Who knew Roald Dahl was such a monster? (But, was he?)

I just read a salacious piece from an interesting blog called This Recording, entitled ANGRY MAN, by Alex Carnevale, about the so-called "real life" of Roald Dahl.

It was interesting, but was it really all true?

Carnevale's post basically states that uber successful children's author, Roald Dahl, the creator of classics such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and The Giant Peach, was no more than a racist, bigoted, womanizing, pedophilic, raging, not to mention extremely cruel son-of-a-bitch.

The piece has another title as well:  In Which We Consider The Macabre Unpleasantness Of Roald Dahl

Naturally, I found this piece impossible to put down.  But as everyone knows, good non-fiction cannot live by salacious grandeur alone.  Facts are good, too.  As in this case, I suspect there's so much more to The Long and Winding Tale of Roald Dahl than has yet been told.  Somebody very clever should tell it.  Complicated people are usually very interesting.  But they are also, when told with dimension, a bit more universally accessible than An Angry Man suggests.

Speaking of tales, I could never trust any fairytale that ignored the inherent corruption and senseless cruelty in our world. Kids are betrayed, stolen and eaten every day while others get to wallow in obscene wealth inside over-protected cocoons of safety. 

It's a spin of the wheel who gets the life they have. But hey, that's life. Best to just accept these quirks of fate and tell some really entertaining stories based on universal truth.

Why ignore these realities to children? I am bored to tears by television entertainment for children, these days. It's mind-numbingly devoid of anything real. I marvel at how brain-dead children have to be to focus on Disney or Cartoon Network for more than two minutes.

However, in my case, I was quite relieved as a child to have someone talk about very real dangers and injustices in the world. My world. Better yet, get me to laugh at it, too.

Truly, I would be lost without subversive work from a variety of children's authors. Folks from Maurice Sendak to Grimm's Fairytales to Roald Dahl. Having a grown up not hide the truth about how scary, unfair, mean things can be was a relief. I am grateful to them for letting me know my feelings of alienation were not my own freakish reality in a vacuum, but were actually quite universal. I marvel those producing children's entertainment today have not learned to do any honest story-telling to kids.  The money folks  lack the courage to take risks, I suppose.  Time to find another "JT" for television, I think.  By refusing to find truly moving, truly scary children's film/writing, we all lose out. Luckily for Mr. Dahl, he had a few publishers with courage.

I found Carnevale's blog post interesting. Over the top. Probably far less than even half-true. And,  well, shamefully I still went and read the whole thing anyway.