Richard Metzger's DangerousMinds.net has a good story on one of the greatest literary mashup interviews in radio history:
Philip Marlowe and James Bond are two of the greatest fictional characters of the 20th century, and this is what happened when their authors, Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming met for a BBC radio program in July 1958.
Fleming and Chandler talk about protagonists James Bond and Philip Marlowe in this conversation between two masters of their genre. They discuss heroes and villains, the relationship between author and character and the differences between the English and American thriller. Fleming contrasts the domestic “tea and muffins” school of detective story with the American private eye tradition and Chandler guides Fleming through the modus operandi of a mafia hit while marvelling at the speed with which his fellow author turns out the latest Bond adventure...
When Raymond Chandler met Ian Fleming
2.02.2011
Paul Gallagher
http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/when_raymond_chandler_met_ian_fleming
Showing posts with label Ian Fleming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ian Fleming. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Thursday, August 14, 2008
James Bond: a reader's guide
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3945358.ece
May 16, 2008
James Bond: a reader's guide
Movies have made Bond a global brand, but the books came first. Ian Fleming expert Henry Chancellor gives the low-down on the entire canon
ON FEBRUARY 17, 1952, Ian Fleming sat down at his desk at Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica, and gazed out at the unbroken Caribbean Sea. He was a 43-year-old journalist, and he was trying hard to take his mind off his imminent wedding. Putting a fresh sheet of paper in the battered Royal portable in front of him, using six fingers he typed out a sentence. He crossed it out and tried again. Discarding that too, he finally came up with “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning”.
Suddenly he was off, writing in a fast, uninhibited manner and by lunch he had already typed 2,000 words. These were pulled straight from his memory and imagination, he had no notes, no plan of where he was going. Fleming claimed he had even found the name of his hero by chance: A Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies, by a certain James Bond, was sitting on his bookshelf.
Every morning for a month he stuck to this iron regime, until he hammered out the final bitter sentence: “The bitch is dead now.” Casino Royale, his first novel, was finished, and the phenomenon of James Bond was born.
For the next dozen years Fleming would repeat the pattern of writing a new Bond novel between January and March at Goldeneye, to be published in the spring of the following year. What he had begun “chiefly for pleasure, and then money”, quickly developed into a long-running saga, in which each book picked up where the last one left off, and Fleming occasionally felt obliged to tie up some of the loose ends of the previous adventure (particularly what happens to the girls) before sending Bond off on his next assignment.
“Everything I write has a precedent in truth,” Fleming once said, and this is true not only of his fantastic plots and locations but also of his alter ego, 007. The James Bond series is not only the continuing story of the world's most famous secret agent, it is also a direct reflection of the lives and loves of Ian Fleming himself.
CASINO ROYALE 1953
The first James Bond novel is a brief, airless affair, set in the French gambling resort of Royale Les Eaux. Here Bond, the best card player in the British Secret Service, takes on the villain, Le Chiffre, at baccarat. Le Chiffre is working for the Soviet spy-hunting organisation SMERSH (meaning roughly “Death to Spies”), and has misappropriated its funds. Bond's task is to bankrupt him to bring him into disrepute.
Fleming claimed that “there are three strong incidents in the book which carry it along and they are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.”
Fleming's life looms large in Casino Royale. Vesper Lynd, the beautiful raven-haired double agent bears a strong resemblance to Christine Glanville, the real-life spy with whom Fleming had an affair. Like Bond, Fleming was a lifelong gambler, and even claimed to have taken on Nazi agents at chemin de fer in Lisbon in 1941. Unfortunately, this story wasn't true, but Casino Royale's memorable torture scene was. In it, Bond's naked genitals are thrashed while he is strapped to a bottomless chair. The combination of high living and violence caught the public's mood: Casino Royale was, according to the Times Literary Supplement, “exciting and extremely civilised”.
LIVE AND LET DIE 1954
Bond, now fully recovered from his lashing by Le Chiffre, is sent to New York to investigate Mr Big, a voodoo baron and unlikely SMERSH agent, whom M suspects is behind a smuggling operation that is funding Soviet agents in America. Seventeenth-century gold coins have been turning up in Harlem and Florida, and M believes that these are part of a larger hoard buried in Jamaica by the Welsh pirate Sir Henry Morgan.
Bond goes up to Harlem, only to be captured by Mr Big, and interrogated by his mind-reading girlfriend Solitaire. When the story reaches the Caribbean Fleming pitches in all the local colour he can think of: buried treasure, underwater swimming, voodoo.
“It is an unashamed thriller and its only merit is that it makes no demands on the mind of the reader,” Fleming declared in a letter to Winston Churchill, sending him a copy of the book. “How wincingly well Mr Fleming writes,” The Sunday Times drooled.
MOONRAKER 1955
Unlike the previous two novels, Moonraker is set entirely in England. Bond, still sunburnt from his “passionate leave” with Solitaire, is asked by M to solve a problem. Sir Hugo Drax, a successful stockbroker and national hero, who has offered to donate his £10 million rocket The Moonraker to the defence of Britain, has been discovered cheating at cards. Fleming was fascinated by cheats, and it was inevitable that his beloved London clubland would make an entrance in his “autobiography”, as he teasingly referred to the Bond novels.
He spent a lot of time working out the crucial bridge hand, and a full 18 pages describing it. From Blades Club, Bond is sent to Kent to investigate the Moonraker rocket himself; he discovers that Drax is a Nazi and that the Moonraker is targeted on London. Fleming was loath to let anything go unused: Moonraker is really two stories; it began life as a film idea about an intercontinental missile, on to which Fleming admitted he had to graft the Blades club scenario, “to bring it up to the necessary length”.
Fleming received many complaints that Kent, even on the most glorious English summer's day, did not compare with the tropical heat of the Caribbean. “We want taking out of ourselves,” declared one elderly couple, who read Bond novels to each other aloud, “not sitting on a beach in Dover.”
DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER 1956
As if in response to disgruntled readers craving the exotic, the plot of Diamonds Are Forever delivers something of a geography lesson. It begins beside a scrubby road in French Guinea, at one end of a diamond smuggling pipeline, then proceeds at breakneck pace to Hatton Garden in London, New York, Saratoga, Las Vegas, Spectreville and Los Angeles.
The villains are Jack and Serrifimo Spang and their unpleasant sidekicks, Wint and Kidd. Diamonds, like gold, fascinated Fleming, and through some old school connections he found an entrée into the closed world of diamond trading.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE 1957
“Personally, I think From Russia with Love was, in many respects, my best book.” So said Ian Fleming, and many critics agreed. John F. Kennedy even included it in his top ten books of all time. The story is of SMERSH'S attempt to lure Bond to Istanbul then kill him on the Orient Express, “with ignominy”.
Rosa Klebb, a SMERSH colonel, proves a suitably extraordinary villain.
The biggest surprise is reserved for the final scene. Bond confronts Klebb and she lashes out at him with her boot, which conceals a poison-tipped steel knife. Bond crashes to the floor...
DR NO 1958
Rosa Klebb's kick had injected 007 with Tetrodoxin, a nasty poison extracted from the unlikely source of the sex glands of the Japanese globe- fish. After an extended leave, Bond returns to be punished by M for failing to kill Klebb (his trusty Beretta jammed - so Bond is issued with a Walther PPK), and he is then given a dead-end assignment in Jamaica. This leads 007 to Crab Key, a private island owed by a mysterious Chinaman, Dr Julius No.
Where From Russia with Love was rich in Cold War detail, in Dr No Fleming allows his imagination to run riot. The book teems with exotic wildlife, some friendly, most not, and No himself is a huge, worm-like man with steel claws, whose home is a “mink-lined prison” built inside a guano-spattered mountain and extending beneath the sea.
Fleming's inspiration for Crab Key was Great Inagua, the southernmost island in the Bahamas, a harsh tropical swamp he visited as part of an expedition to count the flamingos nesting there. He was particularly taken with the Land Rover mounted with huge tyres used to ride through the swamps, and this vehicle, to which he added a flame thrower, became Dr No's “dragon”.
GOLDFINGER 1959
Goldfinger is the longest and most dense of all the 007 novels. Bond is sent to investigate the richest man in England, Auric Goldfinger, whom he discovers is smuggling gold out of the country. Goldfinger's method is ingenious; his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost is made of gold. Bond finds himself working for Goldfinger in his bold attempt to steal $15 billion of gold bullion from Fort Knox. As well as weaving in the impossibly named “Pussy Galore and the Cement Mixers” - a tough lesbian gang from Harlem - Fleming manages to include two of his lifelong obsessions, gold and golf. Fleming had a gold typewriter (that he didn't use), collected gold cobs and reals, and even had a gold top made for his Bic Biro. As for golf, Fleming played almost every weekend of the year, and the three-chapter scene between Bond and Goldfinger was Fleming's homage to a place (the Royal St George's at Sandwich) and a game he loved. Bond, like Fleming, played off a handicap of nine, and his weakness - a flat swing “like a housemaid sweeping the floor” - was exactly Fleming's own.
FOR YOUR EYES ONLY 1960 (subtitled Five Secret Occasions in the Life of James Bond)
By the time Fleming wrote this collection of short stories he was beginning to tire of “Bond and blondes and bombs”, and he wanted to try something different. Though short, these stories are essentially Bond novels compressed, as is The Hildebrand Rarity, a story inspired by Fleming's trip to the Seychelles but set in familiar territory, involving a millionaire, a yacht, a girl and a fish. Here Fleming's ecological awareness of marine life is to the fore, and he writes with anger about the poisoning of an entire reef to obtain the solitary fish of the title.
The story that really departs from the formula is Quantum of Solace, which is not a secret service adventure, but an anecdote about love and emotional cruelty, set in the claustrophobic world of Caribbean expat society. The tale is told to Bond by the rather stiff British Governor of Nassau, and it is based on a true story that Fleming heard from Blanche Blackwell, his neighbour and lover in Jamaica. He gave her a slim Cartier wristwatch in return.
THUNDERBALL 1961
Like Moonraker, Thunderball began life as a film idea, with the added complication that the original was not entirely Fleming's own work, and the wrangling over Thunderball's ownership would last another 37 years. By now Fleming's 60-a-day habit and relentless drinking were having a serious effect on his health, and Bond's medical record, read out by M at the beginning of the book, is a slightly modified version of Fleming's own. Thunderball is the Bond novel that above all others takes place underwater, and again Fleming drew on real wartime exploits for inspiration, particularly the Italian Gamma Group frogmen, who, “in the greatest piece of effrontery of the underwater war”, cut a trapdoor beneath the waterline of a rusting hulk in Algeciras harbour, which they used as a secret base to raid British shipping. Thunderball also marks the first appearance of Ernst Blofeld and SPECTRE, his international criminal gang, who would become his main adversary from now on.
THE SPY WHO LOVED ME 1962
Here is an oddity in the Fleming canon. It is a Bond novel told from a female perspective, in the first person, by Vivienne Michel, the Bond girl. Fleming justified this unusual approach in a letter to his editor, explaining that he was “surprised” that his adult thrillers were being read in schools, and that “young people were making a hero out of James Bond”. He wanted to write a cautionary tale about 007, “from the other end of the gun barrel, so to speak”. He also claimed that this exercise in ventriloquism was the easiest book he ever wrote. It was also the shortest - which was probably just as well, given its reception. The Spy who Loved Me was a disaster. “Just one thing - you oughtna done it,” wrote one irate fan, who spoke for many: “This book does not belong in a public library any more than a packet of garbage does.” Certainly Fleming's descriptions of Vivienne's sexual awakening go farther than in any other book, but that was only part of the problem. Readers had to wait until chapter ten, two thirds of the way through, for Bond to appear.
ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE 1963
This is a complex novel, involving two plots and the second appearance of Bond's enemy from Thunderball, Ernst Blofeld. Bond has spent the last year chasing Blofeld around the globe, and he is on the point of handing in his resignation when his nemesis turns up, posing as one “Comte de Bleuville”. Blofeld has contacted the College of Arms to authenticate his claim, and Bond follows this lead, making his way to Blofeld's Alpine hideaway in Switzerland. An unusual ending: not only does Bond marry the Bond girl, but she is then assassinated by Blofeld hours later.
As with golf and gambling, it was inevitable that at some point Fleming would draw upon his love of the Alps and use them as a backdrop for a book. Fleming had skied enthusiastically since the 1920s, and on one memorable occasion he was pursued then engulfed by an avalanche, which directly inspired Bond's own escapade in this book. The College of Arms was another closed world which, like the diamond trade, Fleming enjoyed prising open. He delighted in the serendipitous discovery that the coat of arms for the Bonds of Peckham bore the legend: “The world is not enough”.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE 1964
This is the 12th and last novel Fleming managed to complete before his untimely death aged 56 in 1964, after a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. The mood is dark and claustrophobic, and in it Bond finally comes to grips with Ernst Blofeld. The beginning finds Bond depressed and withdrawn after the death of his bride, Tracy. Given Bond's mental state, M revokes his licence to kill and sends him on a mission to Japan, where he encounters a mysterious Westerner within a forbidding castle.“Dr Shatterhand” is, of course, Ernst Blofeld in disguise, and after the usual capture and torture Bond succeeds in strangling his arch- enemy. Fleming was enchanted by Japan, and travelled the length and breadth of the country to collect the raw material for this novel. He drank sake and turtle blood, composed haiku with geishas, sought out curious eastern aphrodisiacs, and had a massage from a Bridget Bardot lookalike named Kissy.
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN 1965
This was painful for Fleming to write, and it shows. He managed to complete the first draft months before his death in 1964, and the manuscript was then polished by Kingsley Amis and others before it was published posthumously in 1965. The story is weak, the characters sketchy, and the villain is not a brilliant megalomaniac with dark designs on the planet, but a mere three-nippled pistoleer named Scaramanga.
Apart from a few scenes, Golden Gun is an unfinished muddle, but it begins well. Bond returns to London from Vladivostock, having been brainwashed by the Russians, and his first act is to attempt to kill M. In this he fails, and after six months of “de-brainwashing”, Bond is back in Jamaica on the trail of “Pistols” Scaramanga (whose name, like Blofeld's, was inspired by a boy Fleming had disliked at Eton).
There are far more gadgets in this than in previous novels. These range from the “Fluoroscope” that takes a surreptitious X-ray of Bond as he walks down a corridor in the secret service, to 007's poison spray gun; a real assassin's tool that Fleming appropriated from Bogdan Stashinsky, a Soviet secret agent who had killed two men with it.
OCTOPUSSY AND THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS 1966
This is a posthumous collection of short stories in which Octopussy and The Living Daylights are the main attractions. Written in the 1950s, in Octopussy, like Quantum of Solace, Bond is merely the catalyst for a tale of deceit. He arrives unannounced at the home of Major Dexter Smythe, an overweight ex-commando officer living on the north coast of Jamaica, who spends his days paddling around the reef and feeding his “pet” octopus, Octopussy (named after Fleming's coracle).
The Living Daylights is another taut tale. Bond - the best marksman in the service - is given the unenviable task of assassinating an assassin in Berlin. Fleming had visited the city a year earlier in the company of a spy, and he was fascinated by the skulduggery employed by both sides in this divided city.
He was also pleased to discover that Russian women excelled at rifle shooting. His cello-playing assassin, the golden-haired Trigger, is recognisably Amaryllis Fleming, Ian's ebullient half-sister, a concert cellist.
May 16, 2008
James Bond: a reader's guide
Movies have made Bond a global brand, but the books came first. Ian Fleming expert Henry Chancellor gives the low-down on the entire canon
ON FEBRUARY 17, 1952, Ian Fleming sat down at his desk at Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica, and gazed out at the unbroken Caribbean Sea. He was a 43-year-old journalist, and he was trying hard to take his mind off his imminent wedding. Putting a fresh sheet of paper in the battered Royal portable in front of him, using six fingers he typed out a sentence. He crossed it out and tried again. Discarding that too, he finally came up with “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning”.
Suddenly he was off, writing in a fast, uninhibited manner and by lunch he had already typed 2,000 words. These were pulled straight from his memory and imagination, he had no notes, no plan of where he was going. Fleming claimed he had even found the name of his hero by chance: A Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies, by a certain James Bond, was sitting on his bookshelf.
Every morning for a month he stuck to this iron regime, until he hammered out the final bitter sentence: “The bitch is dead now.” Casino Royale, his first novel, was finished, and the phenomenon of James Bond was born.
For the next dozen years Fleming would repeat the pattern of writing a new Bond novel between January and March at Goldeneye, to be published in the spring of the following year. What he had begun “chiefly for pleasure, and then money”, quickly developed into a long-running saga, in which each book picked up where the last one left off, and Fleming occasionally felt obliged to tie up some of the loose ends of the previous adventure (particularly what happens to the girls) before sending Bond off on his next assignment.
“Everything I write has a precedent in truth,” Fleming once said, and this is true not only of his fantastic plots and locations but also of his alter ego, 007. The James Bond series is not only the continuing story of the world's most famous secret agent, it is also a direct reflection of the lives and loves of Ian Fleming himself.
CASINO ROYALE 1953
The first James Bond novel is a brief, airless affair, set in the French gambling resort of Royale Les Eaux. Here Bond, the best card player in the British Secret Service, takes on the villain, Le Chiffre, at baccarat. Le Chiffre is working for the Soviet spy-hunting organisation SMERSH (meaning roughly “Death to Spies”), and has misappropriated its funds. Bond's task is to bankrupt him to bring him into disrepute.
Fleming claimed that “there are three strong incidents in the book which carry it along and they are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.”
Fleming's life looms large in Casino Royale. Vesper Lynd, the beautiful raven-haired double agent bears a strong resemblance to Christine Glanville, the real-life spy with whom Fleming had an affair. Like Bond, Fleming was a lifelong gambler, and even claimed to have taken on Nazi agents at chemin de fer in Lisbon in 1941. Unfortunately, this story wasn't true, but Casino Royale's memorable torture scene was. In it, Bond's naked genitals are thrashed while he is strapped to a bottomless chair. The combination of high living and violence caught the public's mood: Casino Royale was, according to the Times Literary Supplement, “exciting and extremely civilised”.
LIVE AND LET DIE 1954
Bond, now fully recovered from his lashing by Le Chiffre, is sent to New York to investigate Mr Big, a voodoo baron and unlikely SMERSH agent, whom M suspects is behind a smuggling operation that is funding Soviet agents in America. Seventeenth-century gold coins have been turning up in Harlem and Florida, and M believes that these are part of a larger hoard buried in Jamaica by the Welsh pirate Sir Henry Morgan.
Bond goes up to Harlem, only to be captured by Mr Big, and interrogated by his mind-reading girlfriend Solitaire. When the story reaches the Caribbean Fleming pitches in all the local colour he can think of: buried treasure, underwater swimming, voodoo.
“It is an unashamed thriller and its only merit is that it makes no demands on the mind of the reader,” Fleming declared in a letter to Winston Churchill, sending him a copy of the book. “How wincingly well Mr Fleming writes,” The Sunday Times drooled.
MOONRAKER 1955
Unlike the previous two novels, Moonraker is set entirely in England. Bond, still sunburnt from his “passionate leave” with Solitaire, is asked by M to solve a problem. Sir Hugo Drax, a successful stockbroker and national hero, who has offered to donate his £10 million rocket The Moonraker to the defence of Britain, has been discovered cheating at cards. Fleming was fascinated by cheats, and it was inevitable that his beloved London clubland would make an entrance in his “autobiography”, as he teasingly referred to the Bond novels.
He spent a lot of time working out the crucial bridge hand, and a full 18 pages describing it. From Blades Club, Bond is sent to Kent to investigate the Moonraker rocket himself; he discovers that Drax is a Nazi and that the Moonraker is targeted on London. Fleming was loath to let anything go unused: Moonraker is really two stories; it began life as a film idea about an intercontinental missile, on to which Fleming admitted he had to graft the Blades club scenario, “to bring it up to the necessary length”.
Fleming received many complaints that Kent, even on the most glorious English summer's day, did not compare with the tropical heat of the Caribbean. “We want taking out of ourselves,” declared one elderly couple, who read Bond novels to each other aloud, “not sitting on a beach in Dover.”
DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER 1956
As if in response to disgruntled readers craving the exotic, the plot of Diamonds Are Forever delivers something of a geography lesson. It begins beside a scrubby road in French Guinea, at one end of a diamond smuggling pipeline, then proceeds at breakneck pace to Hatton Garden in London, New York, Saratoga, Las Vegas, Spectreville and Los Angeles.
The villains are Jack and Serrifimo Spang and their unpleasant sidekicks, Wint and Kidd. Diamonds, like gold, fascinated Fleming, and through some old school connections he found an entrée into the closed world of diamond trading.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE 1957
“Personally, I think From Russia with Love was, in many respects, my best book.” So said Ian Fleming, and many critics agreed. John F. Kennedy even included it in his top ten books of all time. The story is of SMERSH'S attempt to lure Bond to Istanbul then kill him on the Orient Express, “with ignominy”.
Rosa Klebb, a SMERSH colonel, proves a suitably extraordinary villain.
The biggest surprise is reserved for the final scene. Bond confronts Klebb and she lashes out at him with her boot, which conceals a poison-tipped steel knife. Bond crashes to the floor...
DR NO 1958
Rosa Klebb's kick had injected 007 with Tetrodoxin, a nasty poison extracted from the unlikely source of the sex glands of the Japanese globe- fish. After an extended leave, Bond returns to be punished by M for failing to kill Klebb (his trusty Beretta jammed - so Bond is issued with a Walther PPK), and he is then given a dead-end assignment in Jamaica. This leads 007 to Crab Key, a private island owed by a mysterious Chinaman, Dr Julius No.
Where From Russia with Love was rich in Cold War detail, in Dr No Fleming allows his imagination to run riot. The book teems with exotic wildlife, some friendly, most not, and No himself is a huge, worm-like man with steel claws, whose home is a “mink-lined prison” built inside a guano-spattered mountain and extending beneath the sea.
Fleming's inspiration for Crab Key was Great Inagua, the southernmost island in the Bahamas, a harsh tropical swamp he visited as part of an expedition to count the flamingos nesting there. He was particularly taken with the Land Rover mounted with huge tyres used to ride through the swamps, and this vehicle, to which he added a flame thrower, became Dr No's “dragon”.
GOLDFINGER 1959
Goldfinger is the longest and most dense of all the 007 novels. Bond is sent to investigate the richest man in England, Auric Goldfinger, whom he discovers is smuggling gold out of the country. Goldfinger's method is ingenious; his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost is made of gold. Bond finds himself working for Goldfinger in his bold attempt to steal $15 billion of gold bullion from Fort Knox. As well as weaving in the impossibly named “Pussy Galore and the Cement Mixers” - a tough lesbian gang from Harlem - Fleming manages to include two of his lifelong obsessions, gold and golf. Fleming had a gold typewriter (that he didn't use), collected gold cobs and reals, and even had a gold top made for his Bic Biro. As for golf, Fleming played almost every weekend of the year, and the three-chapter scene between Bond and Goldfinger was Fleming's homage to a place (the Royal St George's at Sandwich) and a game he loved. Bond, like Fleming, played off a handicap of nine, and his weakness - a flat swing “like a housemaid sweeping the floor” - was exactly Fleming's own.
FOR YOUR EYES ONLY 1960 (subtitled Five Secret Occasions in the Life of James Bond)
By the time Fleming wrote this collection of short stories he was beginning to tire of “Bond and blondes and bombs”, and he wanted to try something different. Though short, these stories are essentially Bond novels compressed, as is The Hildebrand Rarity, a story inspired by Fleming's trip to the Seychelles but set in familiar territory, involving a millionaire, a yacht, a girl and a fish. Here Fleming's ecological awareness of marine life is to the fore, and he writes with anger about the poisoning of an entire reef to obtain the solitary fish of the title.
The story that really departs from the formula is Quantum of Solace, which is not a secret service adventure, but an anecdote about love and emotional cruelty, set in the claustrophobic world of Caribbean expat society. The tale is told to Bond by the rather stiff British Governor of Nassau, and it is based on a true story that Fleming heard from Blanche Blackwell, his neighbour and lover in Jamaica. He gave her a slim Cartier wristwatch in return.
THUNDERBALL 1961
Like Moonraker, Thunderball began life as a film idea, with the added complication that the original was not entirely Fleming's own work, and the wrangling over Thunderball's ownership would last another 37 years. By now Fleming's 60-a-day habit and relentless drinking were having a serious effect on his health, and Bond's medical record, read out by M at the beginning of the book, is a slightly modified version of Fleming's own. Thunderball is the Bond novel that above all others takes place underwater, and again Fleming drew on real wartime exploits for inspiration, particularly the Italian Gamma Group frogmen, who, “in the greatest piece of effrontery of the underwater war”, cut a trapdoor beneath the waterline of a rusting hulk in Algeciras harbour, which they used as a secret base to raid British shipping. Thunderball also marks the first appearance of Ernst Blofeld and SPECTRE, his international criminal gang, who would become his main adversary from now on.
THE SPY WHO LOVED ME 1962
Here is an oddity in the Fleming canon. It is a Bond novel told from a female perspective, in the first person, by Vivienne Michel, the Bond girl. Fleming justified this unusual approach in a letter to his editor, explaining that he was “surprised” that his adult thrillers were being read in schools, and that “young people were making a hero out of James Bond”. He wanted to write a cautionary tale about 007, “from the other end of the gun barrel, so to speak”. He also claimed that this exercise in ventriloquism was the easiest book he ever wrote. It was also the shortest - which was probably just as well, given its reception. The Spy who Loved Me was a disaster. “Just one thing - you oughtna done it,” wrote one irate fan, who spoke for many: “This book does not belong in a public library any more than a packet of garbage does.” Certainly Fleming's descriptions of Vivienne's sexual awakening go farther than in any other book, but that was only part of the problem. Readers had to wait until chapter ten, two thirds of the way through, for Bond to appear.
ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE 1963
This is a complex novel, involving two plots and the second appearance of Bond's enemy from Thunderball, Ernst Blofeld. Bond has spent the last year chasing Blofeld around the globe, and he is on the point of handing in his resignation when his nemesis turns up, posing as one “Comte de Bleuville”. Blofeld has contacted the College of Arms to authenticate his claim, and Bond follows this lead, making his way to Blofeld's Alpine hideaway in Switzerland. An unusual ending: not only does Bond marry the Bond girl, but she is then assassinated by Blofeld hours later.
As with golf and gambling, it was inevitable that at some point Fleming would draw upon his love of the Alps and use them as a backdrop for a book. Fleming had skied enthusiastically since the 1920s, and on one memorable occasion he was pursued then engulfed by an avalanche, which directly inspired Bond's own escapade in this book. The College of Arms was another closed world which, like the diamond trade, Fleming enjoyed prising open. He delighted in the serendipitous discovery that the coat of arms for the Bonds of Peckham bore the legend: “The world is not enough”.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE 1964
This is the 12th and last novel Fleming managed to complete before his untimely death aged 56 in 1964, after a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. The mood is dark and claustrophobic, and in it Bond finally comes to grips with Ernst Blofeld. The beginning finds Bond depressed and withdrawn after the death of his bride, Tracy. Given Bond's mental state, M revokes his licence to kill and sends him on a mission to Japan, where he encounters a mysterious Westerner within a forbidding castle.“Dr Shatterhand” is, of course, Ernst Blofeld in disguise, and after the usual capture and torture Bond succeeds in strangling his arch- enemy. Fleming was enchanted by Japan, and travelled the length and breadth of the country to collect the raw material for this novel. He drank sake and turtle blood, composed haiku with geishas, sought out curious eastern aphrodisiacs, and had a massage from a Bridget Bardot lookalike named Kissy.
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN 1965
This was painful for Fleming to write, and it shows. He managed to complete the first draft months before his death in 1964, and the manuscript was then polished by Kingsley Amis and others before it was published posthumously in 1965. The story is weak, the characters sketchy, and the villain is not a brilliant megalomaniac with dark designs on the planet, but a mere three-nippled pistoleer named Scaramanga.
Apart from a few scenes, Golden Gun is an unfinished muddle, but it begins well. Bond returns to London from Vladivostock, having been brainwashed by the Russians, and his first act is to attempt to kill M. In this he fails, and after six months of “de-brainwashing”, Bond is back in Jamaica on the trail of “Pistols” Scaramanga (whose name, like Blofeld's, was inspired by a boy Fleming had disliked at Eton).
There are far more gadgets in this than in previous novels. These range from the “Fluoroscope” that takes a surreptitious X-ray of Bond as he walks down a corridor in the secret service, to 007's poison spray gun; a real assassin's tool that Fleming appropriated from Bogdan Stashinsky, a Soviet secret agent who had killed two men with it.
OCTOPUSSY AND THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS 1966
This is a posthumous collection of short stories in which Octopussy and The Living Daylights are the main attractions. Written in the 1950s, in Octopussy, like Quantum of Solace, Bond is merely the catalyst for a tale of deceit. He arrives unannounced at the home of Major Dexter Smythe, an overweight ex-commando officer living on the north coast of Jamaica, who spends his days paddling around the reef and feeding his “pet” octopus, Octopussy (named after Fleming's coracle).
The Living Daylights is another taut tale. Bond - the best marksman in the service - is given the unenviable task of assassinating an assassin in Berlin. Fleming had visited the city a year earlier in the company of a spy, and he was fascinated by the skulduggery employed by both sides in this divided city.
He was also pleased to discover that Russian women excelled at rifle shooting. His cello-playing assassin, the golden-haired Trigger, is recognisably Amaryllis Fleming, Ian's ebullient half-sister, a concert cellist.
The spy who loved it
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/specials/for_your_eyes_only/article3684635.ece
April 7, 2008
The spy who loved it
The creator of James Bond liked his women wealthy, double-jointed and able to make an incomparable Bearnaise sauce. What went on in the often dark sexual world of Bond girls and Ian Fleming?
Ben Macintyre
It is a mark of James Bond's cultural reach that, for better or worse, a “Bond Girl” has attained a specific meaning in modern parlance, with either positive or negative connotations depending on your point of view (and, perhaps, your gender). A Bond Girl is beautiful, for sure, and sassy and sporty; she is also sexually available, and unlikely to make a fuss when she is killed off, either literally or metaphorically, at the end of the last instalment to make way for new love interest.
She tends to be good at one-liners, but less inclined to intellectual conversation. In the books, at least, Bond's women are often damaged, in need of male protection, and with some small physical flaw. Like Bond's cars, they are attractive commodities, subject to modifications and improvements, but they can also be exchanged for newer, faster models without much regret. The Bond Girl is a very specific postwar fantasy. Fleming had enjoyed an expansive sex life before the war, and the war had loosened sexual mores greatly. Here was a hero enjoying sex, not merely outside marriage, but effectively without responsibilities or guilt.
Bond is the first major British thriller hero to lead an active sex life. Bond's attitudes to women caused outrage, titillation and amusement in roughly equal parts: they made a generation of men and boys very overexcited, and a generation of feminists extremely angry. But even those critics prepared to see Bond's bed-hopping for the fantasy it was found something chilly and unpleasant in Bond's sexual licence and emotional reserve. In the films, Bond's sex life attained levels of priapism that would merit serious medical attention or industrial supplies of Viagra in a real human being. The Bond expert Henry Chancellor has calculated that Bond sleeps with just 14 women in 12 books, between 1953 and 1964, of whom only five disappear between one book and the next, compared with an astonishing 58 conquests in the first 20 Bond films.
Bond's approach to sex grew directly out of Fleming's own distinctive attitudes to women, which in turn were shaped by the times he lived in, the class he occupied and his own psychological and sexual preoccupations. Fleming might have been an easy lay, but he was not an easy man. He has sometimes, somewhat unfairly, been characterised as a philandering lounge lizard.
The truth is more complex. Fleming was certainly attracted to many women; they were attracted to him, and he knew it. His charm, wit, vulpine good looks, wealth, mysterious war record and slight air of melancholy were powerfully seductive. He had many love affairs, often with other people's wives, including those of close friends. Certainly, he was more versed in seduction than courtship. “The direct approach to sex has become the norm,” he told one interviewer. His own approach was direct to the point of bluntness. He would ask a woman, often on slender acquaintance or first meeting, to go to bed with him; if she declined, he would simply move on, unashamed, unresentful and unembarrassed. He was successful as often as not - odds which he seemed to find perfectly acceptable. Sex was a sort of sport: “He looked on women as a schoolboy does. They were remote, mysterious beings,” said one family friend. “You will never hope to understand them, but, if you're clever, you can occasionally shoot one down.”
Fleming was tremendously interested in sex. Indeed, he studied and pursued the subject, in theory and in practice, with the same avid interest he showed in gadgetry, rocketry, science and politics. He assembled an impressive personal collection of erotica, which he liked to show to visitors, particularly female ones. Flagellation, which amateur psychologists like to trace back to his beatings at school, held a particular fascination. A certain amount of jocular whipping and slippering appear to have formed part of his marriage, and there are several references to these practices in Bond. Agent 007 periodically threatens to spank various women, including, rather courageously, Miss Moneypenny. Not one of the women seems remotely surprised by the suggestion.
More unpleasantly, Bond's apparently insouciant attitude to rape has long provoked debate. In Casino Royale, we learn of Vesper Lynd that “the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape”. Worse yet, in The Spy Who Loved Me, the narrator Vivienne Michel opines: “All women love semi-rape...” Fleming, under a barrage of criticism, tried to argue that The Spy Who Loved Me was an attempt to show young people that Bond was not a good role model. My own view is that Fleming was not seriously defending rape, or even semi-rape, but trying to shock by reinforcing the idea of Bond's essential cruelty: if so, he shocked far more than he intended, and he still does, leaving a tang of toleration for sexual violence that is very far from sweet.
Yet there was, as so often, another side to this careless sexual conquistador. Fleming's longer-term relationships were not with the cocktail party poppets and sexual silhouettes of the novels, but with older, married women. He cultivated a roué air, but he also longed for emotional stability. His relationship with his eventual wife, Ann Rothermere (another wife of a friend, whom he married in 1952), was long, intense, complex and fierce, but also supportive and, at times, deeply loving. At one tempestuous juncture in their stormy marriage he wrote to Ann: “What we both want is more love and warmth but that is a fire we both need to blow on if it is to burn.” Bond could never have said that. It is entirely possible that for all his skirt-chasing, Fleming did not in the end like very many women, and understood even fewer. The novelist Rosamond Lehmann acutely observed: “The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he cannot get on with them.”
As a young man, Fleming hopped from woman to woman with few regrets, except perhaps one. Fleming met Muriel Wright while skiing in Kitzbühel in 1935. Aristocratic, sporty and fun-loving, “Mu” worshipped Fleming; in return, he was consistently and blithely unfaithful to her. Fleming's reputation was well known to Mu's horrified family, and her brother Fitzherbert even turned up at Fleming's home with a horse whip, intending to administer the traditional punishment for cads, only to find that the couple had vanished. When Mu was killed in an air raid in 1944, Fleming was traumatised and guilt-ridden. Muriel Wright was the original Bond girl, beautiful, simple, and doomed, and her sad fate runs throughout Fleming's fiction.
Bond would have married Vesper Lynd, in Casino Royale, but she kills herself. Ten books later, there are distinct elements of Muriel in the well-born, golden-haired Countess Teresa (Tracy) di Vicenzo, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Bond does marry Tracy, but soon afterwards she, too, perishes. Bond's distress over Tracy's corpse may be an echo of Fleming's anguish at Muriel's death so many years earlier.
A year before he had met Muriel, Fleming first laid eyes on Ann (née Charteris), the young wife of Shane, Baron O'Neill, and future wife of Esmond, Lord Rothermere, and the woman Fleming would finally marry in the same year he wrote his first Bond book. Ann was in many ways the opposite of Mu, being dark, highly intelligent, waspish, worldly, sophisticated, emotionally complicated and extraordinarily good company. Fleming's love affair with Ann started during the war; it continued after O'Neill's death and her marriage to Rothermere; and it lasted, tumultuously, until the end of his life. “We are, of course, totally unsuited,” Fleming predicted on the eve of marriage. “China will fly and there will be rage and tears.”
There were, indeed, ample tears and flying crockery. Ann could be wounding, referring to his writing as “pornography”; he, in turn, made no secret of his dislike for her literary friends. After two years of marriage, he was already complaining, only half in jest: “In the old days I demanded or perhaps pleaded for three things in a wife. She should have enough money to buy her own clothes, she should be able to make incomparable Béarnaise sauce, and she should be double-jointed. In the event I got none of these things.”
The rows grew furious, and the marriage colder. Fleming conducted a long affair with a neighbour in Jamaica, Blanche Blackwell; Ann did the same with Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party. She was jealous; he, characteristically, was not. When they were apart, they missed each other painfully. When they were together, they fought viciously and, as self-absorbed people often do, publicly.
Shades of Fleming's turbulent marriage are reflected in Bond's attitude to women. The “conventional parabola” of a Bond affair, described in Casino Royale, is a statement of unalloyed cynicism: “The meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the weekend by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.” Bond points out that if he got married, he would first need to divorce himself from M and the secret service. James Bond has no children, no siblings, and no parents. He is the empty vessel into which the reader decants his or her expectations. Women, Bond declares, are for recreation; he has no desire to tote the emotional baggage that comes from a serious relationship.
The qualities Bond admires are physical, practical and culinary: in Bond's eyes, the ideal woman should be able to make a Béarnaise sauce as well as they make love though not, presumably, at the same time. Character or intellect are purely secondary in Bond's estimation: “Gold hair. Grey eyes. A sinful mouth. Perfect figure. And of course she's got to be witty and poised and know how to dress and play cards...” Fleming was something of a connoisseur of women's fashion, and often describes the clothing of Bond's lovers in lavish detail. The wit is an interesting requirement, since the Bond of the books is never remotely witty: the jokes and one-liners are purely an invention of the films.
Some critics have got very hot under the collar at Bond's sexual activity: “Sex, Snobbery and Sadism”, screeched Paul Johnson in the New Statesman, blasting the “mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent”.
Bond girls are all, of course, intensely attractive, but each bears some small imperfection, a mark of vulnerability: Honeychile Rider has a broken nose; Domino Vitali has one slightly shorter leg. Their names usually offer the hint of availability, and were often drawn from people or things that Fleming knew: Honeychile was the nickname of Pat Wilder, an American former dancer in Bob Hope's troupe who married Prince Alex Hohenlohe, owner of an exclusive Alpine skiing resort; “Solitaire” (Simone Latrelle in Live and Let Die) is named after a Jamaican bird.
Bond is heterosexual from his brogues to his haircut (which cannot quite be said of Fleming, who had many gay friends and could on occasion be fantastically camp). 007 does not approve of homosexuals (“unhappy, sexual misfits”), or sexual equality, or even votes for women. His books, Fleming declared, were “written for warm-blooded heterosexuals”.
Outside the more Jurassic corners of London clubland, it would be hard, these days, to find anyone with the same views as James Bond. “Doesn't do to get mixed up with neurotic women in this business,” M tells Bond gravely in From Russia with Love: “They hang on to your gun-arm.” All of this adds up to a very potent postwar daydream for a particular sort of old-fashioned gent. Having played a vital role in the war, women were asserting themselves in the home and the workplace; they were even becoming secret agents, and had been effective as such during the war, being rather better in that line of work than men. Male dominance was under threat wherever you looked, but not in Bond's world. Bond offered a reassuring fantasy, old-fashioned in tone but modern in sexual liberty: men were still the world's heroes, modern Saint Georges, who could slay the dragon and then fall into the arms of an adoring, beautiful, slightly weak woman, who would love him unquestioningly, and then whip up a terrific Béarnaise sauce.
For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond by Ben Macintyre is published by Bloomsbury to coincide with an exhibition of of the same name at the Imperial War Museum from April 17 to March 1, 2009.
Available from BooksFirst at £18 (RRP £20), free p&p.
April 7, 2008
The spy who loved it
The creator of James Bond liked his women wealthy, double-jointed and able to make an incomparable Bearnaise sauce. What went on in the often dark sexual world of Bond girls and Ian Fleming?
Ben Macintyre
It is a mark of James Bond's cultural reach that, for better or worse, a “Bond Girl” has attained a specific meaning in modern parlance, with either positive or negative connotations depending on your point of view (and, perhaps, your gender). A Bond Girl is beautiful, for sure, and sassy and sporty; she is also sexually available, and unlikely to make a fuss when she is killed off, either literally or metaphorically, at the end of the last instalment to make way for new love interest.
She tends to be good at one-liners, but less inclined to intellectual conversation. In the books, at least, Bond's women are often damaged, in need of male protection, and with some small physical flaw. Like Bond's cars, they are attractive commodities, subject to modifications and improvements, but they can also be exchanged for newer, faster models without much regret. The Bond Girl is a very specific postwar fantasy. Fleming had enjoyed an expansive sex life before the war, and the war had loosened sexual mores greatly. Here was a hero enjoying sex, not merely outside marriage, but effectively without responsibilities or guilt.
Bond is the first major British thriller hero to lead an active sex life. Bond's attitudes to women caused outrage, titillation and amusement in roughly equal parts: they made a generation of men and boys very overexcited, and a generation of feminists extremely angry. But even those critics prepared to see Bond's bed-hopping for the fantasy it was found something chilly and unpleasant in Bond's sexual licence and emotional reserve. In the films, Bond's sex life attained levels of priapism that would merit serious medical attention or industrial supplies of Viagra in a real human being. The Bond expert Henry Chancellor has calculated that Bond sleeps with just 14 women in 12 books, between 1953 and 1964, of whom only five disappear between one book and the next, compared with an astonishing 58 conquests in the first 20 Bond films.
Bond's approach to sex grew directly out of Fleming's own distinctive attitudes to women, which in turn were shaped by the times he lived in, the class he occupied and his own psychological and sexual preoccupations. Fleming might have been an easy lay, but he was not an easy man. He has sometimes, somewhat unfairly, been characterised as a philandering lounge lizard.
The truth is more complex. Fleming was certainly attracted to many women; they were attracted to him, and he knew it. His charm, wit, vulpine good looks, wealth, mysterious war record and slight air of melancholy were powerfully seductive. He had many love affairs, often with other people's wives, including those of close friends. Certainly, he was more versed in seduction than courtship. “The direct approach to sex has become the norm,” he told one interviewer. His own approach was direct to the point of bluntness. He would ask a woman, often on slender acquaintance or first meeting, to go to bed with him; if she declined, he would simply move on, unashamed, unresentful and unembarrassed. He was successful as often as not - odds which he seemed to find perfectly acceptable. Sex was a sort of sport: “He looked on women as a schoolboy does. They were remote, mysterious beings,” said one family friend. “You will never hope to understand them, but, if you're clever, you can occasionally shoot one down.”
Fleming was tremendously interested in sex. Indeed, he studied and pursued the subject, in theory and in practice, with the same avid interest he showed in gadgetry, rocketry, science and politics. He assembled an impressive personal collection of erotica, which he liked to show to visitors, particularly female ones. Flagellation, which amateur psychologists like to trace back to his beatings at school, held a particular fascination. A certain amount of jocular whipping and slippering appear to have formed part of his marriage, and there are several references to these practices in Bond. Agent 007 periodically threatens to spank various women, including, rather courageously, Miss Moneypenny. Not one of the women seems remotely surprised by the suggestion.
More unpleasantly, Bond's apparently insouciant attitude to rape has long provoked debate. In Casino Royale, we learn of Vesper Lynd that “the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape”. Worse yet, in The Spy Who Loved Me, the narrator Vivienne Michel opines: “All women love semi-rape...” Fleming, under a barrage of criticism, tried to argue that The Spy Who Loved Me was an attempt to show young people that Bond was not a good role model. My own view is that Fleming was not seriously defending rape, or even semi-rape, but trying to shock by reinforcing the idea of Bond's essential cruelty: if so, he shocked far more than he intended, and he still does, leaving a tang of toleration for sexual violence that is very far from sweet.
Yet there was, as so often, another side to this careless sexual conquistador. Fleming's longer-term relationships were not with the cocktail party poppets and sexual silhouettes of the novels, but with older, married women. He cultivated a roué air, but he also longed for emotional stability. His relationship with his eventual wife, Ann Rothermere (another wife of a friend, whom he married in 1952), was long, intense, complex and fierce, but also supportive and, at times, deeply loving. At one tempestuous juncture in their stormy marriage he wrote to Ann: “What we both want is more love and warmth but that is a fire we both need to blow on if it is to burn.” Bond could never have said that. It is entirely possible that for all his skirt-chasing, Fleming did not in the end like very many women, and understood even fewer. The novelist Rosamond Lehmann acutely observed: “The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he cannot get on with them.”
As a young man, Fleming hopped from woman to woman with few regrets, except perhaps one. Fleming met Muriel Wright while skiing in Kitzbühel in 1935. Aristocratic, sporty and fun-loving, “Mu” worshipped Fleming; in return, he was consistently and blithely unfaithful to her. Fleming's reputation was well known to Mu's horrified family, and her brother Fitzherbert even turned up at Fleming's home with a horse whip, intending to administer the traditional punishment for cads, only to find that the couple had vanished. When Mu was killed in an air raid in 1944, Fleming was traumatised and guilt-ridden. Muriel Wright was the original Bond girl, beautiful, simple, and doomed, and her sad fate runs throughout Fleming's fiction.
Bond would have married Vesper Lynd, in Casino Royale, but she kills herself. Ten books later, there are distinct elements of Muriel in the well-born, golden-haired Countess Teresa (Tracy) di Vicenzo, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Bond does marry Tracy, but soon afterwards she, too, perishes. Bond's distress over Tracy's corpse may be an echo of Fleming's anguish at Muriel's death so many years earlier.
A year before he had met Muriel, Fleming first laid eyes on Ann (née Charteris), the young wife of Shane, Baron O'Neill, and future wife of Esmond, Lord Rothermere, and the woman Fleming would finally marry in the same year he wrote his first Bond book. Ann was in many ways the opposite of Mu, being dark, highly intelligent, waspish, worldly, sophisticated, emotionally complicated and extraordinarily good company. Fleming's love affair with Ann started during the war; it continued after O'Neill's death and her marriage to Rothermere; and it lasted, tumultuously, until the end of his life. “We are, of course, totally unsuited,” Fleming predicted on the eve of marriage. “China will fly and there will be rage and tears.”
There were, indeed, ample tears and flying crockery. Ann could be wounding, referring to his writing as “pornography”; he, in turn, made no secret of his dislike for her literary friends. After two years of marriage, he was already complaining, only half in jest: “In the old days I demanded or perhaps pleaded for three things in a wife. She should have enough money to buy her own clothes, she should be able to make incomparable Béarnaise sauce, and she should be double-jointed. In the event I got none of these things.”
The rows grew furious, and the marriage colder. Fleming conducted a long affair with a neighbour in Jamaica, Blanche Blackwell; Ann did the same with Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party. She was jealous; he, characteristically, was not. When they were apart, they missed each other painfully. When they were together, they fought viciously and, as self-absorbed people often do, publicly.
Shades of Fleming's turbulent marriage are reflected in Bond's attitude to women. The “conventional parabola” of a Bond affair, described in Casino Royale, is a statement of unalloyed cynicism: “The meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the weekend by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.” Bond points out that if he got married, he would first need to divorce himself from M and the secret service. James Bond has no children, no siblings, and no parents. He is the empty vessel into which the reader decants his or her expectations. Women, Bond declares, are for recreation; he has no desire to tote the emotional baggage that comes from a serious relationship.
The qualities Bond admires are physical, practical and culinary: in Bond's eyes, the ideal woman should be able to make a Béarnaise sauce as well as they make love though not, presumably, at the same time. Character or intellect are purely secondary in Bond's estimation: “Gold hair. Grey eyes. A sinful mouth. Perfect figure. And of course she's got to be witty and poised and know how to dress and play cards...” Fleming was something of a connoisseur of women's fashion, and often describes the clothing of Bond's lovers in lavish detail. The wit is an interesting requirement, since the Bond of the books is never remotely witty: the jokes and one-liners are purely an invention of the films.
Some critics have got very hot under the collar at Bond's sexual activity: “Sex, Snobbery and Sadism”, screeched Paul Johnson in the New Statesman, blasting the “mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent”.
Bond girls are all, of course, intensely attractive, but each bears some small imperfection, a mark of vulnerability: Honeychile Rider has a broken nose; Domino Vitali has one slightly shorter leg. Their names usually offer the hint of availability, and were often drawn from people or things that Fleming knew: Honeychile was the nickname of Pat Wilder, an American former dancer in Bob Hope's troupe who married Prince Alex Hohenlohe, owner of an exclusive Alpine skiing resort; “Solitaire” (Simone Latrelle in Live and Let Die) is named after a Jamaican bird.
Bond is heterosexual from his brogues to his haircut (which cannot quite be said of Fleming, who had many gay friends and could on occasion be fantastically camp). 007 does not approve of homosexuals (“unhappy, sexual misfits”), or sexual equality, or even votes for women. His books, Fleming declared, were “written for warm-blooded heterosexuals”.
Outside the more Jurassic corners of London clubland, it would be hard, these days, to find anyone with the same views as James Bond. “Doesn't do to get mixed up with neurotic women in this business,” M tells Bond gravely in From Russia with Love: “They hang on to your gun-arm.” All of this adds up to a very potent postwar daydream for a particular sort of old-fashioned gent. Having played a vital role in the war, women were asserting themselves in the home and the workplace; they were even becoming secret agents, and had been effective as such during the war, being rather better in that line of work than men. Male dominance was under threat wherever you looked, but not in Bond's world. Bond offered a reassuring fantasy, old-fashioned in tone but modern in sexual liberty: men were still the world's heroes, modern Saint Georges, who could slay the dragon and then fall into the arms of an adoring, beautiful, slightly weak woman, who would love him unquestioningly, and then whip up a terrific Béarnaise sauce.
For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond by Ben Macintyre is published by Bloomsbury to coincide with an exhibition of of the same name at the Imperial War Museum from April 17 to March 1, 2009.
Available from BooksFirst at £18 (RRP £20), free p&p.
Was Ian Fleming the real 007?
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/specials/for_your_eyes_only/article3652410.ece
April 5, 2008
Was Ian Fleming the real 007?
The war heroes, spymasters and beautiful women who inspired Ian Fleming to create James Bond
Ben Macintyre
One morning in February 1952, in a holiday hideaway on the island of Jamaica, a middle-aged British journalist sat down at his desk and set about inventing a fictional secret agent, a character that would go on to become one of the most successful, enduring and lucrative creations in literature. Ian Fleming had never written a novel before. He had tried his hand at banking, stockbroking and working as a newspaper correspondent. Only during the war, as an officer in naval intelligence, had he found a task – dreaming up schemes to bamboozle the enemy – worthy of his vivid imagination. By 1952, he had settled into a job as a writer and manager on The Sunday Times, a role that involved some enjoyable travel, a little work and a lot of golf, women and lunch. Even his best friends would have snorted at the notion that Ian Fleming was destined for immortality.
This, then, was the man who, after a morning swim to sluice out the hangover of the night before, hunched over the desk in his Jamaican home, “Goldeneye”, and began to type, using six fingers, on his elderly Royal portable typewriter. The opening line would read: “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning?” Fleming wrote fast, the words pouring out at the rate of 2,000 a day. A month after he had started writing, he tapped out the words “the bitch is dead now.” Casino Royale was complete, and James Bond was born.
All novelists find inspiration in reality, but Ian Fleming, more than most, firmly anchored the imagined world of James Bond to the people, things and places he knew. The characters, plots, places, machines and situations in the James Bond stories are so firmly embedded in fact that it is often hard to spot where the real world of Ian Fleming ends and the fictional world of James Bond begins. Espionage is itself a shadowy trade between truth and untruth, a complex interweaving of imagination, deception and reality. As a former intelligence officer, Fleming thought like a spy, and wrote like one.
Like the character he had created, Ian Fleming was a great deal more complex than he seemed on first acquaintance. Beneath the sybaritic exterior, he was a driven man, intensely observant, with an internal sense of romance and drama that belied his public languor and occasional cynicism. Bond is, in part, Fleming, and the exploits of 007 grew directly out of Fleming’s knowledge of wartime intelligence and espionage: he would teasingly refer to the Bond books as “autobiography”. Like every good journalist, Fleming was a magpie, collecting material avidly and continuously: names, places, plots, gadgets, faces, restaurant menus and phrases; details from reality that would then be translated into fiction. He once remarked, “Everything I write has a precedent in truth.”
But Bond is also, in part, what Fleming was not. He was the fantasy of what Fleming would like to have been – indeed, what every Englishman raised on Bulldog Drummond and wartime derring-do would like to have been. Bond is a grown-up romantic fairytale, a promise that Britain, having triumphed in the World War, was still a force to be reckoned with in the dull chill of the Cold War. In the grim austerity of postwar Britain, here was a man dining on champagne and caviar, enjoying guiltless sex, glamorous foreign travel and an apparently unlimited expense account.
Thirteen more Bond books would follow Casino Royale. By the time of his death, just 12 years later, Ian Fleming had sold more than 40 million copies, and given birth to a multibillion-dollar film industry. Today, more than half the world’s population has seen at least one Bond film. Even at the height of his fame, Fleming maintained an airy attitude toward his books. “I extracted them from my wartime memories,” he remarked, “dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.” This nonchalance was the purest bluff, something that Fleming, as a lifelong card-player and intelligence expert, was very good at. The idea for Bond had been gestating in his mind, and his personality, for at least a decade. Back in 1944, Fleming had told a friend in deep earnestness, “I am going to write the spy story to end all spy stories.”
And that is exactly what he did.
Who was James Bond? Every acquaintance of Ian Fleming ran the risk of ending up in one of his Bond books, and almost every character in his fiction is based on a real person, even if only by name. He plucked these monikers from his social circle, his memory, his reading, his favourite newspaper, the Jamaica Gleaner, and his imagination: old school friends (and enemies), clubmen, colleagues in the City and Fleet Street, golfing partners, girlfriends and others found themselves transported into Fleming’s fiction. There are several theories as to the origin of the name James Bond. The most popular (and one that he publicly affirmed) is that Fleming, sitting down to work at his desk in Goldeneye, simply lifted the name from his bookshelves, his eye having alighted upon Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, the standard reference book.
People were named after things, and things were named after people. His lover in later life, Blanche Blackwell, gave him a small boat named Octopussy, which became the name of a man-eating pet octopus in the short story. In rather ungallant return, Fleming named the ancient guano tanker in Dr No the Blanche. The crime boss Marc-Ange Draco in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is named after El Draco, the Spanish name for Sir Francis Drake – a reference picked up years later by J. K. Rowling for her Hogwarts antihero, Draco Malfoy. Rosa Klebb (the Russian for bread) was partly based on Colonel Rybkin of Soviet intelligence. Major Boothroyd, the secret service armourer, is named in honour of Geoffrey Boothroyd, the gun expert who provided Fleming with invaluable technical advice.
Like most fictional characters, James Bond is not one individual. “He was a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war,” Fleming once declared. Chief among the contenders is, of course, Fleming himself. The physical descriptions of 007 recall his creator, with his “longish nose” and slightly “cruel mouth”. Fleming sometimes played up the autobiographical aspects of Bond, and sometimes downplayed them. “I couldn’t possibly be James Bond,” he told a friend. “He’s got more guts than I have. He’s also considerably more handsome.” Peter Fleming, Ian’s hero-worshipped elder brother, may have come a little closer to that model, being good-looking, cultured, tough and, most importantly, a secret agent, having been drafted into the world of military intelligence and irregular warfare early in the war.
Behind the Flemings follows a parade of swashbuckling types, each with a claim to a little of the Bond myth: Conrad O’Brien-Ffrench, a spy Fleming had first met on the Austrian ski slopes in the Thirties when the older man was gathering information on German troop deployments as part of an amateur spy network made up of journalists and businessmen. Another strong candidate is Patrick Dalzel-Job, who served in the intelligence commando unit Fleming helped to establish in the latter part of the War. Dalzel-Job was a superb marksman who could ski backwards, parachute behind enemy lines and pilot a miniature submarine. On assignment, he wore an airman’s jacket with a compass hidden inside one of the buttons, and smoked a pipe with a hidden map-chamber. Serving in Norway in 1940, Dalzel-Job revealed a Bond-like streak of rebellion when he disobeyed a direct order and insisted on evacuating 5,000 Norwegian civilians from the town of Narvik who were facing imminent Nazi retaliation. By the time Fleming met him in 1944, Dalzel-Job had won a reputation for bravery just this side of lunacy. Throughout his long life, Dalzel-Job was credited with being the model for James Bond. He never denied the association, but disarmingly pointed out: “I have never read a Bond book or seen a Bond movie. They are not my style? And I only ever loved one woman, and I’m not a drinking man.” Other contenders include Michael Mason, a fur-trapper and successful boxer who operated as an agent in Romania during the war. Also Wilfred “Biffy” Dunderdale, the station chief of SIS (MI6) in Paris, whom Fleming met in 1940. A regular at Maxim’s on the Rue Royale, exquisite in Cartier cufflinks and handmade suit, driving an armour-plated Rolls-Royce through Paris, Dunderdale had much of Bond’s style.
The real “M” may be easier to identify. The fictional Admiral Sir Miles Messervy KCMG is based, in large part, on Admiral John Godfrey, Fleming’s boss at the Naval Intelligence Department. M is grumpy, rude and every inch the naval martinet, with “damnably clear” bright blue eyes; his underlings are terrified and loyal in equal parts. All these traits were apparent in Godfrey. Fleming described him as a “real war-winner”. The admiral would eventually ask Fleming to write his biography (Fleming declined), yet it seems the inspiration for M was not entirely pleased to be immortalised as the boss of a cold-blooded killer. “He turned me into that unsavoury character, M,” Godfrey complained after Fleming’s death.
The original M may, in fact, have been Z. “Colonel Z”, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Claude Dansey, was Deputy Chief of SIS and head of the shadowy Z network. The bespectacled Dansey was witty, spiteful, charming and slightly mad. He was first recruited as a spy during the Boer War, and ended up a pivotal figure in the British secret service. Two famous men who worked in wartime intelligence gave very different assessments of Colonel Z: Malcolm Muggeridge called Dansey “the only professional in MI6”; the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, however, considered him “an utter shit, corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunning”.
Another contender as the original M was the strange MI5 spymaster Maxwell Knight, who ran a subsection of the security service responsible for rooting out potential subversives in Britain. Knight was one of the first to warn that the secret services were being infiltrated by communist moles. He was a man of many parts, most of them odd and quite incompatible: in addition to running a huge spy ring, he was a novelist, a jazz saxophonist who had been taught by Sidney Bechet, and an occultist who befriended and recruited the bizarre black magician Aleister Crowley. He was also an obsessive naturalist who kept snakes in the bath and wrote such definitive works as How to Keep a Gorilla. Maxwell Knight signed all his memos “M”, and was certainly well known to Fleming. After the war, Knight would move effortlessly from a career in spying to a new career as a naturalist, ending his life as “Uncle Max”, a much-loved BBC presenter of nature programmes for children.
There is one final intriguing hypothesis, advanced by John Pearson, Fleming’s first biographer, to the effect that M might conceivably be modelled on Fleming’s mother. Certainly, “M” was Fleming’s nickname for his mother from early childhood. She, like M, was by turns strict and indulgent, loved and feared.
The principal model for the much-loved Moneypenny character appears to have been a Miss Kathleen Pettigrew, who was the personal assistant to Stewart Menzies, director general of MI6, or “C”. In the first draft of Casino Royale, M’s secretary was “Miss Pettavel” or “Petty”, but Fleming clearly realised that was too close to reality, and changed it. Miss Pettigrew was something of a legend in espionage circles: anyone attempting to gain access to C had first to pass through his terrifying secretary, who was brisk, efficient and not remotely seductive. One former colleague described her as a “formidable, grey-haired lady with the square jaw of the battleship type”.
Vera Atkins, executive officer with “F” (French) Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the espionage and sabotage organisation organised by Churchill to “set Europe ablaze”, was described in her New York Times obituary in 2000 as “widely believed to have inspired the character of Miss Moneypenny”. Another strong possibility is Victoire “Paddy” Bennett, who worked as a secretary in Room 39 and knew Fleming well. Paddy Bennett once described her former colleague, somewhat tartly, as “definitely James Bond, in his mind”. She went on to marry Sir Julian Ridsdale, the long-serving MP for Harwich, and was made a Dame of the British Empire for her work with the Parliamentary Wives Club – a role that has a distinctly Moneypennyish ring to it.
Fleming’s villains, like his heroes, are patchworks of different people, names and traits. Le Chiffre, the Benzedrine-sniffing villain of Casino Royale, is believed to be based on Aleister Crowley, who gained notoriety in inter-war Britain as “the Wickedest Man in the World”. Crowley was a bisexual, sado-masochistic drug addict. A master of Thelemic mysticism (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”), he specialised in mountaineering, interpreting the Ouija board, orgies and thrashing his lovers. The press simultaneously adored and hated him. Crowley made Le Chiffre seem positively sane.
Fleming plundered his school register ruthlessly in the quest for names. Hugo Drax, the villain in Moonraker, was named after the magnificently festooned Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, an old friend of Fleming’s. Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the super-villain without earlobes, was probably named after another Old Etonian, Tom Blofeld, whose son Henry Blofeld is the much-loved BBC cricket commentator. Francisco “Pistols” Scaramanga, the triple-nippled gunman in The Man with the Golden Gun, was named after yet another school contemporary, George Scaramanga.
Some people objected to seeing their names in a Bond novel, most notably Ernö Goldfinger, the distinguished modernist architect. Fleming is said to have disapproved of Goldfinger’s love of concrete and the destruction of Victorian houses to make way for tower blocks, and so used his name for one of his most memorable evil-doers:
Auric Goldfinger, the gold-obsessed treasurer of Smersh. When Ernö obtained a proof copy of Goldfinger, he was enraged: Ernö was a visionary 6ft architect and Auric is a murderous 5ft megalomaniac. There is also a whiff of anti-Semitism in Fleming’s depiction of a Jewish billionaire with a gold fixation. The real Goldfinger threatened to halt publication. Equally angry, Fleming thought his publisher should insert an erratum slip, changing Goldfinger to “Goldprick” throughout the book. Fleming’s publishers eventually agreed that, in advertising the book, the name Goldfinger would be coupled with the name Auric wherever possible. Even so, for the rest of his life Ernö Goldfinger was plagued by people calling him on the telephone and saying, in the voice of Sean Connery, “Goldfinger? This is 007.”
Bond’s women were echoes of Fleming’s women, and perhaps one woman above all. Muriel Wright was 26 and a fresh-faced English rose when Fleming met her in 1935. “Mu”, as he called her, was an expert rider, skied beautifully and was one of Britain’s foremost polo players. She came from the finest landed British bloodstock. With an explosion of blonde hair that earned her the nickname “Honeytop”, she was also exceptionally beautiful and refreshingly unconventional. She was rich enough not to have to work, but nonetheless made a good deal of money modelling sportswear and, almost scandalously, swimsuits on the beach at Monte Carlo. Muriel loved horses, dogs, parties, gossip and fun; but most of all she loved Ian Fleming, to the point of self-abasement. She would caddy for him on the golf links, and rush to collect his custom-made cigarettes when he ran out. One of his friends called her Fleming’s “slave”.
Fleming enjoyed showing Mu off to his friends, and annoying his family by introducing this slightly scatty beauty into weekend house parties. But he undoubtedly treated her very badly. Fleming was consistently unfaithful, and, unlike some of his lovers, she minded. It is said that her lack of intellect stood in the way of his commitment, but then there is no evidence Fleming considered brains to be an attractive quality in a woman, and quite a lot to suggest otherwise.
Then suddenly, like some character in a Bond movie, she was dead. On March 14, 1944, Muriel Wright returned to her flat in Eaton Mews (having just delivered Fleming his weekly package of cigarettes) and went to bed. That night, there was an air raid: a chunk of masonry hurtled through her window, striking Mu in the temple and killing her at once. Fleming was called from the card table to identify the body. He was distraught, and wracked with remorse at the way he had treated her. Mu, he reflected sadly, had been “too good to be true”.
The quality of being “too good to be true” is, of course, what distinguishes the Bond Girls. Muriel Wright has a claim to be the fons et origo of the species: pliant and undemanding, beautiful but innocent, outdoorsy, physically tough, implicitly vulnerable and uncomplaining, and then tragically dead, before or soon after marriage.
Fleming’s plots, like his characters, are rooted in reality, emerging in many instances directly from the Second World War and the Cold War. Fleming was quick to point out that the reality of the espionage game was stranger than any fiction he could invent: “My plots are fantastic, while often being based on truth. They go wildly beyond the probable, but not, I think, beyond the possible.”
The most pleasing irony is that MI6 itself is happy to blur the question of where James Bond ends and real life begins. The official MI6 website cannot bring itself to deny its greatest asset, pointing out that recruits will enjoy “a stimulating and rewarding career which, like Bond’s, will be in the service of their country”. James Bond is an MI6 recruiter. A real spy agency, harnessing fiction, based on fact, to recruit real spies: no one would have been more flattered than Ian Fleming.
For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond by Ben Macintyre is published by Bloomsbury on April 7 to coincide with an exhibition of the same name at the Imperial War Museum from April 17 to March 1, 2009, and is available from BooksFirst priced £18 (RRP £20), free p&p on 0870 1608080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
April 5, 2008
Was Ian Fleming the real 007?
The war heroes, spymasters and beautiful women who inspired Ian Fleming to create James Bond
Ben Macintyre
One morning in February 1952, in a holiday hideaway on the island of Jamaica, a middle-aged British journalist sat down at his desk and set about inventing a fictional secret agent, a character that would go on to become one of the most successful, enduring and lucrative creations in literature. Ian Fleming had never written a novel before. He had tried his hand at banking, stockbroking and working as a newspaper correspondent. Only during the war, as an officer in naval intelligence, had he found a task – dreaming up schemes to bamboozle the enemy – worthy of his vivid imagination. By 1952, he had settled into a job as a writer and manager on The Sunday Times, a role that involved some enjoyable travel, a little work and a lot of golf, women and lunch. Even his best friends would have snorted at the notion that Ian Fleming was destined for immortality.
This, then, was the man who, after a morning swim to sluice out the hangover of the night before, hunched over the desk in his Jamaican home, “Goldeneye”, and began to type, using six fingers, on his elderly Royal portable typewriter. The opening line would read: “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning?” Fleming wrote fast, the words pouring out at the rate of 2,000 a day. A month after he had started writing, he tapped out the words “the bitch is dead now.” Casino Royale was complete, and James Bond was born.
All novelists find inspiration in reality, but Ian Fleming, more than most, firmly anchored the imagined world of James Bond to the people, things and places he knew. The characters, plots, places, machines and situations in the James Bond stories are so firmly embedded in fact that it is often hard to spot where the real world of Ian Fleming ends and the fictional world of James Bond begins. Espionage is itself a shadowy trade between truth and untruth, a complex interweaving of imagination, deception and reality. As a former intelligence officer, Fleming thought like a spy, and wrote like one.
Like the character he had created, Ian Fleming was a great deal more complex than he seemed on first acquaintance. Beneath the sybaritic exterior, he was a driven man, intensely observant, with an internal sense of romance and drama that belied his public languor and occasional cynicism. Bond is, in part, Fleming, and the exploits of 007 grew directly out of Fleming’s knowledge of wartime intelligence and espionage: he would teasingly refer to the Bond books as “autobiography”. Like every good journalist, Fleming was a magpie, collecting material avidly and continuously: names, places, plots, gadgets, faces, restaurant menus and phrases; details from reality that would then be translated into fiction. He once remarked, “Everything I write has a precedent in truth.”
But Bond is also, in part, what Fleming was not. He was the fantasy of what Fleming would like to have been – indeed, what every Englishman raised on Bulldog Drummond and wartime derring-do would like to have been. Bond is a grown-up romantic fairytale, a promise that Britain, having triumphed in the World War, was still a force to be reckoned with in the dull chill of the Cold War. In the grim austerity of postwar Britain, here was a man dining on champagne and caviar, enjoying guiltless sex, glamorous foreign travel and an apparently unlimited expense account.
Thirteen more Bond books would follow Casino Royale. By the time of his death, just 12 years later, Ian Fleming had sold more than 40 million copies, and given birth to a multibillion-dollar film industry. Today, more than half the world’s population has seen at least one Bond film. Even at the height of his fame, Fleming maintained an airy attitude toward his books. “I extracted them from my wartime memories,” he remarked, “dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.” This nonchalance was the purest bluff, something that Fleming, as a lifelong card-player and intelligence expert, was very good at. The idea for Bond had been gestating in his mind, and his personality, for at least a decade. Back in 1944, Fleming had told a friend in deep earnestness, “I am going to write the spy story to end all spy stories.”
And that is exactly what he did.
Who was James Bond? Every acquaintance of Ian Fleming ran the risk of ending up in one of his Bond books, and almost every character in his fiction is based on a real person, even if only by name. He plucked these monikers from his social circle, his memory, his reading, his favourite newspaper, the Jamaica Gleaner, and his imagination: old school friends (and enemies), clubmen, colleagues in the City and Fleet Street, golfing partners, girlfriends and others found themselves transported into Fleming’s fiction. There are several theories as to the origin of the name James Bond. The most popular (and one that he publicly affirmed) is that Fleming, sitting down to work at his desk in Goldeneye, simply lifted the name from his bookshelves, his eye having alighted upon Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, the standard reference book.
People were named after things, and things were named after people. His lover in later life, Blanche Blackwell, gave him a small boat named Octopussy, which became the name of a man-eating pet octopus in the short story. In rather ungallant return, Fleming named the ancient guano tanker in Dr No the Blanche. The crime boss Marc-Ange Draco in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is named after El Draco, the Spanish name for Sir Francis Drake – a reference picked up years later by J. K. Rowling for her Hogwarts antihero, Draco Malfoy. Rosa Klebb (the Russian for bread) was partly based on Colonel Rybkin of Soviet intelligence. Major Boothroyd, the secret service armourer, is named in honour of Geoffrey Boothroyd, the gun expert who provided Fleming with invaluable technical advice.
Like most fictional characters, James Bond is not one individual. “He was a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war,” Fleming once declared. Chief among the contenders is, of course, Fleming himself. The physical descriptions of 007 recall his creator, with his “longish nose” and slightly “cruel mouth”. Fleming sometimes played up the autobiographical aspects of Bond, and sometimes downplayed them. “I couldn’t possibly be James Bond,” he told a friend. “He’s got more guts than I have. He’s also considerably more handsome.” Peter Fleming, Ian’s hero-worshipped elder brother, may have come a little closer to that model, being good-looking, cultured, tough and, most importantly, a secret agent, having been drafted into the world of military intelligence and irregular warfare early in the war.
Behind the Flemings follows a parade of swashbuckling types, each with a claim to a little of the Bond myth: Conrad O’Brien-Ffrench, a spy Fleming had first met on the Austrian ski slopes in the Thirties when the older man was gathering information on German troop deployments as part of an amateur spy network made up of journalists and businessmen. Another strong candidate is Patrick Dalzel-Job, who served in the intelligence commando unit Fleming helped to establish in the latter part of the War. Dalzel-Job was a superb marksman who could ski backwards, parachute behind enemy lines and pilot a miniature submarine. On assignment, he wore an airman’s jacket with a compass hidden inside one of the buttons, and smoked a pipe with a hidden map-chamber. Serving in Norway in 1940, Dalzel-Job revealed a Bond-like streak of rebellion when he disobeyed a direct order and insisted on evacuating 5,000 Norwegian civilians from the town of Narvik who were facing imminent Nazi retaliation. By the time Fleming met him in 1944, Dalzel-Job had won a reputation for bravery just this side of lunacy. Throughout his long life, Dalzel-Job was credited with being the model for James Bond. He never denied the association, but disarmingly pointed out: “I have never read a Bond book or seen a Bond movie. They are not my style? And I only ever loved one woman, and I’m not a drinking man.” Other contenders include Michael Mason, a fur-trapper and successful boxer who operated as an agent in Romania during the war. Also Wilfred “Biffy” Dunderdale, the station chief of SIS (MI6) in Paris, whom Fleming met in 1940. A regular at Maxim’s on the Rue Royale, exquisite in Cartier cufflinks and handmade suit, driving an armour-plated Rolls-Royce through Paris, Dunderdale had much of Bond’s style.
The real “M” may be easier to identify. The fictional Admiral Sir Miles Messervy KCMG is based, in large part, on Admiral John Godfrey, Fleming’s boss at the Naval Intelligence Department. M is grumpy, rude and every inch the naval martinet, with “damnably clear” bright blue eyes; his underlings are terrified and loyal in equal parts. All these traits were apparent in Godfrey. Fleming described him as a “real war-winner”. The admiral would eventually ask Fleming to write his biography (Fleming declined), yet it seems the inspiration for M was not entirely pleased to be immortalised as the boss of a cold-blooded killer. “He turned me into that unsavoury character, M,” Godfrey complained after Fleming’s death.
The original M may, in fact, have been Z. “Colonel Z”, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Claude Dansey, was Deputy Chief of SIS and head of the shadowy Z network. The bespectacled Dansey was witty, spiteful, charming and slightly mad. He was first recruited as a spy during the Boer War, and ended up a pivotal figure in the British secret service. Two famous men who worked in wartime intelligence gave very different assessments of Colonel Z: Malcolm Muggeridge called Dansey “the only professional in MI6”; the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, however, considered him “an utter shit, corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunning”.
Another contender as the original M was the strange MI5 spymaster Maxwell Knight, who ran a subsection of the security service responsible for rooting out potential subversives in Britain. Knight was one of the first to warn that the secret services were being infiltrated by communist moles. He was a man of many parts, most of them odd and quite incompatible: in addition to running a huge spy ring, he was a novelist, a jazz saxophonist who had been taught by Sidney Bechet, and an occultist who befriended and recruited the bizarre black magician Aleister Crowley. He was also an obsessive naturalist who kept snakes in the bath and wrote such definitive works as How to Keep a Gorilla. Maxwell Knight signed all his memos “M”, and was certainly well known to Fleming. After the war, Knight would move effortlessly from a career in spying to a new career as a naturalist, ending his life as “Uncle Max”, a much-loved BBC presenter of nature programmes for children.
There is one final intriguing hypothesis, advanced by John Pearson, Fleming’s first biographer, to the effect that M might conceivably be modelled on Fleming’s mother. Certainly, “M” was Fleming’s nickname for his mother from early childhood. She, like M, was by turns strict and indulgent, loved and feared.
The principal model for the much-loved Moneypenny character appears to have been a Miss Kathleen Pettigrew, who was the personal assistant to Stewart Menzies, director general of MI6, or “C”. In the first draft of Casino Royale, M’s secretary was “Miss Pettavel” or “Petty”, but Fleming clearly realised that was too close to reality, and changed it. Miss Pettigrew was something of a legend in espionage circles: anyone attempting to gain access to C had first to pass through his terrifying secretary, who was brisk, efficient and not remotely seductive. One former colleague described her as a “formidable, grey-haired lady with the square jaw of the battleship type”.
Vera Atkins, executive officer with “F” (French) Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the espionage and sabotage organisation organised by Churchill to “set Europe ablaze”, was described in her New York Times obituary in 2000 as “widely believed to have inspired the character of Miss Moneypenny”. Another strong possibility is Victoire “Paddy” Bennett, who worked as a secretary in Room 39 and knew Fleming well. Paddy Bennett once described her former colleague, somewhat tartly, as “definitely James Bond, in his mind”. She went on to marry Sir Julian Ridsdale, the long-serving MP for Harwich, and was made a Dame of the British Empire for her work with the Parliamentary Wives Club – a role that has a distinctly Moneypennyish ring to it.
Fleming’s villains, like his heroes, are patchworks of different people, names and traits. Le Chiffre, the Benzedrine-sniffing villain of Casino Royale, is believed to be based on Aleister Crowley, who gained notoriety in inter-war Britain as “the Wickedest Man in the World”. Crowley was a bisexual, sado-masochistic drug addict. A master of Thelemic mysticism (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”), he specialised in mountaineering, interpreting the Ouija board, orgies and thrashing his lovers. The press simultaneously adored and hated him. Crowley made Le Chiffre seem positively sane.
Fleming plundered his school register ruthlessly in the quest for names. Hugo Drax, the villain in Moonraker, was named after the magnificently festooned Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, an old friend of Fleming’s. Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the super-villain without earlobes, was probably named after another Old Etonian, Tom Blofeld, whose son Henry Blofeld is the much-loved BBC cricket commentator. Francisco “Pistols” Scaramanga, the triple-nippled gunman in The Man with the Golden Gun, was named after yet another school contemporary, George Scaramanga.
Some people objected to seeing their names in a Bond novel, most notably Ernö Goldfinger, the distinguished modernist architect. Fleming is said to have disapproved of Goldfinger’s love of concrete and the destruction of Victorian houses to make way for tower blocks, and so used his name for one of his most memorable evil-doers:
Auric Goldfinger, the gold-obsessed treasurer of Smersh. When Ernö obtained a proof copy of Goldfinger, he was enraged: Ernö was a visionary 6ft architect and Auric is a murderous 5ft megalomaniac. There is also a whiff of anti-Semitism in Fleming’s depiction of a Jewish billionaire with a gold fixation. The real Goldfinger threatened to halt publication. Equally angry, Fleming thought his publisher should insert an erratum slip, changing Goldfinger to “Goldprick” throughout the book. Fleming’s publishers eventually agreed that, in advertising the book, the name Goldfinger would be coupled with the name Auric wherever possible. Even so, for the rest of his life Ernö Goldfinger was plagued by people calling him on the telephone and saying, in the voice of Sean Connery, “Goldfinger? This is 007.”
Bond’s women were echoes of Fleming’s women, and perhaps one woman above all. Muriel Wright was 26 and a fresh-faced English rose when Fleming met her in 1935. “Mu”, as he called her, was an expert rider, skied beautifully and was one of Britain’s foremost polo players. She came from the finest landed British bloodstock. With an explosion of blonde hair that earned her the nickname “Honeytop”, she was also exceptionally beautiful and refreshingly unconventional. She was rich enough not to have to work, but nonetheless made a good deal of money modelling sportswear and, almost scandalously, swimsuits on the beach at Monte Carlo. Muriel loved horses, dogs, parties, gossip and fun; but most of all she loved Ian Fleming, to the point of self-abasement. She would caddy for him on the golf links, and rush to collect his custom-made cigarettes when he ran out. One of his friends called her Fleming’s “slave”.
Fleming enjoyed showing Mu off to his friends, and annoying his family by introducing this slightly scatty beauty into weekend house parties. But he undoubtedly treated her very badly. Fleming was consistently unfaithful, and, unlike some of his lovers, she minded. It is said that her lack of intellect stood in the way of his commitment, but then there is no evidence Fleming considered brains to be an attractive quality in a woman, and quite a lot to suggest otherwise.
Then suddenly, like some character in a Bond movie, she was dead. On March 14, 1944, Muriel Wright returned to her flat in Eaton Mews (having just delivered Fleming his weekly package of cigarettes) and went to bed. That night, there was an air raid: a chunk of masonry hurtled through her window, striking Mu in the temple and killing her at once. Fleming was called from the card table to identify the body. He was distraught, and wracked with remorse at the way he had treated her. Mu, he reflected sadly, had been “too good to be true”.
The quality of being “too good to be true” is, of course, what distinguishes the Bond Girls. Muriel Wright has a claim to be the fons et origo of the species: pliant and undemanding, beautiful but innocent, outdoorsy, physically tough, implicitly vulnerable and uncomplaining, and then tragically dead, before or soon after marriage.
Fleming’s plots, like his characters, are rooted in reality, emerging in many instances directly from the Second World War and the Cold War. Fleming was quick to point out that the reality of the espionage game was stranger than any fiction he could invent: “My plots are fantastic, while often being based on truth. They go wildly beyond the probable, but not, I think, beyond the possible.”
The most pleasing irony is that MI6 itself is happy to blur the question of where James Bond ends and real life begins. The official MI6 website cannot bring itself to deny its greatest asset, pointing out that recruits will enjoy “a stimulating and rewarding career which, like Bond’s, will be in the service of their country”. James Bond is an MI6 recruiter. A real spy agency, harnessing fiction, based on fact, to recruit real spies: no one would have been more flattered than Ian Fleming.
For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond by Ben Macintyre is published by Bloomsbury on April 7 to coincide with an exhibition of the same name at the Imperial War Museum from April 17 to March 1, 2009, and is available from BooksFirst priced £18 (RRP £20), free p&p on 0870 1608080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
100 years of Ian Fleming
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/specials/for_your_eyes_only/
To celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth, Times Online have created an exclusive 100 year interactive Fleming and Bond timeline. Packed with articles and photography from the Times Archive and the original reviews of Bond novels and films, it shows how closely Bond's fictional life paralleled Fleming's
To celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth, Times Online have created an exclusive 100 year interactive Fleming and Bond timeline. Packed with articles and photography from the Times Archive and the original reviews of Bond novels and films, it shows how closely Bond's fictional life paralleled Fleming's
Thursday, May 15, 2008
'In Search Of The Great Beast 666'
Aleister Crowley, self proclaimed "The Great Beast" and known by the press as "The Wickedest Man in the World", was perhaps the most controversial and notorious individuals in British History. This dramatically reconstructed film unearths the barely believable and shocking facts surrounding a man who was voted in a BBC poll to be one of the most influential Britons of all time.
Was he related to US President George Bush? How was he connected to the founder of Scientology, NASA, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jack the Ripper, Winston Churchill, Ian Fleming and how did this Occultist, Spy, Poet, Writer and accomplished Mountaineer come to know and influence so many other remarkable people?
Featuring the Voice of Joss Ackland and Music Score by Rick Wakeman
Check Out The Official Movie Website Here:
www.aleister-crowley-666.com
Check Out The MySpace Site Here:
http://www.myspace.com/aleistercrowleyfilm
Check Out The YouTube Trailer Here:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WpOZX5vTO00
Was he related to US President George Bush? How was he connected to the founder of Scientology, NASA, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jack the Ripper, Winston Churchill, Ian Fleming and how did this Occultist, Spy, Poet, Writer and accomplished Mountaineer come to know and influence so many other remarkable people?
Featuring the Voice of Joss Ackland and Music Score by Rick Wakeman
Check Out The Official Movie Website Here:
www.aleister-crowley-666.com
Check Out The MySpace Site Here:
http://www.myspace.com/aleistercrowleyfilm
Check Out The YouTube Trailer Here:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WpOZX5vTO00
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