Short Story Review: Madame Rosette, by Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl came to writing the children’s classics for which he is best known relatively late in his life. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, The Witches – all of these came only after he’d already made a name for himself as the writer of morbidly wicked adult fiction in the late forties and fifties. His best known adult works are "Lamb to the Slaughter," about a woman who clubs her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb, then feeds the murder weapon to the investigating officers, and "Man from the South," about a compulsive gambler who wagers his own car against the little finger of unsuspecting strangers. (The last of these has been filmed numerous times, most recently by Quentin Tarantino as a segment of the movie Four Rooms.)

Dahl was born into a Norwegian family lured to the boomtown of Cardiff in South Wales when it was a capital of coal mining and shipping, around 1911. His father died when he was four, and a series of harsh English boarding schools notorious for beatings and pederasty left him with a healthy distrust of authority, all of which is on permanent display in his works for adults and children alike. During World War II, he was a pilot in North Africa, flying numerous dangerous missions which wiped out 17 of the 20 pilots in his unit. Finally, after crashes that resulted in murderous headaches, he was posted to Washington, D.C. as an attache. Here, he began writing stories about his experiences in the Army. One of these, first published in Harper's in August, 1945, was "Madame Rosette", which may rank with "MASH," and long segments of "Catch 22," as one of the finest black war comedies which does not involve direct combat.

"Madame Rosette" concerns pilots stationed in North Africa in the early days of World War II. They laze about camp conducting scorpion fights and being bored between missions, and then two of them, the Stag and Stuffy, go on leave to Cairo.  Here they rent a hotel room, take a bath (“They were feeling about having a bath rather how you would feel on the first night of your honeymoon.”) and hit the town, where they pick up Williams, another RAF soldier. Stuffy becomes enamored of a shop girl, and the Stag tells him of Madame Rosette, the madame of Cairo, who can get any girl you want in all of Cairo, shopgirl, wife, or what have you – the only difficulty a matter of price. Stuffy calls her, and indeed she tells him she can get the girl, but his conscience nags at Stuffy, and he cancels the deal.

From here, the three men roll from bar to bar, interacting with the locals, drinking and watching dancing girls, the idea of Madame Rosette’s livelihood eating away at them, until they decide they have to take action. They go to her brothel, their moral outrage hardened into a resolve to liberate all the girls they find there.

I will not say more, except to say there is no irony laden conclusion, or touch of the macabre, nor do you miss this lack of a twist. These are young men in the prime of their youth who’ve spent months if not years living through graphic horrors. Yet the horrors themselves are never graphically depicted in "Madame Rosette;" unlike Catch 22 there is no maudlin mourning for a lost Snowden, nor is there the MASH-like devolvement to an anarchic sex-and-football escape. Indeed, these British soldiers buck up and behave like soldiers at all times, stoically equipping themselves for another rescue mission in the midst of what should be a drunken spree.

Another real appeal of this story is Dahl’s masterful voice, a confident guide to the drunken young men on a gallant mission of slightly debauched heroism. Dahl’s sense of characterization is especially keen with the Stag, who gains a kind of mythic steely menace, with his excessive politeness masking some deep rage: “Stuffy noticed that the Stag was being polite. There was always trouble for somebody when he was like that.” And later: “He talked to him in his best way and when the Stag was polite there wasn’t anybody who didn’t take it.” It's a bravura bit of characterization that rides just inside the edge between character and cartoon, a line Dahl often had trouble with in his fiction but pulls of perfectly in this story.

Dahl would go on to write dozens of stories and a novel, though his output diminished as he married and had children. Critics began to call him trite and predictable, a teller of sick jokes with threadbare characters, stories that didn’t bear re-reading. They may have been right, and his dwindling output and increased rejections likely meant he knew it. In any case, he was becoming far more interested in the stories he told his young children, and when he started writing "James and The Giant Peach" in 1960, it was clear he’d gone down a new path.

There’s far more to his story, of course. He was twice married, first to American actress Patricia Neal, then to one of her close friends. His children went through medical tragedies, and he himself was considered difficult, arrogant, and later accused, perhaps accurately, of anti-semitism. That all is best left for a different time.

Madame Rosette is collected in The Best of Roald Dahl.

Photo of the day... now with haiku!

The trees, looking down,
see the great sky above and
tumble through themselves

Publication

A story of mine, First Avenue, has just been put on-line by the good folks at Lit Up Magazine. You can read the story at this link. This story is a self-standing excerpt from a novel I wrote called The Acronym. It's an epic drama that follows two families across several generations, and their entanglement with anarchists, labor movements, shadow corporations, and a semi-sentient computer virus that may or may not want to take over the Internet. Enjoy!

Shoe, Part 2

I am pleased to report that my neighbor's shoe, first reported in December at this link, remains resting on the corner of their picnic table. I hail this proud and hearty survivor of a harsh Minnesota winter.

I will provide further updates as they warrant.

Morning photograph and haiku

Powerlines slicing
peach-hued dawn, moon retreats as
houses shed their frost.

Open letter to the lamp-post from 59th street bridge song (feelin groovy) by Paul Simon

Dear Lamp-Post:
It was a simple question, wasn't it? "Wat'cha knowin'?" Or was that too much for you? Yeah, you know what I'm talking about, lamp-post. Years ago, this guy, Paul Simon. You remember. Little guy, stoned off his ass, wandering the street, mumbling groovy this, groovy that, dooby dooby doo. Stared at your flowers, then asked you for some rhymes. You didn't answer, lamp-post, and now I've got this stupid song stuck in my head.

Oh, I suppose you found him intimidating, or were scared, and maybe I understand you not wanting to engage stoned folk-hippies with small talk, but really, lamp-post, it was the sixties. Everyone was like that. You could have spared me a lot of embarrassment by throwing out a little something. Like, for instance, "What am I knowing? I'm just sittin' here glowing!" Cute little rhyme, good answer, Simon loses his train of thought, the whole hook of the song is gone. Would have nipped the whole thing in the bud. Simon doesn't write the song, it's not stuck in my head, and I never tell a senior partner his sportcoat was 'groovy' and get the stink-eye of a lifetime.

Groovy, lamp-post. I said 'groovy.' Worse, I meant it. Now, I don't know about 59th street, but here at a prestigious accounting firm in the midwest, to an aging schmuck with hair-plugs like a Ken doll, NOTHING is 'groovy,' especially when it comes from a network administrator who's humming folk songs in the john instead of upgrading the email server, and what's the deal with those Word 2007 documents he can never open? Huh?

Thanks for nothing, lamp post. If I'm never on 59th street it'll be too soon.

Dead before Thirty: Stephen Crane, Author

Stephen Crane, writer (November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900)

It may have been Stephen Crane Virginia Woolf was thinking of when she derided the state of her era’s literature for being more interested in matters of men and their wars than in the thoughts of women as they sat in drawing rooms. Crane’s signature piece, The Red Badge of Courage, has but one woman with a speaking role, and his other great work, The Open Boat, has no women at all. His life, as well, was one of adventure, gambling, war, and brothels.

One can little blame Crane for his material any more than you can any writer for the things they write about, but it’s undeniable that in his day Crane was both masculine and popular. While writing his first novel, the self-published Maggie (at the time a scandalous portrait of a fallen woman), he lived for a time in the notorious Five Corners of New York, amongst prostitutes and criminals. The Red Badge of Courage contains extended scenes of epic Civil War battles, and a central character who aches above all things to be considered heroic, to be tested and found worthy, and in the end considers himself both. In story after story, Crane explores men and their need to test themselves against each other in a world which cares nothing for their survival or death. It is little wonder that Hemingway considered him an inspiration, and popularized him when his literary reputation had fallen.

During his life, Crane achieved great fame on both sides of the Atlantic, and after the success of The Red Badge, parlayed his fame into a series of adventures as field reporter in the American West and later the Spanish-American war, where he traveled for a time with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Then, Crane fell into disrepute when he began a long-term relationship with Cora Taylor, the madam of a Jacksonville, Florida brothel. After a brief stint covering the Greco-Turkish war for the Hearst syndicate, Crane settled in England with Cora, where he lived the life of a profligate ex-patriot, throwing lavish parties that only left him deeper in debt. He struck up friendships with HG Wells, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James. In 1900, he collapsed during a party, the tuberculosis he’d been living with finally catching up to him. He died in a spa in Germany in June, not yet 29 years old.

Over a hundred years later, Virgina Woolf may have the final laugh. Bookstores have become the playground of chick-lit bestsellers of single women chatting over lattes, and war stories are requisitely broody, irony-laden apologias for the cliché of war as a pointless relic of barbarous times. One reads his poem War is Kind, and you may not regret that his star has faded.