which a cabal of “sensitivity readers”
will “regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be
enjoyed by all today.” What extraordinary arrogance this is! Leave aside for a
moment that such an approach to literature is, quite literally, totalitarian —
need I remind you that, in 1984, Winston Smith’s job was to ensure
that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every
picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed,
every date has been altered,” so that “nothing exists except an endless present
in which the Party is always right”? — it remains the case that there is no
evidence whatsoever that Dahl’s readers were not enjoying his
work in the form in which it existed at the time of his death. I enjoyed it in
the late 1980s. My cousins enjoyed it in the 2000s. My kids are enjoying it in
the 2020s. Properly understood, “regularly review the language to ensure that
it can continue to be enjoyed by all today” is the publishing equivalent of “We
no longer service our hotel rooms each day for your convenience,” or “To
improve customer satisfaction, we will not be serving drinks on this flight.”
It’s weaselspeak for “We’re going to do what we want to do, and then blame you
for our decisions.”
Already, the excuses are flying. “It’s only a few words,”
say the toadies. “The rest is there!” But that dog won’t hunt. If it’s “only a
few words,” then . . . well, it’s only a few words. Either those words matter,
or they do not. Either they are negligible, or they’re not. Either they’re
worth our attention, or they’re not. And besides, those are “only a few words”
written by Roald Dahl — the greatest genius in the history of
children’s books. As a literary yardstick, “only a few words” cannot be
divorced from those words’ context, because not all words are equal. “Love is
not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” are only a few words. “It is
a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good
fortune, must be in want of a wife” are only a few words. “For God so loved the
world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not
perish but have eternal life” are only a few words. What matters is whose words
they are, and what they convey. And in this case, the answer is that they are
Roald Dahl’s words. Yes, Dahl changed his own work after the fact at various
points in his life. Does that grant other people the license to alter his work
after he is dead? No, it bloody well does not.
Ah, but Charles, surely “times have changed”? Yeah,
maybe. But Dahl’s characters have not. Among the many words that have been
excised from Dahl’s books are “fat,” “ugly,” and “crazy” — which is a pretty
big problem given that the characters those words are describing are, by
design, fat, ugly, and crazy. Those who have defended the revisions like to
talk about words as if they are wholly extricable from meaning — as if, in a
careless hurry, authors pick them at random, on the understanding that, at some
point in the future, they could be jumbled up and stuck back down with no
effect on their connotation. This is incorrect. In The Twits, Mrs.
Twit has “a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out
teeth.” She does not, as the new version tells us, merely have “a wonky nose
and a crooked mouth and stick-out teeth.” Another character
might have “a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and stick-out teeth” and no double
chin, but that character is not Mrs. Twit; she has “a double chin,” too. That
is how she was written by the author, and it is how she ought to remain in
perpetuity.
And here’s the other thing: Objectively, the changes
are crap. Where before, The Witches read, “‘Don’t
be foolish,’ my grandmother said. ‘You can’t go round pulling the hair of every
lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what
happens,’” now it reads, “‘Don’t be foolish,’ my grandmother said. ‘There are
plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly
nothing wrong with that.’” Which is crap, isn’t it? We’re not
talking here about Süssmayr finishing Mozart’s Requiem. We’re
talking bad work, performed by the terminally average. As the changes plainly show, the people who have been charged
with “improving” Roald Dahl couldn’t write their way out of a balsa-wood
outhouse. These aren’t artists; they’re people who like to boast that they
“work in publishing” but who’ve never had an interesting or eloquent thought in
their lives. They’re not editors; they’re vultures, dependents, parasites.
They’re people who read lines such as “We few, we happy few, we band of
brothers,” and wonder if the author might consider changing “brothers” to
“persons.” They’re people who read “Reader, I married him,” and complain that
it’s too bourgeois. They’re the sort of people who think that Kipling was an
inadequate writer because they heard from a more knowledgeable friend that he
was an imperialist.
I’m not just posing a hypothetical here. Since it was
published in 1988, Matilda has contained this description of
the title character’s reading habits: “She went on olden-day sailing ships with
Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with
Rudyard Kipling.” Now it reads: “She went to nineteenth century estates with
Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and California with John
Steinbeck.”
That’s an instructive set of substitutions for those who
believe that this will end with Roald Dahl.
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