On 13 April 1953, Casino Royale was published as a hardcover for 10s. 6d. The first print run of just over 4,700 copies sold out in a month. A second print run also sold out, as did a third of 8,000 copies. It was respectable enough for Cape quickly to offer Fleming a deal for a further three books.
The jacket of Casino Royale, designed by Fleming himself, is noticeably restrained, particularly in comparison with the garish girl-straddling-gun covers that would feature on the later Pan paperbacks. Indeed, Casino Royale was marketed as quality ‘literary’ spy fiction, which explains why it was given notices in places like the highbrow Times Literary Supplement. Most reviewers assumed the novel was for the ‘knowing reader’ who would pick up the parodic elements. During the climactic moment, Le Chiffre tells Bond that ‘The game of Red Indians is over … This is not a romantic adventure story in which the villain is finally routed and the hero is given a medal and marries the girl. Unfortunately these things don’t happen in real life.’
This is one of a number of curious moments, repeated at least once in all the novels, when Fleming suddenly gives the reader a ‘knowing look’. In Dr No, the villain tells Bond that he has ‘been reading too many novels of suspense. Your little speech reeked of grease-paint and card-board.’ In Diamonds are Forever, Fleming’s minor villain Pissaro ‘looked like a gangster in a horror-comic’. The heroine of The Spy Who Loved Me, on hearing of Bond’s latest adventure, exclaims: ‘I could hardly believe it. It was like something out of a thriller.’ In ‘Quantum of Solace’, by which time Fleming’s stories were appearing as a cartoon strip in the Daily Express, Bond ponders that his duties are ‘the stuff of an adventure-strip in a cheap newspaper’. And there are many other examples. This self-awareness and self-deprecation are central to the Bond novels and to the wider Bond phenomenon. In a copy of one of his books sent to his novelist friend Paul Gallico, Fleming wrote: ‘To Paul, who has always seen the joke.’ Perhaps this self-consciousness prevents Fleming from being considered a truly great thriller writer, but it has ensured his longevity.
As a journalist, Fleming was well placed to encourage reviews of the book. His own newspaper, the Sunday Times, declared him ‘the best new thriller writer since Eric Ambler’. Although there were complaints about the graphic torture scene, most reviews were favourable. In the Daily Telegraph, John Betjeman declared that ‘Ian Fleming has discovered the secret of narrative art … the reader had to go on reading.’ Alan Ross in the TLS called the novel ‘an extremely engaging affair’, with his greatest praise for the ‘high poetry with which he invests the green baize lagoons of the casino tables’. The Manchester Guardian called it ‘a first rate thriller … with a breathtaking plot’.
Ann’s brother Hugo, who had ambitions as a novelist himself, was unimpressed, telling his sister Mary Rose that ‘Ian’s thriller starts well but ends as the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in print – torture such as Japs and Huns eschewed as not cricket. I always knew he was neurotic and tangled.’
After a heavy Christmas, Ian was longing for Jamaica, telling his friend Cyril Connolly that ‘the Doctor Birds are waiting in the Crown of Thorns bushes and the Butterfly fish on the reef’. Having parked Caspar with his nanny in London, Ann and Ian flew out to New York, staying for one night before heading on to Florida, where Ian wanted to do some research on his next book. Most of the action, though, he planned to take place in his beloved Jamaica.
1953 The First Jamaica Novel – Live and Let Die
Carribean reality resembles the wildest imagination.
Gabriel García Márquez
At the end of 1952, it was learnt that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was shortly to visit Jamaica for a two-week holiday. He’d be arriving after a trip to the United States to meet President Truman and President-Elect Eisenhower as part of his strenuous efforts to stoke more life into the ‘Special Relationship’. The Gleaner was in ecstasy at the news. ‘This island is no stranger to distinguished visitors – To royalty, statesmen, film stars, literati, millionaires … Jamaica takes most such visitors in its stride,’ the paper opined. But Churchill deserved extra ‘reverent affection’. The announcement of his visit had, the paper reported, ‘stirred the patriot emotion of all the people of Jamaica’.
The Governor, Sir Hugh Foot, in a white suit, was standing at the bottom of the steps on 9 January as Churchill climbed out of the US presidential jet, lent to take him on his holiday. With Foot at Montego Bay airport was Sir Harold Mitchell, at whose Prospect Great House Churchill was to stay. Churchill inspected his guard of honour lined up in white pith helmets and was then introduced to Bustamante, who presented him with Jamaican cigars.
Churchill’s impending holiday in Jamaica trumps the Queen’s first Christmas broadcast to lead the front page of the Gleaner on 27 December 1952.
At Prospect, the road to the main gates had been resurfaced by the government and telephones installed in every room, with a special exchange on the first floor. The Mitchells had already moved out of the main house into one of their cottages to make room for Churchill’s wife, daughter and son-in-law, who arrived on separate flights, as well as two secretaries, two detectives, a maid and a valet. The secretaries were to deal with mail and cables from London and to ‘work on his memoirs’. A police camp of forty men was established in a citrus grove near the house.
Churchill spent much of his time on the veranda, which had been converted into a studio for his painting. Mitchell’s staff kept the whisky and sodas flowing. ‘The doctors have advised me not to swim,’ Churchill declared when he arrived; ‘I intend to swim every day.’ ‘And indeed he did,’ Mitchell remembered, ‘even when it was quite rough.’ Where the Prospect land met the sea was Frankfort beach. Here, while the Prime Minister swam, a mounted policeman kept a lookout at the gate and two plain-clothes detectives concealed themselves in the bushes at either end of the tiny strip of sand.
To commemorate the visit, Mitchell asked his guest to plant a mahogany tree in front of the house. Churchill ‘selected the exact spot and went to work with a spade in a business-like manner’. ‘When the ceremony was over he called for champagne, his favourite Pol Roger’ and he and Mitchell ‘toasted the tree’. The mahogany is still there, now grown to a huge size.
Although he was on holiday, there were still some official duties for the Prime Minister to perform. On 17 January, there was a tour through Kingston followed by a reception for a thousand guests at King’s House. Churchill’s speech at the occasion tellingly celebrated the unity and importance of the ‘Great British Empire’. The following day he visited the new University College of the West Indies and then Spanish Town, where he admired the lavish memorial to Admiral Rodney.
The Pathé News footage of the visit is extraordinary. It was created by the Jamaican Film Unit, which had recently been established with a policy to ‘produce films for Jamaicans, by Jamaicans, with Jamaicans, designed to assist in the solution of Jamaica’s problems – educational, social, cultural, and economical’. But in the reel, the elderly British imperialist politician is filmed at the centre of every scene, surrounded by adoring, cheering homogenous black crowds. In spite of the current moves towards self-representation and autonomy within Jamaica, as evidenced in ongoing political and artistic agitation, the film shows a very traditional image of Jamaica and its relationship to Britain, as if all Jamaicans were unified in support of the Empire.
Enthusiasm for Churchill was also surprising in the context of his well-known objection to Jamaican emigration to Britain. The Empire Windrush had docked at Tilbury in June 1948 with 492 passengers from the West Indies; it was the birth of multicultural life in Britain. As Evon Blake wrote in 1950: ‘Britons made them feel like the uninvited they were … Nipped and gnawed by starvation, many begged to be (and were) repatriated … Bitter stories by sadder and wiser returnees did not deter more travelling to the Land of Unwelcome.’ In 1952, some 2,000 Jamaicans migrated to Britain. It was still a trickle rather than a flood – in 1955, t
he figure would reach 17,000 – but it was still too many for Churchill’s liking. He told Sir Hugh Foot that he feared Jamaican migration would produce a ‘magpie society and that would never do’, and tried to get his cabinet to legislate to stop it. He would also suggest that for the 1955 election campaign the Conservatives stand on the slogan ‘Keep Britain White’.
But it does seem that Churchill’s ‘star quality’ won over some doubters. Every time his car left Prospect – for instance to visit Beaverbrook at Cromarty – crowds would line the streets to catch a glimpse of the old man, who gamely gave his famous V sign. Foot himself was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of Kingstonians as he accompanied the Prime Minister through the city. He had been slightly anxious that Churchill would be suspicious of his family’s politics, particularly those of his brother Michael. But for the whole visit, Churchill ‘made no reference whatever to any of my political relatives’ until they were both standing surveying the cheering throng in Kingston, when the Prime Minister turned to Foot, and only just audibly above the ‘din of acclamation’ asked: ‘I wonder what Michael would say about all this?’
It all strikes a rather unreal note. Ironically, the day before Churchill’s arrival, the Governor had announced through the Gleaner that he was acceding to demands for greater democratic reform in Jamaica. What was agreed was the establishment of proper ministries, headed by elected officials, who now also achieved a majority on the Executive Council. By the approval of the House of Representatives, Bustamante became Jamaica’s first Chief Minister. Defence, foreign affairs, justice and finance to a large measure remained under the control of the Colonial Service officials on the spot, but it was nonetheless an undoubted diminution of the power of the British Governor and a significant lurch towards Jamaican self-government.
Seventy-eight-year-old Winston Churchill greets crowds at Montego Bay.
Although Foot differed politically from Churchill, and certainly had very much more liberal views on race, somewhat surprisingly he did share the Prime Minister’s strident anti-communism. In August that year, he made a speech alleging that ‘the Communist movement in Jamaica’ was being financed by a ‘supply of foreign Communist money’. Suspected communists had their whereabouts tracked and post opened. Foot’s particular bugbear was the Chinese community on the island, which he saw as a Maoist vanguard. He ordered that all Chinese incomers be fingerprinted and photographed, and even suggested that previously naturalised citizens have their Jamaican nationality revoked.
A lot of it now looks like overreaction, but Foot’s fear of communist infiltration was shared by many, particularly in the United States, then in the throes of McCarthyism. By now, the spread of American influence and the start of the Cold War had made the ‘red menace’ an international issue.
In February 1952, Bustamante, on Jamaican government business, was detained in the US colony of Puerto Rico, on suspicion of being a communist. He demanded an apology, which was hardly surprising as in fact, according to Foot, he was a ‘fanatical opponent of communism’. In November the same year, Bustamante called for it to be banned by law in Jamaica, and for many years he had been using anti-communist rhetoric to attack the PNP, in which ‘red communism’, he said, was ‘rampant’. On several occasions Norman Manley’s party had been forced to declare publicly that it was not communist.
Despite these denials, American anti-communist interest was also focused on the PNP As early as 1948, an American from the consulate met Manley to discuss ‘communist accusations’. As the Cold War stepped up, so American security policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean was increasingly directed against the spread of communism. It became ever clearer that the United States would simply not tolerate ‘communist’ regimes popping up in their backyard. For example, in 1953, elections in Guyana saw victory for the People’s Progressive Party, which the American State Department considered too supportive of communism. The colonial authorities in London were unconcerned, but American pressure saw the constitution suspended, a state of emergency declared and the colony occupied by British troops. The following year, following arm-twisting, a majority of the Organisation of American States foreign ministers supported a US resolution declaring communism incompatible with the inter-American system.
In January 1952, Governor Foot launched an attack on Kenneth Hill, who was a founder member of the PNP, the mayor of Kingston and the most popular leader of the PNP’s left wing. Foot described him as ‘an extremist who cares nothing for the disruption which he causes to industrial development in Jamaica and if he is eliminated from the trade union field Jamaica will certainly be better for it’. Later the same year, the party was forced to set up a committee to investigate charges that the left had been engaged in communist teaching. The result was the expulsion from the party of the ‘Four H’s’: Hill, his brother Frank, Richard Hart and Arthur Henry. The event, which sent shock waves across the Caribbean, was accompanied, according to Public Opinion, by ‘shouts, screams and threats, followed by bottles and chairs hurled by Communist observers’. In June, Edna Manley wrote in her diary, ‘The political world seethes and boils and it’s too, too much.’
In Live and Let Die, written at Goldeneye in February and March 1953, the action takes place in the context of this fear of communist infiltration in the Caribbean. If the fantastical elements of the story are stripped away, effectively Bond’s mission is to defeat a communist agent established in Jamaica. But, interestingly, Fleming seems rather half-hearted about this fear. In the novel, we are told that Bond had been on a ‘long assignment’ in Jamaica just after the war, ‘when the Communist headquarters in Cuba was trying to infiltrate the Jamaican labour unions’. We are given no more details except a very curious comment from Bond that ‘It had been an untidy and inconclusive job.’ This is immediately followed by the reader learning that he was very pleased to be back in Jamaica. Earlier, we hear from the heroine Solitaire that Cuban and communist agents are actually controlled out of US territory – Florida and Harlem. As will emerge in the later novels, sometimes Fleming’s anti-Americanism even trumps his anticommunism. The greatest threat to his Jamaica was not the Soviet Union, but Uncle Sam.
Ann and Ian arrived in Jamaica the day Churchill left, 22 January 1953. On the way, they had taken the train from New York to Florida, the same journey that Solitaire and Bond (under the name of Bryce) would travel in Live and Let Die. It was all research for this next book. In Florida, Fleming visited a live worm warehouse at St Petersburg, which would soon inspire the Ourobourus Worm and Bait Company, the setting of Bond’s discovery of fish tanks containing gold, and his fight with Robber, the villain’s local agent.
Goldeneye was looking fine, its harsh outlines now slightly softened by ‘a cloak of verdure’. To sort out the paying of bills, repairs and other problems, as well as to help Violet ready the house if it was to be rented, Fleming had employed a local ‘attorney’, Anthony Lahoud.
In a letter to the author Evelyn Waugh, Ann did not mention Ian’s ongoing writing, describing their 1953 trip to Goldeneye as ‘two months of freedom from care, there was constant sunshine, black slaves, and solitude save for occasional intrusions from celebrities’. Most ‘shocking’ was an encounter with Katharine Hepburn: ‘She was wearing brief shorts from which protruded an immense length of bone and old skin knitted together by vast purple varicose veins, she must be the oldest gamine in the world.’
Hepburn, along with other Hollywood celebrities, was staying at the Titchfield Hotel in Port Antonio, which in 1951 had been purchased by Errol Flynn. (His ghost-writer later criticised Flynn for the way he treated locals around the Titchfield Hotel and his Boston Estate. He spoke to them in pidgin English, they were very badly paid, and he ‘seemed to derive pleasure out of seeing them bow and scrape whenever he appeared on the scene’. It was also claimed that he used local pimps to procure underage girls.) Flynn, now married to his third wife Patrice Wymore, was also trying to build an airfield at Port Antonio, which was currently missing out t
o booming Montego Bay. He had artist Olga Lehman paint a large mural in the reception of his hotel depicting ‘Bloody Morgan’ and other infamous pirates.
Angus Wilson, an orchid enthusiast, and his partner Odo Cross invited Ian and Ann for dinner at their new house in Ocho Rios, and in turn visited Goldeneye. The usual party fare from Violet was ‘suckling pig – big one roast in the oven’. There was also a special drink wheeled out on every celebratory occasion. As Violet explained: ‘Where there is a party, the Commander make his Poor Man’s Thing.’ It sounds like the concoction Fleming served on his wedding night. You have a dish,’ said Violet, ‘You have skin of orange, skin of lemon. Pour rum on top. Put sugar in dish. Put on oven, keeping stirring. Set light when coming to the boil. Put lid on the dish, then turn out all the light in the house when carry it in to the guests.’ This spectacular concoction, plus Ian’s combination of martinis and other cocktails, saw Odo Cross pass out and have to be carried to a bed to recover.
Noël Coward at nearby Blue Harbour had a string of visitors, including actor Michael Redgrave and his partner, and later the novelist Joyce Cary. Coward held a series of parties up on his land on Look-Out Hill, and was confirmed in his decision to build another house for himself there. Returning from a Coward party one night, Ian and his companions were surprised by the noise of insistent drumming and singing. Leaving their car, they found they had stumbled on a local variation of the voodoo funeral. Ian was fascinated and fairly baffled, as the contents of Live and Let Die would show.
Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Page 14