Michael Rosen wouldn’t use the words “fat” and “ugly” in children’s stories. And the author is pleased the Oompa Loompas from the Roald Dahl classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory have had a makeover too.
“I wouldn’t use fat or ugly in my work, and if someone told me to change some bad language in something I wrote in my thirties or forties, I’d probably say, ‘Sure’,” says the 76-year-old former children’s laureate. “Tastes change. Dahl himself changed the Oompa Loompas, who were originally little black people from the jungle. The NAACP [the prominent American civil rights group] protested and he made them fantasy creatures.”
The row about Dahl’s stories being revised for modern audiences made headlines around the world this week. After a sensitivity reading, his publisher Puffin quietly decided that Mrs Twit from Dahl’s story The Twits should no longer be “ugly and beastly”, just “beastly”. And Augustus Gloop, the greedy boy in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is no longer “enormously fat”, just “enormous”.
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Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed multiple times at a reading of his work in America last year, decried the changes as “absurd censorship”. The Succession actor Brian Cox has called them “disgraceful”. Even the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, weighed in, saying literature should not be “air-brushed”.
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Rosen thinks they’re blowing it out of proportion. “I know Salman is upset, presumably because he believes an author’s work is sacrosanct, whereas I believe there are no stable texts. Shakespeare comes in different versions, the quartos and folios, and he was censored by the master of the revels for saying things Elizabeth I didn’t like. Aesop’s Fables were rewritten and, of course, the Bible is a translation that comes in both authorised and unauthorised versions.
“There are no stable texts,” he repeats. “All writers are edited and changed. And when I think about some of the stuff I enjoyed watching or reading as a kid, I’m glad.”
Growing up as a Jewish child in northwest London, Rosen used to enjoy watching westerns. “Then at school I’d run around the playground slapping my own bottom pretending to ride a horse while shooting the Apache Indians,” he says. “Bear in mind this is only a few years after the Holocaust, but I was basically re-enacting the genocide of America’s indigenous people. That’s gone now thankfully — and surely that is progress.”
Still, we’re not talking about condoning genocide here. We’re talking about tractors in Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox no longer being described as “black”, I say. “What you’re doing there is fine,” he replies. “Arguing each point individually is OK, but let’s not pretend literature doesn’t evolve.”
Rosen has a complicated relationship with Dahl. They have shared an illustrator in Quentin Blake and, in 2012, Rosen published a book titled Fantastic Mr Dahl, a biography aimed at kids, when he styled himself as his “biggest fan”. However, though he was aware of it, Rosen didn’t tackle Dahl’s notorious antisemitism.
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“Yes, I’ll concede that,” he says. “I’d written a book for children in praise of his storytelling and, at the time, my publishers felt a discussion of antisemitism didn’t really belong. I was persuaded by that. Of course, the family have since apologised for his views [they did so in 2020], so I’d feel differently now. But all this is so similar to the debate about the composer Wagner [he was virulently antisemitic] or even some of the impressionist painters [who were split over the Dreyfus affair, an 1894 scandal that exposed endemic antisemitism in France after a Jewish army officer was falsely accused and imprisoned for treason]. Where is the antisemitism in Wagner’s music? Can you identify the antisemitic impressionists just by looking at their paintings?”
Rosen is in fine debating form, and knows all about being badly edited. His YouTube poetry readings have attracted over 100 million views, but 15 years ago some were downloaded, “remixed” with profanities and reposted. Parents complained, and Rosen was furious. “I’m human. I didn’t like people messing with my stuff.”
Rosen even managed to be philosophical when he was cancelled by the security services. As a trainee producer at the BBC, he made no secret of his Marxist views. In 1972 he was suddenly sacked without reason. Only later did he discover an MI5 brigadier working at the corporation had blocked his advancement. “I was only working on Play School, but, you know, I took it on the chin and became a writer instead.”
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He has since gone on to write some of this country’s best-loved children’s books. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt has sold 11 million copies and his 2019 book An Unexpected Twist, which retells Oliver Twist from a modern perspective, is touring as a stage play. “Dickens is a wonderful writer but I hope he’d say, ‘You’ve given younger readers a way in — thanks, Michael! I’m resilient enough to deal with that!’.”
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Rosen is nothing if not resilient himself. He’s just published a book called Getting Better, a sort of manual for emotional survival inspired by his near-death from Covid in 2020. He was in a coma for 40 days. Even now he is deaf in his left ear and has lost 80 per cent of the vision in his left eye. This brush with mortality inspired him to confront other life crises, like his mother Connie’s early death aged 56, and the discovery, aged ten, that he had an older brother (Alan died before Michael was born but his parents never discussed him). But pre-eminent among these gruelling experiences was the very sudden death of Rosen’s 18-year-old son Eddie, from meningococcal septicaemia, in 1999.
One evening Rosen said goodnight to him. The next day he found him dead in his bed. He gives an unflinching and poignant account of the frantic 999 call, even the sound of the body bag being zipped up. Despite the awfulness of this tragedy, Getting Better stresses the need for life to go on.
“Shortly after Eddie died I went to Paris and I saw a woman grieving in a cemetery. It may sound callous but my thought was, ‘I cannot live like that; I cannot let this overcome me.’ Losing my son was enormous and there were mornings I opened my eyes thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be good if I didn’t ever wake up?’ But . . . you find a way.”
Even on Zoom, Rosen is an extraordinarily vivid and bouncy presence. He seems genuinely interested and excited by everything around him. Sometimes, though, his subconscious can hijack things a bit. He still dreams about Eddie; sometimes he says terribly sad things like, ‘Dad, I think I’m dying.’ Then Rosen wakes up and suffers another mini-bereavement.
“It happens at the oddest moments. Recently I met a young boy who had won a poetry prize — meeting me was the prize! Afterwards his mum and I got talking and she mentioned she was a bit deaf in one ear because aged 18 she’d had meningitis. That was the same age Eddie got it and for about ten seconds I drifted off into a fantasy where I spotted Eddie’s illness in time and got him to hospital . . .”
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Rosen goes a bit quiet, then shrugs. “But it was a passing fantasy and I didn’t crack up, so that’s good, isn’t it?”
Rosen still lives in north London with his third wife, Emma, a trainee case worker. They have two children, aged 22 and 18 (Rosen also has two sons and two stepdaughters from his previous marriages) and, on weekends, they’ll walk or watch football (he supports Arsenal) or go to the cinema. But he’ll always write.
“I still really enjoy it,” he says. “I’m working on new poems for children. And ever since Eddie died that’s what has helped: do something, however small, every day. Life is about appreciating moments.”
If anything, that’s the lesson of Getting Better. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Enjoy every little thing you can. “Oh yes, I end each day with an appreciation of the smallest thing,” he says. “And it really can be tiny. Like yesterday I remembered to buy eggs from the supermarket so I meditated on that. I lay there thinking, ‘Despite all the distractions and various memory lapses, I remembered the eggs. Well done!’ And then I nodded off and slept like a baby.”
Getting Better by Michael Rosen is out now (Ebury Press, £16.99)
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Michael Rosen’s perfect weekend
Roald Dahl or Jacqueline Wilson?
Jacqueline Wilson
City or country?
City
Fry-up or muesli?
I make my own muesli every day
TV or cinema?
Cinema
Bear hunt or gym?
I try to walk every day, which is like a bear hunt
I couldn’t get through the weekend without...
My Yiddish class. It’s very moving to finally understand what my parents were saying to me all those years ago.
This article was amended on February 25 to take account of the following correction:
Michael Rosen has asked us to correct or clarify a number of points in his interview (Weekend, Feb 25). He did not use the words “sensitivity reader”. While he said he would not himself now use the words “fat” and “ugly”, he did not comment on whether they should be in other books for children. He was re-enacting cowboy films a few years after the Holocaust, not “a couple of decades”. He did not say he had worked with the Dahl family. His YouTube readings have had 128.5 million views, not 300-400 million. He has done what he can to get antisemitic “remixes” of his videos removed from YouTube. His wife is a trainee case worker, not an immigration lawyer. We are happy to put the record straight and apologise for the mistakes.
