Writing is a funny vocation. I don't know about you, but when I've finished writing something, I usually feel quite limp and wrung out, like I've donated a little too much blood and a spleen has fallen out as well. A glass of orange juice and a hard lolly just isn't going to cut it.
The exception to this is when I’ve started a passionate rant about, say, people who don’t check the toilet seat when they’re done, and leave a little surprise for the next visitor (i.e., muggins here), in which case I could go on and on until the cows come home, or I reach the word limit of my text editor. Strangely enough, rants make me feel quite energised.
Anyway, you'd think that it would be impossible for the best writers to hold anything back; that what you fall in love with on the printed page has to be their essence and their all.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Roald Dahl and Anne Rice, two of my favourite authors, had hidden lives.
Firstly, let's talk about Roald Dahl, traveller, adventurer, World War II flying ace, and successful children's author.
I have always loved Dahl’s books, with their extraordinary mix of the absurd and the obscene (he toed a very fine line but always managed not to cross it). Very few people can really get into children's heads like that.
The Witches convinced me that most of the teachers at my school would like nothing better than to do away with me (actually, witches or not, I was probably right about that). Every night I hoped and prayed the BFG (Big Friendly Giant) would bring me wonderful dreams. And James and the Giant Peach just made me hungry. My mother found this renewed interest in fruit very gratifying and bought me the rest of Dahl's books, hoping for a revival in leafy greens.
The Irregulars: Roald Dahl And The British Spy Ring In Wartime Washington, a biography written by Jennet Connant, was released earlier this month. It reveals that Dahl was an undercover agent for the British Embassy during the Second World War.
A Flight Lieutenant with the Royal Air Force, Dahl was invalided when severe headaches and blackouts meant that he could no longer fly planes safely. After a few months, he was transferred to Washington, D. C. as an Assistant Air Attaché.
Dahl’s job was to win support and acquire useful information for the United Kingdom. Now, I’m not sure if this was part of his job description, or just his special way of doing things, but he fulfilled this task by bedding many of America’s most influential women, with the full support of the British government.
This may seem a little negligent on the government’s part, but remember that Ian Fleming was working for British Naval Intelligence at the same time, and if you've read the James Bond novels or seen the movies, it would appear that bedroom calisthenics were not only expected, but encouraged, if you were a spy in those days. Or Fleming was making it all up to sell more books.
Anyway, regardless of whether or not "Lying Back and Thinking of England" was on the study list for Spying 101, people weren't as paranoid about STDs in the 1940s, since they had bigger things to worry about ... like, um, the Nazis, so I suppose that as long as you treated the syphilis in time (because going insane would be inconvenient), and bits didn’t fall off, everyone was happy.
On to our second author.
A few posts ago I mentioned Anne Rice, the undisputed queen of vampire fiction.
Rice's books featured prominently in my teenage years, until I found out that she had written some naughty fiction under the pen name "A. N. Roquelaure".
A school friend that I used to spend the holidays with was an even bigger Anne Rice fan than I was, and had collected all of her books, including the ones that had nothing to do with vampires at all.
As Roquelaure, Rice wrote a series of books that reinvented the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty. (I later found out that it was part of a charming genre known as BDSM fiction.) To my amazement, in this version, the prince wakes up Sleeping Beauty with a thorough rogering instead of a chaste peck on the lips.
He then brings poor Beauty back to his kingdom of S&M, floggings, nudity and creative forms of punishment involving giant anatomically-correct marble statues and equestrian apparatus. (I hope you've noticed that I've tried very hard to keep the descriptions PG-rated.)
It was all rather sordid, but at the same time extremely dull, especially if you weren’t into whippings and wearing horse tackle as punishment.
Oh, Anne, it’s just as well you didn’t use your real name.