SAMUEL HYLAND

The troubled writer Roald Dahl spent decades churning out canonical children’s literature—Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, James & the Giant Peach, The Fantastic Mr. Fox—which you’d never guess if you made it past the title page of Switch Bitch, his 1974 collection of rapey, masculinist fantasy tales. Like his more innocuous books, the four stories comprising Switch harp on fairylike wish-fulfillment, except rendered through an old, perverted gaze: Why yes, you wrinkly sicko, of course you can deceive and pun your way into intercourse with any young woman you want… and they’ll thank you for it! I’m reminded of “Once a man, twice a child,” a snide old-timey saying (and Nas song) about retrogenesis. A fragile toddler might enjoy round-the-clock attention, only to grow old, bear the wounds of 7 or so decades, and find that he’s back in the nursery, now verbosely labeled the “Geriatric Care Unit.” Our bodies (and bank accounts) only grant us the power to act on our desires for so long: go beyond that point, and your imagination may run wild with fleeting fantasies, visions of things you’d do if you could. For wide-eyed kids, it’s why regular-degulars can double as DC superheroes, or literate pets can collude to save the planet, or a newborn baby can be a business-suited boss. And for a certain genre of retired, egotistical man, it’s why the dream of being desired—or, of desire (see: consent) not being a factor—makes far more sense on paper than it ever should in real life.

“I was now a gigantic perpendicular penis, seven feet tall and as handsome as they come.”

Over the latter half of the 20th Century, this particular man might have subscribed to Playboy, the now-defunct men’s magazine where Dahl’s smut-stories were printed within pages of nude centerfolds. Founded in the early 1950s, the publication both prefaced and embodied a country-wide culture war, tightly waged between sex-positive young people and their puritanical parents. By 2024, that ghastly rift has devolved into a nostalgic, very-palatable soup called The ‘60s™: peace, love, weed, Woodstock. But while the “free country” crux of Americana was largely at stake, some arbiters of said freedom were reckless middle-aged men, seemingly more concerned with their own liberties—both on-stage and in bed—than anyone else’s. Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy, was a poster-boy of this archetype, and every month, he proffered its dream to thousands of paying readers, charmed by his roster of well-written jocks. Among those jocks was Dahl, a zany British novelist, although one whose philosophy fit squarely with the watershed macho-movement churning just across the ocean. Retrospectively speaking, the American 1960s boiled down to transcendence: while Jim Morrison rasped about “Breaking on through,” NASA scientists frantically sought to apply his logic to the stratosphere. Somewhere in Playboy’s scandalized pages, a mischievous Dahl was filing similar ideas from his London study. “I was now a gigantic perpendicular penis, seven feet tall and as handsome as they come,” he wrote in “Bitch,” a short-story about a magical perfume that makes men ravage the nearest woman in sight. “A moment later, the two of us were millions of miles up in outer space, flying through the universe in a shower of meteorites all red and gold.” (In the story’s final line, the pair have returned to Earth, and all our narrator can hear is his victim thanking him.)

Six decades removed from Hefner’s heyday, ambitious outer-space treks are still occurring, although the “perpendicular penis” in question isn’t very tall, nor very handsome. While his homemade rocket-ships burst in flames high above, our tech-savvy dickhead busies himself with the tough task of ravaging Twitter—not necessarily a human, but the saving grace of millions of bored ones, particularly those damned to long, dreary days in jury duty. Not long after my copy of Switch Bitch arrived in the mail, I was served a crimson envelope with a set of strict instructions: You are summoned to serve as a trial juror for all Suffolk County Courts beginning Monday, July 8 , 2024. For reporting instructions call 1-800-499-2819 or visit www.nyjuror.gov/suffolk anytime after 5 PM beginning on Friday, July 5, 2024. Your juror ID number is [REDACTED]. If you are not instructed to report, continue calling each day for updated instructions. The first time I called, I was told that it wasn’t doomsday just yet, which gave me hope. Two days later, I was emptying my pockets in the foyer of the Suffolk County Supreme Court Building, desperately avoiding eye contact with the poor security guard likely seeing Dahl’s book—complete with a “cheeky” front cover illustration—for the first time. I wondered, had this been six decades prior, whether a copy of Playboy would have elicited the same reaction, or a winking head-nod.

“There was a lilt in his walk, a little prance of triumph in each pace he took, and when he reached the steps of his front porch, he ran up them two at a time.”

As I would learn over the next several hours, Switch Bitch largely comprises self-important sex fantasies, ripe for retellings in sweat-soaked YMCA locker rooms. Dahl is rumored to have pilfered one of the book’s stories, “The Visitor,” from a friend. In any case, his prose certainly lends itself to extensive hearsay—gossip you know to be false, but tune into anyway, because it’s slightly more interesting than your own affairs (literally: affairs), which may or may not include jury duty. Troubling as it is, Switch might be, after all, the ultimate waiting-room text: bored men, tired of their boring lives, fucking up everybody else’s as if it makes it any better. Much like jury duty, attempts to quell the mundane often make matters much, much worse. In “The Great Switcheroo,” a story about one man’s master-plan to trick his friend into a partner-swap, his own wife actually enjoys the sex—far more than she ever did with her egg-faced husband, who must now somehow replicate his neighbor’s “methods” for the remainder of his married life. (“Through the kitchen window, I caught sight of Jerry crossing the garden with the Sunday paper under his arm,” he recalls, of the following morning. “There was a lilt in his walk, a little prance of triumph in each pace he took, and when he reached the steps of his front porch, he ran up them two at a time.”) Two of the four stories pull verbatim from a fictional “Uncle Oswald”’s diaries; in the first, he unknowingly fornicates with a leper, while in the second, he sniffs the above-mentioned perfume, dooming himself to an SA controversy he’d planned to pin on the President of the United States. It’s kindergarten literature for bawdy man-children—you can see the night-lamps flickering on, hear the wives snoozing, smell the forbidden pages emerging from under the pillows. 

By 1974, Magazine-as-Mistress was far from a novel concept. Long before Playboy was sent to any pressers, the English poet John Milton penned Areopagitica, a heady critique of censorship in 17th-Century Britain. It’s a long treatise, rife with twisty, convoluted sentences. In the most famous of these sentences, he mentions “the benefit of books promiscuously read,” which is funny, because the “benefit” in question is virtue—in other words, books will make you pure, but if you want the purity, you must cheat on the books, pile up texts like a lover piles up bodies. There’s wicked pleasure in the ritual of buying a novel, getting far, putting it down, stumbling upon another, letting the first one rot, sucking the new one dry, then waking up someday to a ravaged desk, littered with the mangled bodies—dog-eared, sticky-noted, folded, annotated—of books you’d promiscuously munched. Adulterous men have long held similar feelings towards women, although the advent of sex zines added a new, bawdy layer to the dance: By reading Playboy, you weren’t only cheating on the last thing you read, but maybe your wife, too. Per his unnamed nephew, Uncle Oswald “refused to get married” because “he had never in his life been able to confine his attentions to one particular woman for longer than the time it took to conquer her.” In a world where finishing a text is marrying it, some might say the same of their bookshelves.

“The silence was eerie, and the stillness, the utter stillness and desolation of the place was profoundly oppressive.”

Dahl loved Uncle Oswald—enough, at least, to crown him Switch Bitch’s sole recurring character, then write a separate novel, five years later, in his voice. Oswald reads like a straight man’s idea of Oscar Wilde, a hedonistic traveler whose exploits are more sexual than sartorial. He needs constant stimulus, constant intercourse, constant confirmation—the more convincing, the better—of his superiority complex. The middle-aged men in jury duty seemed to need these things, too. (Two of them, at least.) Just after lunchtime on July 9^th, myself and several disgruntled parents were ushered into a sunlit room, where two gray-haired attorneys sat, stone-faced, bellies bulging over leather belts. They were there to pick jurors for the case, they explained, but no one was having it. A woman seated beside me loudly protested, and the men up front raised their voices even louder than she did, as if to say Relax, damsel: I, a gentleman, am here to rescue you from the evil soft-spoken attorneys, using only my hoarse throat and the glorious phlegm lodged within it. Soon enough, the rules of the game became clear—get called to the front, make your best excuse, go home early—and everyone became a player. Two losers, myself among them, remained by morning. And within 48 hours, these losers were following a burly cop up three flights of stairs, trudging towards a chilly courtroom like lambs to the slaughter. “The silence was eerie, and the stillness, the utter stillness and desolation of the place was profoundly oppressive,” Uncle Oswald groans in “The Visitor,” stranded in a desert. It was the first time, reading Switch, that I felt seen.

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“He took her firmly by the shoulders and pushed her back into the other room. Then he locked the door.”

Ten or so years ago, a four year-old preschool student fell—under shadowy circumstances—directly into the corner of a table, injuring her right eye. No one saw it happen, which presented both a problem and a solution: at the cost of a teeny scar, a negligence suit might have promised a hefty paycheck, perhaps the beginnings of a college fund, or a down-payment on a better place. Thus, ten years later, the young woman—now just shy of 14—was thrust onto a Suffolk County witness stand to testify against the caregivers, much wrinklier and much wearier, who taught her how to read. She seemed nervous. The prosecutor squinted and told her to speak up, but it didn’t matter, because she couldn’t really remember anything. Nor could her stepmother, who was shocked to be shown incident reports she’d signed all those years ago, each alleging that she’d sent her daughter to school in flip-flops. “I would never send my daughter to school in sandals,” she’d told the defense attorney, “because I’m not stupid.” When he asked her whether it was her signature on the paper, all she could say was that she didn’t recall.

The following day, myself and the jury were summoned into an empty courtroom, where the judge explained to us that our services were no longer needed. Upon realizing—a decade or so late—that the “case” was a finicky cash-grab, the prosecution settled for an undisclosed amount, far smaller than the new-car numbers they’d originally had in mind. I wondered whether justice had been served, especially without the closure of a verdict, or the damning (and aesthetically pleasing) boom of a gavel. The Suffolk County Supreme Court building lies in Riverhead, a ghastly town bare enough to make you yearn for television, theater, dramatic servings of justice: anything to correct the grave injustice of your own boredom. Kids read stories for similar reasons. When I was in elementary school, my mom’s job was headquartered in New Jersey, which allowed her to waltz through a bookshop in Penn Station every afternoon. At some point, she began buying me stories—kid-appropriate ones—by Dahl. Most of my reading happened when it wasn’t supposed to: under my desk during class, under my pillow after bedtime, in the nurse’s office when I feigned sickness. Where school was a wasteland of creaking wood and muffled voices, Dahl’s worlds were fever dreams, zany havens where the right things always happened, no matter how long they took. You kept reading, even through the wrenching parts, because you knew the good was guaranteed to win.

“I cannot seem to rid myself of the unfortunate habit of having one person do nasty things to another person.”

Needless to say, real life is a lot less marketable. Switch Bitch is written for people old enough to know this firsthand, but also old enough to seek escapism in other people’s bodies. To Dahl’s credit, his adult stories inventively juggle these extremes, of youthful justice-servings and scandalous desires. Masculinist as they may be, the tales’ perverted male protagonists are ultimately punished for their sins—they contract leprosy, squander lifelong projects, tarnish their reputations, doom their marriages. In “Bitch,” the aforementioned perfume story, the inventor subjects his female assistant to a “test run,” in which she’s ravaged by a boxer while gleeful spectators take notes. She enjoys this, begs for an encore, and is stowed away in a closet—“He took her firmly by the shoulders and pushed her back into the other room. Then he locked the door.”—only to re-emerge the next day, killing her captor with his own creation. “The lecherous little slut Simone had apparently sprayed herself with the entire remaining stock of Bitch, nine cubic centimetres of it, the moment she arrived at the lab!” Dahl writes, in Uncle Oswald’s voice. “(…) When the molecules hit him the poor fellow didn’t stand a chance. He was dead within a minute, killed in action as they say, and that was that.”

Compared to children’s literature, this evokes an inverted mode of storytelling, less concerned with good guys winning than evil men losing. As much as his oeuvre may suggest otherwise, Dahl often seemed far more infatuated with the latter, especially if it allowed him to render wickedness in bright, garish colors. Historians remember Dahl as a twisted man; “When writing stories,” he once admitted, “I cannot seem to rid myself of the unfortunate habit of having one person do nasty things to another person.” He suffered his fair share of nasty things from others, and he did—and said—his fair share of nasty things, too. Raised in England by wealthy Norwegian immigrants, he attended various private schools across the country, where he was subjected to violent beatings by headmistresses and peers alike. Upon finishing his education, he was enlisted, without training, to serve as a fighter pilot in World War II: a low point for humanity, with the stoppage of bloodshed also demanding the proliferation of it. On the day his own blood was shed, he crashed his Gloster Gladiator into a boulder, shattering his nose and blinding him for six weeks. He’d go on to argue that his brain injury sparked his creative genius. “Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it,” he wrote in Billy and the Minpins, his final work of literature. It’s hard to think he didn’t mean it.

Hefner shared this philosophy, though his own brand of magic was slightly more perverse. Playboy, like Dahl’s children’s books, proffered exemption from the mundane: growing up no longer meant dying of boredom; it meant having, and exploiting, a brand-new netherworld of hedonistic pursuits—and not having to work for it. At the height of his power, he spent his days on a large, motorized bed, watching porn on his television and reenacting it with his various maidens. “Hefner is at the center of the world,” Tom Wolfe once wrote, after visiting the mogul’s headquarters. “He is deep down inside his house—at the center of his bed. The center of the world!” While Hefner’s bed may well have been an epicenter of the 1960s—the symbolic crossroads of its sex, its drugs, its literature—his outlook argued that the beds of his readers, motorized or not, should anchor their own worlds, too. Which doesn’t seem all that new, nor radical, when you consider the 21st-Century males who have leapt at his idea, milking it beyond his dreams. Having money means having the opportunity to do things with it. Things that include, by 2024, the curation of porn outlets, the purchase of pixelated monkeys, and the confinement of oneself to the digital sphere. You don’t have to be a good person, nor really exist. You just have to have fun.

“She would have liked a house to go to, a house with a family.”

Dahl seemed to be having fun with Switch Bitch, all except for one story. In January of 1966, he published “The Last Act” in Playboy, after the New Yorker turned it down for its disturbing content. The story follows a lonely woman, Anna Cooper, whose longtime husband—and sole sex partner—dies one morning in a tragic car accident. She falls into a manic depression, which intensifies as her children go their separate ways: universities, marriages, new homes, new families. The days grow increasingly silent, increasingly dreadful. She’s waiting for razor blades to come in the mail, when she gets a phone call from a friend, begging her to tag along at her job. Soon enough, she’s working full time at an adoption agency: bright-faced and bushy-tailed, reveling in her newfound purpose. The work is hard, but the people need her. Someone needs her. That’s all she needs.

Newly invigorated, she embarks on a work trip to Dallas, where the bustle of the city puts her at unease. Memories of her dead husband creep in. She feels alone. “She would have liked a house to go to, a house with a family,” Dahl writes. “A wife and husband and children and rooms full of toys, and the husband and the wife would fling their arms around her and cry out, ‘Anna! How marvelous to see you! How long can you stay? A week, a month, a year?’” Flipping through a phone-book, she remembers a high school flame named Conrad, who conveniently happens to live in the area. She calls, and they catch up over drinks. A few martinis later, they’re back in the hotel room, taking their clothes off. Anna isn’t necessarily over her husband’s death. Conrad isn’t necessarily over being dumped for her husband, all those years ago. He makes the sex as uncomfortable as possible: gripping, commenting, glaring, pushing. In the story’s final pages, his once-lover is screaming, begging him to get off. When he finally does, she races to the bathroom, hysterical. He puts his clothes back on, hears the cupboard open, and slips out—a case for another judge, and another jury.