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Watch it on prime video starting January 8th. If the name Roald Dahl does not immediately ring a bell for you, he was the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and thus the creator of Willy Wonka. And he wrote James and the Giant Peach. And all of his kids books combined have sold about a quarter of a billion copies dead since 1990. Two years ago, Forbes placed Dahl first on its list of the top earning dead celebrities, ahead of Prince and Michael Jackson. Roald Dahl made about $513 million in 2021 compared to 13 million by the late John Lennon. And that is where the problems began. And if you have not heard about the problems, the first is Roald Dahl was often, as somebody on Twitter put it succinctly, he was often the. The C word. He was at times anti Semitic, racist, misogynistic and cruel. And his writing was at times anti semitic, racist, misogynistic and cruel. None of that has ever really slowed down his book sales though, largely because first, kids who read books are actually smarter than nearly every adult thinks they are. And second, it seemed then and now that the more problematic a lot of Dahl's characters were, the smarter he made them. The Oompa Loompas of Willy Wonka are not Dahl's finest moments. On the other hand, they do run everything in the chocolate factory. They know everything about the ticket winning kids and their foibles. And when Violet turns into a giant blueberry and when Veruca gets devoured by squirrels, it is the Oompa Loompas who know how to save them. So apparently the Oompa Loompas are doctors, or at least paramedics. Anyway, the reason roald Dahl made $513 million 31 years after he died was that his estate sold the rights to the books to Netflix. By then, the book publishers had already brought in a company of so called sensitivity readers to rewrite the more troublesome parts of Dahl's work. We're seeing the first results of this now, and it is literally what George Orwell described in his novel 1984. Erasing the past, replacing it with a new past and leaving no indication that any editing or changing was done. While I'm assuming it still says that in 1984, presumably all of that could be edited out of Orwell and we'd never know, right? But it's even worse than that, because the edits are being made not because of some pure, if misguided, desire to make changes reflecting the changes in mores and respect, changes even the author might want to make. They're being done so that the books, according to the publisher, can continue to be enjoyed by all today. Meaning they did this to literally sell more books. This is not even about well intentioned censorship. It's about profit. And if all that were not bad enough, the rewriting of Roald Dahl has, from a quality viewpoint, gone about as well as the so called restoration of the painting of Jesus in Spain in 2012. The painting is now known as Monkey Christ or Potato Jesus. Apart from the wholesale elimination of words like fat and ugly. The publishers have decided to take out references that no kid would ever notice. She went to India with Rudyard Kipling becomes She went to California with John Steinbeck. Why? In his story the Witches, Roald Dahl has the hero believe that all witches are bald and wear wigs and gloves. And that's a way to check, check. Don't be foolish, my grandmother said. You can't go around pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens. That would be an admonition not to believe that everybody with a wig is a witch. It has now been changed to don't be foolish, my grandmother said. Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that. It's like Shakespeare. Now look, it is one thing if you are giving a public reading of Tom Sawyer and you may want to drop a couple of words here and there. I have performed James Thurber's stories since 2010 on TV, on radio, on this podcast, in person. His epic story, by the way, forecasting Trump, the Greatest man in the World is coming up short. Thurber's daughter Rosie offered me the right to edit anything I felt I needed to edit for time or for taste, and said there was plenty in there her dad would be mortified by today that he wrote. Letting me edit it though, was like saying, hey, you have a heart. So that means you can perform heart surgery. But the goal in doing that is to change as little as possible. There are adjectives that were once perfectly normal and seemingly liberal and once thought even to be complimentary that you really need to just skip. So when you're reading them aloud, just skip them, but erase them permanently, forever from Thurber's books when maybe a note to new readers would be sufficient warning. Plus, if I'm changing anything about Thurber while transforming his work into a different medium like podcasts, I am necessarily going to edit things. A movie might leave out 9/10 of any knowledge novel, but just reading a novel aloud might change something as important as the emphasis on the way certain words were said from the way the author intended that emphasis to be. Besides which, all those changes are temporary. I'm not altering Thurber's text, I'm altering my reading of his text. And the same goes for Roald Dahl. And a lot of people saying this are people who do not like Roald Dahl, Sir Salman Rushdie wrote he was a self confessed anti Semite with pronounced racist leanings. And he joined in the attack on me back in 1989. Roald Dahl was no angel, but this is absurd. Censorship, Puffin books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed, because that's the point. If we're going to edit or otherwise circumscribe every book or author or film or producer with a significant problem, we're going to wind up with a world library of about 50 books and 10 films. I mean, this isn't Florida. And artists, like people, are rarely all good or all bad. And often they have huge disturbing flaws which can, in their own way, teach you what not to do or be in life. The publishers defended doing this on the premise that Roald Dahl's works have always been edited and modified, that he permanently changed the description of those Oompa Loompas several times to make it less offensive. And again, that misses the point. He made those changes, not his publishers, not his literary estate, not you, not me. Him. And if you're wondering why I'm going on so long about this, it's because this is personal for me. I think I learned that truth that almost everybody is a mix of good and bad, often in big, bright, ugly letters, often with extraordinary self contradictions. I learned all that from Roald Dahl. Sometime in the second half of March 1966, a letter unlike any other I had seen before arrived at our little house in the suburbs of New York City, where my parents packed me off each morning to the third grade. The words Par avion were printed in the upper left and the postmark was from somewhere called Great Missenden, and the addressees was me. It was a letter from Roald Dahl. I had a number of very special teachers in my life, but the first of them was Mrs. Marjorie Plant, who survived an entire school year of me in 1965 and 1966. We sidled down the hallway to Ms. Ritz for an hour or so of math every day. But the rest of the time we were Mrs. Plant's class. And when she was not leading us out to the glorious natural meadow and the pond just behind the elementary school and teaching us the name of every plant and every tree and every bird, she was reading to us or getting us to read to her, or one day asking each of us to name our favorite author, well, I didn't hesitate. My dad read to me each night, and it's probable somebody else's book was first, and I know he later read me Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Ian Fleming. But the first books for me were Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl. And I don't know how many times dad read each of them to me, but I do know that somehow those books conveyed to me that books didn't just happen. That a grown up like my dad had written them deliberately for kids to read and to listen to. And this man had clearly included jokes that the kids would get, but the grownups didn't seem to notice. And this was this man's job, the way being a draftsman and later an architect was my dad's job. That you could. Could do this and people would pay you. This is how I understood about this. A thousand other writers and broadcasters fleshed out the details and the specifics for me. But the man who opened the first door into the world in which perhaps I could write for a living was Roald Dahl. So, Keith, who's Your favorite author? Mrs. Plant asked Roald Dahl. Mrs. Plant, knowing her and knowing me, she probably said, I knew it. And soon after, she explained that we had an assignment that day. We were all going to write. Great. I thought, I'll write another book. I had already written something like 40 books in Mrs. Plant's class. Two or three pages with illustrations, with construction paper, covers with staples with titles. I wasn't just going to be a writer like Roald Dahl. I already was one, not a book. Today, Keith, she said, I want you all to write a letter to your favorite author. Author. I know how to get your letters to your author so you don't have to worry about that part. You can ask them anything you want in the letter. You can tell them anything about yourself, but I especially want you to tell them why you like their books and who you are and how old you are. And on that day in March 1966, my favorite author had written me back. I had a sense immediately of it being a special occasion. I believe only one author besides Roald Dahl replied to anybody in our class. I do know the school thought it was a big enough deal to call the town newspaper to do a story on it. It's not as if I forgot the story or the letter or the sense of wonder at its arrival either. But despite the coverage in the weekly Hastings News, it still seemed like a very private family kind of thing. And then in 2010, somebody told me maybe it was the public publisher, that the private family thing had made it into the authorized biography of Roald Dahl, a book called Storyteller by Donald Sturrok. He wrote this next part. I did not. I think it's okay for me to bother it here quoting Mr. Sturrock. His stories were encouraging children the world over to read books and that many of them loved his stories so much that they felt impelled to write and tell him stories. So the current rate of letters from children in the US is between 50 and 60 a week. He had written to Mike Watkins in 1966. I try to answer them all with a postcard. Roald was always a diligent and engaging correspondent, and if he was in the right mood and thought a child's letter particularly imaginative, he or she would receive a fuller and more memorable response. When the sports journalist and television anchorman Keith Olbermann was seven years old and and head of maps in his class at school, he wrote to Dahl from Hastings on Hudson in New York and told him at some length about his own writing ambitions and successes. Roald's reply was thoughtful, generous and full of gentle, ironic humor. My dear Keith, he began, it was wonderful to receive a letter from a fellow author. It meant so much more than the usual ordinary message from a mere reader. As head of maps, you will be able to calculate very easily what a long way your letter had to travel in order to reach me in this little village, thousands of miles. The postman, an elderly fellow who comes on foot, knocked on the door this morning and said, I have a letter from you from K. Olbermann of Hastings, usa. I said, how do you know? He said, it says so on the envelope. He is a very inquisitive postman and he likes to know who is writing to to me. Who is Olbermann? Asked the postman. I opened the letter and read it. He is a writer, I said. He has written more books than me. Olmen's parents later told the local newspaper that the letter had given the boy the kick of his young life. Mrs. Olbermann added that it just about proves that there are still some very nice people left in this old beat up world. If all adults acted with such loving attention to children, would it not be wonderful? Dahl was quite sincere when he argued that he thought children alone were decent judges of whether a book written for them was any good or not. In 1962 he had written to a child critic of James and the Giant Peach to tell him that up to now a whole lot of grown ups have written reviews, but none of them have really known what they were talking about, because a grown up talking about a children's book is like a man talking about a woman's hat.
