How doth Roald Dahl offend? The problem of poetry

HOW DOTH DAHL OFEEND?

Does Puffin’s now much-commented-on bowdlerisation of the children’s author Roald Dahl (1916–1990) warrant the outrage that broke out in February?

The latest edition of Dahl’s works carries a note, explaining that the publishers regularly review Dahl’s language to ensure that it can still be enjoyed, implying that were they not to do so, his books would be exposed as hurtful in a way they never were when we were less brittle.

Dahl was a nasty, patronising man, and in the days before cancel culture, his unguarded mockery was partly what people liked him for. Those who now object most to the censoring of him include those who think he was merely being forthright.

Those who have tried to adapt him to our more inclusive age are accused of misplaced sanctimony. A more extreme view is that Dahl should have been totally erased rather than merely emasculated, if we wished to say that his relish for divisiveness no longer has a place in our world.

In some ways it’s a pity that the argument about literary house-keeping should have focused on Dahl, because it has allowed the primary question—should writers’ work be updated?—to get tangled up with a separate question about Dahl himself and the question of whether he should ever have been published.

One wouldn’t pretty up Richard Wagner’s Judaism in Music or Adolph Hitler’s

Mein Kampf because the thinking in both is so poisonous that it can’t be made palatable. What Puffin is saying is that because Dahl didn’t articulate his prejudices but merely used them as background, they deserve a new lease of life. And with a $686 million price tag on the Dahl estate, reportedly paid by Netflix in 2021, one can see why Puffin should have thought so.

Meanwhile, the answer to whether updating can ever be justified is of course Yes. One of the UK’s bestsellers, in the days when care for language was technical rather than emotional, was Fowler’s Modern English Usage. The book had originally been published by Oxford in 1926 and took the world by storm. “Why must you write intensive here,” Churchill wrote to his Director of Military Intelligence about plans to invade Normandy during the war. “Intense is the right word. You should read Fowler.” And “Fowler” meant Fowler.

But in 1965, Sir Ernest Gowers brought out an extensive revision of the book and everyone cheered again. As with the updating of the Pevsner County Guides, which originally appeared between 1951 and 1974 before being brought back to life by Yale University Press from 2003, few have suggested that updating in itself is illegitimate. And we all read Percy Shelley’s version of Frankenstein rather than Mary’s.

What is illegitimate is bad revision, and this attracted too little attention when the fuss about Dahl took off. It’s all very well being sanctimonious, after all, but your replacements have to be an improvement. Time and time again, the changes offered by Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company, together with Inclusive Minds, “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature”, are horrifically worse.

The locus classicus of this is the attempt at poetry, where today’s editors reveal a blindness to basic scansion and poetic form that raises suspicions about other blindnesses. Here is a Dahl original, from James and the Giant Peach:

Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier. / She was so long and thin / If you carried her in / You could use her for poking the fire!

‘I must do something quickly,’ she frowned. / ‘I want FAT. I want pound upon pound! / I must eat lots and lots / Of marshmallows and chocs / Till I start bulging out all around.’

‘Ah, yes,’ she announced, ‘I have sworn / That I’ll alter my figure by dawn!’ / Cried the peach with a snigger, / ‘I’LL alter your figure’— / And ironed her out on the lawn!

That was simple enough: three perfect limericks in a row. But now comes Puffin’s all-knowing Committee of Public Safety with this alternative:

Aunt Spiker was much the same / And deserves half of the blame. / Ta-ra, Aunt Spiker! / (Though we never did like her) / It’s sad but true. / If only she knew, / How the absence of charm / Can do so much harm. / With thoughts so frightful / One can’t be delightful / And now worms will have Spiker for tea!

Apparently, it is OK to offend against literary precision if one’s motives are virtuous and the flawed result can be laughed off as humorous. Here (if it really needs spelling out), Inclusive Minds and their chums were completely defeated by the modest-enough challenge of respecting the rhythm of what went before. It’s clear that they tried—and failed, generously leaving the detritus of their failure for all to see.

Unable to construct even three five-line limericks to match the original, they struggled to compose four lines (three with a syllable short, then one with a syllable too many) before going careening off into chaos, with six additional lines arranged as rhymed couplets.

These six extra lines weren’t replacing anything, so there was no excuse for getting the rhythm wrong in them, yet their violations come thick and fast. “It’s sad but true” needs an extra syllable (how difficult would “It’s sad but it’s true” have been?), as does the next line, as do lines 8 and 9.

And when the last line is finally allowed to appear (stuffed with too many syllables, as if in triumph), it leaves us, bizarrely, with a poem of 11 lines—one more than two limericks back-to-back—and what is either a delayed or premature denouement, in defiance of the expectation the editors themselves have set up. What a terrible example to pass to a child.

Here at Booklaunch, we think the neglect of poetic form counts decisively against the Puffin team, but evidently we’re in a minority. After all, rap—which permeates popular culture—bulldozes its way past every other poetic feature in its fetishising of rhyme, as does ChatGPT, which mirrors the best it can find on the web. In every other way, this unbelievably competent AI app can perform wonders, but when it comes to poetry, it is utterly defeated.

To demonstrate this, we asked ChatGPT to knock off a limerick on the subject of the Dahl controversy. What emerged—in one second flat—showed a perfect grasp of the topic but a very imperfect grasp of scansion. Here was one of its many flawed efforts:

In Dahl’s books, some words caused strife, (1 syllables too short) / Controversy over what’s fit for life, (2 syllables too long) / But to rewrite his tales, / Would surely curtail, (1 syllable too short) / The spirit of his creativity and knife. (Don’t ask.)

We take from this two lessons: the first is that contemporary moral virtue is selective in what it will fight for. The second is that with every other human task now being bettered by computers, poetry offers the last redoubt in the fight against mankind’s total existential wipe-out.

Hoo-bloody-rah.