What is Roald Dahl best know for in his fiction? A certain level of macabre creepiness stretching from the characters to the plot and a distinct lack of what might be termed autobiographical realism. The actual facts of the case are that there is an abundance of autobiography in even the most outrageous of Dahl’s stories, but it is hidden beneath the manic frenzy of outrageous unreality. Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, for instance, has origins which can be directly traced back to very specific events when Dahl was part of a schoolboy focus group for Cadbury. Still, in most Dahl stories—at least those that are most well-known—it would be quite a stretch to describe them as autobiographical even when using the term loosely.
The same is mostly true of the stories in Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life. They do differ substantially in being loosely autobiographical, but the key term here is “loosely.” These stories are autobiographical more in the sense that Stephen King’s stories about Maine are so. The tales are rooted in the reality of a specific location that comes alive not just geographically, but sociologically. The major difference really is that while King’s stories set in Maine often revolve around a writer who at least seems to be autobiographical in nature, the main character in this collection is not a writer, but a dreamy schemer bound to fail named Claud Cubbage.
In the Preface, Dahl describes how during time spent in Buckinghamshire country immediately following World War II, he met a man his own age named Claud. Claud was definitely no writer, but he and Dahl shared other interests including gambling, greyhounds and getting “something by stealth without paying for it.” Those three shared interests describe, in a nutshell, what the stories in this collection are about. The “something” to be acquired by stealth should not, Dahl explains, be confused with mere consumer goods, but rather refers to getting something in which the getting is the real draw rather the thing itself. This fits in with the shared interest in gambling.
Dahl claims that he learned many things from Claud on this subject and that, furthermore, Claud was “an acknowledged expert on such matters.” For the typical reader—especially those who came to these stories before the invention of the internet, this is where the idea of these stories being autobiographical gets interesting. Dahl is pushing off on the “real” Claud a level of talent at getting things by stealth which is not mirrored by the fictional Claud Cubbage in the stories. At every turn, the schemes of Claud Cubbage are thwarted and the big payoff never materializes.
The “real” Claud worked in a butcher shop. Or so Dahl claims. The original publication history of some of the Claud stories date back to the early 1950’s and this book was published in the late 1980’s. It should be pretty possibly to use the modern convenience of search engines to determine whether or not there really did exist this Claud in the butcher shop or not, but for most of the existence of these stories, one would have to take things on Dahl’s word. Dahl, the imaginative creator of such tricksters as Willy Wonka and Mr. Fox. Dahl, the memoirist whose singularly defining moment during World War II when his place crashed has undergone rather drastic variations in details in his own work and has been attacked from outsiders for a vague ambiguity of truth.
So the real question for readers not overly inclined to hit type in something like “is Claud Cubbage really based on a real person” into the search engine of their choice becomes fairly ripe with possibility. Is the sweet mystery of the life of Claud Cubbage that there never was a real person working in a butcher shop in Buckinghamshire named Claud? More succinctly: is the real sweet mystery here that all along Claud Cubbage has really been fictionalized version of Roald Dahl?
