Note: Like last week’s offering, this is a transcription from a now-lost radio interview, and it also delves deeper into the Bond books than the usual interviews. My thanks once again to the fellow researcher and collector who kindly sent me the transcript.
Fairy Tales for Grown-Ups (BBC, June 1, 1962)
“Fairy Tales for Grown-Ups” is a phrase Ian Fleming has used to describe his James Bond thrillers. In the interview which follows he is talking about their recipe with Peter Duval Smith.
PETER DUVAL SMITH: Mr. Fleming, this year is the 10th birthday of James Bond. Every spring since 1953 you’ve brought out a novel featuring Bond, the wonder M.I.5 [sic] secret service agent, as your hero. I wondered what started you off writing these enormously successful novels?
IAN FLEMING: Well it was really quite by chance, because I was in Jamaica, and I was faced by a kind of vacuum in my life, with nothing particularly in my mental hands, and I was also just on the eve of getting married, after being a bachelor for 43 years, and this was rather a dreadful step to take, and partly to anaesthetize my mind, as a sort of antibody to this situation, I sat down at the typewriter and decided to write a thriller.
SMITH: You’ve been a journalist since you were a young man working for the Times and Reuters and so forth, but had you ever wanted to write a book before?
FLEMING: No, I can’t really say I had, I’d never thought I’d have the energy to finish it.
SMITH: Had you always been interested in the cloak-and-dagger world that the novels take place in?
FLEMING: Yes, I think so. You know I was brought up on penny dreadfuls and then Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace and Phillips Oppenheim, the usual things—people nowadays are presumably brought up on rather similar stuff on television, westerns and so on and so forth. And I thought of it as an entertaining type of book to write, because I am interested in action more than dialogue and psychological insight, and my intention was to fill these books with action, or at any rate fill the first one with action.
SMITH: You seem to have at hand a lot of specialised knowledge about the cloak-and-dagger world.
FLEMING: Well I came a certain amount in contact with it when I was in Naval Intelligence during the war, but of course it’s pretty far from reality, and has to be, because otherwise I should be infringing the Official Secrets Act and have a lot of trouble on my hands. So it has to be, to a certain extent, fantastical, and it must not of course duplicate what in any case I don’t know myself personally happens in real life.
SMITH: What was the genesis of your great hero, James Bond? Was he based on anybody in particular, or any kind of person in particular?
FLEMING: Well, to go back to what I was saying, I wanted really to find a blunt instrument in the hand of the government, and get away from the old hero, the sort of Bulldog Drummond-Saint-Buchan type of hero, because I don’t believe they exist, to somebody who’s slightly more believable. Also, I didn’t wish him to obtrude his personality, I meant him to be read as simply a really good professional, without any particular trademarks, but of course he’s gathered them over the years, and now a sort of myth of James Bond has clouded what was a simple, straightforward pro.
And that’s really the reason why I chose his name, which I thought was an extremely dull name, James Bond, rather than calling him Peregrine Carruthers or something…That name I borrowed from one of my bibles in Jamaica, which is a book called Birds of the West Indies by a man called James Bond. And funnily enough last Christmas I got a very nice letter from Mrs. James Bond, saying that I was misinterpreting her husband’s character, and…
SMITH: Well James Bond, however anonymously you may have meant him, has put a lot of people’s backs up—as you know, you’ve been immensely criticized, especially by literary critics, for what one of them called “sex, sadism and snobbery.” Well sex I suppose is alright, but you wouldn’t want to be accused of sadism and snobbery, yet in the books there is a lot of violence, and sometimes it does seem to be—even to me, an admirer—a bit gratuitous.
FLEMING: Well I think that’s perfectly true; of course, in a way each of these stories has been a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress, where James Bond surmounts Giant Despair and Mount Whatever it is, and goes through a great deal of physical pain in the process before he wins the prize at the end. And the old days of just getting a whack on the head like Bulldog Drummond used to get, perhaps with a cricket stump or something of that sort, are very much out of date, and I’ve always tried to keep these books to a certain extent contemporary. In fact, so far as sadism’s concerned, if I were to describe literally the tortures which you read being inflicted or that have been inflicted in Algeria I should certainly be stepping into the realms of sadism, far more than I am at present moment.
SMITH: But look, take things like Felix Leiter, the American secret service agent who is Bond’s great friend, being practically eaten alive by that shark in Live and Let Live I think—
FLEMING: Live and Let Die.
SMITH: Live and Let Die, and the girl being eaten in the West Indies in one of the other books.
FLEMING: Well the point really is if you do an awful lot of underwater swimming, which I do, the perils of sharks and barracuda become very real, and fix themselves in your imagination, and I think that the shark incident—and there’s been also trouble with barracudas and a giant squid and various other terrifying animals—is largely because I know the underwater world and I know its perils—I mean, one’s got to write about something—and I translate them into my stories.
SMITH: But what about Bond being nearly cooked alive in the health institute in Thunderball? I’m sure that’s never happened to you.
FLEMING: Well—funny, I don’t say he’s cooked alive, but—I’ve certainly been on this tension instrument for stretching the spine, and I found out the technical details of it and I’ve found out that it certainly could get out of hand, and that unless the tension was kept at around 120 lbs—if it was allowed to go up to say 200, which is the maximum of the machine, which was really a form of rack for stretching the spine…I had arthritis some years ago…That was another fact which fixed itself in my mind as a possible trouble that James Bond could get into.
SMITH: Well, to get back to the critics who dislike Bond so much and their charge of snobbery, all the stuff in the books about clubs and the very best wine for a certain dish and so forth—do you think that’s a fair criticism?
FLEMING: Well, I don’t think that’s a fair criticism, because I think everybody should strive for better—I don’t know what to say—better food, better soap, better bread, better everything. I think that there’s no harm in if one has an admiration for a particular kind of, let’s say, soap or something of that sort, mentioning it by name, just as I think it’s silly to talk about a hotel not more than a mile from Piccadilly Circus instead of describing the Ritz in detail.
SMITH: Yes. Yes.
FLEMING: The old-fashioned way to not mention any object or place in detail—
SMITH: Call it the Splendide or…
FLEMING: Call it the Splendide or something…on the grounds that one was advertising the place. Well I don’t mind advertising these things that I let James Bond use and so on, because very often I use them myself and I think they’re very good.
SMITH: Yes. And finally their accusation, these angry young men who are so angry with Bond, of perverse sex. And one can think of one or two examples. Why does Domino in Thunderball—that enchanting girl that he finds in Bermuda—why does she have one leg shorter than the other, though everything else is perfect?
FLEMING: Well, again, it’s an attempt to try and get closer to real life. The girls I have known have not all been Brigitte Bardots, some of them have had minor deformations of one sort or another, which one finds rather endearing. And giving Domino one leg slightly shorter than the other, I think gave her rather an attractive limp.
SMITH: Well that’s fair enough…
FLEMING: The trouble is you see with these heroines…again if one’s writing about a serial character like James Bond, it’s really awfully difficult not to write about the same sort of heroine, or the same sort of villain in each book, and it’s quite a business trying to make them very different.
SMITH: But if Bond is supposed to be close to real life in that respect, why then in his dealing, all his dealings, with all these enchanting girls isn’t he more tender? He’s very much a chap who has his sex and disappears.
FLEMING: Well, he hasn’t really got the time to be tender, he’s got to get back to his headquarters and go on with his next job. (Laughing)
SMITH: In writing the books, have you any kind of purpose? I know you haven’t had a solemn message to put across, but anything you’ve been trying to show?
FLEMING: Well, in a world where everybody’s smashing heroes and idols in every possible direction, I rather like in my own mind to create somebody who is in some shape a form of hero. He does a good professional job for his country and I rather deplore the fact that heroes have gone out of fiction, and that now it’s this anti-hero who holds the stage.
SMITH: I found a marvellous cutting from the Manchester Guardian—some of it would have never appeared in any other newspaper—that ran as follows: “It’s evident that fiction of this kind (Mr. Fleming’s) provides a vicarious satisfaction of innately violent instincts which tends to prevent their expression in the everyday world, therefore we should be grateful to Mr. Fleming for providing a convenient safety-valve for the boiling sensibility of modern man.”
FLEMING: Well I think that’s rather well-said, but as a matter of fact Paul Gallico wrote something rather similar in an introduction to an omnibus volume of my books that came out in America last year, when he rather likened them to the psychoanalyst’s comparison of the cat with the tiger. The psychoanalysts apparently maintain that a lot of people who keep cats [do so] because they are baby tigers, and that this domestic pet is in fact really the relic of some desire for a gigantic man-eating monster, but whether that’s true or not I don’t know.
SMITH: And do you think your books then work for people in the nature of a safe tiger—do you think that somebody who reads about violence and enjoys reading about it would be therefore less likely to do it?
FLEMING: I don’t think it really acts one way or the other. From the sort of letters I get from readers, they simply enjoy a jolly good story and have it at that. I’ve never thought that these books have any great effect on anybody—I should be rather horrified and frightened if I thought they did have, any more than Fu Manchu had a great psychological effect on me when I was about 12 or 14.
SMITH: Well the sex, sadism, and snobbery doesn’t bother me personally very much. I like the books very much, but I’ve got objections that are growing as I follow the Bond saga, and the main objection is to the decreased credibility of his more recent adventures.
FLEMING: Yes, well there again, I’ve written somewhere—I’ve forgotten quite where—that of course if you read the newspapers, you’ll find that you’re often astonished at what happens in the real life secret service. One occasionally sees the tip of the iceberg in an operation like the U2 operation, with all the poisoned needles the chap carried and the currency and so on. And then you get people like Khokhlov, the Russian who was sent to assassinate a man in West Germany, who carried an explosive cigarette case—when he offered a man a cigarette, you pressed a button and the bullet went through his heart.
And then you’ve got the Crabb exploit, when he was lost doing presumably some kind of underwater frogman’s job on the Russian cruiser several years ago. Now those you might say are rather incredible, but nevertheless they are real life, and lot of my stories are in fact based, or taken from actual incidents that I’ve read about. I could run through the whole gamut and tell you where I’d read about them and what it’s all about but basically, I try and keep my foot more or less on the ground.
SMITH: But you don’t seem to allow that there’s ever any element of farce in the Secret Service work.
FLEMING: Well, (laughs) the trouble is if you start to laugh at yourself, these books would destroy themselves, because they’re meant to be thrillers, and to thrill and chill as much as possible, and if I suddenly started laughing at myself, or at my audience, in my books, my purpose would be defeated and I should be writing an entirely different kind of book.
I have felt rather the same—I am a tremendous admirer of Hitchcock, for instance, the film producer, but when I saw his marvellous film North by Northwest I thought what a splendid plot he’s got there, and how because being Hitchcock and having a sly sense of humor he refused to go on being serious, he pulled the plot’s leg so much at the end that you came out of the cinema not knowing whether to shudder or to giggle, so to speak. I think there’s a certain amount of humor in my books—some of the dialogue is fairly humorous, I think. Felix Leiter makes humorous cracks every now and then, but of course it’s not in Bond’s character to be a humorous man.
SMITH: Yes. You don’t think that to have a more obvious background of ordinary life would help? Do you remember that Buchan novel that begins marvellously with the sentence—I think it runs something like this—“Sir Edward Leithen ran for his life like a hare down St. James Street, surrounded by ordinary, respectable, upper-middle-class London.” This man clutching his bowler hat and his briefcase, running for his life—and I miss that a little bit in the Bond books.
FLEMING: Yes…I think there may be something in that. Admittedly they are rather fantastic, but of course I find—perhaps remembering my youth—that one used to love the books that really took you out of yourself, into an entirely different world, and I think that possibly is what I have in mind when I write these books, that you’d be translated into an entirely different world where the improbable can happen, in rather luxurious surroundings.
SMITH: What everybody likes about the books is the tremendous display, and not at all a self-conscious display, of knowledge. You obviously know about the things that I know about, I know that you know about food and wine and aeroplanes, and obviously you know all about aqualung fishing and sunken treasure and guns and bath salts. Is the information accurate that we read?
FLEMING: Yes. I make about one mistake per book, but I take immense trouble to try and get it right. But the mistakes I do make of course pursue me endlessly through the years. The fact that I once, in my first [sic] book, said that a scent called Vent Vert was made by Dior instead of Balmain pursues me to this day, as also when I said the Orient Express had hydraulic brakes instead of air pressure brakes. Well, that pursues me, and there are various other items of that sort that enthusiasts pick up, and of course it’s the enthusiasts that generally write to you and say, “What the hell’s the good of writing this trash if you don’t know that Vent Vert is made by Balmain?” for instance.
SMITH: And there is such a car as the Studillac in Live and Let Die [sic]?
FLEMING: Oh yes, and I’ve driven it—in fact I was arrested in one going at 94 miles an hour on the New York State Highway.
SMITH: And could you in fact steal an H-bomber in the way that it is described in Thunderball?
FLEMING: Well I consulted a very high-up chap in the Air Ministry about this, and he told me, including a lot of gen which I gave about flying a plane, that a single man could in fact have flown this plane.
SMITH: I remember that you once in conversation with me gave yourself a splendid out about the probability business and so forth in the books when you said “well really I regard them as fairy tales for grown-ups.”
FLEMING: Yes, well I suppose that’s a convenient crack.
SMITH: You wouldn’t say daydreams, rather than fairy tales?
FLEMING: Yes, daydreams is another good simile.
SMITH: But fairy tales have got a shorter pipeline to real life than daydreams have.
FLEMING: Yes, and of course generally they have a much more clear moral than I produce in my books.
SMITH: Do you feel the complaint that Raymond Chandler, whom you admire, often made, that thriller writers are not properly treated by the critics, they’re not treated as if they could possibly be part of literature—does this bother you?
FLEMING: It doesn’t bother me, because I’ve always been pretty lucky in that respect. My critics when they’ve been harsh on me have been harsh for good reasons, but they’ve been pretty intelligent chaps. Chandler was hurt, and I know he was, but his books—which were in fact a step above what I might call thrillers, they were really novels of suspense—weren’t given rather more serious treatment. They are of course today, as are Dashiell Hammett’s, they’re regarded as part of American literary heritage. But I think on the whole that the ordinary run-of-the-mill thriller gets adequate treatment, and I think that probably the outstanding thriller doesn’t. But as things work in newspaper offices, if a thriller comes along it’s sent along to the thriller reviewer, and isn’t for instance taken out and given, say, to Cyril Connolly or Toynbee.
SMITH: Are you sorry about that?
FLEMING: Yes, because I think it’s great fun, first of all Cyril Connolly suddenly has some very entertaining views about my books, and I should be most amused to see him write them down one day.
SMITH: Who do you admire among your fellow thriller writers?
FLEMING: Well Eric Ambler of course I think is tops, and I hope that the disaster he’s suffered in California-Los Angeles fire last year, which cost him…nearly all his belongings, won’t have upset him too much and that he’ll be getting on with his writing. I think he’s the best alive today, though one or two—
SMITH: What about Buchan?
FLEMING: Well Buchan I’m afraid I try and read, but I find his writing is tremendously old-fashioned. Geoffrey Household is excellent, there’s a very good chap called Lyall—
SMITH: Gavin Lyall.
FLEMING: Gavin Lyall, yes, wrote a very good first thriller last year, The Other Side of the Sky, which I admired very much. There’s occasionally [something] really fresh and new, but the ordinary English thriller writer generally doesn’t go further than Soho and Tangier, and that’s about as far as his knowledge goes, and I’m very tired of Soho and Tangier.
SMITH: But these writers you’ve mentioned are all very literate writers, and we know from Chandler’s remarkable book of essays published recently that he was an extremely self-conscious writer, that he wrote as carefully as any poet. Do you yourself take a great deal of trouble over the novels?
FLEMING: Yes, I do, but then I write them very fast, and I do a tremendous amount of correcting afterwards. And I try to make them as literate as possible, but I also true avoid sort of O.K. English, because I think it holds up the pace of what are primarily books of action.
SMITH: Are you going to go on writing books about Bond? Will there be 20 books in 10 more years’ time?
FLEMING: Well I don’t think—I should rather guess that I shall run out of inventiveness by then, and you’ve already ticked me off for getting too bizarre, and I should think that my powers of invention will gradually die away. I have just in fact written, I think, the longest James Bond…where he appears on the first page and goes right through to the last. Some pretty extraordinary things happen in that, and in fact I’m just correcting it today. But how much longer I shall find any situations to put Bond in without getting stale and repeating myself, I really couldn’t say.
SMITH: You wouldn’t like to try a new kind, perhaps a more ambitious kind of novel that didn’t necessarily have Bond in it all—and that wasn’t necessarily just a thriller either?
FLEMING: Well I don’t know that I would, I don’t think I’ve got anything…you see, if you’re going to write a straight novel, you’ve got to either have some sort of message, or you’ve got to go over these hackneyed themes of youth, boyhood, first love and so on, so forth, which have been done ad nauseam. What I would like to do, of course, is to write a great novel which is also a great thriller, and Chandler says the same thing in one of his letters. I suppose one of these days there will be a thriller which is also a War and Peace but I doubt if I’m the man who’ll write it.
SMITH: Thank you very much, Mr. Fleming.