Behind Bond
By Philip Oakes (Lilliput, Oct. 1958)
Even on a wartime memo, the scheme looked wild enough to succeed. First, take a captured Nazi plane; load it with four British agents (all speaking German); crash land it in the path of a German U-boat crawling down the English Channel; overpower the crew at gunpoint; then sail to England.
Proposing the mission was not secret agent James Bond (who might conceivably have pulled it off, with the aid of a marine Mata Hari), but his subsequent creator; Ian Fleming, at that time the personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence.
“Fortunately,” says Fleming, “the scheme never came to anything. The invasion came first.”
Lately the names of Fleming and his fictional hero James Bond have been fitted together in print like the sinister halves of a pantomime horse. Angry critics, outraged by the ethics (or lack of ethics) of Fleming’s sex-charged best-sellers, have shrilled convincingly that Bond’s exploits indicate “a bad symptom of the state of civilization in this country.”
In fact, there are many similarities between author and character. “Bond is everyone’s alter ego, including mine,” admits Fleming. “I write for the sensible, warmblooded heterosexual.”
But fact and fiction part company from here on. James Bond (code number 007) is a British secret service agent who has slugged and slept his way through six novels, beginning with Casino Royale, to the delight of an estimated 1,250,000 British readers. He is a hero created by the cold war. He is licensed to kill enemies of the State. He shoots fast, and he takes his sex where he finds it. “He is absolutely non-political,” says Fleming. “He is merely a blunt instrument of the government in power.”
Fleming, on the other hand, is foreign manager of the Sunday Times, with a large, shabby office on the third floor of Kemsley House, and a secretary, discreet to the point of deafness. He has a house in Belgravia, a small estate in Jamaica (“30 acres bought cheaply in 1946”), and a professed dislike of his strong-arm hero. “Bond,” he says distantly, “is a bit of a bastard. I don’t approve of him at all.”
Neither do critics like Bernard Bergonzi, who (writing in the Twentieth Century) sees Bond as a Savile Row-suited fascist, whose sexual antics plunge headlong into the pornographic. Bergonzi quotes a passage from Diamonds are Forever, in which Bond first meets Tiffany Case, the victim of a multiple rape in her adolescence. She is sitting half-naked in front of a mirror: “…her spine was arched, and there was arrogance in the set of her head and shoulders. The black string of her brassiere across her naked back, the tight black lace pants and the splay of her legs whipped at Bond’s senses.” Bergonzi comments: “Mr. Fleming’s characteristic mode of fantasy seems to be that of a dirty-minded schoolboy.”
Unperturbed, Fleming bares his big, white teeth in a bland smile, and screws a fresh cigarette into a gold-tipped holder. “There’s an awful lot of sexual confusion in criticism today. Bond may get the girl, but I make him suffer for it.”
The youngest [sic] son of a successful banking family, Fleming went through the usual upper-crust mill of prep school and Eton (where he won the public school hurdles). But he denies that he belongs in any way to the Establishment—the closed social shop of Britain’s ruling class. “Anyone who says that, is absolutely dotty. I never went to Oxford or Cambridge. I was earning my living at 22, and I’ve never been anywhere near Ascot.”
Now 49, Fleming cultivates the air of a tough, rakish dandy. He wears dark, casually-cut, two-button suits; spotted bow-ties; and black moccasins. His hands are hard and hairy. His belt has a gold buckle. His long, full-lipped face is tanned to a deep terracotta. In the light, rapid flow of his conversation the U-accent is barely discernible, but golf (which he plays with a handicap of 10) is invariably pronounced as “goff”.
Fleming opted out of Sandhurst when the army became mechanized. “I was supposed to be going into the Black Watch, but they wanted to turn me into a grease monkey. There was a vague idea of me going into the Diplomatic, and with that future in view, I went to university at Geneva and Munich. I was so fed up that I joined Reuters.”
Soon promoted to a reporter, Fleming went to Berlin and Moscow, where he covered the Metro Vickers trial in the 1930s. Then came the war (“I had a pretty good time”), and a pre-invasion sortie on the beach at Dieppe. “I headed a special squad which was supposed to grab whatever equipment the Germans had left lying around and then get the hell out of it.” Most of the time, however, Fleming was desk-bound, a feature of his service career which earned him the jeering title (from a touchy Press lord) of “The Chocolate Sailor”.
The Bond books started in 1953. Fleming and his wife were staying at Goldeneye, Fleming’s Jamaican home. “I began writing,” he says, “because my mental hands were empty, and as an antibody to my hysterical alarm at getting married at the age of 43.” For three hours every morning he sat at his type-writer, clocking up an average of 2,000 words a day; and the result was the best-seller Casino Royale.
Fleming was unprepared for success. “When I got back to London, I did nothing with the manuscript. I was too ashamed. Even under a pseudonym, someone would leak the ghastly fact that it was I who had written this adolescent tripe. There would be one or two sly paragraphs in ‘The Londoner’s Diary’. Then…Shame! Disgrace! Disaster! Resign from the club. Leave the country.”
But, on the advice of William Plomer, the book was published, and Bondmanship—a chic literary variation on Lifemanship—was born.
Basically, this is a snob fantasy on Gracious Living; a game in which the object is to equip any well-known character in fact or fiction with the right income, the right clothes, the right food, and the right girls.
In the case of James Bond it is known (on the evidence of six novels) that he earns the salary of a principal officer in the Civil Service, plus an annual £1,000 of his own (tax-free), and unlimited expenses while on a job. His cigarettes—Balkan and Turkish mixture—are custom-made by Morlands, of Grosvenor Street. His coffee comes from De Bry, of New Oxford Street. He insists on his eggs being boiled for three and one-third minutes. His breakfast comprises wholewheat toast, Jersey butter, Cooper’s vintage Oxford marmalade, and Norwegian heather honey from Fortnums. His bath water is scented with Floris lime essence. He drives a Bentley, and his choice of champagne is Dom Perignon.
Fleming admits to sharing many of Bond’s tastes. But the trappings, he insists, are not as Bernard Bergonzi says, “…fantasies of upper-class life which can only be a desire to compensate for the rigours of existence in a welfare state.”
“I had to fit Bond out with some theatrical props,” he wrote in reply to a Time questionnaire. “I myself abhor Wine and Foodmanship.”
The Bond books have earned high praise from such critics as Raymond Chandler and Elizabeth Bowen. “Here’s magnificent writing,” she once enthused. But the opposition is just as vocal. Reviewing Dr. No, in which Bond is put through an obstacle course of refined torture, including red-hot tunnels, poisonous spiders, and electrical shock-treatment, the New Statesman’s Paul Johnson branded gourmets of this fare as psychological cousins to the prison torturers in Algeria.
Fleming professes to be puzzled by this kind of attack. “I can’t understand why they take it all so seriously,” he complains. He does, however, take himself seriously. Proud of his “A” class-readership, he is not flattered by his classification by booksellers as “the Peter Cheyney of the carriage trade”.
“Cheyney was always making mistakes,” he says. “I always try to get it right.”
But even Fleming is fallible. “I do apologize for once making Bond order asparagus with béarnaise, instead of mousseline sauce,” he says. “A writer should acknowledge his shortcomings.”
Curiously, Bond seems to lack any sense of humour, while Fleming is an avid collector of jokes, many of which studded the Atticus column of the Sunday Times during his tenure. Sample: he suggested that a bishop should have his “in” and “out” trays stamped “Sacred” and “Top Sacred”.
Fleming spends every January and February at Goldeneye. In London, he is a member of three clubs: Boodles, The Turf, and The Portland, where he plays what is reputed to be a savage game of bridge.
He detests the theatre and enjoys films. But his real passion is reserved for his Thunderbird, over which he dotes like a lover.
Fleming’s fortunes seem inextricably bound up with those of James Bond. And the prospects look good. A seventh novel, Goldfinger, is already in the bag. The Daily Express has launched Bond (looking remarkably like Fleming) in a strip cartoon. And an American TV series of Bond adventures is being filmed.
Enthroned on a rapidly mounting heap of dollars, Fleming affects surprise. “There seems to be some sort of plot to make Bond a world figure,” he declares. “I find it all very odd.”