Mister Macabre
Jr, Edwin M Yoder
Mister Macabre The storyteller with a twist, or two. by Edwin M. Yoder Jr. Morning, Doc. Thanks for seeing me on short notice. I have a problem. I can't tell whether it's pathological. That's...
...When she goes to the kitchen to cook the cat a good meal, her exasperated husband throws the cat into a bonfire in the back yard...
...What other characteristics are there in Dahl's stories...
...Then, there's "William and Mary...
...He jumps overboard, but no one notices...
...Interesting term...
...So you see, Doc, their little schemes and petty villainies are often thwarted, sometimes hilariously so...
...I don't torture animals or people...
...A barrel of laughs...
...Botibol who, in one story, imagines that he's Brahms and Beethoven, and in a later one tries to stop the liner he's on in mid-ocean so as to slow the day's sail down and win the captain's betting pool...
...That's part of the strangeness...
...But pardon, I didn't mean to take over the diagnosis...
...What about it...
...I hate cruelty and I'm certainly no sadist...
...An example...
...You're looking at your watch...
...You name it, they're there...
...I see, Doc: I am a "literary hypochondriac," you say...
...I get it...
...thanks...
...Sadistic, I'd say, but not nihilistic...
...Or the vandal housebreaker who accidentally swallows a huge diamond hidden in an ice tray and is found out when its sharp end lodges in his small intestine and has to be removed surgically...
...You say you don't have to hate sex to like Hamlet, or be a regicide or madly ambitious to admit a grudging admiration for Macbeth, or a jealous husband to see where Othello goes terribly wrong...
...Please Doc, can you help...
...As when a deluded wife fancies that a beautiful stray cat who likes her piano-playing is Franz Liszt reincarnated...
...I don't want to waste your time...
...Children's stories, if you can believe it...
...When she goes to see that eye, floating in a basin at the infirmary, she lights up and blows great clouds of smoke right in it...
...And I can't get enough of these stories...
...Or Mr...
...There is often a sort of rough justice...
...Like the two men who poach pheasants by doping them with sleeping powders in raisins, only to have the birds wake up as they're being delivered to the poachers (in a baby carriage...
...And that reading such stories is a bit like the old homeopathic medicine: little drops of poison to ward off the Big Blues...
...Actually, speaking of depressed humorists, you make me think of James Thurber...
...You can't be serious...
...The problem is Roald Dahl, the man and his stories...
...If he were clumsy, you'd quit reading in disgust and throw the book across the room...
...They sit down to eat, still wondering where the weapon is...
...And strange...
...Later, she invites them to have a bite of dinner...
...I can see you nodding...
...And your diagnosis...
...You know me to be sane, right...
...Did you invent it on the spur of the moment...
...I begin to see your point, Doc...
...Like "Touche," for instance, where a fencer has just cut off his fencing partner's head...
...There is even the occasional touch of magical realism...
...Later a widely published and anthologized short-story writer and, of all things, a successful writer of children's stories...
...She begs to fix him a last meal before he leaves...
...is a former editor and columnist in Washington...
...And yet, I suppose it does explain why Dahl can be also a successful writer of children stories...
...What's that...
...She fetches a frozen leg of lamb from the basement freezer and, on a sudden impulse, cracks his head with it...
...Very rough...
...I can't wait to get him home," she says...
...Who is he...
...Are you saying it's healthy to read about Hansel and Gretel burning the witch in the gingerbread house...
...but this guy is sui generis—as macabre as Poe, as cruel as Sade, as full of twists as O. Henry, and as artful as Chekhov...
...It has to be right under our noses," one says...
...Bettelheim, you say, Bruno Bettel-heim...
...Well, yes, that's an interesting "parting shot," as you call it...
...Some of Thurber's cartoons, come to consider it, might well be visual Dahl stories...
...Or the stepsisters picking on Cinderella and making her clean the fireplace all the time...
...There's the RAF pilot who disappears for three days, but is seen at night sleeping in his bed and who turns up, finally, having visited a sort of radiant Valhalla beyond the clouds for downed pilots...
...Good point...
...William is an Oxford philosopher, an unpleasant control freak who tyrannizes his wife...
...and fly every which way...
...I don't understand my embarrassing reaction to Dahl's stories, Doc...
...Okay, you wish I'd get to the point...
...You're nodding yes, again...
...Yes, I'd say that Dahl's stories are often sadistic...
...Or the wine connoisseur who boasts that he can identify any great wine by taste but is caught cheating when the maid brings him the glasses he's left in the room where the rare Medoc has been breathing...
...The eye is furious...
...You say he insists that fairy tales, even the morbid ones, are healthy for children and that he scolds bowdlerizers for trying to launder the cruelty and morbidity out of them...
...And I can't recall the caption just now, but there's one in which we see a stuffed woman crouched on the mantel and she's identified as a man's first wife...
...But no—I laugh, Doc, I laugh...
...Then she cooks it while his colleagues from the PD are swarming over the house searching for the murder weapon, sure that it has to be heavy and metallic...
...He grumbles but accepts...
...He especially won't let her smoke cigarettes and impounds the grocery money when she breaks the rule...
...Often and aloud...
...This guy knows a lot about everything from surgery to viticulture, from flying to greyhound racing...
...Collected Stories by Roald Dahl Everyman's Library, 888 pp., $30 And you say there's often an intimate connection between depression and humor, that humor of the morbid kind is a "defense" against darkness...
...Lamb to the Slaughter," for instance: A woman's husband, a policeman, comes home one night and announces in a surly voice that he's leaving her...
...And I'm not one of those pious imbeciles, either, who believe they're wholly free of the dark impulses that go with our human condition...
...I can hear you asking: So, what's the problem...
...A Briton of the World War II generation, born in England of Norwegian parents, died 16 years ago...
...The range is vast and the detail is always authentic...
...I shudder to think what they must be like...
...William has his brain and right eye preserved when he dies of cancer...
...I can give you several— all you want...
...The ship sails on...
...is serious...
...Don't laugh, this Edwin M. Yoder Jr...
...Frequently, his characters contrive get-rich-quick schemes, like the geeky inventor of "The Great Automatic Grammatizator," who builds a computer that will gush out instant stories and novels by the dozen and soon drives all the mediocre writers out of business...
...I read a lot of fiction and have taught it too, even written a bit...
...Hilarious...
...Or about the Big Bad Wolf dressing in grandma's gown and eating Little Red Riding Hood...
...An RAF pilot in the war, when he began writing about his aviation adventures...
...That's where you come in...
...His book The Uses of Enchantment...
Vol. 12 • January 2007 • No. 18
