Profile: Ian Fleming (Criminology, Sept.-Oct. 1963)
By Michael Fitzgerald
James Bond and his bride, Tracy, are driving away on honeymoon at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service when the fiendish Blofeld shoots up their car. Frankly, Tracy looks a gonner, but it seems Bond may pull through. Is Tracy being killed off to give Bond a free rein with the women again? Next March, when another James Bond adventure, You Only Live Twice, appears, there will be crowds at the bookshop wanting to buy the book to find out. Until then here is the background story of the writer who invented James Bond and began a literary cult.
I went to see Ian Fleming at his office just off Fleet Street—a mere pistol shot from the Temple and had the unusual experience of seeing him at work on a Bond book. It is called The Fabulous Pay-Off and will appear at Easter, 1965.
Unusual, because all his previous books have been written in the peace and seclusion of a house called Goldeneye in Jamaica. Fleming was breaking a personal rule by writing in London and he told me with a slightly exasperated smile: “I’m finding it difficult to work here. There never seems to be enough time and there’s always someone coming to see me.”
Always someone to see him…people like Cummings, the Daily Express cartoonist, who preceded me into Fleming’s office and presented him with the original of his cartoon The Adventures of MacBond, which shows the hapless Mr. Macmillan being pursued by knife-carrying “personalities” featured in the Profumo Affair.
The Cummings cartoon was proof of the fame of the remarkable Mr. Bond—if proof were needed.
Nearly everyone knows Bond. But few of the people who so avidly follow his adventures know the story of how he was created one sunny morning in Jamaica by a man who had never written a novel and who has never since written about any other fictitious character.
A borrowed name
Fleming, then 45 [sic] had gone to Goldeneye in 1952 to “sooth my nerves” before his marriage. One day, having nothing better to do, he sat down at a typewriter and began to tap out a story called Casino Royale, which was about a secret agent. Stuck for a name, Fleming “borrowed” that of the author of one of his favourite books, The Birds of the West Indies. The author’s name: James Bond.
Of that first book Fleming told me: “I had no particular interest in the hero. I just wanted him to be an agent doing his best for his chief, M, head of the secret service. Bond seemed a fairly anonymous sort of name. I made no attempt to portray him as an heroic figure. Rather the opposite. But he had to be efficient, ruthless and self-indulgent.”
So an adventure legend was born; for Fleming it was the start of a fabulous pay-off in royalties and the real Mr. Bond achieved the fame that all the West Indian birds would never have earned him.
“Write another quickly”
When Fleming told his friends he had written a novel they urged him to write another quickly because, they said, if the first book was a flop he would lose heart and might never write another. So he wrote Live and Let Die in 1953.
Fleming admits that he was astonished when reviewers, especially one in The Times Literary Supplement, were enthusiastic about Casino Royale and its follow-up. He began a yearly routine—flying to Goldeneye every January to write a Bond adventure and then returning to Britain to his newspaper job in Fleet Street. Sales of the Bond books climbed (they are now well over two million) and the film-makers decided they wanted Bond on the screen.
Fleming’s acceptance of the film offer was not unconditional. “I was very pleased, of course. It meant a lot of money. But I did insist that a comparatively unknown actor should be cast as Bond. James Mason, David Niven and Cary Grant were among the big names who wanted the part—but Sean Connery got it, and I thought his work in the first Bond film, Dr. No, was first class.”
Background Story
Bond, in his mid-thirties, is aggressive to the point of sadism, snobbish and highly sexed. His past is shady and his future quite unpredictable. Fleming, in his mid-fifties (he really does look 10 years younger) has a rather different background and attitude towards life, however tempting it is to depict him as the real-life counterpart of his lusty hero.
Ian Fleming was born in May, 1908, of Scots parents. His father, Major Valentine Fleming, DSO, MC, was killed in 1916 while serving with Winston Churchill’s regiment, the Oxfordshire Hussars. Churchill, in fact, wrote Major Fleming’s obit for The Times.
The second of four sons, Ian went to a private school at Dumford, Dorset. He was no scholar, but found that this did not bar him from a place at Eton, where again his total lack of interest in book-studying always ensured him a position near the bottom of the class list. But on the athletics field the young Fleming outplayed most of the others.
“A bit of a duffer”
Fleming admits he was “a bit of a duffer,” which is probably the reason why he drifted into Sandhurst at the end of his Eton schooling. Again the academic side of Sandhurst (minor though it was) bored him; but he was still out in front on the athletics field. It was while he was at Sandhurst that Fleming had an escapade that would not have been out of place in a story of Bond’s youth: a lovely girl nearly got him thrown out of the royal military academy. Fleming had taken her to a night club in London and although it was already well past lights out time at the barracks, he insisted on escorting her back to her home in Aldershot. Fleming’s subsequent attempt to slip into the barracks without being seen by the sentry was a failure and in true Bond fashion he got the stiffest punishment (apart from dismissal) ever handed out at Sandhurst. Instead of being sent down from the academy, he was confined to camp for six months—a heavy blow to his social life.
On leaving Sandhurst, Fleming was commissioned onto the Black Watch. But his army career was brief. He resigned his commission because of rumours that plans to mechanise the army would mean young officers becoming “glorified garage hands.”
His family decided that Ian should be entered for the diplomatic corps, as he had a flair for languages. He went to Munich and Geneva universities to cram for the diplomatic service’s exams and for the first time in his life he worked hard at his books. Fleming came seventh in the exam result list; but there were only five vacancies at that time in the Corps.
He next turned to journalism and joined Reuters for three exciting years, competing with the giant UP and AP agencies in Berlin and Moscow for exclusive stories.
In 1933, Fleming returned home and went into the City intending to become a stockbroker.
Special correspondent
“But I decided, fairly quickly, that I was not very good at making money from stocks and shares,” he told me, “so I managed to persuade The Times to send me to Moscow as their special correspondent.” This job didn’t last long, either. The British Intelligence Service asked the Bank of England to find them a young man who was good at foreign languages and who knew the international situation. Fleming was chosen, and so gained practical experience in the world of espionage that was to prove invaluable when he began writing the Bond stories.
In 1939, a few months before war broke out, Fleming was commissioned as a lieutenant in the RNVR and became assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence. His still-secret war record cannot be recalled here, but again it provided background for Bond’s adventures.
After the war, Fleming returned to journalism and Lord Kemsley picked him to reorganise the foreign services of the Sunday Times and the rest of the Kemsley newspaper group. He stayed with the group as Foreign Manager until 1959, when Kemsley sold out to Roy Thomson. By that time of course, Bond was bringing in enough money to provide Fleming with almost everything he wanted out of life.
In Bond, some see a man whose sadism, sensuality and egotism have a harmful effect on readers, particularly the young. I asked Fleming about this, and his reply was: “As a boy I used to read the penny dreadfuls and the blood and thunder stuff. Bond is no worse, and has no greater influence on readers. Even Grimm’s fairy stories are filled with violence.
“Bond is the kind of man every girl secretly dreams of meeting and he leads the life every man would like to live if he dared.”
Belief in Smersh
I also asked Fleming whether he saw Bond as an instrument of anti-Communist propaganda and whether he really believed in the notorious Russian counter-espionage organisation called Smersh, which appears in so many of his books. Fleming said he had not deliberately set out to write anti-Red propaganda. “If I had begun writing Bond books before or during the war, Bond’s enemies would have been the Nazis. It is just that the Russians were the people who were the obvious adversaries of Bond when I first began writing about him.
“I don’t doubt for one minute that Smersh existed. I know it did. But Mr. Krushchev seems to have stopped all that and consequently I have dropped Smersh from my latest books.”
A London journalist who worked for Fleming when he was Kemsley’s Foreign Manager told me: “Ian Fleming was the ideal chief. In a way, he was rather like ‘M,’ sitting behind his somewhat cluttered desk, silhouetted against the window of his office in Kemsley House. He rarely gave an order, just made requests in such a way that it was almost an honour to carry them out. Quiet-spoken, good-humoured, he would sit doodling on his green blotting pad and smoking cigarette after cigarette from a long holder. In an office where tempers were frequently lost, his never seemed to fray. He appreciated good work and forgave mistakes. There are, alas, too few Flemings left in the newspaper business today.”