I Need to Stop Pretending Roald Dahl Wasn’t Problematic
When I was a kid, Roald Dahl was my favorite author. Dude pretty much turned me into a reader. I’ve written about my pre-internet quest to find every last one of his books. I wanted to ride in the great glass elevator. I wanted to live in Danny’s caravan and pull one over on Mr. Hazell.
But I’ve known for a while that he wasn’t someone to look up to. An awful guy, actually. Anti-semitic. Misogynistic. Mean. While he was alive, a number of edits were made to his books to remove racist or otherwise offensive content. After he passed, his estate did more (BTW: This HAS to be the best post title that’s ever appeared on this blog).
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While evidence of his indefensible faults and biases is more widely known than ever, his life and work seem to be all around. John Lithgow is playing him (warts and all) on Broadway. Film adaptations of his work are still being released.
What do you do when your favorite childhood author is someone you don’t approve of? It’s the tired “Can you separate the art from the artist?” debate all over again.
My next assignment is to listen to a recently released podcast on Dahl. It’s called The Secret World of Roald Dahl. I’m curious to see if it leads to any new insights on an author I used to love.
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About Travis Jonker
Travis Jonker is an elementary school librarian in Michigan. He writes reviews (and the occasional article or two) for School Library Journal and is a member of the 2014 Caldecott committee. You can email Travis at scopenotes@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter: @100scopenotes.
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Roald Dahl was a terrible human being. His most glaring, and recently publicized, malicious words and acts were profoundly antisemitic. Why can you not state that directly, rather than referring to books with “racist or otherwise rough content?” Apparently, there is now some controversy attached to directly condemning the man who stated his unambiguous hatred of Jews.
I’m with you 100% Emily – thanks for your comment. Dahl was anti-semitic and misogynistic. I didn’t mention that in the line you cited because I wasn’t sure there was specifically anti-semitic content that has been removed from his books – you might know more about that. But I added it in the post elsewhere, since I agree it could use more specificity.
I feel the same way about Neil Gaiman; love his creative works, but hard to separate his genius from all the horrible allegations of abuse against him. Can you love the work and not the person? The book Monsters by Claire Dederer addresses this topic wonderfully.
It’s a great question, and I think we’re allowed to be inconsistent in how and for whom we separate the art from the artist. I will read Ezra Pound and Flannery O’Connor and Roald Dahl, but I won’t read Neil Gaiman, Woody Allen, or JK Rowling. Why? Other than not wanting to enrich a *living* horrible human, I don’t know that I can articulate my reasons. (And I’m not even consistent with my dead haters; O’Connor and H.P. Lovecraft were both racist and antisemitic, so why am I willing to read the former and not the latter?) (My mom, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary whose field is moral education, always sighs and half-jokes, “Marjorie, if we didn’t read antisemites, we’d have no one to read.”)