by Colin Watson
More ingenuous was Amis’s attempt to counter the sadism charge by quoting two extracts from ‘the real thing’ – the works of Mr Mickey Spillane. This is rather like retorting to a diner who complains of having found slugs on his cabbage that he is lucky not to have gone to the establishment next door, where slugs are served as the main course. Fleming’s stories do contain liberal lardings of very vicious behaviour. To assert that there never was any element of self-indulgence in his description of torture and beatings is against probability. Unconvincing, too, is the denial of an implicit invitation to the reader to share in the enjoyment.
The third count on which Ian Fleming’s reputation has been assailed is snobbery. It arises chiefly from his constant preoccupation with objects and places (not, Amis claims, people) which he supposed to have special merit. He never lost an opportunity of naming an expensive car or specifying a desirable vintage. Brand-named washing aids, or ‘toiletries’ as their disseminators call them, clearly fascinated Fleming: Bond’s almost Holmesian skill in identifying esoteric perfumes is indicated with all the rehearsed nonchalance of a television commercial. But whether this sort of thing really qualified as snobbery is doubtful. Nor is it likely that Fleming the journalist was at the elbow of Fleming the author, prompting him to drop in all those ‘free puffs’ in hope of being rewarded by some grateful P.R.O. with a Rolex Oyster watch, a couple of bottles of Dom Perignon ’46, or, failing all else, a carton of Cadbury’s Milk Flakes. The most likely explanation is the simplest – that he just wanted to be thought thoroughly worldly and knowledgeable.
That, unfortunately, is always a dangerous ambition in a writer. A fair semblance of connoisseurship and ‘inside’ savoir-faire can be acquired by an intelligent researcher with time to bother, but just as illusory as the perfect crime is the perfect imposture. One slip (and errors in print sit pat for ever, proclaiming their parentage) is enough to destroy the credibility of all. Consider, for example, Fleming’s careful build-up of Bond as the good liver. It is fairly safe to impress the customers with that Dom Perignon ’46 and the ‘real pre-war Wolfschmidt from Riga’, but when Bond confidently doubles his chief’s order of peas and new potatoes ‘as it’s May’, the whole edifice of his pretentiousness is demolished by three little words. What he has implied is: I would not dream of ordering new potatoes and peas if I thought there was a risk of the first having been imported and the second deep-frozen. If only Fleming had looked into the gardening section of any home cyclopaedia he would have seen that neither fresh peas nor newly dug potatoes can reasonably be expected on an English menu until July.
Where Fleming’s snobbery is genuine and not mugged up, it is of a mean order that compares unfavourably with the haute snobisme of Wimseyland.
Thus Dorothy Sayers:
His double-breasted suit of navy blue and his socks, tie and handkerchief, all scrupulously matched, were a trifle more point-device than the best taste approves, and his boots were slightly too bright a brown.
And Fleming:
… where elderly couples with Ford Populars and Morris Minors talked in muted tones about children called Len and Ron and Pearl and Ethel, and ate in small mouthfuls with the points of their teeth and made not a sound with the tea things.
Sayers, unselfconsciously employing the authentic speech patterns of the most splendidly odious section of England’s gentlefolk:
‘What, the intense young woman with the badly bobbed hair and the brogues?’ ‘Well, she’s never been able to afford a good hairdresser … they’re awfully poor, and her mother ought to have some frightfully difficult operation or something, and go and live abroad … And perhaps Hannah wouldn’t be quite so Red if she’d ever had a bean of her own. Besides, you could make it a condition of helping her that she should go and get properly shingled at Bresil’s.’
Fleming, describing two men who deserve obloquy because they are Russian agents who film through a false mirror the coupling of a British agent (Bond) with a fourth agent, female, Russian:
And the view-finders gazed coldly down on the passionate arabesques the two bodies formed and broke and formed again, and the clockwork mechanism of the cine-cameras whirred softly on as the breath rasped out of the open mouths of the two men and the sweat of excitement trickled down their bulging faces into their cheap collars.
Sycophantic bluestocking Miss Sayers may have been, but she usually managed to make her characters’ expressions of contempt for unmonied people ring with something of the supreme self-confidence of the rich and well-born whom she envied. The reference to Hannah’s mother’s need of ‘some frightfully difficult operation or something’ indicates exactly the attitude of bored flippancy with which a socialite of the time would have regarded anyone with the nerve to be ill beyond her means. The certainty of such phrases as ‘the best taste’, ‘good families’, discounts the possibility of cavil.
Fleming, by contrast, was unsure and therefore tended to be bad-tempered and petty in his manner of asserting superiority. Having elected as he did to inhabit a world teeming with monstrous villains and evil-minded Soviet satraps, what could he have been thinking of to waste a whole clip of ammunition upon elderly couples sitting in an English tea-room? Compared with the atrocities of SMERSH, the ownership of a Morris Minor and the bestowal of ‘common’ names upon one’s children seem smallish crimes, but Fleming, via Bond, obviously felt very strongly indeed about the genteel affectations of his own country’s lower middle class. Was there, perhaps, an element of pseudo-refinement in his own background that embarrassed him?
In the passage about the two spies who are trying to compromise Bond on film, emphasis is laid on certain bodily circumstances. The men’s breath ‘rasps’. Their mouths are open. They sweat copiously. They are fat, or so we conclude from their ‘bulging’ faces. And where does their sweat run? Why, into ‘cheap’ collars, naturally. These few lines epitomize the obsession that is the genuine article lying beneath Fleming’s highly publicized but unconvincing epicurism; a simple aversion to human physicality in general and in particular to that of the sort of people who wear cheap collars. It merges sometimes into social snobbery – as when Bond notices that an insufficiently respectful taxi-driver, ‘typical of the cheap self-assertiveness of young labour since the war’, has a ‘foxy, pimpled’ face. More often, it inspires an ablution of some kind (Bond is a compulsive washer), or a dissertation on those toiletries, or a swim, or, as an occasional treat, an interlude of love-play in the bathroom. The evidence of friends quoted by Fleming’s biographer, John Pearson, suggested that in real life Fleming was disgusted by women viewed otherwise than in the abstract. One said he had refused to have anything more to do with a girl after he had seen her go behind a rock to urinate. Another declared that Fleming would not even have tied a cut finger for her, so extreme was his revulsion from bodily things.
So much, then, for the ‘sex, sadism and snobbery’ formula which has been held to account for the multi-million sales of the Fleming thrillers. It will not do. Close appraisal reveals no more piquant a combination of these three old ingredients than has been offered by a dozen writers of crime and espionage novels in recent years.
However, the more carefully Fleming’s books are examined in relation to the general body of sensation fiction from 1920 onwards, the more striking does one particular aspect of his work become.
It is astonishingly derivative.
George Orwell, as we have seen, compared the work of E. W. Hornung and that of James Hadley Chase in order to support his thesis that popular literature had suffered a decline in moral standards between the two world wars. No Orchids for Miss Blandish admittedly is not a text for human improvement, nor even an informed picture of human depravity. It is a calculated, if clumsy, attempt to titillate by projecting its English author’s idea of how American gangsters go about being beastly to one another and to their women. Neither Mr Chase nor any of his characters attempts to justify or rationalize this behaviour. The ‘Raffles’ books, on the other
hand, unmistakably invite the reader to approve the assaults and burglaries in the spirit of an onlooker at feats of sportsmanship. Whether this makes Hornung a more moral entertainer than Chase is questionable, but it certainly qualifies him to be considered as a precursor of Fleming.
For Bond, too, is primarily a performer – a sportsman – and our applause is solicited whether the game is murder or seduction or simply card-sharping. He is outside the law, like Raffles, but remains acceptable, as does Raffles, to the sentimental English middle-class world by virtue of two admirable abstractions, loyalty and patriotism. In Raffles’s case, the loyalty is to his ‘sort’. Bond’s is equally nebulous: it is to a mere initial letter, the anonymous head of a secret organization with unspecified and perhaps non-existent limits of responsibility. The patriotism of Bond consists mainly of a willingness to kill or encompass the death of agents of organizations exactly similar to his own except that they have different initials and always lose. It is a more dangerous kind of patriotism but not really much more intelligent than that which prompted Raffles to rob the British Museum of an antique gold cup so that he could send it by post as a personal gift to ‘absolutely the finest sovereign the world has ever seen’ (his own). The success of such an escapade would be celebrated by Raffles with Sullivans – the special cigarettes he kept for the purpose. A childish indulgence? It might be thought so – or at least its being mentioned might. Yet the later, presumably more sophisticated Fleming permitted himself to go on like this:
Bond had lit up a Duke of Durham, king-size, with filter. The authoritative Consumers Union of America rates this cigarette the one with the smallest tar and nicotine content. Bond had transferred to the brand from the fragrant but powerful Morland Balkan mixture with three gold rings round the paper he had been smoking since his teens. The Dukes tasted of almost nothing, but they were at least better than Vanguards…
Smoking ceremonial changed little over forty years, apparently, among gentlemen cracksmen and secret agents. Nor has the breaking of glass in faces gone out of fashion since Raffles hit his boy pursuer with a torch in The Wrong House. Fleming describes two instances: the grinding of a flash bulb into a man’s cheek, and Bond’s somewhat extravagant use of his Rolex Oyster Perpetual wrist watch as a knuckleduster, so that when
Bond’s right flashed out … the face of the Rolex disintegrated against the man’s jaw.
A final point of similarity between Hornung and Fleming that might be mentioned is the warmth of feeling generated in both their heroes by delinquent male confederates. Raffles forever had that ‘dear old hand’ ready for Bunny, his narrator-companion on the burglary rounds. Bond, after only two short encounters with Marc-Ange, the Mafia-style gangster whose specialities included mass murder and organized prostitution, admits readily to having ‘developed much love, and total respect, for this man’. He ascribes his feelings to animal magnetism.
The next most prominent character in the Bond album of family likenesses is Uncle Bulldog. Not only was Drummond a great basher of villainous lesser breeds; he was, like Bond, obsessed with cleanliness. His rebukes to adversaries almost always contained such adjectives as filthy, unwashed, foul. Much less taciturn than his nephew, and inclined to idiotic argument, Drummond nevertheless operated with a dispatch that would certainly have earned him a double-o prefix if such a thing had been for disposal in the 1920s. He was, for instance, good at shooting people exactly between the eyes. The amount of time spent by Drummond in being tied up might help explain Bond’s notable propensity for getting himself trussed, although it is to the younger man’s credit that he offers more intelligible comment on the situation than a muffled oath. Again, the convention whereby any young woman foolish enough to attach herself to Bond is liable to be tommy-gunned, staked out as crab food, or otherwise ill-treated, can be traced to the ‘Sapper’ canon. One recalls the outsize tarantula sent to Mrs Drummond by Carl Peterson.
The master of the creepy-crawly, of course, was old Fu-Manchu, the chronicle of whose exploits showers centipedes and scorpions from every page. If Carl Peterson was the original of Fleming’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the fiendish Chinese Doctor was owed a heavy modelling fee by the creator of Dr No. There is only one substantial difference between Sax Rohmer’s villain and the Fleming super-sinisters. Dr No, Mr Big, Le Chiffre and the rest really do get down to cases where torturing is concerned. They break fingers and whack testicles with great professionalism. Fu-Manchu was content to make diabolical noises (‘My files! My wire jackets!’) without causing anybody actual physical harm – a matter he deputed to his Burmese assassins or to the centipedes. Sax Rohmer must have considered that his readers would be thrilled sufficiently by the mere nationality of the Doctor, constituting as it did that Yellow Peril dread of which was then politically in vogue. He failed to foresee that shifts of national commitment and racial attitude would leave works of fiction that assumed the permanence of such things looking outdated and silly. Fleming made the same mistake until he tried to redeem it more than half-way through the Bond series by transferring the onus for villainy from the U.S.S.R. to the fanciful hotch-potch SPECTRE.
One more Rohmer–Fleming parallel is afforded by the way in which the heroes of both have owed their survival on frequent occasions to the defection of a female associate or servitor of the villain. But whereas the slave-girl Karamaneh’s constant shuttling to and fro in her boss’s time with warnings or means of escape for Nayland Smith and Petrie was treated by the Devil-Doctor with a degree of forbearance that would have done credit to a Schweitzer, aiding Bond almost invariably had a punitive sequel. Fleming’s anti-feminist streak could have been responsible for this difference: Rohmer, by all accounts, was a gentle and chivalrous man, remembered by friends as ‘a real charmer’.
No one has ever succeeded in discovering the precise aims of the great Fu-Manchu conspiracy. ‘Domination’ was the word that Rohmer found sufficient, but he was adept at avoiding definitions and his fog of portentousness remains impenetrable. What the villains were about, how they financed their schemes, by what curious means they had come to be in possession of so much capital equipment, house property and armament (spiders included) in the middle of London – these things were never explained, and most readers have never particularly wanted them to be. Edgar Wallace availed himself of much the same sort of licence in regard to the motives, methods and means of his arch-criminals. He loved conspiracies, and in such books as The Fellowship of the Frog (1924) and The Terrible People (1926), he described in his none too careful but mettlesome way sets of outrageous events engineered in each case by a totally unscrupulous villain and calculated to wreck the security and well-being of the entire community of Britain.
This aspect of Wallace was to be reincarnated in Fleming, of whose novels conspiracy is the essence. Although there is no certainty that either writer deliberately chose the theme as a good ‘seller’, both were businessmen and firmly in the writing trade for profit. Wallace was astute enough to realize the fascination exerted upon ordinary minds by mysterious clanship such as freemasonry. A person who lacks prospect of gaining power, influence and respect by his own efforts and in his own sphere takes to thinking how he would like to exercise secret power. It is a very common form of self-indulgence, as Wallace doubtless knew. Fleming, on the other hand, must surely have seen something of the usually shabby and often ludicrous reality of plot and counterplot during his service with Naval Intelligence. If this disenchanted him, he gave no sign in the Bond books. Instead, he postulated conspiracies every bit as bizarre as those invented by Wallace and a technology of knavishness and counter-knavishness that is reminiscent at point after point of the earlier battles against the Frogs, the Terrible People and the rest of Wallace’s resourceful undesirables. Even in minor details affinity is obvious. There is, for example, a Wallace precedent for the telephone-gun in Fleming’s From Russia with Love. It nearly killed that oddly Bond-ish policeman ‘Betcher’ Long and was ‘modelled on the pattern of a humane killer,
with a chamber for the cartridge halfway up …’ Again, the report in Casino Royale of a Russian agent’s suicide ‘by swallowing a coat button of compressed potassium cyanide’ is an echo of the passing of the formidable Miss Revelstoke, who cheated the gallows (as Wallace was so fond of putting it) by an exactly similar trick. It was Miss Revelstoke, incidentally, whose habit of carrying a ‘razor-sharp blade’ sheathed between the upper and lower sole of a special shoe she wore gave her a thirty-year lead over Rosa Klebb, Fleming’s lethal kicker.
Flamboyance was the quality which, above all others, contributed to the popularity of the books of Edgar Wallace. His plots were outrageous, his continuity was erratic, his ‘facts’ dubious, his climaxes hasty and carelessly contrived; but always the sheer showmanship of the man made the flaws in his work seem unimportant. Wallace’s millions of readers, cheated or not, were satisfied customers. Fleming achieved the same result but more quickly, more spectacularly. It would be easy to conclude that because there are so many similarities between the Bond novels and the books of Wallace, Rohmer, ‘Sapper’, Oppenheim, Horler, Charteris and the other inexorable bestsellers of their time, then Fleming must simply have studied them and worked out a composite formula for success – a kind of derring-do cocktail. The following random selection of sample ingredients could, with only the slightest modification, be put straight into Bond:
‘I took some new Askaris in and they made trouble … looted the stores one night … I was obliged to shoot one or two and the rest deserted.’
The Great Impersonation – E. Phillips Oppenheim, 1920
‘What was the explosive?’ ‘Dynamite,’ said Elk promptly. ‘It blew down – Nitro-glycerine blows up and sideways.’