Writers in the Tense Present
Interview by Elizabeth J. Howard (Queen, August 1961)
If we are lucky, we notice a certain amount of our present and remember fragments of our past, while the future is usually a subject for idle, speculative anticipation, curiosity and foreboding. In an attempt to clarify our reactions to the age we live in, I asked a group of writers six questions relating to their work in the Sixties. Here they are…
FIRST QUESTION What do you expect to achieve in the Sixties? Are you aiming at any particular quality or quantity of work?
IAN FLEMING: thriller writer, creator of James Bond, whose adventurous orgies he records every year.
One can never expect to achieve anything—even less if one is in the fifties and living in the sixties. Since I am a writer of thrillers I would like to leave behind me one classic in this genre—a mixture of Tolstoy, Simenon, Ambler and Koestler, with a pinch of ground Fleming. Unfortunately I have become the slave of a serial character and I suppose, in fact, since it amuses me to write about James Bond, I shall go on doing so for the fun of it. I would also like to write a really stimulating travel guide to the Commonwealth and the remainder of our Colonies, regarding this as a public duty. But this would require too much time and energy from me, and, in fact, would better be done by a central editor using a different writer, but good ones, for each territory. I would also like to write the biography of a contemporary woman, once a professional prostitute and spy, who has changed the face of a certain country. But the source material would be difficult to get, the story would be bristling with libel, and I expect the idea will be stillborn.
SECOND QUESTION What do you feel is different about the Sixties? (Better, or worse, or simply different)
IAN FLEMING: During my lifetime, life in general has accelerated fantastically—communications, inventions and the pace of peoples’ lives. This process will continue in the Sixties together with the further destruction of gods and images and heroes, which the Age of Realism is achieving. Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World will come closer and closer, life will become more comfortable and much duller and basically uglier, though people will be healthier and live longer. Boredom with and distaste for this kind of broiler existence may attract an atomic disaster of one sort or another, and then some of us will start again in caves, and life on this planet become an adventure again.
THIRD QUESTION Do you want to make any particular public impact in this time? (Political, moral, spiritual, intellectual, or any combination of these?)
IAN FLEMING: Certainly not. Personal privacy is becoming worth diamonds. But I would like to continue, in the thin literary seam that I mine, to provide occasional slices of excitement and fantasy which will briefly hoist people out of their broilerdom.
FOURTH QUESTION Do you expect, or hope for; any change in your way of life as a writer, and if so, what kind of change?
IAN FLEMING: No. All I ask for is more zest and inventiveness—and time.
FIFTH QUESTION: What medium, first in all the arts, secondly in writing, do you think is the most influential today?
IAN FLEMING: If television could develop from a craft to an art, it would be more influential than any of the individual painters, writers, actors, etc., who would be presented through its medium to the public.
SIXTH QUESTION What three living writers do you think have, or will have (in this decade) the most impact (a) on you, (b) on society?
IAN FLEMING: William Plomer, for his quietude and irony in the midst of chaos. Simenon, because he is the master of my particular craft. Graham Greene, because each sentence he writes interests me, both as an individual and as a writer. (b) At a wild guess, Muriel Spark, Bernard Levin, and the partnership of author and draftsman known as Trog.