Welcome to the weekend!
This weekend’s short comes from Roald Dahl, the author of such favorites as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and the peerless pair of memoirs Boy (about growing up in the 1920s and ’30s England) and Going Solo, his tales of flying for the RAF in WWII (which sometimes gets muddled with Catch-22 in my mind).
Rejected by the New Yorker (for being too interesting, probably), “Lamb to the Slaughter” was picked up by Harper’s and published in 1953. It’s no accident that Hitchcock would jump at the opportunity to develop and direct the morbid tale for television.
Dahl writes:
The room was warm, the curtains were closed, the two table lamps were lit. On the cupboard behind her there were two glasses and some drinks. Mary Maloney was waiting for her husband to come home from work.
Now and again she glanced at the clock, but without anxiety: She merely wanted to satisfy herself that each minute that went by made it nearer the time when he would come home. As she bent over her sewing, she was curiously peaceful. This was her sixth month expecting a child. Her mouth and her eyes, with their new calm look, seemed larger and darker than before.
When the clock said ten minutes to five, she began to listen, and a few moments later, punctually as always, she heard the car tires on the stones outside, the car door closing, footsteps passing the window, the key turning in the lock. She stood up and went forward to kiss him as he entered.
You can read the rest here.
Much like Theodor Geisel, Roald Dahl has long been a favorite author of mine, first for the generosity of his pencils in coloring the margins of my childhood ,and now because of the authors’ shared ability to accept our multi-chromatic experiences — delighting and despairing in them with equal measure.
It takes a certain level of genius to write for children just as well as adults — offering children a more complicated vision than the infantilizing fiction that assails them while pointing out the ludicrous and absurd in the buttoned-up world of adults.
But what Dahl has crafted goes beyond Geisel’s cartoonishly honest depiction of women’s shapes and faces to something that more resembles a biblical account. Assuming you’ve finished “Lamb,” there’s something very Catholic in me that sees what Mary does and thinks, “Eh, the guy had it coming.” It’s obvious from her initial reaction upon hearing him end her world in those undocumented five minutes that he has given up on the union and expects her to figure things out for herself, with him sending her some bucks every month to make ends meet and salve his conscience.
I cannot help but think of Yael looking upon the sleeping form of Sisera and driving a tent peg through his skull and into the earth beneath — the victim meting judgment upon her oppressor. Through this lens, one may consider Patrick’s death at Mary’s small but intent hand and perhaps weigh one’s selfishness against the blessed expectations of the marriage union.
Well-known but apt, here’s Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails’ evocative and devastating “Hurt”:
