hell-and-pepsi

As embodied by John Lithgow, Dahl is incisive, avuncular, irascible, acerbic, and always entertaining. He has deep compassion for the suffering of innocents, an irresistible sense of comic timing, and considered critiques of the state of Israel. He also engages in casual misogyny, narcissism, and anti-Semitism. He repeatedly casts Jews as cowards, claiming that he never saw any engaged in combat in World War II—more than 1 million in fact  served in the Allied armies—and derides the Jewish victims of the Nazis as submissive in the face of their aggressors. By the end of the play, one understands why this otherwise impressive man was—according to his own daughter—once expelled from a social club that he’d complained had too many Jews in it.

By presenting Dahl in all his maddening and flawed humanity, Giant explores an uncomfortable truth: Bigots do not present themselves for easy identification as they do in children’s stories like Dahl’s. “There was such a courtesy and an intelligence in the way he framed his answers to me that it was very disarming,” Michael Coren, the journalist who elicited Dahl’s Hitler remarks, told me. “Plus, he came with this heroic baggage, the way he had dealt with tragedy in his life, and he was such a gifted writer. So, yeah, it was very jarring to hear it from him.”

As history shows, and Giant demonstrates, prejudice is often sustained not by the casual intolerance of the unwashed masses, but by the sophisticated justifications and permission structures devised by educated elites. Anti-Semitism is built on conspiracies and contradictions that take time for an observer to unravel. In fact, the very term anti-Semitism was popularized by Wilhelm Marr, a German nationalist who sought to distinguish his anti-Jewish ideology from the crass bigotry of the common folk by dressing his hate up in pseudoscientific terms.

Giant illustrates how prejudice can coexist with intelligence, talent, refinement, and even empathy. Shakespeare’s genius is as evident in The Merchant of Venice, which is pervaded by anti-Semitism, as in his other work. The technical and business acumen of Henry Ford, the music of Richard Wagner, and the heroic feats of physical endurance by the likes of Charles Lindbergh all thrived alongside their anti-Jewish activism.

Dahl was a polymath. He was a war hero and a literary virtuoso, responsible for both best sellers and Hollywood blockbusters. He even invented a valve to drain fluid from the brain of his injured infant son after contemporary remedies proved inadequate. “He was a pathological fixer of problems,” Rosenblatt, the playwright, told me. And “one of the most illusory tools for fixing problems, because it simplifies the world so much, is a conspiracy theory or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”

Dahl’s achievements would not have been possible without immense self-confidence. But such self-regard also made him obstinate, immune to correction, and prone to hubris—as well as prejudice. “Any person who is greater than another,” the Talmud declares, has a greater “evil inclination.” Or as a different giant of children’s literature, Albus Dumbledore, once put it: “Being—forgive me—rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.”

Many struggle with this idea. They want to believe that those responsible for great deeds or good art are uncomplicatedly great and good themselves. And they want prejudiced people to be readily identifiable, defined by their shortcomings, and easily expunged from our collective canon and society. Put another way, they want bigots to be like the villains in Dahl’s books, not like Dahl himself. But Giant refuses to indulge this soothing fiction about human nature.