THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN TYPEWRITER
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN TYPEWRITER
Ian Fleming’s
James Bond Letters
Edited by
FERGUS FLEMING
To R. K. G
My love
This is only a tiny letter to try out my new typewriter and to see if it will write golden words since it is made of gold.
Ian Fleming to Ann Fleming, 16th August, 1952
Contents
Introduction
1Casino Royale
2Live and Let Die
3Moonraker
4Notes from America
5Diamonds are Forever
6From Russia with Love
7Conversations with the Armourer
8Dr No
9Goldfinger
10For Your Eyes Only
11The Chandler Letters
12Thunderball
13The Spy Who Loved Me
14The Liebert Letters
15On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
16You Only Live Twice
17The Man with the Golden Gun
Afterword
The Works of Ian Fleming
The James Bond Films
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
A Note on the Editor
Introduction
In the 1963 edition of Who’s Who, by which time he was virtually a household name, Ian Fleming summarised his achievements in four words: ‘several novels of suspense’. It was a modest description of a career that not only gave the world its most famous secret agent, James Bond, but was conducted at breakneck speed. Between 1952 and his death in 1964 Fleming wrote fourteen Bond books, three works of non-fiction – The Diamond Smugglers, Thrilling Cities and State of Excitement (unpublished) – as well as a three-volume children’s story Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. On top of which he worked as Foreign Manager for the Sunday Times, to which he contributed numerous articles as well as being instrumental in creating its (and Britain’s) first colour supplement; was motoring correspondent for the Spectator; directed a small publishing house, Queen Anne Press; operated the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA); wrote several film treatments; and managed a magazine for bibliophiles, The Book Collector.
To this hectic schedule was added what Who’s Who listed as ‘Recreations’. These were, in Fleming’s words, ‘First Editions, spear fishing, cards, golf’. When it came to spear fishing, he had by 1963 become keener on observing fish than killing them, but over the years he had acquired a close knowledge of oceanic life – particularly when it came to predators and the more poisonous tropical specimens – and for a while kept a journal of his underwater exploits which he titled ‘Sea Fauna or the Finny Tribe of Golden Eye’. Cards were another fascination, not only in the way they fell on the gaming table but in their mathematical progression (as well as being an enthusiastic gambler he was an avid bridge player). Golf, meanwhile, had been a favourite sport since he was a teenager. To these three items should have been added two others: cars and treasure-hunting. He was gripped by the mechanics, the sensation and also the look of speed, to which end he acquired whenever possible the latest, smartest and fastest automobile on the market. As for treasure, it had been a fascination ever since he was a boy, and would feature prominently both in his novels and non-fiction.
Diving, cards, golf and cars were passions that he passed on to Bond (along with women, tobacco, Martinis and scrambled eggs) and when his novels were translated into film they became his hero’s hallmark. But he drew the line at 007 being interested in First Editions. Although not often advertised, Fleming was an ardent book collector and from the 1930s, with the assistance of expert Percy Muir, amassed a library of first editions charting the advent of thoughts and practices that were relevant to modern life. It was an eclectic collection, ranging from The Communist Manifesto to the birth of computing and the rules of billiards, but was considered of such national importance that it was evacuated from London during the Blitz and in 1963 formed the largest private contribution to the British Library’s seminal exhibition, ‘Printing and the Mind of Man’.
Underpinning this activity was an equally energetic output of letters. In an age of instant electronic communication, it is hard to appreciate the vitality of postal services during the 1950s. In Britain, letters were the thrum of life, with at least two collections a day and maybe more if you lived in a big city: the weight of London’s letters was so great that it had an underground network devoted solely to the transmission of mail. People may have been tempted to use the telephone (Fleming’s office number was Terminus 1234) but the crackling reception combined with the omnipresent threat of crossed lines made it an uneasy means of communication. Anyway, why use the phone if you were a writer? With post you could be guaranteed delivery by the next or even the same day. Despite being an advocate of modern technology – and a dab hand at telegramese – Fleming chose to write letters.
The following selection charts the progress of his literary career from a January holiday in Jamaica to a September memorial service in London. It is not exhaustive: many of the letters mentioned in the two major biographies1 have proved untraceable; Fleming’s stepdaughter Fionn Morgan,2 with a view to publishing a memoir of her own, has understandably withheld the majority of Fleming’s correspondence with his wife Ann; unfortunately almost all correspondence with his siblings has been lost, including what his brother Peter called the ‘nitpicker’ letters which he sent after reading each manuscript; and no doubt whole bales of vital and informative material will come to light the moment this book is published. Nevertheless, it offers a glimpse of Fleming’s life as a writer and, importantly, it is written mostly by himself.
To put the contents in perspective a potted biography may be helpful. Ian Lancaster Fleming was born on 28 May 1908, the second son of Valentine and Eve Fleming. Val was the eldest son of a self-made Scottish banker; Eve a musically talented, snobbish yet contrarily bohemian English rose. After Val’s death in action on the Western Front in 1917 Fleming and his three brothers – Peter, Richard and Michael – were raised by their mother, who in 1925 gave them a half-sister, Amaryllis, courtesy of the artist Augustus John. The terms of Val’s will put his family in a peculiar situation. Under its provisions Eve would inherit Val’s considerable funds provided she did not remarry, whereupon the money would go to their children, leaving her with only a stipend. So despite the occasional dalliance, she preferred to remain single, and although her children were brought up amidst the trappings of wealth they were left in no doubt that they had to make their own way. Which they did, with considerable ability,3 but the fear of financial insecurity and the desire to succeed would dog Fleming throughout his life.
He was educated at Eton College, where he excelled at athletics and produced a small but profitable magazine called The Wyvern. After a failed attempt at the diplomatic service and an unsuccessful spell at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, he went for a while to Munich to brush up his German and then to the Austrian Tyrol where, at Kitzbühel, he studied under the ex-spy Ernan Forbes Dennis and his wife Phyllis Bottome – a novelist who inspired him to write his first short story, ‘A Poor Man Escapes’. He later joined Reuters, where he learned how to write fast and precisely, and in 1933 was sent to Moscow to cover a notorious spy trial involving the firm Metro-Vickers. His ingenuity in delivering reports ahead of his competitors became something of a legend in journalistic circles, as did his attempt to obtain an interview with Joseph Stalin.4 But, worried that he was not making enough money, he quit Reuters for the City. Spells with two major finance houses proved unsuccessful and, as war loomed, he felt
his experience of both Germany and Russia might be of use to the nation.
His thoughts on Germany were expressed in a letter to The Times which was published in September 1938.
TO THE EDITOR
Sir,
Since the immediate future of Europe appears to depend largely on Herr Hitler’s intentions, it is most important that we should have a clear knowledge of exactly what those intentions are. The present crisis has shown that to be forewarned is not necessarily to be forearmed, but it may be argued that fore-arming did not appear necessary when the warning was so incredible. Doubts are dispelled, and it may now be of interest to your readers to learn the exact details of the National-Socialist Party Programme as circulated to members of the party and others on February 24, 1920, four years before “Mein Kampf” was written.
The original 25 points were issued from Munich in the form of a circular which is now extremely rare. I know of only one other copy, in the Nazi archives at the Brown House.
This is a literal translation, from an original copy in my possession, of the preamble and the first three points:
“The Programme of the German Workers’
Party is a ‘Time-Programme’ (Zeit-Program).
The Leaders will abstain from setting up new
goals, after the attainment of the goals set out
in the Programme, with the sole object of per-
mitting the continued existence of the Party by
artificially stimulating the appetite of the
Masses.
“(1) We demand the union of all
Germans within a Greater Germany on the
grounds of the right of peoples to self-
determination.
“(2) We demand equality of rights for the
German people vis-a-vis other nations, and
repeal of the Peace Treaties of Versailles
and St. Germain.
“(3) We demand land and soil (colonies)
for the feeding of our people and the
emigration of our surplus population.”
The remaining 22 points deal with racial questions and other internal matters, and, although they do not concern the purpose of this letter, it is remarkable with what minute fidelity each of these 22 points has been adhered to. One might say with justice that only the above three points remain to be carried out to the letter [. . .]
Then, in April 1939, he submitted a confidential report headed ‘Russia’s Strengths: some cautionary notes’, in which he outlined the pros and cons of relying on Russia as an ally. He judged, correctly, that for all its administrative incompetence the Soviet Union would prove a potent military power: ‘When the moment comes for action [we] will realise that these tough, grey-faced little men (the average height of the Army is 5ft. 5in,) are a vastly different force from the ill-equipped gun-fodder of 1914.’ At the same time, he advised caution: ‘Russia would be an exceedingly treacherous ally. She would not hesitate to stab us in the back the moment it suited her’. Perspicaciously, he added, ‘When the Soviet Government has more leisure it will certainly redirect its energies towards World Revolution. The threat of a territorial world war should not blind us to the ideological struggle which will have to come one day.’ While personally fond of Russia he detested the Soviet regime.
Fleming’s efforts drew him to the attention of Rear-Admiral John Godfrey, head of Naval Intelligence, who, on the outbreak of war, made him his personal assistant with the rank of commander. Fleming’s wartime career was one of ingenuity and daring. Although he never engaged in active combat he engineered numerous covert operations, some of which had a major impact and others – such as recruiting the assistance of black magician Aleister Crowley – did not. But they were notable for their imagination and despite various changes of command his input was considered so valuable he was retained at his post until 1945. As the war entered its final stages, his parting coup was to organise a team of commandos, 30AU, whom he called his Red Indians, to retrieve vital documents left behind by the retreating Nazi forces.
The Second World War left him with two ambitions. The first was to build a house in Jamaica, which he had visited during operations. The second was, as he declared, to write the spy story to end all spy stories. He managed the first quite swiftly, constructing a bungalow on the north coast that he named Goldeneye. Guests complained that the furniture was hard, the windows unglazed, the plumbing unpredictable and the food (cooked by his housekeeper Violet Cummings) even more so. The bedrooms were small, with cast-iron beds whose legs rested in saucers of water to keep ants at bay. Noël Coward, who built a house nearby, Firefly, thought it looked like a clinic and christened it ‘Goldeneye-nose-and-throat’. But it did have a small beach fringed by a coral reef over which Fleming hovered for hours on end with goggles and snorkel. His second goal, to become a thriller writer, would take a little longer. In the interim he found a job as Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times, instigating a news service called ‘Mercury’ that employed ex-intelligence personnel who provided information from every corner of the world but, most valuably, from the borders of the Iron Curtain. He retained, too, many of his espionage contacts who kept him abreast of covert activities as the Cold War gradually unfolded. His journalistic assignments for the paper would later supply inspiration and background detail for many of the Bond novels.
The terms of his contract with press baron Lord Kemsley, who owned the Sunday Times, were extraordinarily lenient, allowing him two months holiday every winter in Goldeneye. So, in January he would fly to New York where he caught up with old acquaintances such as Sir William Stephenson, erstwhile head of British Intelligence in North America, plus his childhood friend Ivar Bryce, a charming but wilful millionaire based in Vermont.5 And from there he would fly to Jamaica, where at Goldeneye he kept open house for his friends. Among them, in 1948, was Ann,6 the wife of Esmond, 2nd Viscount Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail. She and Fleming had been conducting an on-off affair since the 1930s and by 1951 they agreed that they were quite incompatible. Whereas Fleming preferred a coterie of close male friends such as Noël Coward, Somerset Maugham, Ivar Bryce and others (mostly from the golfing or London club fraternity), Ann was a saloniste who preferred the intellectual scene. She couldn’t stand Fleming’s hankering after nature, activity and the open air; and he was unable to abide what he considered to be her brittle lifestyle. On which understanding they agreed to marry.
‘We are of course totally unsuited,’ he wrote from Goldeneye to Ann’s brother Hugo Charteris on 23 February 1952.
I’m a non-communicator, a symmetrist, of a bilious and melancholic temperament, only interested in tomorrow. Ann is a sanguine anarchist/traditionalist.
So china will fly and there will be rage and tears.
But I think we will survive as there is no bitterness in either of us and we are both optimists – and I shall never hurt her except with a slipper.
These are disjointed thoughts which I must now take into the grey valleys of the sea.
China did fly, and their marriage was never smooth. They were both unfaithful, Fleming could be particularly heartless at times, and it was perhaps only at the end that they reconciled their differences. In 1961 Fleming had a heart attack, and, although he maintained an outward appearance of vigour, mortality loomed. He became increasingly weak and died of a second heart attack in 1964 aged only fifty-six.
A short word about how this opusculum (to use one of Fleming’s favourite words) has been arranged. Each chapter concentrates on a single Bond novel and follows the sequence in which they were written. To muddy the situation, however, Fleming also wrote a children’s book and several non-fiction books whose creation spanned several years –Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, for example, was written in 1961 but not published until 1964. Furthermore, Fleming’s correspondence concerning one novel might well spread across the years when he was writing others and the more books he wrote the more this became the case. A few chronological hiccups are therefore inev
itable.7 As to content, some chapters are thinner while others are fuller depending on the material available (there is a particular dearth when it comes to Thunderball, possibly because the correspondence went missing during the legal wrangles that followed its publication). Letters to Fleming, as opposed to those by him have, with the exception of a few stand-alone sections that give both sides of the conversation, been restricted to those from his publishers and one or two close friends such as Noël Coward and Somerset Maugham, though the gist of other exchanges (where available) are supplied in the commentaries. As some of the archive material consists just of carbon copies, salutations (My Dear Michael, etc.) have been included only where they are known.
While the vagaries of Fleming’s spelling have been standardised in the editorial text, these and other typewritten quirks have been retained in the letters themselves.
1
Casino Royale
‘I really cannot remember exactly why I started to write thrillers,’ Fleming recalled in 1956. ‘I was on holiday in Jamaica in January 19511 [. . .] and I think my mental hands were empty. I had finished organising a Foreign Service for Kemsley Newspapers and that tide of my life was free-wheeling. My daily occupation in Jamaica is spearfishing and underwater exploring, but after five years of it I didn’t want to kill any more fish except barracudas and the rare monster fish and I knew my own underwater terrain like the back of my hand. Above all, after being a bachelor for 44 years, I was on the edge of marrying and the prospect was so horrifying that I was in urgent need of some activity to take my mind off it. So, as I say, my mental hands were empty and although I am as lazy as most Englishmen are, I have a Puritanical dislike of idleness and a natural love of action. So I decided to write a book.’
Thus Fleming described the genesis of Casino Royale. His wife-to-be, Ann, put it more simply in her diary: ‘This morning Ian started to type a book. Very good thing.’
The Man with the Golden Typewriter Page 1