by Sean Egan
Mrs Val Fleming forced Ian to break off an engagement when he was at university in Geneva, implicitly holding over him the power of disinheritance provided by her late husband’s will. Her hard-heartedness did not stop there. Although Fleming had not excelled academically and had brought a minor level of shame on the family, with his literary creation he outflanked his brother Peter to become by far the most successful of Val Fleming’s brood, yet she would not seem to have been placated by this. Asked if his mother began to respect Ian as he became one of the world’s most successful authors, Pearson says, ‘Don’t think so. I think she became more reconciled to him, but I don’t think that success really impinged upon Mrs Fleming.’
Also unimpressed by Bond was his supposed nearest and dearest. Ann looked down on James Bond novels, jokily dismissing them as ‘pornography’. ‘Annie had this desire to be a bluestocking saloniste,’ says Pearson. ‘She was an intellectual snob and she had a lot of smart followers around her, some of whom were lovers – Hugh Gaitskell was one. A whole group of rather smart intellectuals, writers and so forth, and I think Annie always thought that Ian couldn’t possibly come up to that sort of standard.’
‘That hurt him the most of anything,’ says Benson of Fleming’s wife’s failure to take seriously his literary achievements. ‘One evening he came home and she and some of her literary friends were in the living room and they were reading from his latest Bond novel aloud and laughing.’
In both public and in private correspondence, Fleming would come out with self-deprecating remarks about his work: ‘I’m not in the Shakespeare stakes’; ‘My books tremble on the brink of corn’; Bond was a ‘cardboard booby’. Yet this strikes one as being not so much a genuinely held feeling but an example of getting his retaliation in first, the position automatically lunged for by someone in a lifelong cringe at the expectation of reproach.
Both Fleming’s American agent Naomi Burton and his friend and fellow writer Noël Coward felt he had it in him to write a non-thriller, i.e. literary fiction. From Burton’s point of view, the only reason Fleming did not was that he was afraid of being ridiculed by his wife and her friends.
No fewer than three characters in Fleming’s fiction are afflicted by ‘accidie’, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘Spiritual or mental sloth; apathy’. It seems reasonable to conclude that in fact Fleming had this malaise, and that the malaise was the consequence of a deflated spirit engendered by a lifelong lack of validation.
Pearson recalls of Fleming, ‘He really gave very little of himself away. Although when I worked for him I had three children, including two sons, I don’t think I ever discussed the fact that he had a son too. There was never any interplay of family relations or anything very much.’ Although Pearson suggests this circumspection is partly attributable to his old profession (‘I always felt that he had absorbed an awful lot of spymaster’s mentality from his time in Room 39’), the fact that Fleming did not readily proffer the information of the existence of Caspar – born in 1952 – seems yet another measure of his lack of conviction that anything about him might be of interest to anyone else.
Yet his spiritual flatness was by no means perpetual. Cubby Broccoli, co-producer of the Bond movies, recalled Fleming as a man curious about everything, always anxious to glean knowledge about people and their lives. This hardly chimes with the notion of a man weary of existence, notwithstanding the natural inquisitiveness of writers. Benson offers, ‘He was very melancholic by nature, although he had a very dry wit and a dark humour about him. When he was out and about with his buddies, he was a barrel of laughs and a lot of fun.’
Nor did Fleming exhibit the unpleasantness that is the usual giveaway of self-loathing. ‘Oh, no, not at all,’ says Pearson. ‘I never saw any sign of it whatsoever.’ Politesse comes naturally to the upper classes but Fleming’s civility was not a thin veneer. Pearson: ‘He was in fact very, very kind to me. He got me my first commission to write a book. That was very much typical of Ian.’ Someone who was on far more intimate terms with Fleming was his stepdaughter Fionn Morgan (née O’Neill), daughter of Ann and her first husband Shane. Aged sixteen when her mother married Fleming, she has described him as ‘as much a father to me as a stepfather’ and bristles at criticism of him.
James Bond, though, ultimately seems to be born of Fleming’s unhappiness. He said he wrote the first Bond book to ‘take my mind off the shock of getting married at the age of forty-three’. Although the point he was making was about the upending of what had seemed the natural course of his life – bachelorhood – it’s still a peculiar thing indeed to say about what is usually a cause of great joy and anticipation.
For Pearson, James Bond stemmed from his creator’s fantasy of a happier life. ‘It was very much an essay in the autobiography of dreams,’ he says. ‘I think he used the books, or used Bond, as an alter ego to enjoy himself in ways that he couldn’t in reality.’
BIRTH OF BOND
Journalism aside, writing had long featured in Fleming’s life. At Eton, he produced a magazine called The Wyvern, which published his first piece of fiction (‘a shameless crib of Michael Arlen’). In 1926, Fleming attended a finishing school in Kitzbühel, Austria, run by Ernan Forbes Dennis (an ex-spy) and Phyllis Bottome. When he was around nineteen, Bottome encouraged Fleming to write. One result was a short story entitled ‘A Poor Man Escapes’, another a story called ‘Death, On Two Occasions’. Not long after leaving Reuters, Fleming wrote and privately published a collection of poetry called The Black Daffodil, although shortly became so embarrassed by it that he burned all copies.
Fleming toyed with the idea of authoring an espionage novel from at least summer 1944, when he told war colleague Robert Harling that, once demobilised, he would ‘write the spy story to end all spy stories’. What is remarkable about Fleming’s idle boast is that it was accurate: the espionage template was changed for all time by Casino Royale and its sequels. Before he thus changed the landscape, though, Fleming was – like any other writer – merely the sum of his influences.
Asked in 1963 by Counterpoint which writers had influenced him, Fleming offered, ‘I suppose, if I were to examine the problem in depth, I’d go back to my childhood and find some roots of interest in E. Phillips Oppenheim and Sax Rohmer.’ Oppenheim wrote thrillers laced with vignettes of high living, convincing psychology and Edwardian morality. His famous works included The Great Impersonation (1920) and The Spy Paramount (1935). Rohmer was the creator of Fu Manchu, a Chinese criminal mastermind nicknamed the Yellow Peril on whom Bond villain Dr No seems to be heavily based.
Fleming gave a couple of notable quotes about Bulldog Drummond and his creator, Sapper (H.C. McNeile). When asked to describe Bond, he said, ‘Sapper from the waist up and Mickey Spillane below.’ In a posthumously published December 1964 Playboy interview, Fleming said, ‘I didn’t believe in the heroic Bulldog Drummond types. I mean, rather, I didn’t believe they could any longer exist in literature.’ Both quotes invoke Drummond/Sapper in a negative, or at least ambiguous, sense. The impression that might be gleaned from this is that Fleming had never liked Sapper, but, as John Pearson discovered, he had been partial to his writings when as a young boy they had been read to him by his headmaster’s wife at boarding school. Drummond was an ex-army man whose rough-hewn features created his nickname. Bored with life, he advertised in The Times for adventure. Fleming’s later conviction that Drummond’s escapades belonged to the past was probably not due to Bulldog’s oft-stated contempt for Jews, Germans, ‘wops’, ‘dagos’, ‘frogs’, ‘niggers’ and ‘greasers’: such racism would be pretty much matched by Fleming, whose hero detested Koreans and Germans, and almost all of whose adversaries would be foreigners. As alluded to in Fleming’s comments above, it was more likely due to the complete absence of the carnal in Sapper’s prose, plus Drummond’s unlikely preternatural abilities in physical combat. Moreover, Sapper had ‘no literary pretensions’, to use the peculiar phrase employed to describe those who can�
�t write very well – as though their lack of ability is both voluntary and a defiant statement of integrity.
Pearson found John Buchan to be another action author who featured in Fleming’s reading history. Buchan’s most famous protagonist was Richard Hannay, whose best-known adventure is The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). Hannay was a departure from previous action-adventure protagonists in being vulnerable and flawed, and this was something that Fleming would bring to his own hero.
The character the Saint was introduced to the world by author Leslie Charteris in 1928 with Meet the Tiger. Many novels and short stories followed. He was brought to a wider public by movies and television. ‘It’s surprising that very little comparison is made between the Saint and James Bond,’ says Jeremy Duns, a Bond fan and scholar, as well as an espionage novelist himself. ‘It must be that Ian Fleming was aware of the Saint. He was a hugely successful character and there are an enormous number of similarities between the Saint and James Bond.’ Simon Templar – whose initials gave rise to his sobriquet – was a handsome, charming, dapper, hedonistic Englishman of action, as knowledgeable about gourmet meals as martial arts and weaponry. He was also catnip to the ladies, and his premarital sex life was explored in a relatively frank manner. Although there was a certain Robin Hood element to his persona, he was darker than Bond. Duns: ‘If you ever watch parodies of Bond, they actually tend to be more like the Saint. The Saint is a ruthless, devil-may-care rogue, whereas Fleming’s character was a much more straightforward sort.’
Somerset Maugham may have been an influence on Bond via Ashenden: or the British Agent, a 1928 volume of spy stories set in World War I. That Ashenden’s superior is known by an initial, like Bond’s boss M, may be coincidence, but indisputable is the fact that Maugham was a friend of Fleming and that Fleming’s 007 short story ‘Quantum of Solace’ is – uncharacteristic though it is of the literary Bond canon – modelled on Maugham’s stories of colonial domestic drama.
When Fleming submitted his first Bond novel, he was told by William Plomer – his friend and subsequent copy editor – that it needed revision. Fleming wrote back, ‘It remains to be seen whether I can get a bit closer to Eric Ambler and exorcise the blabbering ghost of Cheyney.’ Ambler was a writer much admired for his devising in the 1930s a new model for the thriller. We can infer from Fleming’s comment that he shared that admiration, although probably more for Ambler’s realism, deftness and literary bent than an unusually leftish perspective, which was for many a refreshing change from the elitism and/or racism of Sapper, Buchan, et al. Ambler became best-known for The Mask of Dimitrios, which had an Istanbul background. Fleming – who was acquainted with him – picked Ambler’s brains about that city and Byzantium in general when writing From Russia with Love (in that book Bond is to be found reading an Ambler).
Fleming’s putdown of Peter Cheyney wasn’t his only one. Despite being British, the crime writer popular since the late thirties devised Americanised titles such as Dames Don’t Care and Your Deal, My Lovely and gave protagonists handles such as Lemmy Caution and Slim Callaghan. Strangely, though, reviews of Fleming’s books often compared them to Cheyney’s. The one such comparison that really delighted Fleming was the occasion W. H. Smith’s Trade News columnist Whitefriar, reviewing Casino Royale, called him the ‘Peter Cheyney of the carriage trade’. Fleming made sure that Whitefriar received inscribed copies of his books from that point on.
The end of that Playboy ‘I didn’t believe in the heroic Bulldog Drummond types’ quote was, ‘I wanted this man more or less to follow the pattern of Raymond Chandler’s or Dashiell Hammett’s heroes – believable people, believable heroes.’
Fleming was referring to purveyors of American ‘hard-boiled’ fiction (of whom Mickey Spillane was also an example, if a less refined one). They were the sorts of writers whose lowlife vignettes and wise-guy argot Cheyney attempted to imitate from the distance and incongruous surroundings of drizzly, low-key Britain. The private-detective heroes of these writers were cynics and loners, low-waged characters hired by wealthy clients to discreetly solve shameful mysteries and who faced the dangers that resulted therefrom with alternate muscularity and wryness. The writers concerned tended to be very good on colloquial dialogue, albeit with a suspicion of its being souped up with witticisms and street poetry beyond the average denizen of a back alley. Unlike Cheyney, Fleming ensured that, whatever trappings he co-opted from the hard-boiled genre, his protagonist was quintessentially English.
Jeremy Duns has alighted on what he feels is a clear but little-known inspiration for James Bond. At the end of his life, Dennis Wheatley was notorious for the likes of The Devil Rides Out and To the Devil a Daughter. However, before that tumble into the outré, he was known as a writer of thrillers. His protagonist, Gregory Sallust, and the adventures in which he became entangled were, for Duns, prototypically 007.
Duns says of Sallust, ‘He has a scar on his face. He’s a cynical, hedonistic British secret agent. He’s a freelance secret agent, so he doesn’t have quite the organisational, bureaucratic power behind him, but he has this M figure in Sir Pellinore, who he’s got a very similar, paternal relationship to, although it’s perhaps more friendly. The character is womanising, drinking, gambling – quite unusual for a hero.’ Moreover: ‘There is a surprising amount of sex in the Dennis Wheatley books. There’s lots of spanking in it. Sallust seems to be absolutely obsessed with spanking women. And so was Fleming.’ Sallust made his debut in Contraband, published in 1936. Duns: ‘That whole first chapter. Hang on a bloody minute: this is a British secret agent with a scar on his face in a casino in northern France … A beautiful woman comes in on the arm of a villainous aristocrat who also happens to be a dwarf … It feels like you’re reading Casino Royale. Come into My Parlour is the one that I would really single out. That very much feels like a prototype of From Russia with Love.’
Yet, while Fleming acknowledged other influences in interviews and journalism, he never mentioned Wheatley. Duns thinks that this is because he wanted to look cool in terms of his inspirations: ‘Wheatley is a very below-stairs writer.’
Fleming had the advantage of not having to draw his inspiration only from fellow writers. He had worked alongside – even directed the missions of – real-life action heroes. Asked about 007 on Desert Island Discs, he said, ‘He’s a mixture of commandos and secret-service agents that I met during the war, but of course entirely fictionalised.’ Merlin Minshall, Michael Mason, Commander Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale and Commander Alexander ‘Sandy’ Glen are all names that will be meaningless to most, but there is circumstantial evidence that the personalities and/or exploits of these intelligence colleagues and acquaintances of Fleming contributed to the character of James Bond. William Stephenson is fairly well known to the public – if only by his codename: Intrepid – and seems one of the strongest candidates of all. An operation engaged in by the MI6 employee in New York with Fleming by his side involved a break-in at the office of a Japanese cypher expert. It later became – in a heightened version – a mission that helped earn Bond his double-O status. Moreover, in 1941 Fleming participated in the exercises undertaken by students at a type of training school for saboteurs run by Stephenson in Canada. One of the tasks – attaching a limpet mine to the underside of a ship – turns up in Live and Let Die in a scene containing considerable verisimilitude. It seems logical that other techniques Fleming learned there also pepper the Bond canon.
Fleming’s ‘spy novel’ would not take place in World War II, however, nor any of the other conflicts around which twentieth-century spy fiction had so far revolved. Novels with a backdrop of World War I, World War II and early-twentieth-century anti-Bolshevism became, as soon as those conflicts were concluded, period pieces (if, in some cases, enduringly readable ones). The war of attrition and ideology that developed after World War II between Communist, totalitarian East and capitalist, democratic West was, however, a novelist’s gift that kept on giving. Although it was a war of low-level intens
ity, for several decades it genuinely seemed one without end and it was into that conflict – rife with fictional possibilities – that Fleming dropped his new character.
What, though, should he call him? ‘I wanted the simplest, dullest plainest-sounding name I could find,’ Fleming told the Manchester Guardian in 1958. ‘“James Bond” was much better than something more interesting like “Peregrine Carruthers”. Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure – an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government department.’
It was long assumed Fleming got the name for his hero from the American author of Birds of the West Indies, a book on his shelves at Goldeneye. However, another Fleming biographer, Andrew Lycett, proffers a different story. When during the war Fleming spoke of his literary ambitions to C.H. Forster of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, the latter asked him how he would choose names. Fleming replied that he would think of the first couple of names in his house at school and change – by which it seems he meant ‘transpose’ – their first names. Replied Forster, ‘In my case, the first names were James Aitken and Harry Bond. So you could have Harry Aitken and James Bond.’ Of course, the two stories don’t necessarily contradict each other.
Fleming met the ‘real’ James Bond in 1964 when he was writing his final 007 story, The Man with the Golden Gun. It was a convivial affair in which the ornithologist and his wife amusedly explained how their lives were now punctuated by ribbing from people in minor officialdom such as porters and airport staff to whom they had cause to reveal their names. In a letter to Mary Wickham Bond – Mrs James Bond – Fleming said the name was just what he needed because it was ‘brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine’. The name, though, was less prosaic and more in the poetical literary tradition than Fleming might have thought: ‘bond’ – another word for promise or pledge – was ideal for a character of patriotic duty and iron purpose.