The thing is (and now
we’re finally getting to the point of this post), My Uncle Oswald is not
Dahl’s ‘first-ever novel’. That distinction belongs to a book called Some
Time Never, published by
Scribners in the US in 1948, with a UK edition (confusingly titled Sometime
Never) from Collins the following year. It has never been reprinted. You’ll
search in vain for a mention of it on roalddahl.com. Its
Wikipedia entry
doesn’t tell you much. Copies are hard to come by: of the few examples on ABE at present,
you’ll have to pay well into three figures for one with a decent dustjacket,
and the UK edition appears to be really scarce,
with only two copies currently for sale (it’s entirely possible that the print
run for that edition was only in the hundreds). Even a reading copy will cost
you a few notes, and that’s what I finally managed to snap up a while back: a
jacketless ex-library copy of the UK edition, which I bought the day
it was listed on ABE, thanks to my wants list alert. I’d been wanting to read
this apparently ‘suppressed’ work by one of my favourite writers for years!
So what’s it all about?
I’ll let the flap copy from the US edition sum it up, as it actually tells
pretty much the whole plot in précis:
Some Time Never is a
blend of superbly written realism and outrageous fantasy, with an almost
Swiftian quality in its savage wit and subtle humor.
It is the story
of the hitherto little-known Gremlins. It is moreover a piercing commentary on
Man and the qualities in Man which are leading him to his destruction.
The Gremlins were
the original rulers of the earth in ages past, but with the advent of Man and
the spread of his obnoxious activities to every part of the globe, the Gremlins
were forced underground to a subterranean network of tunnels. Out for revenge
and for the restoration of their former dominant position in the world’s
affairs, the Gremlins bent every effort to plotting Man’s annihilation.
During the Battle
of Britain these odd and menacing creatures began an offensive against pilots
in an effort to hasten the eradication of the human race. From the experiences
of three Royal Air Force pilots, Stuffy, Peternip and Progboot, we get an
appalling picture of Gremlin activities, and through the eyes of the Gremlins
themselves we get a portrait of Man that is far from flattering.
After the Battle
of Britain the Gremlins became convinced that Man would effect his own
self-destruction without any help from them – so they ceased their ingenious
offensive and retired underground to wait. The atom bomb appeared, more
devastating weapons followed, World War III took a terrible toll the world over
and finally World War IV finished the job. The Gremlins emerged from their
underground tunnels and took over world in which all human life and all works of
Man had been destroyed.
The theme of this
book is a serious one. Mr Dahl’s implications are the most serious a writer
could suggest. Ironic and witty, Some
Time Never will amuse you, even give you you a few hearty laughs – but it
will also make you think.
As someone who’s written
a few blurbs myself, I can tell you that the above
is a valiant attempt to summarize/'sell to a general readership’ a book that
vehemently resists such things. Which isn’t to say it’s a bad book – far from
it.
By 1948 Dahl had already
had two books published: 1943 saw The Gremlins, an illustrated
children’s story, and his first collection of adult short stories, Over to
You: 10 stories of flyers and flying came out in 1946. Some Time Never is
in some ways a combined offshoot of both: taking the whimsical characters of
the former and putting them into the adult style of the latter. (The story of The
Gremlins book, and the ultimately abandoned Walt Disney movie version of
it, need not detain us here, but thanks to the scene-setting Introduction in
Dark Horse’s still in print 2006 edition of that previously
impossible-to-find-for-less-than-$300 book, it is now easily accessible.)
So why is Some Time
Never out print? Why has it seemingly been airbrushed from the Dahl
timeline? Does it hang together as a novel? No, in all honesty, it doesn’t.
This is a young writer writing his ‘important first novel’ and he’s trying really
hard, but it doesn’t entirely work. Mind you, his chosen theme is about as big
as you can get: the destruction of mankind in a nuclear holocaust. Dahl started
writing the book in 1946, and even in 1948 it was still one of the first
(possibly the first?) novels published post-Hiroshima to address that
looming possibility. There is some very powerful writing though, especially in
the chapter after the bomb has hit London. Stuffy survives the initial blast,
and emerges from a tube station to wander the ruined streets in a daze:
He walked around
a double-decker bus which was standing upright in the middle of the road, and
as he went past it he saw through the open glassless windows that the bus was
full of people, all sitting in their places, silent, immobile, as though they
were waiting for the bus to start again. But their faces were scorched and
seared and half-melted and all of them had had their hats blown off their heads
so that they sat there bald-headed, scorch-skinned, grotesque, but very upright
in their seats. Up in front, the black-faced driver was still sitting with his
hands resting on the wheel, looking straight in front of him though the empty
sockets of his eyes.
It’s a long way from the
BFG doing a whizzpopper in front of the Queen, isn’t it?
And yet, the book also
deals in fascinated detail with the green bowler hat-wearing Gremlins and their
love of snozzberries (a fruit later revived for Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory), so it’s still very much proto-Dahl.
At the risk of making
this already long post stupidly long, I won’t attempt more lit crit here,
though I will agree with Donald Sturrock (whose excellent authorised biography
of Dahl, Storyteller, covers the novel in commendable detail) that Some
Time Never is “extraordinary, undervalued and visionary”.
Its author evidently
thought otherwise. Writing the “bastard book” was a long and wearing process,
and though Dahl had high hopes for it, Scribner’s respected editor Maxwell
Perkins (who had discovered Hemingway and Fitzgerald) died before he’d had a
chance to read it, it didn’t get any illustrations (Dahl had wanted Mervyn
Peake), the reviews were lukewarm and the sales were negligible. Sturrock
recounts how Dahl refused a publisher’s request to print a paperback edition
after his later success: “Why in God’s world anybody should want to paperback
that ghastly book I don’t know.” A signed copy of the US hardback currently for sale contains a typed note dated 1973 from Dahl to the recipient that says, ''I have had a few of them lying around for a long time and it seems to be the one book of mine that nobody wants. I am not sure I blame them.'' He later told a fan who’d written asking where
she could get a copy that “It’s not worth reading.”
I’d have to disagree with
Mr Dahl: it’s well worth tracking down. It’s a shame that it will probably
never be reprinted, but then why would the massive Dahl industry machine bother
with bringing back a flawed, untypical and adult novel just to potentially sell
a few thousand copies, and get a few eyebrow-raised reviews in the broadsheets,
especially if Dahl himself had ended up being embarrassed by it? Better to
protect the brand. That’s perfectly understandable, but still a shame. What’s
more, Sturrock’s biography reveals the existence of several unpublished short
stories in the author’s files, and indeed the manuscript of something called Fifty
Thousand Frogskins, a novel that Dahl wrote directly after Some Time
Never, which never got properly published at all…
Meanwhile, that copy of the UK edition has now joined the shelves at Withnail Books, should anyone be interested...
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