I must keep reminding you that this is a book for children and I don’t give a bugger what grown-ups think about it. The nicest person in the whole thing is a woman so I have not changed anything here.”Īnd when I suggested that women teachers standing on their desks in response to seeing a mouse was a cliché, he wrote, “This is not a cliché to children, it is a situation they will enjoy. “I don’t agree with you about women coming in for a lot of stick all the way through. I was concerned about the portrayal of women, but Roald wasn’t. I asked: why does he have to change back? Why not leave him a mouse? Roald was delighted by the idea and, as usual, took considerable pleasure in defying expectations. Otherwise, he wrote, “I am afraid I have let myself in for a sequel there but I don’t want to think about that for the moment.” He never intended to write a sequel. Originally, Roald felt that the mouse-hero had to change back into a boy. I have allowed the mouse-hero to have all the bright ideas instead of Grandmamma.” She is less incisive and far kinder, especially to Bruno’s parents. Grandmamma: “I have softened her all the way through. I don’t like my original version because it does not make for easy reading aloud.” The Grand High Witch’s speech: “I have already told you that I didn’t feel I could add much about this except to give her a very strong letter R. Here’s some of what he said about the revision. Roald signed the letter “Ernest, Scott and Tom.” Perkins was a legendary editor who worked with Ernest Hemingway, F. He responded on April 22 with the salutation “Dear Max Perkins.” This was his way of telling me he was pleased with my work. On March 26, I wrote a long editorial letter-nine single-spaced typewritten pages-to Roald, with all sorts of questions. You start moving big things, but, in the end, you focus on the smallest details. Eventually he agreed and the two chapters disappeared, but not forever.īy March, The Witches was coming together, and it was time to drop down to the next level. Roald disagreed, strongly, and we argued about it. They were good stories, but I didn’t think they belonged in this book. One significant change involved two chapters about problems the hero had at school. Our early conversations and the revisions Roald made had to do with the shape of the story, the major characters, how the story began, how it ended, and what was missing. Within hours I received calls from both Roald’s agent, Murray Pollinger, and his British publisher, Tom Maschler, saying time was of the essence. We discussed the revision over the phone while he was in Barbados. In fact, I’ve never worked harder or faster, because I was determined to get it off my mind before leaving for Barbados.” It has, as you can imagine, been done at some speed. I came back to America and on February 4 received a revised manuscript with this note: “This one, thanks to you, now has a far better shape and form. Once I said I’d thought the story was terrific, we were off and running. I was nervous, but I had already discovered that with Roald all I had to do was ask good questions and leave it to him to come up with answers. The manuscript was good but still very rough, so I just asked a lot of questions. That night I read the manuscript and then read it again the next day before getting back on a train to Great Missenden in the afternoon. No one else had read it, not even his agent or his British publisher. It was a manuscript titled War on Witches. Imagine if the BFG had knocked on your door! That afternoon Roald Dahl had dropped off a package for me. A day or two later, after I’d gotten back to the flat in London where I was staying, my hostess was atwitter. Then he excused himself to go take a nap, or, as he would say, “have a kip.” His gardener drove me back to the station, and that was that. We drove back to Gipsy House, had lunch, and chatted about this and that for a couple of hours. I was in London on business and took the train out to Great Missenden, where he met me. Naturally, I wanted to meet him in person. We’d done all our work on The BFG by correspondence. This fall Farrar, Straus and Giroux is publishing a 30th-anniversary edition of The Witches, and they asked me to write a brief reminiscence of working with Roald on the book as an afterword. Working on this book provided the occasion for me to go to Great Missenden, the small town where Roald lived, and visit him at his home, Gipsy House. It was an enormously productive period: in all we worked on eight books together, the first The BFG, the last Matilda. I was Roald Dahl’s editor from about 1981 to 1987: at the time I was president and publisher at Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers.
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