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You've Got to Be Cruel to Be Kind: The Life of Roald Dahl Jeremy Treglown. Roald Dahl: A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.
Near the end of Roald Dahl's life, as Jeremy Treglown notes in his biography, an average of one in three British children bought or received a Dahl book every year. Though many authors of adult fiction have tried their hand at writing children's books, the list of those famous in both fields is small indeed. For years an exemplar of this versatility, Dahl has lately come under the same kind of cloud that has rained on more single-track authors such as H. L. Mencken and Philip Larkin, accused of everything from anti-Semitism to xenophobia. It is to Treglown's credit that he neither over-valorizes his subject nor serves up what Joyce Carol Oates once termed pathography.
Treglown is not Dahl's official biographer, but he has done the kind of interview and background work one expects of an authorized study. And, as Dahl made a habit of knowing everyone (or everyone famous or otherwise useful in his career), this makes for a celebrated supporting cast. Authors and politicians from Ernest Hemingway and Ian Fleming to Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman came into contact with this charismatic ex-R.A.F. pilot. Yet he also had his dark side, most apparent near the end of his life. As Treglown notes: "He was famously a war hero, a connoisseur, a philanthropist, a devoted family man who had to confront an appalling succession of tragedies. He was also, as will be seen, a fantasist, an anti-Semite, a bully, and a self-publicizing troublemaker" (9).
Dahl's story has been told before, both in Mark West's 1992 biogra- phy and in Dahl's own autobiographical Boy (1984) and Going Solo (1986). Born in Wales of Norwegian parents, Dahl was brought up by his strong-willed, widowed...