The Man Who Made Bond
Douglas Keay meets Ian Fleming (Harper’s Bazaar, Feb. 1962)
He sits at a leather-topped desk (small, one feels, mainly because the room is small), which is somewhat cluttered with a fancy gold clock (present from his wife), a garish red pen tray decorated with a life-size black china revolver (souvenir from Las Vegas), papers, magazines, and a sick-joke ashtray on which the word “THINK” has been crossed out by the manufacturer and the word “SCHEME” scrawled underneath.
His suit is subdued blue hopsack, well cut to his tall, lean frame, but not so well cut that creases do not show like weals across his back when he rises to go to the glass-panelled bookcase behind him. His bow-tie is as gentle as his handshake of greeting and his whole appearance, in fact, admirably suited to the front pew of a parish church any Sunday.
Indeed one is almost disappointed to discover that only the smile, which begins with the upper lip rising a fraction before both lips part, and the look in the eyes, which lingers disconcertingly, can persuade one that this could possibly be Ian Fleming the thriller writer, the creator of James Bond, the most vicious, sadistic, supersexed secret agent ever to keep readers moist with tensility until the last excruciating page.
When The Spy Who Loved Me appears on the bookstands in April Ian Fleming will have completed ten thrillers in ten years, seen his sales rocket to two million in Britain, one million in America, and a total of over four million throughout the world. More significant, he will almost certainly remain the only contemporary “non-serious” writer to have been attacked (instead of being merely mocked), by two well-known “quality” papers, and count among his most publicly avid readers the President of the United States and Mrs. Kennedy.
In his self-described “rather splendid” office, tucked strategically mid-way between the holocaust of Fleet Street and the deceptive calm of the Temple, I began by asking Mr. Fleming if he could explain why his books are as successful in Kensington as in King’s Cross, which they are.
“Well I think one of the reasons is that I do produce a hero who isn’t in line with the current fashion, you know. I mean, everybody’s always knocking the Queen and knocking Admiral Mountbatten and crying down with this and down with that, and people who read Bond say, ‘well at least the fellow’s doing a good job for his country and is not ashamed of it…’
“And then again, I think one of the reasons for their success in Belgravia is that I do know a higher stratum of life than the average thriller writer does. I’ve been round the world two or three times. I’ve got very strong views about which are my favourite restaurants and which aren’t. I’m not starry-eyed about night-clubs and the Ritz and things of that sort, and because I know German and French and took psychology as one of the extra subjects for the Foreign Office exam, I’m much more at ease with the sort of world I write about than I might otherwise be.”
Fleming’s background as well as his manner of speaking might be said to be out of the top drawl. His father, a major, a DSO, an MP, was killed in 1916 serving with the Oxfordshire Hussars and had his obituary in the Times written by Winston Churchill. He himself was educated at Eton, Sandhurst, Munich and Geneva universities. His brother is Peter Fleming, the travel writer, and his wife was married first to the third Baron O’Neill and then to the second Viscount Rothermere. One of his three houses, “Goldeneye” in Jamaica (allegedly renamed the Goldeneye, Nose and Throat by Noel Coward), was used by Sir Anthony Eden for convalescence.
All of which might make it seem slightly surprising that Ian Fleming should even want to write thrillers, let alone be the indisputable master that he is.
But then, like the hero of his books, one ventures further, and in doing so makes some interesting discoveries. At Eton, for instance, the young Fleming was Victor Ludorum (winner of the individual track and field championship) twice—a unique achievement. At Sandhurst he was meted out the severest punishment ever, short of dismissal (a month’s CB and six months’ stoppage of leave), for an escapade involving a beautiful girl. And in the last war he was Personal Assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence and, strong rumour has it, didn’t confine himself to chairborne spying.
“I suppose I could be described as belonging to the old school,” he says. “If I’d been born a bit earlier” (he’s fifty-four), “I would probably have been an Empire builder. Not that I’ve a desire to collar India again or anything like that, but I like the idea of adventure immensely and I do think the Empire did provide adventure for a host of excellent chaps. Nowadays nobody wants to go out and govern some little province, which I find rather sad. And though there is still a desire for adventure—there was that little party in the Amazon the other day, remember?—we live in an age which is becoming increasingly coloured with the blue rinse of American widows with large alimonies living in fat hotels. The whole ethos of adventure is regarded rather as old hat and consequently there isn’t enough for young people to do on wet afternoons…”
Did he in any way feel that his James Bond thrillers helped to fill the gap?
“Well yes I suppose so. There are plenty of people who want a straight adventure story. They don’t want the kitchen sink and they don’t want everyone to be filthy and dirty. I can’t say I enjoy the Osbornes and Weskers either. I quite liked [John] Braine’s Room At The Top, but I can’t be bothered with—what’s the name of the red-brick one?—that’s right, Kingsley Amis. I couldn’t be bothered with his sense of humour. It didn’t seem to me to be funny compared with Evelyn Waugh. And it does seem to me, I must admit, that there is something tremendously vulgar in a different sense about [Alan] Sillitoe’s writing—a sort of inverted snobbery.”
Fleming’s own books have been criticised for being extremely vulgar and snob-ridden. I quoted to him an extract from the Guardian: “The idea that anyone should smoke a brand of cigarette not because they enjoy them but because they are exclusive…is pernicious, and it is implicit in all Mr. Fleming’s glib descriptions of food, drink and clothes.”
Mr. Fleming leaned forward, extracted a cigarette (a popular brand), from a drawer, placed it in a holder, and lit it. “Well, I agree. My books have got an air of vulgarity, but then nowadays so many good things are automatically vulgar. I mean if a man eats a large meal you immediately assume he’s on an expense account and that he’s on some racket or other. The sort of people you see nowadays in the smart restaurants are extremely vulgar looking people and really I’ve tried to give my villains strong touches of vulgarity so as to have more fun knocking them down.
“What I’m after is realism and authentic detail with a touch of the fantastic towards the end. Everybody’s always talking about the sadism in my books but the torture Bond suffers at the hands of his enemies” (in one story he’s stripped, strapped to a seatless chair and his most sensitive parts are flicked with a cane switch) “is not nearly as bad as what was done to our secret agents during the war. If I used the absolute truth it would really make the reader’s hair stand on end. You see, all life is violence and love. All of us are sadists or masochists. Freud tells us so anyway and I’m pretty sure my books do ring a bell with everyone. Besides which the kind of thing which happened to Bulldog Drummond just won’t do any more. He used to get a bang on the head with a wooden stick and that was all. But that’s not Life! In the same way I don’t think there’s a kiss in the whole of Buchan. He may occasionally hold the girl’s hand but no more. Well, really…”
The more one talks with Ian Fleming the more one is troubled by a niggling desire to ferret out some sort of satisfactory connection between this urbane man and the ruthless hero of his books. Was it true, I wondered, that after a pre-war spell with Reuters and during his time as Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times, he had deliberately set himself the task of writing “a spy story to end all spy stories”? And why?
“Well yes, it was true. I’ve always liked reading the kind of book I write, but they’re jolly hard to come by you know. Most of the English thrillers start with a sleazy Soho night spot which has fascinated the writer and end up in Tangier which has also fascinated the writer. Now I regard both these areas as absolutely dead meat as far as thrillers are concerned, far too overdone.
“I also find a lot of the writing in other thrillers worse than it should be. Thriller writing is a thin seam of literature.
“But as far as there being a connection between James Bond and myself, I don’t really think that we’re at all alike. I don’t live the smart life he lives and I don’t particularly like the food he eats. I put the foodmanship stuff in the first book because at the time, just after the war, we were all feeling a bit thin. But in fact my own favourite dish is scrambled eggs. I admit I share his enthusiasm for gambling, but I’ll not go to a casino more than twice a year.
“People often ask me how I would describe James Bond and, really, I’ve no idea. I’ve got so confused by the pictures I see of him in strip cartoons, on book covers and on posters advertising shirts.
“When I started I looked for a name that would have no glamour and would help to make my hero an anonymous secret agent. The name actually came from a book called James Bond’s Birds of the West Indies. When I saw it I thought, ‘My God, that’s a dull name.’”
Next July the first James Bond film (based on Dr. No) will be premiered in London. Playing the role of Bond will be a young, hardly known actor called Sean Connery. Fleming appears pleased with the choice. “Physically he’s a very good example of James Bond—except he’s got rather a strong Scottish accent. He’s very slow moving, powerfully built, six feet tall, dark hair, weight-lifts for Scotland, boxed for the Navy, and plays centre forward for the Variety Artists team at weekends—yes, I think he will be very good in the part, and if he clicks, his fortune is made because I’m going to do a Bond film a year from now on.”
“Doing” a Bond film a year means writing a Bond book a year. He spends months on research (“attention to detail has helped my success tremendously”), then, within a day or two of January 17th each year, he takes off for Jamaica where he spends exactly two months pressurizing facts and fiction into yet another Bond book as smooth as the bonnet of a Bentley, as taut as a suspender.
“I regard myself as a pro trying to make as much money as possible without lowering my sights which, even in thriller writing, one must have. I’m a commercial writer in a commercial world…”
But oh, one instinctively feels, if only the sun hadn’t gone down on the Empire, what Ian Fleming might have been!