July 12, 2005

Summer reading. Dahl.

Roald Dahl in the February 1973 edition of Horn Book Magazine:

Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Mrs. Eleanor Cameron (I had not heard of her until now) has made some extraordinarily vicious comments upon my book Charlie and The Chocolate Factory (Knopf) in the October issue of this magazine. That does not worry me at all. She is free to criticize the book itself for all she is worth, but I do object strongly when she oversteps the rules of literary criticism and starts insinuating nasty things about me personally and about the school teachers of America.

She quotes Eudora Welty - and she wouldn't quote her if she didn't agree with her - as saying, "three kinds of goodness in fiction... the goodness of the writer himself, his worth as a human being. And this worth is always mercilessly revealed in his writing." Having said this, she goes on to announce that Charlie is "one of the most tasteless books ever written for children." She says a lot of other very nasty things about it, too, and the implication here has to be that I also am a tasteless and nasty person.

The full exchange is collected and archived here; found via a page at RoaldDahlFans.com: "Politically Correct Oompa-Loompa Evolution."

Related: Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker and Filmbrain's review of Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Posted by dwhudson at July 12, 2005 9:03 AM

Comments

Fantastic link. I remember seeing the original Wonka movie as a kid and being angry that they made the Oompas orange instead of black.

Posted by: MrBaliHai at July 12, 2005 7:54 PM

Time's a wonderful thing. Here we are three decades later, and everybody knows that Dahl is a genius. Mrs. Eleanor whatsername, and all of her pointless criticism, has been consigned to history's dustbin.

That whole school of criticism that argues art must be edifying to have value, arising out of the Puritanical need to purge the world of all darkness in order to protect the innocent, reminds me of those parents whose houses are so clean you can eat off of the floor. Turns out that this might not be such a good thing, as children raised in these antiseptic environments are much more likely to suffer from severe allergies, asthma and even develop leukemia, reason being that our bodies need to be exposed to the filth in order to develop the ability to fight off the bugs and develop immunities to 'em.

Posted by: Dan Jardine at July 13, 2005 9:48 AM