It is ‘Chigroes’ – an expression that seems to be the invention of Fleming – who carry out the murders of Strangways and Trueblood and act as overseers on Crab Key. But they are only operating on behalf of Dr No. It is still the outsider who represents the greatest threat to Jamaica in the novel. Furthermore, Dr No has achieved his wealth and therefore his power thanks to his success as a gangster in New York. So there is a suggestion that it is the crime-ridden nature of American society that, in the end, threatens Jamaica, as well as the fact that the British have allowed American missiles to be stationed on their territory near the island.
More than anything, though, it is the British themselves who are to blame. It was the Jamaican imperial government who sold Dr No the island in the first place for the tempting sum of £10,000. Furthermore, the complacency of the elite residents of Richmond Road is nothing compared to what Bond finds at King’s House. Leaks from a spy in the centre of British power on the island twice threaten Bond’s life – the poisoned fruit and the centipede in his bed. Foot – a ‘great success’ – has left (he would in real life leave in late 1957 to try to sort out the difficulties in Cyprus), and the acting Governor, dressed in ‘an inappropriate wing collar and spotted bow tie’, is a time-server who keeps trying to close the Strangways case to avoid trouble – ‘all he wants is to retire and get some directorships in the City’, Bond is told by a friend in the Colonial Office. (So offended were the colonial authorities by their depiction in the novel that in 1962 they refused permission to film Dr No inside King’s House.) The acting Governor even wants to shut down the Secret Service office in Jamaica, having ‘every confidence in our police’, earlier dismissed by M as only understanding ‘sex and machete fights’, and seen as unsuccessful in investigating Strangways’ disappearance.
Nonetheless, the novel makes clear that this imperial weakness is not unique or specific to Jamaica. Britain’s responsibilities are shown to be widespread – in the radio calls from stations around the globe, and in M’s comment ‘There were plenty of other worries waiting to be coped with round the world’ – but there are simply not the resources to make good on these commitments. Bond notes M’s concerns about the ‘slim funds of the Secret Service’, and how M had been unsuccessfully ‘trying for years to get the Treasury to give him an Auster [a light aircraft] for the Caribbean station’. Yet, more than financial, it is viewed as a failure of hardiness and purpose: M complains at the beginning of the novel, ‘Nowadays, softness was everywhere.’
A parade in Kingston with a jokey effigy of the Governor Sir Hugh Foot. Chief Minister Norman Manley and his wife Edna stand to the right of the saluting base.
In April 1957, Fleming travelled to Tangier to interview John Collard, an English solicitor who had worked for the Internal Diamond Security Organisation, established to reduce diamond smuggling from Sierra Leone and elsewhere. The result was a series of articles for the Sunday Times, collected into a book, The Diamond Smugglers, which would echo and amplify many of the themes of Dr No. Fleming has great fun ‘Bondifying’ the whole thing, changing Collard into a ‘famous spy’, giving him a pseudonym, John Blaize, with Bond’s initials, and even allowing him Bond’s (and Fleming’s) golf handicap of nine. But he is also fascinated by Blaize’s comments about Liberia and Sierra Leone, in which he is ‘scathing about Liberia … The first Negro State [sic], and Utopia in the imagination of coloured peoples all over the world, and if this was going to be the pattern of Negro emancipation Blaize didn’t hold out much hope for the future of Ghana and the Federation of the West Indies.’ He ‘despised many of the comic opera Negroes in official positions, but he thought even less of the white men who backed them and often incited them in their venality’.
For Blaize, Sierra Leone is an imperial possession gone totally wrong, with corruption and squalor everywhere, leading to rioting and ‘a complete collapse of law and authority throughout the whole of a British colony nearly as big as Ireland’. He believes that only prompt action by a handful of men on the ground with ‘guts’ prevented European families being ‘hacked to death’. And again, the fault is not just with the Africans, but with ‘drift, weak local government and ignorance in Whitehall’. He concludes, like M, that, We’ve got bits and pieces of territory all around the world, and not enough money and enthusiasm to go around.’
No one can accuse Bond of ‘softness’ or a lack of enthusiasm. In Dr No, through bravery and initiative, he survives a tortuous journey past electric shocks, a red-hot zinc tube, huge spiders, then a captive giant squid, defeated with his improvised weapons. Dr No himself perishes, buried in guano. There is wider hope, too, at the end, when the brigadier in command of the Caribbean Defence Force takes prompt action. He is a ‘modern young soldier’, ‘unimpressed by relics from the Edwardian era of Colonial Governors, whom he collectively referred to as “feather-hatted fuddy-duddies’”. A modern navy warship, HMS Narvik (flagship of the British Task Force for the atomic bomb tests in Monte Bello Islands in 1952), is on station to be sent to Crab Key. Perhaps, Dr No suggests, the empire is not entirely moribund after all. Best of all, for Bond and Fleming, resolution is achieved without any help from the Americans, who, in a way, caused the problems in the first place. And yet, stepping back, the overriding picture is of imperial decline, a feeling not entirely washed away by the therapeutic, fantastical heroism of Bond.
1958–60 Goldfinger; For Your Eyes Only; Thunderball
The man from the Central Intelligence Agency was due in by Pan American at 1.15. Bond hoped he wouldn’t be a muscle-bound ex-college man with a crew-cut and a desire to show up the incompetence of the British, the backwardness of their little colony.
Thunderball
Six weeks after Fleming’s return from Jamaica, From Russia, with Love was published by Cape in hardback. It came wrapped in what would be an award-winning jacket by a new designer, Richard Chopping, featuring the embrace of a gun and a rose. It was also serialised and heavily pushed in Beaverbrook’s Daily Express from 1 April, a week before publication. (From July the following year, Express support would also include a strip cartoon of Bond’s latest adventures. Bond was on a roll.)
Fleming’s previous novel, Diamonds are Forever, the first to be serialised by the Express, had sold well, but From Russia, with Love was the breakthrough, the first emphatically on the best-seller lists. The timing of publication was good, against the backdrop of rising Cold War tensions. An advertising campaign played on Eden’s visit to Goldeneye. Reviewers were impressed as well, the TLS calling it Fleming’s ‘tautest, most exciting and most brilliant tale’. Bond, the paper declared, was ‘the intellectual’s Mike Hammer’. Raymond Chandler commented that Fleming’s public would now ‘never let him go’.
From the outset, Fleming had been described by reviewers as ‘Peter Cheyney for the carriage trade’ – a thriller writer for educated, knowing, even ‘intellectual’ readers. But beginning in April 1955 with Casino Royale, the books were now appearing as paperbacks with ever-increasing commercial success. The year after the publication of From Russia, with Love, Fleming explained to a US TV company: ‘In hard covers my books are written for and appeal principally to an “A” readership, but they have all been reprinted in paperbacks, both in England and in America and it appears that the “B” and “C” classes find them equally readable.’ So readable, in fact, that the Bond books are credited with bringing the American paperback revolution to Britain. Fleming’s paperback publisher, Pan, would later affirm that no fewer than ten of the first eighteen million-selling UK paperbacks were Bond novels.
All these factors combined to make Fleming a new literary superstar. So much so that when Dr No was published a year later, the inevitable backlash occurred. Suddenly he was noticed, and important enough to be shot down. First off the blocks was literary critic Bernard Bergonzi, who deplored the relish with which violence was described at a ‘horror-comic level’, and wrote that ‘Fleming rarely rises above the glossy prose of the advertising copywrite
r.’ Further missing the point about Fleming’s cleverly updated jingoism and imperial nostalgia, Bergonzi compared Bond unfavourably to the Buchan heroes, who were ‘more virtuous, and deserved their ultimate victory. Much of this patriotic ethic now seems impossibly priggish and even hysterical.’ He was closer to the truth when he wrote: ‘His fantasies of upper class life can only be a desire to compensate for the rigours of existence in a welfare state.’
Next came Paul Johnson in the New Statesman, who described Fleming as ‘the owner of Goldeneye, a house made famous by Sir Anthony Eden’s Retreat from Suez’. In a review headlined: ‘Sex, Snobbery and Sadism’, he declared that Dr No was the ‘nastiest book I have ever read’, but acknowledged that because of the novels’ popularity, ‘here was a social phenomenon of some importance’. Writing about the ‘dual Bond-Fleming personality’, it all got quite personal. ‘There are three basic ingredients in Dr No,’ he went on, ‘all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult.’ Worse still, it was ‘very second-rate snobbery … not even the snobbery of a proper snob – it’s the snobbery of an expense-account man’.
Of course, Fleming enjoyed the success of From Russia, With Love, but he had returned from Jamaica and his time alone with Blanche to find Ann understandably suspicious and resentful. Blanche had got into the habit of visiting England every summer with her mother, and Ann took the opportunity to invite her for lunch at Victoria Square, along with a coterie of friends, including Paddy Leigh-Fermor and Peter Quennell. Ann, who could be prone to ‘flick-knife remarks’, did her best to make Blanche feel uncomfortable, introducing her to all and sundry as ‘Ian’s mistress’. In the awkward silence that followed, Blanche responded quietly: ‘Ann, that’s an unfair attack.’ Blanche disliked Ann’s intellectual friends as much as Ian did. ‘They were talking so much,’ she remembered. ‘At that party I felt it was a whole lot of children frightened of the dark.’
Through the rest of the year, Ann and Ian’s relationship continued to deteriorate, which didn’t go unnoticed by her family. Her brother Hugo, who had never liked Ian, wrote to his other sister Mary Rose: ‘Ian is a subtle bitch and in fact married to no one but himself … Esmond was a come down from [O’Neill] – but Ian was really falling through the floor. And I believe [Ann] has really suffered with him – as one must being married to a person who really exists only for themselves – and who is neurotic and verbally violent into the bargain.’
In fact, Ian was immensely depressed about his failing marriage. In December, he and Ann had a ‘clear-the-air’ lunch at Scott’s. This achieved nothing except the decision that they would spend their winters apart. On 16 December, Ian scribbled in his notebook: One of the great sadnesses is the failure to make someone happy.’
So Ian was on his own at Goldeneye again in January 1958 to write the new book, Goldfinger. He had ‘arrived in a tempest’ and the weather had remained poor: ‘torrential winds and rain’, as he reported to Ann in the first of a series of anguished letters. ‘Thank God for the book, at which I hammer away in between bathing in the rain and sweating around the garden in a mackintosh … The sofas were covered with the stains of rat shit as it appears the servants have used the house as their own since I left. Paint peeling off the eaves, chips and cracks all over the floor and not one bottle of marmalade or preserves … ‘ Then, after completing the ‘sitrep’, Fleming ended the letter: ‘I can’t write about other things. My nerves are still jangling like church bells and I am completely demoralized by the past month. I think silence will do us both good and let things heal.’
There was no Noël Coward and entourage this time, as he was acting in his Nude with Violin in California, but Blanche was ever-present. Soon a routine was established. She had now almost finished the rebuilding of Bolt and was spending most of her time there. ‘I used to come down to swim at twelve o’clock, when he had more or less finished writing, and that’s when we would go on the reef,’ she says.
‘He was strict with himself,’ she remembers. ‘Because he always had the shutters closed near his desk he didn’t know when I arrived but as soon as he found out I was there, then he came down.’ The two became closer than ever. Blanche found Ian ‘very unhappy, in a terrible state of depression. I was able to give him a certain amount of happiness. I felt terribly sorry for him.’
When Fleming’s friends the Pitmans arrived for a short stay, Blanche acted the hostess, taking the family off on long excursions along the coast or into the mountains while Ian worked. Later she would write to them in England, saying, ‘Someone should keep an eye on Ian.’ ‘She was really in love with Ian Fleming,’ says Blanche’s son Chris. ‘He was the love of her life. She saw her role as looking after him.’
While Ian was in Jamaica, Ann had checked in once more to the Enton Hall health farm in another effort to get herself off the pills. Soon the combination of productive work and the ministrations of Blanche and ‘Doctor Jamaica’ had mellowed Ian once more into a sympathetic husband. ‘I’m terribly worried about your health,’ he wrote in late January, ‘and I pray that Enton’s prison walls have mended your darling heart and somehow got you off this tragic switchback of pills which I implore you to stop… They are a way of life which is killing you … You’ve no idea how they change you – first the febrile, almost hysterical gaiety and then those terrible snores that seem to come from the tomb! … My darlingest darlingest love get well.’
At the end of his stay, with the writing of Goldfinger completed, Ian took the chance to go with Blanche on a trip to Pedro Cays, small islands sixty miles off the south coast. Blanche had signed up to help with a mission there to collect insect, fish and bird samples for the Jamaica Institute. She remembers that the crew were inexperienced and the yacht almost entirely without charts. After a roundabout route they eventually found the Cays, where, to Ian’s horror, the scientists tipped the Indian poison curare into the sea in an effort to capture a specimen of a particular fish.
At the end of Fleming’s trip, refurbishment work at Bolt was still under way and so Blanche was invited to stay rent-free at Goldeneye in his absence. She paid her way by having the house painted, improving various comforts, and planting in the garden. Her old friend Errol Flynn also came to stay and worked on his autobiography. (Flynn was by now in a very bad way, ‘a floating, boozy bum’, according to David Niven. He would be dead the next year at the age of just fifty.) As a parting gift on her return to her home, Blanche presented Goldeneye with a small wooden coracle, which Ian christened Octopussy.
Goldfinger is the longest and densest of the Bond novels. It went straight to the top of the best-seller charts and was well reviewed, the Observer commenting under the headline ‘Sophisticated Sapper’ that Fleming, ‘even with his forked tongue sticking right through his cheek … remains manically readable’. As in Diamonds are Forever, Bond in Goldfinger is on an economic mission. Britain is suffering from a currency crisis and high bank rate because the villain, Auric Goldfinger, is smuggling out gold, ‘the foundation of our international credit’. As during the recent Suez Crisis, the Americans are unwilling to help.
Goldfinger, ‘a misshapen short man with red hair and a bizarre face’, is the richest man in England, but not actually English, of course, and his international headquarters is in the badlands of the Caribbean, in Nassau. He is part of the international super-rich, a class Fleming of course knew from Jamaica’s smartest hotels and whom he increasingly disliked (in Miami, he speculates, his hotel bill would have used up his year’s salary in just three weeks). Goldfinger’s allies are Germans and Koreans, ‘the cruellest, most ruthless people in the world’. Like Sir Hugo Drax, Goldfinger cheats at cards, and like Spang from Diamonds are Forever, he doesn’t drink or smoke — he’s not to be trusted on either count.
Bond gets the better of his enemy twice – in Miami and on the golf course – but then, in a possibly fata
l plot flaw, Goldfinger makes the mistake of employing Bond to help in his plan, with the aid of American gangsters, to rob Fort Knox and hand the gold over to SMERSH in the form of a waiting Soviet cruiser. ‘It was modern piracy with all the old-time trimmings,’ Bond muses. ‘Goldfinger was sacking Fort Knox as Bloody Morgan had sacked Panama.’
So Bond once more comes to the aid of the Americans on American soil, and although they are grateful, he is left dissatisfied after Goldfinger escapes. ‘Who in America cared about the Bank of England’s gold?’ he asks himself. ‘Who cared that two English girls had been murdered in the course of this business? Who really minded that Goldfinger was still at liberty now that America’s bullion was safe again?’ Bond wonders in a passage that seethes with post-Suez resentment at the United States.
For Ian, the 1958 trip was perhaps the most cocooned of any he made to Jamaica. With Ann absent, there was no pressure to go to any parties, and there was no Coward dropping in with his friends. Nonetheless, outside the Goldeneye bubble, there were significant events taking place for Fleming’s Jamaica.
Sir Kenneth Blackburne, previously governor of the Leeward Islands, had been appointed as Foot’s replacement in Jamaica, but now the post had little to do with the day-to-day running of the country, which was firmly in the hands of elected Prime Minister Norman Manley. There had been some significant achievements: the national income of Jamaica had more than doubled from 1952 to 1958, and exports increased by 250 per cent in value. In the same period, industrial output by value quadrupled, in all producing an annual growth rate of 8 per cent. Manley would retain power in the election of 1959, increasing his party’s share of the vote and its majority
Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Page 23