Puffinry Bows to Dahl Fans

Kudos for Queen Camilla

Fra Girolamo Savanarola (Public Domain from Wikimedia Commons)

Bastiat’s Window has gained around 175 subscribers in the past month, so welcome aboard to all the newcomers. A large number of those were attendees at HCAA’s Executive Forum in Las Vegas—a fantastic event where I spoke last week. A good number came from a get-together of Health Tech X (HTX) here in the DC area.

It appears as if Roald Dahl is this decade’s Coca-Cola.

In 1985, the soft-drink manufacturer decided that the public was looking for something sweeter and gentler, so they bowdlerized their venerated 19^th century recipe. After three months of withering criticism and ridicule, the company announced that the original recipe would once again be available under the name “Coca-Cola Classic.” The teeth-chatteringly sweet version, dubbed “New Coke,” lingered for a few years, was renamed “Coke II” in 1990 and ultimately terminated in 2002.

A week ago, Puffin Books announced that, as with Coke’s management in 1985, Puffin’s overlords just knew that the public was yearning, churning, burning for a neater, sweeter Roald Dahl. I wrote about it last week under the title “Castrating Dahl: Puffin Books Conscripts Dahl into the War on Enjoyment.” Puffin announced that it was reissuing Dahl’s entire collection, shorn of its deliciously misanthropic prose. (They did so in concert with Inclusive Minds and the trustees of Dahl’s legacy.)

From the descriptions, my assumption is that the editors simply went to ChatGPT and typed commands like:

Rewrite Roald Dahl’s Matilda in the style of Barney the Purple Dinosaur.  

Thanks to the internet’s rapid fury, the auto-da-fé that consumed New Coke in three months was compressed into one week for Dahl’s publisher, Puffin Books. Puffin’s parent company, Penguin Random House, issued a press release announcing that the unexpurgated Dahl would remain available:

Puffin announces today the release of The Roald Dahl Classic Collection, to keep the author’s classic texts in print. These seventeen titles will be published under the Penguin logo, as individual titles in paperback, and will be available later this year. The books will include archive material relevant to each of the stories.  

So, discriminating readers can choose the Penguinated originals or the Puffinized pap (at least until they are buried alongside New Coke and spent nuclear waste materials).  

Queen Consort Camilla with King Charles III (Public domain, from WIkimedia Commons)

Some say the publisher’s hand was forced by Queen Consort Camilla’s public outrage over Puffin’s bowdlerization. In what was perhaps the British monarchy’s finest moment since World War II, Camilla was “shocked and dismayed” by Puffin’s surgical maneuvers on Dahl. She made the point loud, clear, and eloquently in a fervent plea to a group of prominent authors—with King Charles III in attendance. She implored the assembled writers to:

remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or impose limits on your imagination.

Camilla quoted John Steinbeck’s Nobel address in which he described “the ancient commission of the writer,” which is, he said:

not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse but to roar like a lion out of pride.

God Save the Queen Consort. Unconfirmed rumors also suggest that actual puffins—the pelagic seabirds of the North Atlantic and Pacific—were also distressed by the publisher’s tampering and had asked that their name be removed from the altered versions of Dahl’s books.

One of the authors who attended Camilla’s address was British crime writer Peter James—one of her personal favorites. James said:

The big question is how far back are we going to go? Are we going to censor Dickens? There is some pretty tough stuff in Dickens that is quite offensive. … Are we going to look at Shakespeare? I think what we have got to accept is that it was a moment in time and this is now.

Of course, Thomas Bowdler and his sister Henrietta did, in James’s words, “look at Shakespeare” in the early 1800s and their surname has been—like Puffin’s over the past week—synonymous with buffoonery ever since. James’s comment brings up another aspect that made the rounds. One of the justifications for rewriting Roald Dahl is the fact that he made loads of antisemitic comments. I am, in fact, Jewish, and I’ve long been aware that Dahl was a scummy antisemite and a generally unpleasant fellow. But the fact is that enjoying his literary works does not depend upon his being an amiable companion for tea. In fact, I suspect that only a hateful asshole like Dahl could have conjured up as memorable a villain as Matilda’s Miss Trunchbull.

My attitude is informed by my upbringing in the 1950s and 1960s in a Jim Crow redoubt where members of the Jewish community enjoyed amiable relations with people who nevertheless would not think of allowing us to set foot in their country club. One learned to compartmentalize—to accept the pleasant aspects of individuals around us and, at the same time, to deal with their less admirable qualities. One virtue of this compartmentalization is that, in time, bigotry faded. The town ended up with a Jewish mayor, a Jewish congressman, and Jewish members of the formerly exclusionary country club.

But the most powerful argument against using Dahl’s antisemitism to airbrush his prose is the point that Peter James alluded to. If antisemitism or other bigotries justify wholesale rewriting of authors’ works, then few authors will be safe from scissors and indelible marking pen—particularly with the ever-shifting boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable. James specifically mentioned Shakespeare and Dickens. In 2016, Smithsonian Magazine quoted Harold Bloom from his 1998 book: “One would have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to recognise that Shakespeare's grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-semitic work.” Of course, Bloom’s description would brand him as a bigoted ableist today, and Smithsonian Magazine would find itself in trouble for using Bloom’s quote. The Times of India wrote that, “Dickens compared Indian people to dogs. Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857, Dickens wished that he was the commander-in-chief in India so that he would be able to, ‘do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested.’”

It's not difficult to compile lists of authors who have been accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, or other bigotries—in their writings or in their public and private dsicourse. A web search of a few minutes turns up accusations against Scott Adams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Amiri Baraka, Emily Brontë, Orson Scott Card, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Geoffrey Chaucer, G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Winston Churchill, Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling (expunged from Matilda by Puffin), Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, Harper Lee, Abraham Lincoln, David Mamet, V. S. Naipaul, Pablo Neruda, Frank Norris, Flannery O’Connor, Boris Pasternak, James Patterson, Ezra Pound, Theodore Roosevelt, Philip Roth, Alexander Pushkin, J. K. Rowling, Dr. Seuss, Mark Twain, Alice Walker, Evelyn Waugh, Edith Wharton, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Thomas Wolfe. You can certainly add to that list whomever you believe wrote The Bible—be the author(s) divine or human.

If the Dahl Rule is, “It’s OK to vandalize Roald Dahl because he was a bigot,” then none of these authors is safe. Nor really, is any author safe from the Savanarolas of our time, because the Dahl Rule has no limiting principles or fixed range of offenses.

What is most peculiar about the whole Dahl saga is the logic behind the edits. It was, essentially, “He was a horrible bigot, so let’s edit his words to make him seem like a nice, kumbaya-kind-of-fellow.” If Dahl was, indeed, an oleaginous antisemite, why the hell would you want to hide that fact, thereby posthumously absolving him of his vulgar trespasses? (Spoiler: book sales). In 2021, the publishers of Dr. Seuss’s works withdrew six of his books because they contain bigoted imagery of Blacks and Asians. Withdrawal is, I’ll admit, more honest and courageous than what Puffin did to Dahl. But again, why hide the fact that an author had some disturbing predilections. Take the offending books off the kids’ list, but keep them out there so the world will not forget the truth.

I would have little objection to Puffin Books or Seuss’s publishers adding “abandon hope all ye who enter here” prefaces attesting to the authors’ vile natures. If you go that route, however, be prepared to append such warnings, over time, to a supermajority of authors. Eventually, the sheer volume of such warnings may simply anesthetize readers to such concerns, rendering them meaningless. On the other hand, constant reminders that the world contains few saints might just be a welcome palliative for our era.

Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.