Short Story Review: Madame Rosette, by Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl came to writing the children’s classics for which he is best known relatively late in his life. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, The Witches – all of these came only after he’d already made a name for himself as the writer of morbidly wicked adult fiction in the late forties and fifties. His best known adult works are "Lamb to the Slaughter," about a woman who clubs her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb, then feeds the murder weapon to the investigating officers, and "Man from the South," about a compulsive gambler who wagers his own car against the little finger of unsuspecting strangers. (The last of these has been filmed numerous times, most recently by Quentin Tarantino as a segment of the movie Four Rooms.)



Dahl was born into a Norwegian family lured to the boomtown of Cardiff in South Wales when it was a capital of coal mining and shipping, around 1911. His father died when he was four, and a series of harsh English boarding schools notorious for beatings and pederasty left him with a healthy distrust of authority, all of which is on permanent display in his works for adults and children alike. During World War II, he was a pilot in North Africa, flying numerous dangerous missions which wiped out 17 of the 20 pilots in his unit. Finally, after crashes that resulted in murderous headaches, he was posted to Washington, D.C. as an attache. Here, he began writing stories about his experiences in the Army. One of these, first published in Harper's in August, 1945, was "Madame Rosette", which may rank with "MASH," and long segments of "Catch 22," as one of the finest black war comedies which does not involve direct combat.

"Madame Rosette" concerns pilots stationed in North Africa in the early days of World War II. They laze about camp conducting scorpion fights and being bored between missions, and then two of them, the Stag and Stuffy, go on leave to Cairo.  Here they rent a hotel room, take a bath (“They were feeling about having a bath rather how you would feel on the first night of your honeymoon.”) and hit the town, where they pick up Williams, another RAF soldier. Stuffy becomes enamored of a shop girl, and the Stag tells him of Madame Rosette, the madame of Cairo, who can get any girl you want in all of Cairo, shopgirl, wife, or what have you – the only difficulty a matter of price. Stuffy calls her, and indeed she tells him she can get the girl, but his conscience nags at Stuffy, and he cancels the deal.

From here, the three men roll from bar to bar, interacting with the locals, drinking and watching dancing girls, the idea of Madame Rosette’s livelihood eating away at them, until they decide they have to take action. They go to her brothel, their moral outrage hardened into a resolve to liberate all the girls they find there.

I will not say more, except to say there is no irony laden conclusion, or touch of the macabre, nor do you miss this lack of a twist. These are young men in the prime of their youth who’ve spent months if not years living through graphic horrors. Yet the horrors themselves are never graphically depicted in "Madame Rosette;" unlike Catch 22 there is no maudlin mourning for a lost Snowden, nor is there the MASH-like devolvement to an anarchic sex-and-football escape. Indeed, these British soldiers buck up and behave like soldiers at all times, stoically equipping themselves for another rescue mission in the midst of what should be a drunken spree.

Another real appeal of this story is Dahl’s masterful voice, a confident guide to the drunken young men on a gallant mission of slightly debauched heroism. Dahl’s sense of characterization is especially keen with the Stag, who gains a kind of mythic steely menace, with his excessive politeness masking some deep rage: “Stuffy noticed that the Stag was being polite. There was always trouble for somebody when he was like that.” And later: “He talked to him in his best way and when the Stag was polite there wasn’t anybody who didn’t take it.” It's a bravura bit of characterization that rides just inside the edge between character and cartoon, a line Dahl often had trouble with in his fiction but pulls of perfectly in this story.

Dahl would go on to write dozens of stories and a novel, though his output diminished as he married and had children. Critics began to call him trite and predictable, a teller of sick jokes with threadbare characters, stories that didn’t bear re-reading. They may have been right, and his dwindling output and increased rejections likely meant he knew it. In any case, he was becoming far more interested in the stories he told his young children, and when he started writing "James and The Giant Peach" in 1960, it was clear he’d gone down a new path.

There’s far more to his story, of course. He was twice married, first to American actress Patricia Neal, then to one of her close friends. His children went through medical tragedies, and he himself was considered difficult, arrogant, and later accused, perhaps accurately, of anti-semitism. That all is best left for a different time.

Madame Rosette is collected in The Best of Roald Dahl.