Roald Dahl: "The Landlady," "William and Mary," and "The Way Up to Heaven"

Roald Dahl has been in the news lately, so I figured it was high time I got around to reading something by the famous Royal Air Force veteran and writer.  In an essay near the end of Judith Merril's 1961 anthology The 6th Annual of the Year's Best S-F, Anthony Boucher recommends the 1960 Dahl collection Kiss Kiss, so that seemed a good enough place to start.  Today we'll look at the first three stories from a 1970s Penguin edition of Kiss Kiss, a scan of which you can find at the internet archive.

"The Landlady" (1959)

A naïve seventeen-year-old man moves to a new town to take an office job.  He is irresistibly drawn to a boarding house where no other people seem to be staying, which turns out to be run by a very friendly middle-aged woman.  We readers see a multitude of clues that indicate the young man is going to suffer a terrible fate at the hands of this woman, but he does not recognize them. 

"The Landlady" first appeared in The New Yorker and has been anthologized quite a number of times in volumes of horror stories, as well as in a book of stories designed to aid French readers who are seeking mastery of the rich language of William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, and Nora Roberts.

"William and Mary" (1959-60?) 

Wikipedia suggests this story was first published in 1959, but doesn't say where, while isfdb lists 1960 as the date of initial publication and Kiss Kiss as the earliest book or periodical in which it appeared.  "William and Mary" has also been reprinted in numerous horror anthologies.    

Mary has been widowed for a week; she gets an envelope from her lawyer containing a long letter from her recently deceased husband, William.  Much of the text of this story is the letter.  William, a professor of philosophy struck down by pancreatic cancer while still in middle age and mentally lucid, explains at length the scheme of an innovative doctor friend of his to preserve William's brain minutes after the death of his body, connect it to an artificial heart, put it in a basin of life preserving fluid and keep it alive, perhaps for over a century.  Dahl describes every little part of the brain removal procedure in such a way that I found it hard to keep reading--I'm a queasy sort of guy (readers of my twitter feed may remember that the open heart surgery scenes of Two Faces of Fear kept me from finishing the film.)   

After reading the letter Mary goes to visit William, now a disembodied brain with a single immobile eye pointed at the ceiling (the medical staff periodically hold a newspaper up over the eye with the idea that William will derive pleasure from reading it.)  Throughout the story we have been given clues that Mary was not happy in their marriage--she didn't enjoy cooking William's meals and ironing William's shirts, William didn't want children and so they didn't have any, William proved a major obstacle to Mary doing the things she really loved, like watching TV and smoking cigarettes, and so on.  When she sees William's current state of helplessness, Mary quickly realizes how easy it will be to achieve revenge on her now silent husband by smoking and watching TV within sight of his single immobile eye and begins trying to convince the doctor to let her take William home.  

"The Way Up to Heaven" (1954)

Another unhappy marriage story!  Mr. and Mrs. Foster are old; he is 70, and they have a daughter who lives in Paris with their three grandchildren, whom they have never met.  Mrs. Foster has a sort of quirk--she is paranoid about being late, always nervous that she is going to miss a train or plane or whatever.  Mr. Foster, she sometimes suspects, deliberately tortures her by delaying her departure so that she just barely makes it to her destination on time.

As the story begins, Mrs. Foster has finally convinced her husband to let her take a vacation alone to Paris to meet her grandchildren.  Events--and perhaps her husband!--conspire to delay her leaving their home on time, threatening to make her miss her plane to the City of Lights.  But then an unlikely coincidence offers her a chance to begin a new life, one altogether free of her husband's restrictions and (alleged) torment.

This is another The New Yorker story that would go on to be included in horror anthologies.

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These three stories have quite a bit in common.  In each, a woman commits a terrible sin against a man, and Dahl not only coldly and dispassionately describes her crime, passing no explicit judgement on the perpetrator, but, by portraying her victim in an unflattering light, invites the reader to identify with and even sympathize with the woman, to see her crime as justified.  Dahl doesn't do this in an in-your-face fashion, but in a subtle way, such that readers might easily identify with either the female criminal or the male victim, or just conclude that all the characters are monstrous--these three stories don't offer the fun of seeing Indiana Jones gun down faceless Muslims or German soldiers or the catharsis of witnessing a Mickey Spillane character kill Communist agents and organized crime figures; who the bad guy is and who the hero is not obvious, instead the issue is ambiguous.  Dahl is also somewhat oblique in his descriptions of the actual crimes, at least in "The Landlady" and "The Way Up to Heaven;" the clues are pretty clear, but we don't actually see the men die at the women's hands, we have to piece together what selfish misbehavior the women have committed.

Of the three stories, "The Landlady" has the least sympathetic female figure, as she is luring in handsome young men who are strangers to her, poisoning them to death and then using expert taxidermical techniques to preserve their youthful beauty, and the least reprehensible male victim.  Still, Dahl, on the first page of the story, is careful to signal to the sort of sophisticated intellectual types who read The New Yorker that they should have contempt, not sympathy, for the 17-year old--he is a money-grubbing bourgeois in larval form who admires his employers and is eager to get to work at an office.  Also, this kid is so dim, misses all the obvious clues to what is about to happen to him, that the smarty smarts who read The New Yorker could never identify with him.  

Mary in "William and Mary" is perhaps not quite so foul as the murdering landlady--she doesn't actually kill her husband--and William is a more blameworthy character than the aspiring junior businessman--William after all has stifled his wife, kept her from the joys of motherhood, nicotine and TV.  Similarly, Mrs. Foster doesn't actually slay her husband with her own hand--he has the bad luck to get stuck in an elevator at their Manhattan mansion, and she has a chance to save him but instead lets him die of thirst between floors while she is on her six week visit to Paris.  As for Mr. Foster, he has kept her from the joys of seeing her grandchildren, and Dahl offers enough evidence to indict him for exploiting her fear of being late for his own amusement, though I don't think there is enough evidence to convict him.

Continuing to pursue our theme of ambiguity, we might see these stories as feminist or leftist narratives in which the male elites who have casually dominated women are subjected to vengeance at the hands of women who win or have won their liberation, or, we could read them as misogynist stories that portray women as petty, selfish, and sneaky, ungrateful parasites who will stab men in the back and twist the knife with glee if given a chance to do so.

These are good mainstream stories that integrate genre conventions; maybe I'll read more stories from Kiss Kiss in the future.  But first, more science fiction stories from the 1950s.