When Kingsley Met Roald

 One last dip into Kingsley Amis's Memoirs...
He is at a party at Tom Stoppard's house in Buckinghamshire when one of the guests arrives, long after everybody else – and, unlike everybody else, by helicopter. It is none other than Roald Dahl, the monstrously successful children's author, and a little later Amis finds himself reluctantly closeted with him. Dahl immediately steers the conversation onto the subject of money. 'What you want to do,' he advises, 'is write a children's book. That's where the money is these days.' To prove his point, he tells Amis the jaw-dropping size of the advance he was paid for his latest one. However, Amis protests, reasonably enough, that he couldn't do it: 'I don't think I enjoyed children's books much when I was a child myself. I've got no feeling for that kind of thing.'
'Never mind,' replies Dahl, 'the little bastards'd swallow it.'
That, Amis swears, is exactly what Dahl said, verbatim. 
  Later, however, Mr Dahl changes tack and tells Amis that, 'unless you put everything you've got into it, unless you write it from the heart, the kids'll have no use for it', and more along similar lines, before, 'with a stiff nod and an air of having asserted his integrity by rejecting some outrageous and repulsive suggestion, the man who put everything into the books he wrote for the kids left me to my thoughts.' 
Amis concludes:
'I felt rather as if I had been looking at one of those pictures by Escher in which the eye is led up a flight of stairs  only to find itself at the same level as it started at.
  I watched the television news that night , but there was no report of a famous children's author being killed in a helicopter crash.'
Somehow one gets the feeling Amis didn't take to Mr Dahl. 
  For myself, as long-time readers of this blog might know, I loathe Dahl and his works, and count myself lucky that my own children proved largely immune to their charm. However, I recently watched, with the grandchildren, the 2009 film of Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox, and I enjoyed it. My pleasure, I'm sure, was due less to Dahl's story than to director Wes Anderson's imaginative re-creation of it (in fact much of the film is Anderson's own invention). In particular, it was a joy to see proper crunchy hand-made animation (mostly stop-motion) instead of the usual slick and soulless computer-generated capers – and there were some great songs on the soundtrack. Heaven knows what Mr Dahl would have made of it...