Roald Dahl and the trouble with genius
Actor Elliot Levey considers the uneasy dance between dazzling art and deeply flawed artists
I have never struggled with the good art v bad artist debate.
Can we enjoy Wagner without the ‘ick’? Easy. Yes. His music is astonishing. Next? T.S. Eliot, Chesterton, Pound? Products of their time, sublime, but of little contemporary influence. Inverse this for Kneecap and Kanye. Huge impact, ridiculous art and more ick than you can shake an antisemitick (sic) stick at.
And so to Dahl…
There’s a wonderful line in Mark Rosenblatt’s play Giant, where his publisher is asked why he is prepared to stay silent over Dahl’s not entirely pleasant views about Jews.
“Because books are how we grow up. How we first navigate the world, learn to live, become vaguely functioning adults. And this man, he deserves criticism for what he’s said, sure, but in his books, he picks a glorious, playful path through the chaos of childhood. It’s the rarest of gifts. To show its cruelty but take you out the other side. And the more kids feel guided by his books, the more boldly they’ll read as adults…”
As the actor lucky enough to be saying these words, I’d like to tell you how deeply this resonates. My parents were drowning in a rancorous divorce, but a copy of Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World nestled under my pillow kept my five-year-old self happily afloat. It’s the story of a beautiful relationship between a father and son living in Arcadian bliss after the death of a barely-remembered mother. My father would read a chapter to me the night before I was handed back to my – happily very much alive – mother.
He’d turn out the lights. I’d beg for another chapter and, as his footsteps retreated, I’d switch the light back on and force myself to decipher the words. I willed myself to read. It was an act of instinctive parental brilliance that leaves me in awe to this day. I became literate over a paean to fatherhood. My imaginative light was switched on over a book that pitted father and son against a hostile world. And their nemesis? A moustachioed man in a big car called Mr Hazell. When I tell you my new stepfather drove the same car and sported a moustache, you’ll forgive me for thinking my Dad had written it himself.
That my Dad and Dahl could become synonymous in my infant mind speaks less to the coincidence of our situation – and my Dad’s propaganda coup – and more to the universal genius of Dahl. He really had the magic touch. When he was threatened with cancellation over his antisemitic remarks, Dahl knew the kids would revolt. He spoke directly to them. The adults had no idea. His book sales would be unaffected.
But what if his antisemitism makes it into the books themselves? What if the blood/brain barrier of art and artist is crossed? That’s the dilemma at the heart of Giant. Dahl’s publisher fears his new book The Witches could be seen – in the light of his newly-published views on Jews – as analogous, the witches being hook-nosed Jewish devils who stalk the land printing money and killing children. Dahl rightly rejects this as ridiculous, but once his bigotry has become explicit, how does one refute the accusation of implicit racism? Let the work speak for itself and keep shtum? Open your mouth and you open a Pandora’s box of prejudice.
I’m not calling for artists to be muzzled – however blissful a respite that might sound to some – but for them to recognise that their best work rarely comes from the part of the brain that churns out political opinions or ideology. A thesis may be inspired, but it’s built from evidence. When we call something non-artistic ‘a work of art’, we do so knowingly – because something beyond logic has happened. It escapes the everyday. I’d never claim the actor’s craft ranks alongside the painter’s or composer’s, but you recognise when the judging mind switches off. You look into someone’s eyes on stage and just believe. It’s time out of the quotidian mind.
When Wagner composed Parsifal, was he taking time out of his antisemitic mind? The art is too magnificent to believe otherwise. When Kanye spews his latest bile, and Kneecap hail Hezbollah, the art is too crass to care.
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