I am not a voyeur. I hate that sort of thing. But in this case, I stood there absolutely transfixed.
(Switch Bitch page 130)
Apart from his well-known children’s novels, Dahl also wrote movie screenplays, TV scripts, and some fifty-four short stories for adults which appeared in various magazines throughout his career, the first in 1942, the last in 1988. Over the years these were collected together in ten or so collections, and further rounded up into six ‘collected’ or ‘best of’ selections. More recently, Penguin have published his ‘Complete Short Stories’ volumes one and two, which is probably the easiest way of having them all in one place.
Switch Bitch (1974) contains four medium-length stories, making up a slender paperback of just 130 or so pages. Basically, they are stories for teenagers or for middle-brow readers on holiday. Undemanding, obsessed with sex, sometimes very funny, sometimes gruesome.
- The Visitor (1965)
- The Great Switcheroo (1974)
- The Last Act (1966)
- Bitch (1974)
The Visitor (first published in Playboy May 1965)
The nameless narrator claims to be a nephew of Oswald Hendryks Cornelius, a rich bachelor and connoisseur, collector of spiders and scorpions, expert on Chinese pottery, and unstoppable philanderer. Upon Cornelius’s death the narrator receives a big crate containing all thirty-six volumes of the old man’s scandalous memoirs, detailing his outrageous sexual escapades, mainly during the 1940s. Almost all of them involve people (generally women) who are still alive and are therefore unpublishable without running the risk of prosecution. Except for the story he tells here.
Whereupon the text cuts directly to Cornelius’s own diary account of the incident, which commences on 24 August 1946.
Having set the tone by making love to a lady at the top of the great pyramid at Giza, Cornelius drops her off (he tells us he can never stand a woman’s company for more than 12 hours, ideally only eight) and motors across north Egypt towards the Suez Canal, planning to carry on up to Jerusalem.
He is driving his Lagonda sports car and singing opera – entire operas – at the top of his voice, as is his wont.
Unfortunately, pulling over at a very remote gas station in the desert, the mechanic informs him that his fan belt is just about to break. The garagiste makes a phone call and returns to tell a hot and bothered Cornelius that he’s ordered a new one from the nearest town but it won’t be delivered till the morning.
As luck would have it a Rolls Royce, no less, comes driving the long straight desert road and Cornelius flags it down. The sleek, well-dressed Syrian owner, Abdul Aziz, speaks perfect English and has immaculate manners. ‘Oh my dear chap, how ghastly for you, well, you can’t stay here, you simply must come and stay at my place,’ and so Cornelius gets into the Rolls with his overnight bag, telling the garagiste he’ll be back in the morning.
Throughout the preceding narrative Cornelius has revealed in various asides how very fastidious he is about personal hygiene, continually washing his hands and, when the filthy garagiste breathes over him, immediately taking a snifter of scotch to cleanse his mouth and nasal passages.
So he is delighted to discover that Mr Aziz’s house is a marvel of modernity and cleanliness. It is entirely alone out here in the middle of the desert, but with all mod cons. He is introduced to Mr Aziz’s dark-haired wife and daughter and they all persuade him to go for a swim in the pool. They lend him trunks and soon all four are splashing in the pool. Then it is time to retire to their rooms to wash and change for dinner, for which black tie is required (Uncle Cornelius, of course, is never without full dinner suit).
Over dinner Uncle Cornelius shares with us his extremely frank assessment of which of the two women, mother or daughter, it would be best to take to bed. The mother is a little fuller figured but would have experience. The daughter, leaner, would have more energy. Throughout the entire meal he is entirely focused on fantasising about which one to sleep with and is convinced that both of them appear to be making eyes at him. Why does their father/husband, Mr Aziz, sitting right there at table with them, not mind?
Considerably aroused, Cornelius is disappointed when both ladies simply shake his hand at the meal’s end, withdraw, and he is left to walk upstairs to his bedroom, a bit disconsolately. He tries to read to take his mind of sex. But in the small hours he hears the tell-tale sound of the bedroom door squeaking open and tiptoes across to his bed. He moves to turn on the light and speak but dainty woman’s hands stop him.
Instead he is treated to a night of passion unlike he’s ever experienced. Upside, downside, right side, wrong side, every which way he can imagine this woman’s fertile imagination treats him to. Hours later and utterly exhausted, she finally leaves him, picking up her clothes and tiptoeing out the room.
But not before he had given her a tasty little love bite on the neck. Next morning he dresses for breakfast on tenterhooks to discover which of the two ladies it was. When the wife comes in she is wearing a light scarf around her neck and Cornelius thinks oho, and yet she is strangely reluctant to make eye contact. And then he is thrown when the daughter appears, also wearing a scarf hiding the teeth marks. Hmmm.
And before he knows it it is time to leave and he bids a polite and formal goodbye to the two ladies, still mystified about which one gave him such a sexual marathon the night before. On the drive back to the garage Mr Aziz is also a little quiet. Cornelius asks, Isn’t it boring for you with only your wife and daughter for company? Oh, Azis replies, he has another daughter too. We didn’t see her, says Cornelius, is she living away? No, she lives with us but doesn’t socialise very much. You see she has leprosy! The worst, the most incurable kind.
‘But you needn’t worry my dear fellow. There is no way to contract the disease unless you have the most intimate contact with the sufferer.’
When they reach the garage and Uncle Cornelius steps out, he is shaking so badly he drops his pack of cigarettes. A classic case of the biter bit, the colonialist tricked, the white man duped, the philanderer punished. It is so neat it could be a folk story, or one of the traditional tales told in the Canterbury Tales.
The Great Switcheroo (Playboy, April 1974)
Much more straightforward in structure. The first person narrator is Vic, husband of Mary, father of Victor (9) and Wally (7). He’s at a party given by his neighbours, Jerry and the slinky Samantha. Vic has a theory that a woman’s lower lip tells you how sensual she is. He reckons Samantha is a scorcher. And all of a sudden he conceives a plan.
He goes and sits with half-drunk Jerry and tells him a story, a story about a bloke he knows who has come up with a plan for wife-swapping. This ‘friend’ came to an agreement with a mate of his, they agreed to swap, they got to know the layout of each other’s houses, and at 1am on a Saturday night, walked across the road, passing each other on the way, crept upstairs into the other man’s bedroom, gradually awoke and aroused the other man’s wife, and then made love to them, in the dark, without putting on a light or uttering a sound. Then waited for the wife to go back to sleep. Then snuck downstairs and crossed the road, saluting each other as they passed, on the way back to their own bedrooms.
All this time Jerry is watching Vic’s wife chatting to one of the party guests, himself with mounting fervour in his eye. He’s taken the bait! He suggests trying it. Vic acts surprised, but tentatively agrees.
And what follows is a peculiar combination of lechery with boys’ own enthusiasm. They decide to call the evening when they’ll do the deed D-Day. They come up with a sequence of preparations numbered one to eleven. The more Vic describes it, the more juvenile and ridiculously boyish it sounds. Both men will pretend to nip their fingers earlier that day while chopping vegetables and make a point of showing their wife a finger with a plaster on it. In the weeks leading up to it, when the wives are out, they go round each other’s houses and put a blindfold on, and practice moving from back door, down the hall, up the stairs, and into the bedroom in pitch darkness. For hours. Three hours in Vic’s case.
They discuss physical differences but agree that since Jerry is six foot tall and Vic five eleven, there’ll be little difference there. Vic stops smoking cigarettes and takes up a pipe so he’ll smell the same, and they make sure to both use the same hair lotion and after shave.
To cut a long story short, it works. They take their wives out for a double date dinner at a steak house, come home, clean teeth, go to bed, wait till wives are fast asleep. At 1am on the dot meet at the gap in the hedge between their front gardens, sneak upstairs as practiced so many times, slip into bed, begin to caress and arouse the other man’s wife, then make love to them, and so on.
In Vic’s case he touches up the beautiful Samantha for a few minutes in silence and then suddenly she jumps on him and ravishes him. And here’s the funny thing. All the excitement and interest has gone into the planning of this juvenile feat and yet, when it comes to it, a) Vic is completely unprepared, and b) Dahl is oddly reticent about the act itself.
It was only 1974 and this is, essentially, a story for teenage boys. Sex with a woman is just ‘the goal’ of this game, the actual deed itself almost comes as an afterthought, certainly he is astonished at how Samantha makes love to him, and yet it is described in the silliest boyish way.
I never dreamed a woman could do the things Samantha did to me the. She was a whirlwind, a dazzling frenzied whirlwind that tore me up by the roots and spun me around and carried me high into the heavens, to places I did not know existed. (p.75)
This sounds like the description of someone who doesn’t actually know very much about sex, just that it is this great big fireworks display.
In his tenth novel, Girl, 20 Kingsley Amis has two lecherous middle-aged men discussing the sexual practices of their much younger girlfriends and one is simply dazzled by the fact that this young woman is prepared to put his penis in her mouth. In a flash you realise the kind of absolutely straight-down-the-line, missionary position-in-the-dark kind of sex these kinds of characters had been having in the previous decades, the 1940s, 50s and 60s. It reminds you that The Joy of Sex was regarded as a breakthrough book when it was published in 1972.
From Vic’s description it sounds as if he fingers his wife until she’s aroused, then clambers on top of her and fucks her till he comes, then rolls off. That is the content or end point of all his leching, the driven wish to do the same to more or less every woman he sees. This explains why when it finally gets to the point of actually having sex the narrator here, and in the previous story, slips into a riot of metaphors about tigers and passion and whirlwinds which, you suspect, conceals something much more mundane.
Anyway, the boom-boom punchline of the story is that the next morning, Mary, his wife, is oddly distant and asks their sons to leave the kitchen and close the door as she has something to tell their father. Vic’s guts tie themselves in a knot and his heart is pounding fast as he is sure she realised he played a ‘trick’ on her.
But it is worse than that. She confesses to him that she has never once enjoyed sex with him (and, from my analysis above, we can see why), but that last night, for the first time ever, she understood the point of the whole thing, and finally enjoyed it. Oh thank you thank you thank you, she says covering him in kisses while, of course, his self-image as a great stud and pleaser of women and sexual adventurer turns to ashes in his mouth.
The Last Act (Playboy, January 1966)
This story has genuine grip. It is the least juvenile and at moments rises to what you might tentatively call a real investigation of human nature. It’s set in New York state. Anne Cooper is making dinner for her three twenty-something kids and expecting husband Edward home at any moment, when there’s a knock on the door and two state troopers are there to tell her Ed’s been killed in an auto accident.
She becomes hysterical, needs sedating and spends months in an institution, never getting used to the idea that the one great love of her life is dead. And, later, when she’s allowed home, her two grown-up daughters get married in quick succession and become increasingly distant, committed to their new husbands. And her son goes away to university, leaving her in the big empty house alone. In her darkest moments she thinks about taking an overdose of pills. Or using a razor to slash her wrists. Tricky, though, it’s easy to cut the veins, but you need to sever the artery to really bleed out and that is buried deep deep down.
Then she is rescued by a good friend who runs an agency in New York, and one day has almost the entire staff off with flu, and just won’t take no for an answer but comes and collects Anna and takes her to the busy downtown office where she is rushed off her feet, and discovers, at the end of a really gruelling day, that she feels shattered but emotionally great!
From that point onwards she throws herself heart and soul into her friend’s business, an adoption agency. Some months later she has to fly to Dallas, Texas, for a tricky case involving a mother who adopted a child but, when her husband died, changed her mind and wants to give it back. She has a terrible day and returns to the hotel where she’s staying drained and demoralised. Once again, the pills beckon… but then she suddenly remembers that an old flame of hers form high school moved down here. He always wanted to be a doctor. She looks him up in the yellow pages. Dr Conrad Kreuger. She leaves a message with his receptionist. He phones back and says, Anna! How wonderful! What brings you here! We must meet for a drink!
And so commences the heart of the story which is that 1. Kreuger is still as phenomenally handsome as ever. 2. He is rich and successful. 3. After Anna dumped him at High School for Perfect Ed, she remembered that Kreuger not only started going out with a bosomy girl in the class but the next year married her. However 4. Conrad now tells her that they had one child, a son, but divorced after two years and 5. that he never recovered from her dumping him. She has carried a torch for her ever since. Now, now is a chance for them to be together in the way he’s always dreamed.
As if this wasn’t enough information, two other things have been going on in tandem. They have met in the quiet, dark hotel bar and Anna has been drinking quite heavily. By the third martini she is positively floating. But she and we have also noticed Kreuger’s tendency to lecture her, to adopt the pose of doctor and warn her about the health risks of her behaviour. He tells her smoking mentholated cigarettes is bad for her. A little later, in the middle of discussing emotions and suchlike, he interrupts to tell her that drinking gin is also bad. Juniper extract is bad for the uterus. Turns out he is a gynacologist.
By now Anna has made herself drunk enough to be ready to be splayed and fucked like a chicken. She lets herself be paid for, guided to the lift, floated up to her floor, through the door of her apartment and into the darkened room. Here Conrad suddenly kisses her, covering her mouth and cheeks in kisses which she observes as if from a great distance. But eventually he hits the jackpot when he kisses her in the ear and her whole body lights up with lust.
She strips and unbuttons his shirt but two things happen. 1. Conrad behaves coldly and clinically. He sits fully clothed on the bed and undoes all Anna’s buttons and straps and bra and stockings and panties and pulls them off carefully and precisely. Then he himself stands and takes off all his clothes, folding them carefully and placing them over the back of the bedroom chair. At one point, looking own on her head, he notices that she is showing signs of incipient alopecia. She tells him to shut up and kiss her.
Only then does he grab her wrist and fling her onto the bed where she floats and the room spins in a great swirl of sensations as, we gather, he fingers her vulva, working her up into a state of screaming arousal, and then swings his body over hers and starts making love to her. The reader is reminded, again, that this story is from over fifty years ago. There is something very stiff and constrained and embarrassed about it all. I can see why Anna had to get drunk to nerve herself for the ordeal.
But right in the middle of sex Conrad asks if she is wearing a cap or diaphragm. Obviously the head of his penis is bumping against something. She indignantly says no, but she insists that she must be and… suddenly she is sober-remorseful, suddenly she sees the whole situation with blinding clarity, suddenly his face over hers looks like a dentist peering into her face and about to use a drill.
She starts screaming at him to get off, he argues that she can’t just change her mind like that, in mid-stream, but she carries on trying to push him away at which he, ungallantly, pushes her right off the bed and on the floor with a bang. She gets up, weeping, and flees into the bathroom locking the door behind her, and Conrad hears her rooting about in the bathroom cabinet, by implication – after the running thread of suicidal thoughts – looking for an overdose of pills to take.
Quietly, Conrad dresses, wipes the lipstick off his face, combs his fine black hair, takes a last check in the mirror, and walks out.
The men aren’t coming off very well in these stories, are they? Obsessed with sex but, when it comes down to it, narrow and unimaginative, and generally getting pretty rude come-uppances.
Bitch (Playboy July 1974)
Uncle Cornelius is a great creation, a fabulously shameless posh boy aesthete and philanderer. He collects women, or more accurately, one-off sexual experiences with women, the same way he collects Persian carpets and Chinese porcelain. Here’s an example of his thinking:
He was a totally amoral man, that much was clear, but then so was I. He was also a wicked man and although I cannot in all honesty claim wickedness as one of my virtues, I find it irresistible in others. (p.121)
In this, the second ‘excerpt’ from his outrageous memoirs, he describes his encounter with a French scientist, Henri Biotte. This man is an expert on smells and scents and perfumes. He devised the two of the most famous perfumes in the world for a Parisian perfumier. Now Biotte persuades sceptical Uncle Cornelius to fund his attempt to carry out a revolution in smell.
To be precise, Biotte claims that dogs and other mammals are susceptible to the powerful pheromones emitted by the female of the species when they’re on heat. Biotte tells Cornelius the ability to emit or smell this scent was evolved out of humans over 100,000 years ago. Now he proposes to recreate the scent and the chemical catalyst which will activate it, spray it on a woman, and see what happens.
‘You are a dirty old man,’ I said.
‘I am an olfactory chemist,’ he said, primly. (p.125)
Cornelius forgets about the project till he gets a phone call. Biotte has isolated the chemical. He invites Cornelius to witness an experiment. Biotta has booked a short wiry boxer named Pierre Lacaille. They place his assistant, Simone, on a chair and stationthe boxer six metres away.
Biotte makes the usually fastidious Cornelius place two nose plugs in his nostrils to prevent being affected by the wonder-scent, then he sprays a little on Simone’s throat. then they instruct Lacaille to move towards her a step at a time. Nothing happens and he is puzzled and Simone bored until… suddenly the scent hits him, he whinnies like a stallion, tears all his clothes off and ravishes Simone. It is an instructive display. Biotte goes up to the copulating couple and threatens Lacaille with a revolver, he ignores him. Biotte fires the revolver right over Lacaille’s head, he ignores him.
Wow. The scent really takes complete animal possession of a man. They wonder what to call it. Cornelius suggests Bitch.
So far Biotte has only manufactured 10cc of the stuff. Cornelius insists on being given 1cc for purposes of his own. He takes the carefully sealed phial to a gadget-maker he knows in Paris and asks him to make a tiny container, no bigger than an inch which will contain the scent but also have a tiny timing mechanism and hammer, so that the phial can be set to be punctured and leak its life-changing content. This the gadget-maker does.
But when Cornelius returns to the lab the next morning he discovers that the vixenish assistant Simone had used up the entire supply of scent on herself and sent Biotte into such a frenzy that he had a heart attack and died. And he hadn’t written down the chemical formula or the process for extracting the perfume. Damn!
(All these coincidences and extremities make you realise this story is really a cartoon.)
The special plan Cornelius has is to use the spray on the American president! The current president is (according to him) a particularly loathsome, lying reptile. He plans to get close enough to spray bitch on the nearest woman (while wearing nose plugs) and watch the president turn into a horny animal.
So he flies into New York, checks into a hotel and reads in his paper that the president is due to give a speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution that same evening. Cornelius discovers the head of the Daughters is one Mrs Elvira Ponsonby. He discovers which hotel she is staying in and goes round with a spray of lovely orchids and gets past reception by claiming they’re a gift from the president himself. Concealed among them is the phial of scent and the tiny little timer.
His plan is to pin the flowers onto Mrs Ponsonby’s enormous bosom, then watch as she goes off to sit next to the president, guest of honour at tat evenings dinner. And at 9pm precisely the little clockwork hammer will penetrate the little phial, bitch will spread across Mrs P’s bosom, the president will be transformed into a raging satyr, and ravish her right there and then on the table in front of all the other guests, and a television audience of 20 million. Cornelius cackles with anticipation. He will be ruined. he will be impeached. He will be thrown out in shame and dishonour.
Mrs Ponsonby answers the door to her room and, after some initial doubt, is persuaded that Cornelius is a courier bringing flowers from the president himself. Unfortunately, she is not only a very large lady, but very clumsy, and as she tries to force a pin through the stems of the flowers to attach them to her dress, the penetrates the phial, the precious drops of bitch leak out and… Dahl gives us an extraordinary description of how Cornelius feels, it is as if his entire body shrinks as his penis becomes bigger and more erect until he is nothing but penis with which he transfixes Mrs Ponsonby and they fly up into the sky, through exploding stars etc, in a sort of X-rate Disney animation.
What seems like hours later, he comes back to himself, finding himself stark naked in a hotel room which looks like it has been trampled by elephants, and, as he sheepishly finds his clothes and gets dressed, he hears a woman’s voice emanating from behind an upturned table in the corner of the room, ‘I don’t know who you are, young man, but you’ve certainly done me a power of good!’
Thoughts
The stories certainly reveal in graphic detail the thoughts of the kind of Playboy-reading male chauvinist pig which feminists have spent fifty years hunting to extinction. Nobody nowadays could write such frank assessments of women solely in terms of their fuckability, as the narrators of three of these stories do.
But then, the obvious feature of the first, second and fourth stories is that the male chauvinist pig gets his comeuppance: in the final one Biotte dies and Cornelius’s plans collapse into fat-bottomed farce.
The exception is The Last Act which swings in and out of sexist territory, skirts along the borderline. But I found his portrayal of a woman destroyed by grief, redeemed by finding a tough demanding job to do, and then undone on a disastrous date with a high school boyfriend, contained surprising depths and acuities.
Uncle Cornelius is a monstrous cartoon caricature and I want to read much more about his outrageous escapades and absurd pratfalls (apparently, there is a short novel about him). But it is the messy, modern story of the widow Anna Cooper which sticks in my memory.
Credit
Switch Bitch by Roald Dahl was published by Michael Joseph in 1974.
Books & Boots 