by William Boyd
And the more one reads about Fleming, as he appears in the two biographies thus far written, in his wife’s published letters and in the comments and observations made by his friends and associates, the more complex and flawed he appears. He seems to be one of those emotionally closed Englishmen, incapable of fully engaging with the women he took up with. Time and again his girlfriends complain of being used and then discarded. His seduction technique rarely varied. First the girlfriend would be invited to peruse his collection of erotica (heavy on flagellation), then a Viennese waltz would be played on the gramophone while dinner was served—kedgeree or sausages with copious alcohol—then to bed. The common complaint was that Fleming was clearly far more interested in himself than his companion.
Fleming described himself thus: “I’ve always had one foot not wanting to leave the cradle, and the other in a hurry to get to the grave. It makes rather painful splits of one’s life.” And, one might add, provides a field day for the amateur psychologist. Am I wrong in thinking that this curious blend of the infantile and the world-weary is most commonly found in a certain type of upper class Englishman? One can mention any number of soldiers and explorers, industrialists, aristocrats and politicians who all too easily fit this peculiar bill. James Bond now seems a kind of hopelessly remote role model, a Platonic dream—the juvenile defects replaced by expensive hobbies, the emotional failings by carnal ruthlessness: the ultimate form of wishful thinking.
The “hurry to get to the grave” recalls Waugh again, another man eager to meet his maker. What was it about Fleming’s gilded life that prompted this death wish? My own supposition, for what it’s worth, is that it is fostered by a sense of the bogus and the sham. “To thine own self be true” is not a bad aphorism to guide you through your life but neither Fleming nor Waugh adhered to it, creating elaborate personas to shore up the bundle of neuroses and fraught contradictions that made up their innate selves. Their taedium vitae is just that: the urge to quit this world being a sign of the huge fatigue that maintaining the pretence engenders.
So it comes as no surprise that, at the end of his life, Fleming so cavalierly disregarded his doctors’ orders: he knew he hadn’t long to go—his heart was failing, there were blood clots forming on his lungs—his clock was rapidly ticking down, so why not carry on eating and drinking and smoking as if he were a young man again? And this knowledge perhaps explains the new serenity that his writer friends observed in his last months, whether watching cricket with Alan Ross at Brighton or reminiscing with Cyril Connolly about pre-war dalliances in Kitzbühel. Connolly found him altogether “sadder, gentler, and wiser.” According to his wife, however, “he stared from his bedroom window at the sea in total misery.” Relief and release came on 11 August 1964. He was fifty-six.
2002
The Duchess of Windsor
17 August 1940. Does this date mark the lowest level in the fortunes of Wallis, Duchess of Windsor? On 17 August 1940, a day of humid, relentless heat, the Canadian cargo ship MV Lady Somers docked at Nassau harbour, in the Bahamas. On board was the colony’s new governor, accompanied by his wife: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. At the end of the gangway the Duke paused, allowing the Duchess to pass by, ensuring that she set foot on Bahamian soil before he did: neither of them had any idea that this tiny colony was to be their home for the next five years. They were being sent into a form of exile—one might even say a form of penal servitude—for Nassau, in those days, was a shabby colonial town with one main street, Bay Street, and a shifting population of around 20,000—made up of tax exiles, American tourists and, of course, the indigenous Bahamians. Government House was dilapidated and the swimming pool was empty. For the Duke and Duchess, after the life they had been used to living, it was an unequivocal tropical hell (albeit one peopled with servants). They were far away, constrained (they had to ask Churchill’s permission to leave the island) and gainfully employed. If you interpret the Duke’s posting as an act of revenge by the Royal Family it was a particularly shrewd and malicious one. Since the abdication and their marriage in 1937 the Duke and Duchess had led an idle, wealthy life in Paris and the Côte d’Azur (with a certain amount of foreign travel thrown in). But now war had broken out in Europe they had to go somewhere, and whoever thought of the Bahamas ensured that the biggest of bigwigs now found themselves in the smallest of small towns: the Duke and Duchess must have looked around them in dismay and incredulity.
For once, I feel I can say “must have” with some justification. Because, bizarre and presumptuous claim though it may seem, I feel I know the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in a peculiarly intimate way. This is because I placed them in my latest novel, Any Human Heart, as significant characters with whom the hero has, for some weeks, a close and fraught relationship. I undertook the usual research into their lives, spending months reading about them, poring over photographs and memoirs and generally trying to get inside their heads. But in a case like this the novelist’s task is different from the historian’s or the biographer’s. Having never encountered the Duke and Duchess, I had to imagine them into life, as I would do with the fictional characters I usually create. The better and more fully you can imagine a character the more they will live on the page—so I set about imagining the personalities of the Duke and Duchess buttressed by all the documentary evidence I could muster. Paradoxically, in the strange process that is the creation of a fiction, authenticity and plausibility are among your most powerful assets. So I had to imagine, for example, what it would be like to sit beside the Duchess of Windsor at a private supper party in Government House in Nassau in 1943. I had to imagine how it would be to play a round of golf with the Duke of Windsor in Portugal in 1940. And in the course of this exercise the couple began to flesh themselves out and become real—to such an extent that I was able to create fictitious conversations and encounters that seemed to me to have the ring of authenticity. The Duke and Duchess became as familiar to me as the other fictional characters in my novel and that strange familiarity now colours everything I read about them.
Their Bahamian exile was particularly interesting because I had visited the islands many times in the 1980s and had become highly intrigued by the Duke’s suspicious role in the investigation of a notorious murder (in 1943) of a local millionaire called Sir Harry Oakes. In my novel I try to make a convincing case—and the evidence is damning—that the Duke of Windsor conspired with corrupt detectives to pervert the course of justice and would have happily seen an innocent man hang for Harry Oakes’s murder. The more I came to learn about the Duke the more I came to dislike him. But the Duchess—subject of so much obloquy over the decades—was different. I wasn’t so much charmed by her as came to understand her better, somehow. The fact is that in the hell of their Bahamian exile—she called the place “this moron paradise”—the Duchess actually behaved extremely well—with patience, decorum and graciousness. The image of her as a spoilt, grasping harridan, manipulating the ineffectual Duke, doesn’t chime with the serene public face of the woman who was in fact loathing every minute of her life in Nassau. One could argue that almost everything that the Duchess aspired to in marrying the Duke was now absent from her life in the Bahamas. Position, high society, renown, glamour, haute couture and all the fine things money could buy were absent—or rather were replaced by farcically reduced simulacra. She had position—she was the governor’s wife—but that was a joke in this tinpot colony. High society was composed of dreary official receptions for visiting minor dignitaries and the unsavoury local politicians. Renown didn’t exist—during the war they were virtually forgotten—and as for haute couture, copious perspiration will make a mess of the most elegant outfit. And so on.
What makes the Duchess’s compliance more remarkable is that this role-playing, this tolerance of circumstances that she could never have imagined she was destined for, was not inspired by great love. The relationship between the Duke and Duchess was heavily one-sided. He adored her abjectly, slavishly, caninely. She was fond of him:
the “great love” flowed only in one direction. It says something about the Duchess’s own sense of duty that she didn’t crack up under the strain. Her health was bad, she suffered from ulcers, but she didn’t let the side down. During the Bahamian years, 1940–5, she behaved, it has to be said, in an exemplary manner: just like a true royal.
But in fact the Duchess did crack—the mask slipped—but not until six years later. In 1951 she met a young man called Jimmy Donahue. He was good-looking, good company, very wealthy and homosexual. And the Duchess became obsessed by him. What is fascinating about the relationship between the Duchess and Jimmy Donahue is that such a fall from grace took so long in arriving. The suspicion remains that it was an after-effect of those years of drudgery during the war. Jimmy Donahue—a gossip, a joker, outrageously camp—offered the Duchess something that had been absent from her life and still was: fun and frivolity.
The Duchess was fifty-five, Donahue was twenty years younger. He was an heir to the huge Woolworth fortune and initially the Duke and Duchess’s interest in him was purely mercenary: Donahue’s even wealthier mother was lavish in her gifts to the royal couple and they did very well by her. In 1951 the Duke was a lugubrious, fussy, hollow man. The empty life he and the Duchess now led was well established and for the Duchess the prospect of the years ahead was daunting. She set out to win Jimmy Donahue and quickly did so. The Duke and Duchess and Jimmy Donahue became an unusual trio in the beau monde of Paris and New York and Mediterranean cruises where the Duchess’s torrid embroilment with her new young friend was rarely concealed. They were observed kissing passionately in a Parisian night club; one of Jimmy’s friends provided him with the use of an apartment so they could meet when the Duke was away. There was a sexual relationship between the Duchess and Jimmy Donahue but what precisely went on behind the bedroom door will only be informed guesswork. Donahue himself later claimed that it was mutually bestowed oral sex but by then he had been ousted from the royal circle and consequently his testimony has to be weighed up in that light.
But something carnal did go on and the relationship lasted just over four years. It ended with a row in a restaurant in Baden-Baden. Jimmy was growing bored trailing around Europe with the elderly couple. One evening he got drunk, became angry at some remark the Duke made and kicked the Duchess under the table, drawing blood on her shin. The Duke ordered him out and the end of the affair was finally achieved.
It’s not hard to imagine what the Duchess took from this association. In the kind of life they led—of peripatetic, well-heeled idleness that took them on a seasonal round to Paris, New York, Palm Beach, Biarritz, Monte Carlo, Portofino and back again—the great enemy is boredom. Jimmy Donahue was a gossip and a prankster and his own wealth and social connections made him unimpressed by the faux-regal aura around the Duke and Duchess. He made the Duchess laugh and passed the time, and the fact that he was handsome and prepared to put his own sexual proclivities on one side in order to pleasure her was an added bonus. As for the Duke, he became a public cuckold, a subject of whispered jokes and condescending tittle-tattle, but he bore the humiliation, until the final row, with glum stoicism. Nothing, it seemed, could dull the edge of his total devotion.
The Duchess, it has to be said, behaved badly and seemed unperturbed by her betrayal of her husband. As one of her friends later told her, Jimmy Donahue had destroyed her reputation and indeed it is the Duchess’s post-war incarnation—the mask-faced, immaculate, society hostess and permanent house guest of the vastly wealthy—that has coloured the world’s perception of her, subsequently. It is interesting to contrast her behaviour with Jimmy Donahue with the recent revelations of her so-called affair with Guy Trundle in 1935, before the abdication. But, thinking of the Duchess I “know,” I find I’m highly sceptical about the Trundle relationship. I can easily understand why she became infatuated with Donahue in the 1950s but I cannot imagine she would ever risk betraying the Prince of Wales, as the Duke then was, for a brief fling in a Mayfair flat with a man from the motor trade. Too much was at stake in 1935 for her to risk even a whisper of scandal: the prize was too big and her own affair with the Prince of Wales was by now fully established and at its most intense. I would argue that her behaviour in the Bahamas during the war underlines that she had as clear a sense of protocol and duty as any royal. That punctiliousness would have been at its most acute while the Duke was wooing her and the prospects of a royal marriage one day were not some impossible fantasy.
Picture the situation. It is 1935: you are an ageing, not particularly attractive American woman in a loveless marriage to a portly and dull businessman. You are having a passionate love affair with the world’s most eligible bachelor, the Prince of Wales, the future King of England. You have just been on a luxurious Mediterranean cruise and holiday with your lover. You are at the very pinnacle of high society: the prince’s terribly smart and aristocratic friends are suddenly your friends. After a difficult and rackety life and two husbands you find yourself breathing the rarefied air of a world you could only have dreamed about. Outside royal and political circles no one in Britain knows of the affair nor of the Prince of Wales’s obsession for you (you have helped him overcome his “sexual difficulty”). So do you pop off to Bruton Street, W1 for some clandestine sex with a Ford Motor Company salesman, however handsome and dashing? Whatever Mrs Simpson was doing when she visited Guy Trundle—if indeed she ever did—it wasn’t to have sex with him. Duff Cooper—one of the Prince’s inner circle and one who had no axe to grind—came up with an assessment that seems to me to be completely valid and true: Wallis Simpson, he thought, “is a nice woman and a sensible woman,” and he concluded, “but she is as hard as nails and doesn’t love him.” She didn’t love him but I believe she remained true to him, in her way, and lived up to the demands her role as his wife required of her—until, that is, she met Jimmy Donahue.
2003
Edward VII and Frederick Treves
On 13 June 1902 Edward VII had under a fortnight to wait until his coronation. On that day the King travelled from Buckingham Palace to Aldershot to review a parade of troops. He did not feel well and it was observed that his normally florid complexion was blanched and drawn. By the 14th he was complaining of pains in the abdomen and nausea. Edward was a prodigious eater and drinker and his personal physician, Sir Francis Laking, suspected that these symptoms were the familiar ones brought on by His Majesty’s compulsive over-indulgence. He prescribed a laxative and confidently expected matters to resolve themselves naturally. It was not to be. On the night of the 14th the King suffered violent spasms of abdominal pain and repeated vomiting. Laking called in an eminent surgeon for consultation, Sir Thomas Barlow. The two men feared the worst: King Edward VII was afflicted with perityphlitis.
Perityphlitis is one of the forgotten names in the medical lexicon. It was used to refer to the mysterious and inevitably fatal “abdominal affections of the right side” that had been killing people for thousands of years. The cause was obscure but the symptoms were remorseless: abdominal pain, followed by vomiting, fever, intestinal inflammation and ultimately death from general peritonitis—the inflammation and corruption of the serous membrane which lines the stomach cavity. The disease was a potent killer: in 1856 one study showed that out of forty-seven cases of perityphlitis only one survived. Over the years countless victims’ corpses had been dissected and their innards poked about and pored over but it wasn’t until 1812 that a surgeon suggested that this fatal inflammation of the stomach cavity may be caused by an initial inflammation of the vermiform appendix, a small worm-shaped attachment of the blind gut.
“Appendicitis,” as the disease came to be known towards the end of the nineteenth century, was very much an American appellation. American surgeons, in particular McBurney and Fitz, were in the vanguard of the treatment of the disease. Unlike surgeons in Europe, they advocated the earliest possible removal of the appendix as soon as the symptoms appeared. In Europe this was regarded as modish, not to say pervers
e, nonsense. If, in the nineteenth century, as a European, you were afflicted with appendicitis you would be dosed with opium and purgatives and it would be hoped the problem would disappear of its own accord. If not, and if an abscess appeared around the appendix and grew as it filled with pus, it would be hoped that a natural process of capsulation would then occur that would seal off the abscess from the abdominal cavity. The argument ran that the American method of early intervention created greater risks of general infection: it was too precipitate, better to wait until capsulation had occurred and then drain off the offensive matter. There was no greater advocate of this procedure, and no greater sceptic of the American way, than Britain’s most eminent surgeon, Frederick Treves, and it was he who was now called to the King’s bedside.
Frederick Treves (1853–1923) was a self-made man, the son of a cabinet maker who had risen to the heights of the medical profession. In 1902 he was internationally recognized as a brilliant surgeon and the authority on diseases of the abdomen and gut. He was a prolific writer and his medical textbooks were in standard use. More than this, he was a friend and confidant of King Edward and Queen Alexandra and was sergeant-surgeon to the monarch from 1901. Additional renown had accrued in the 1880s over his care and handling of Joseph Merrick, the so-called “Elephant Man.” It was Treves who formulated the adage that a good surgeon needs “a lacemaker’s fingers and a seaman’s grip.” He might have added that, in what we now recognize as the dawn of modern surgery, a good surgeon also required an adamantine ego and an unswervable ambition. Treves possessed all these attributes and in the small world of Edwardian medicine he guarded his pre-eminence jealously.