Conversation with Francis Bacon emerges amid the row over updating controversial language in the children’s author’s books
One of Roald Dahl’s best-known characters was the Enormous Crocodile, “a horrid greedy grumptious brute” who “wants to eat something juicy and delicious”.
The conversation took place in 1982 at Dahl’s home in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, where he was talking to the artist“I’ve warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!” he said. He was referring to his Norwegian roots and to his earlier story of “the greediest croc” in talking to Bacon, who apparently felt just as strongly about the subject, telling him: “There must be no changes to an artist’s original work when he is dead for any reason whatsoever.” Crossing himself in mock jest, Dahl replied: “I just hope to God that will never happen to any of my writings as I am lying comfortably in my Viking grave.
for hiring “sensitivity readers” to rewrite his books with hundreds of revisions so that they “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”., Augustus Gloop – a glutton for chocolate – is now just “enormous” rather than “enormously fat”; inThe Enormous CrocodileMarx and Lenin commenced this political correctness rubbish way back in 1917, and by God it’s creeping into this country
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